Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:36:32 · Tulsee Doshi, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:36:32] S0: Yeah, or just like consistently retest, right? Because you might be even hampering what you're getting out of the model, out of a new model, because you're trying to force fit it into your existing structure. [00:36:43] S1: Let me ask you a completely unrelated question, just because I think this might be helpful for folks to understand. There's this term harness that people often hear, this idea of there's a model, there's a harness that sits on top of the model. What's the simplest way to understand what a harness is? [00:36:56] S0: Yeah, I mean, I think of a harness as like the wrapper around the model essentially, right? So think of it as like, what are the system instructions, the tools, the skills, the context that the model has access to and how can it leverage those things, right? And so what you want to basically do is give the model an environment in which to operate. And that's really what your harness builds out. [00:37:17] S1: So essentially it's a system prompt plus tools that have access to do things. And then whatever other context, other data [00:37:25] S0: information that it has access to and skills, right? Like all of these things kind of come together to build out your harness.
00:37:25 · Tulsee Doshi, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:37:25] S0: information that it has access to and skills, right? Like all of these things kind of come together to build out your harness. [00:37:31] S1: Awesome. Okay. That is very helpful. So one other thing I wanted to get your thoughts on, there's a lot of change, obviously. A lot of people are trying to figure out how to thrive in this new world. How are you upskilling and helping your team get better and kind of understand what they need to be good at in this new world? What are just ways you're helping your team develop and kind of Survive and thrive. Survive and thrive. Yeah.
00:37:58 · Tulsee Doshi, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:37:58] S0: I mean, honestly, I feel like my team is helping my team in a lot of this, actually. I think when you look at the PMs on my team, you see some who have really leaned in and built a lot of skill in leveraging our internal tools and they're individuals who play around with the models a lot. And they actually are, I think, amazing assets to the rest of my team because they build skills that others can use. And one thing we've been starting to do more of is like, how do you share a skill that you've built that is giving you some value in your day to day job with others, right? So that we can actually build out an entire repository that helps the PM team. PMs who have gotten stronger and more confident in eyeballing data and really looking at it and understanding longer traces and trajectories. How can we run workshops with other PMs so that we kind of all collectively build more of that confidence? And so for me, a lot of it is about confidence building. How do we build everyone's confidence in the tools that we have and their ability to leverage them effectively? And I think that's something that we're trying to build more and more across the team. [00:39:00] S1: So going one level deeper there, what is it you do? So you said workshops, there's like PMs that are good at a thing, teach a workshop to the rest of the PMs. Is there anything else just like very practically that you do to help people get better at these things?
00:39:00 · Lenny Rachitsky, Tulsee Doshi
[00:39:00] S1: So going one level deeper there, what is it you do? So you said workshops, there's like PMs that are good at a thing, teach a workshop to the rest of the PMs. Is there anything else just like very practically that you do to help people get better at these things? [00:39:12] S0: The biggest thing I would say actually that is needed to get better at these things, and I say this knowing that I am starting to do this, but we are not quite there yet, is actually giving people the time and space. I think when you're just sprinting constantly, it is hard to create the space to actually take a step back and make sure you know the tools well. But once you do, then it accelerates you 10x on the other side. And so a lot of it is about pushing the team to say, hey, could we leverage JetSki, our internal tool, to do this? Right. And hey, I have a skill that I use to do this. Do you want to try? Right. And actually building that kind of set of skills, if you will. And actually, I think sometimes the most practical thing to do is like actually build a skill to do something. And when I say skill, I don't mean like the human skill. I mean, like the technical skill to do it. And then that skill gets shared to others. That builds more confidence. That then leads to someone else building another skill or improving that skill. And now you have this like iteration flywheel, which I think is good. [00:40:15] S1: Does Google still do the 20% thing? Because that feels like a really good place to spend time on this stuff. Is that still a thing or less so these days?
00:40:15 · Lenny Rachitsky, Tulsee Doshi
[00:40:15] S1: Does Google still do the 20% thing? Because that feels like a really good place to spend time on this stuff. Is that still a thing or less so these days? [00:40:21] S0: I don't know, actually. I do feel like all my PMs are working like 150%. So there is also that. [00:40:29] S1: Okay, so you could do 100. You get your 20% out of the 150%. [00:40:33] S0: Yeah, or you could do 170%, I guess, instead. There you go. But no, I think actually one of the things we're working on is actually a two-day workshop in November where we're going to actually pull all the PMs out of their day job for two days and just actually give them the space to build and play with the tools that we have. I think... You're just giving yourself even that mind space to be like, hey, here's something I did. The other rule of thumb that I've I've heard people share and I've been starting to adopt myself is like if you have to do something twice, do you need to do it yourself? Right. Or can you outsource it? And some things, yes, obviously, like writing a strategy twice, you should probably still be writing it yourself. But there's other aspects of this where it's like actually like how replicable is this and how much can I use the models to like help me with this task?
00:41:19 · Lenny Rachitsky, Tulsee Doshi
[00:41:19] S1: Yeah, there's this thought I've been having that one of the most important new habits to build is to insert between stimulus and response. Say, I have a thing to do and then I'm going to go do it. You have to insert this question. Can AI do this for me? And then try. And I find that, like, I've actually built that habit much more strongly over the past few months. And it makes a huge difference. Because then you start building all these little workflows and automations. I'm doing a lot of GrokBotting. And it's just like, once you realize you should be doing that more and more, you really start to get the benefits of this versus like, I don't know what to do with it. [00:41:55] S0: And you know what I found is like you really just need one example where that works really well to change your mindset. And I think that's what happened to me, at least, is like I feel like it was hard for me to get out of my mindset of just doing what I knew how to do until I started being like, oh, actually, to your point, like set that interim period of actually can the model help me do this? And the minute you take one instance to do that and you're like, actually, this was really helpful for me. You start being like, oh, actually, now I'm going to try throwing this at the model. And now I'm going to try throwing this at the model because you're confident in what it can do for you, Grosh.