Lessons in product leadership and AI strategy from Glean, Google, Amazon, and Slack | Tamar Yehoshua (Product at Glean, ex-Google and Slack)

0:00 Make sure you go somewhere where you have a good engineering partner because if you have great ideas of what to build, but you can't get them built. then you go nowhere. So that has to be part of your evaluation criteria. that you meet and Value. your engineering partner before you join. And then I think what's really important is that you're aligned. You understand your roles and responsibilities and where you're gonna divide and conquer and where you're gonna be aligned. You don't want any of this

0:26 like people in the organization, they asked mom, they asked dad and they got different opinions and playing one against the other, like that doesn't work. Today my guest is Tamar Yahushua. Tamar is currently president of product and technology at Glean. Они моксой Ай компанії. Prior to joining Glean, Tamar was chief product officer at Slack for four years, where she led product design and research as the company scaled.

0:54 tenx the revenue, went through IPO and then got bought by Salesforce. Tamar also led product and engineering teams at Google, where for many years she was responsible for the Google search experience. She also spent five years at Amazon, as director of engineering and vice president at a9.com. She was also venture partner at IVP and has been on board of directors for Service Now, Sneak, Retail Me Not, Yxt. In our conversation, we get into all kinds of juicy advice. Including white companies don't have to be run well to win.

1:23 Why you don't nier career plan. The two habits she credits most for helping her succeed throughout her career. What she learned from Jeff Bezos and Stuart Butterfield and Mark Benioff. How to build stronger cross-functional реліщеншіпс. and a bunch of advice on AI, including how it will likely change your jobs, examples of how she and her colleagues are already using AI to be more productive in their work, and what she's learned about building AI based products that are non-deterministic and can be very unpredictable. This episode is for anyone looking to level up as a leader

1:54 And get a better sense of how AI will change your job. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and it helps the podcast tremendously. With that I bring you Tamar Yahushua.

2:12 Tamar, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for having me. I've had so many people recommend you coming on this podcast. I'm really happy that we're finally doing this. I wanna start with a question that I've started to ask people who have had extraordinarily successful careers, which you've had So let me ask you.

2:31 What are one or two specific skills or mindsets or Habits. that you think most contributed to your success during the course of your career that you think might be helpful to people who are trying to figure out how to accelerate their career or just be more successful in their career. One of the things that I think is

2:49 Overlooked? Is Do a really good job at whatever your job is at that point. So people have a tendency, especially product managers, are very ambitious and they want to get to the next level and they're always eyeing the next job. But you're not gonna get the next job unless you do really well.

3:08 at the job that you're in. Like knock it out of the park. However simple However easy it may be to you. do a great job. And in in tech jobs There's like table stack. There's table stakes of

3:20 You need to be technical, you need to know the latest technology, you need to understand your product, the product you're working on. No matter what your role is, you have to understand it deeply, you need to understand metrics. So especially product managers have kind of wide birth of things that they need to understand. So those Those are a given. You need to do that. This episode is brought to you by Xflow, a game changer for customer-facing analytics and data reporting.

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5:39 Join product teams at Figma and at The Notion. By uncovering AI powered product opportunities at scale, visit Sprig.com slash Lenny to book a demo and get a$75 gift card. That's SPRIG dot com slash Lenny. So now the question is The difference in leadership and executive roles.

6:00 And like when you're getting there. So how do you start transitioning? So after you've done a great job at everything and you understand the the core skills that you need. Another thing you really need to know is understanding People.

6:19 and motivations. And when you're building products, you have to understand why does somebody want to use your product? What problem are they solving? Why do they want to click on that button? What's gonna make them feel good? when they click on it. give them delight and what's also going to make them feel bad and frustrated and what do they not want to do.

6:38 So you need to understand motivations in people for building products and for building teams and organizations. So just like why does somebody want to click on a button, why does somebody want to join your team? Why do they want to work hard? What are they trying to accomplish? What's the goal for their career? So you have to be able to read people, ask lots of questions to understand them. And I'll say one thing that really helped me, this is a strange segue, but

7:04 My father was a psychiatrist. And when I was growing up We would have family occasions, go to events, whatever, and afterwards In the car ride back. He would always

7:16 give his perspective of analyzing what happened at the event. What this person was thinking, why did they say this? Wha what and then he would he would like quiz me of like, why do you think they did that? And it was really interesting because it taught me to see the whole room.

7:35 To see how people react. Like Lenny, if you say something and somebody else is there, look at the other person, what's their face saying? You can understand so much. If you're Pay attention.

7:47 So I think when you want to build for people and lead organizations It is about the people and understanding them and motivating them. I l I love this advice and there's I feel like we could do a whole podcast on just this topic. So on this last point about understanding People

8:06 Is there an example of this in either a product you build of just like, oh, here's something I noticed about someone using Slack or Google or Amazon that change the way I think about building this specific feature.

8:19 I I caution product managers about Is it you don't want to be too overly reliant on metrics? And you want to also have an intuition. You want product managers who understand intuitively their customers. And their product.

8:32 And sometimes you'll make decisions because you just know it's the right thing to do,'cause it feels right. And it usually is right if you understand your product well enough. How do you get good at it? Ask a lot of questions. Don't assume you know. Go in, uh Mark Benioff would always say, have a beginner's mind.

8:52 Go in assuming that you know nothing. And listen to your customers, listen to the people, because I also see this as like You're building a feature and you think it's the best thing. 'Cause of course everyone's gonna want it'cause you worked on it and you're gonna put it front and center in the interface where everybody's gonna see it.

9:13 Well no, you gotta earn that right. And that is another thing that people do is they want the thing they worked on. to be right there, but it might not be the most important per thing that a person needs at that point. So have perspective. have perspective of what your users are actually trying to achieve.

9:33 Going back to your first point about doing a great job at The job you have. I imagine some people hear this and the advice is do a great job at the job you're already doing and they may feel like They are Or and are other reasons that are being promoted?

9:47 Is there an example? For my career. Or a story you could tell I've just like to clarify like what doing a great job looked like. Where it's not just like I

9:55 I hit my goals. It's like here's what it looks like, here's how you actually get ahead. Are you helping the business move forward? So it's not about I achieved what I was asked to.

10:08 To do. But did you build something that people actually used? It's not about just launching something. And did you do the right thing? For the company.

10:20 And that It's different. It's a different mindset. Did you enable the entire organization to be pro more productive? Despite you. So uh there I remember very early in my career I was

10:33 Working as an engineer And I was offered a job to manage a team. That was across uh across it it was uh across different programs and I went back to my took a vacation, I came back and I said, You know

10:46 I don't think this team should exist. It was my first management job. And they were like and I wanted to be a manager and I said Here's why I don't think that this team should exist. It's not the right thing for the company. It's

10:59 Not gonna be productive. And my manager was so stunned. He was like Wait. You're saying no? I'm like, Yeah, because here's how you should organize it.

11:09 And Then he's like You know, you're right. And I'll find you something else and he did. If I were to put this into one word, it's impact.

11:17 Drive impact. Yeah. Amazing. Okay. Going in a different direction. We were chatting before we started recording this and something that you share with me.

11:26 And some people may be really surprised to hear this, but I completely agree with this take is that You don't need to be a well run business. To win. I've seen this myself. I'd love to hear your insights here and especially where you where you notice this. What parts of your career notice this to be true.

11:45 I love working at well run companies. It's more fun, it's your people are happier. I like running a well run team, so I aspire to have a very well run team and to work at a well well run company. But what I've seen is when a company isn't well run, like

12:03 IT isn't working, marketing is broken, there are not enough people in HR. There's a lot of turnover, all of these things. I've seen that they're not correlated to the company being successful. So I can think of a couple of examples right now of companies I know. Not Glean where I'm working today.

12:21 where there's like high executive turnover. where people get yelled at. There are lots of people fired. There's reorgs all the time. People I talk to are super unhappy, but the numbers are

12:34 Amazing. Like they're growing like crazy. And the opposite is said is also true. I can think of one company I know really well, amazing CEO, well run, well oiled machine. Everything. hire the executives.

12:49 And they flatlined. So you just see it. You see it over and over again, and people get very upset about these things that aren't working. And one of the things I try and do is give a perspective of what matters and what doesn't. And it might even be to the sales team because you get like all these requests for features all the time.

13:09 If you did every single one, it would be impossible. But even if you did Eighty, ninety percent of them won't matter for the success of the company. But then there are some that really matter. So what are the things that really matter? We always talk about product market fit. Nobody really knows what product market fit is. Everybody has a different explanation, but it means like

13:30 people want to use your product, right? That they're like clamoring for it. So you've built something that people value. And that They're that people value and that solves a problem for them.

13:42 But that's also not good enough. You need to build a great product, but you also have to have distribution. And you need to have a sales team that works. And those are Probably, and you have to have enough money in the bank to get there.

13:54 So those are probably the things that are the most important. I might be missing something. And then within each of those there's the things that that really mattered. And there's so many features that we built at Slack that were the most important features ever that failed and nobody used. So that clearly didn't have an impact. And you can see that in retrospect, but I think After being at multiple different big companies and small companies, I had that perspective of

14:20 Let's just make sure that we do the right things and don't get too worked up about all the things that are broken'cause Every startup. has so many things that are broken. So I think a really interesting insight here is that if you're working at a company that is just chaotic and it feels like We don't know what we're doing. I don't know how this thing is running.

14:38 Uh, I don't know how this will continue to be successful. Your experience is that most is it that most of the successful companies you've been at are just like chaotic internally and aren't like incredibly one run and that's normal. That's Very typical. Until they get to a certain scale.

14:53 Mm. Now once you reach a certain scale and you've already conquered the market, then you kinda need to be well run. Then you bring in professional managers and things are about the cost and executing and getting all the like once you get to like over five thousand people or ten thousand people, like you gotta have things that

15:12 It I mean then you're like a growth engine. So different you have to know what phase you're in. And what's important at that phase. So it isn't that At every phase chaos is okay, and also some chaos is okay and some chaos. is not okay if you're changing your strategy all the time.

15:30 And you're changing your direction and you're changing Like you're changing projects on people all the time so that they can't like actually achieve anything. So there's This is again so it's you can't simplify it that

15:43 Some chaos is okay and some isn't. And also some chaos is right for you as a person. Like there's some well run there's some really great companies I would never work at. Because they don't fit me. They're not

15:56 a company I would enjoy going to work. In the morning. Or they're not aligned with what I'm good at. So Just because a company is doing well

16:06 If the chaos is chaos and something that's gonna make you upset and unhappy, don't work that. Is there a correlation there just like Companies that have strong product market fit. Things are just breaking as they're hyper grow hyper Going through hypergrowth.

16:19 Just thoughts on why this is the case. A lot of it is that because if you are in hypergrowth. You've got Customers coming at a really fast pace. you're growing your company really quickly in the number of employees and it's just really hard to keep up. because things in the infrastructure break, things in the communication break down.

16:38 You've got at any given point fifty percent of the company's been there less than six months. So But you have to grow really fast because once you hit product market fit. If you don't Then Your growth will stop.

16:52 So if you're suddenly growing, especially if you're an enterprise company, you have to b have salespeople. If you're a consumer company, your systems have to keep running as as you scale and you know, look at companies like MySpace, well, they died because their product got too slow. And so some companies have initial product market fit and then they don't keep up and So I do think a lot of it is it's very hard to grow that fast. And so things really do start breaking, but then once you get

17:20 All the right. leadership and play's processes in place, then it starts to get better. So it goes through ups and downs and level of chaos. There's one takeaway here that product market fit solves a lot of Problems. Strong product market fit.

17:33 Well, no product market fit is A descendant. I'd say it more like that. Like you can't like if you built a product that people aren't Really excited to use. then you don't have a company, um,'cause it's very hard to to do that unless you have a distribution machine and then you catch up over time.

17:51 But we will not name companies like that. I so you there are other ways uh of doing it, but yeah, that is the the most important thing. Yeah, I will say, uh, during my experience at Airbnb I absolutely saw this. It was just nonstop chaos and always felt like well how is this continuing to operate?

18:10 And six seed. Things are just out of control. Everything's changing every six months. I don't know what's happening here. And I think a lesson here is just that's normal for a hypergrowth business that has strong product market fit.

18:23 But again, uh not a good excuse to just allow chaos and it's not like Uh chaos means success. Right. like not have an organization that's functioning. You should still strive to have an organization that's functioning and keep people happy and motivated and all that. Great.

18:40 Okay. Another Maybe contrarian opinion that you hold. uh along the career track is that you don't need to plan Your career.

18:49 I also 100% agree with this. I had no plan for my career. I never knew where the hell it was gonna go. I never had this like vision of here's what I wanna do. I just kind of followed. things that were pulling me and things that seemed interesting. I love that you also Tell people this. I'd love to hear your insights here, especially for someone that's either struggling with their career or just stress they don't have a plan or their plan's not working the way they wanted it to. I really recently I was talking to somebody in their twenties who was asking me for career advice and you know, should I be a product manager, et cetera? And

19:20 Um, like I'm trying to put together my five year plan and I said I never had a five year plan. Like So to be clear, some people need that. That's the kind of people they are. They want the planning.

19:32 I said, it's great if you want that. But I never had it. And The person I was talking to just relaxed. And they're like

19:41 Oh my God, that's so great to hear'cause I've no idea what I want to do in five years. I'm like I still have no idea what I want to do in five years. I've never had an idea what I want to do in five years. So I w and when you know, early in your career you have a lot more angst about it because The

19:58 forks in the road are more significant'cause they can go like do I go get an MBA or do I go work for somebody? Do I be a product manager or an engineer? And those really take you in very different paths. And I f I meet a lot of kids in there. Should okay. Uh My kids are my kids' friends.

20:15 But I mean a lot of uh people who are younger in their career. who uh are struggling with this a little bit. So what I believe And I've always believed is that you follow people. You learn the most from people.

20:29 I don't look for domains Oh I mean some people have a domain like I'm super interested in like, you know. Climate or whatever. And they really want to work in that area and that's fine. So maybe within that area. But you

20:43 Follow who are the best at what they do. So it's not good enough to follow somebody who you like. You want to follow somebody who's either the best product thinker or the best engineer or the best salesperson.

20:56 And so that you will learn the skill of how to be the best at that. So you follow people Where you're gonna learn the most. And a way to do that also is you look at where the great people are going. So you wanna go to companies where there's also a nexus of great people.

21:12 Because they together will do great things, and even if the company fails. Or succeeds, but not as much as you'd like. You still have the those connections. I mean, everybody talks about the PayPal mafia.

21:27 and how they've gone on to do things. Like I was super lucky to be at Google for so many years and I know I spent a lot of time with ex Googlers that I met and that are all working in different companies now,'cause you build those relationships by working together. So If you follow people and where you're gonna l lear the most.

21:47 And you go step by step, I think that's a great way. uh uh progressing in your career. That's such tactical advice. And I've seen this succeed this work for a lot of people that just go where their favorite former employees work and and not favorite to your point, but like the people that they most respect.

22:05 And I've been most impressed by. And Uh, I think it's such an it's such an easy thing to do. It's like it's a really easy heuristic. For understanding where to go. There's something Mark Andrews someone shared that

22:17 I r I'm reminded of when you say this is that there's this idea There's like a term for this, I forget the actual term, but There's like Certain companies have this gravitational pull. Where they are

22:26 acquiring all the best talent. They're currently like the gravity in the space and everyone awesome is going there. And you have to, as a company, know you're one of those companies or you're the opposite, you're losing all the people and they're all going to this other company. Um, I guess any thoughts on that? I

22:43 Yeah, and it's it's really bad when you don't have a gravitational pull. It's it's it's super hard. I would say that one thing that if you're a manager, I always advise managers. Go somewhere where you can recruit. And One I got a piece of advice.

22:59 from a friend that I thought was amazing advice. As a leader. She said to me Take a job. where if you hire people

23:09 It's gonna make their careers. Oh I was like I was getting offers for like some kind of turnaround jobs. And you know, if you think you can turn around, great. But you want If you're gonna hire the best people.

23:25 you wanna make sure that it's gonna be a good place for them. And that they're gonna learn and they're gonna grow. And so you want to do right by them and you really earnestly want to say you can make your career by coming here. And I thought

23:37 that gave such a higher bar For every job I was looking at. As a leader. That I thought was just amazing advice. And then on the flip side, on the negative side.

23:50 Some people are looking putting too much emphasis on where will I get a big financial return. And I found that financial returns are the hardest to predict. You know who's good, you know who you want to work with, you can Predict where you're gonna learn.

24:08 'Cause even if a company fails, you learn a lot. But predicting financial success Is so hard because you don't know what's gonna happen with The market.

24:18 The whirlwind with like crypto and then AI. And people who do that and say like I had one person say I took this job because I'm a mercenary. They just paid me a ton. Did not work out for him.

24:32 And I feel really bad when you d when when people do that. But I think that that it's just a it's a dangerous thing to do. I imagine some people hearing this advice are gonna feel like I'm not gonna get a job at OpenAI or Glean in this or Other awesome companies that everyone wants to go work at.

24:51 Any advice to those folks? There's lots of good companies and there's lots of smart people. You don't have to be at the top brand. And if you go somewhere where you're gonna learn and it's gonna get you there. I mean, I made mistakes. I made I went to some companies, multiple companies, that failed or stopped crying and didn't do well or didn't have all the right people. Like Careers, you don't make every step is to the right place. You you remember in what you cited all the companies I went to that did well. You left out all the ones that I went to that didn't do well.

25:22 And so then people will assume that every time I made a job change it was to a company that did well. No, that was not the case. So If you if you focus on that learning bit, you will get there. And there are lots of paths. There isn't just the

25:39 you know, open AI or clean or anthropic. Awesome. And Again, I love how tactical this is. Like if someone is trying to figure out where to go work. if they're unhappy in their current job or don't have a job right now is just make a list of the people you most respect that are the best at the thing they do.

25:53 see where they work. And there's your list of companies to potentially go after. There's a lot of benefits to this, as you shared. It's not just helping you pick the place to work, it's the network. It's it'll level you up. Is there anything else along those lines that is Helpful for people to think about why this is a really good strategy.

26:10 Uh skills can't be taken away. A company can fail, but if you learn a skill You will always have that skill. Mm-hmm. Well that I've totally seen this to work, so I I really love that you're focusing on this advice.

26:22 You mentioned Places you've worked and folks you've worked with. Worked with Folks like Jeff Bezos, Stuart Butterfield, some of the top Product.

26:30 Thinkers, leaders in the world. So let me just ask, what's one thing you learned from Jeff Bezos? And Stuart Butterfield. Probably can't narrow down to one, but from uh I'll talk about Bezos first. I was very lucky to join Amazon early when I still like I had quarterly meetings with Jeff Bezos. Oh well. And this was before AWS launched, so it was before Amazon was known in the valley.

26:52 And and that kind this is another example. I went there because I went to work for U Man Bar, who started A9. And he was talking to me one night trying to recruit me and he spent two hours on the phone with me telling me how amazing Jeff Bezos was. And this was before like there were any books on it. And that really convinced me to go there. So

27:14 There's a lot written on Bezos. Read his shareholder let letters, read the books about him, read Colin Bryar's working backwards. The everything box, I think it's called, or the everything store. The everything store, yeah. And uh there I mean there's so many good books and there's so much to learn about how he works. So I won't try and cover those things. The things that stood out to me From the meetings I had with him were a couple things.

27:38 One, you know, a lot of people have written about these six pagers, so you have you can't he doesn't believe in PowerPoint, you write a six pager about I mean it it's like, you know, studying for the final exam. is ready in these six pages. So you go into the meeting And there's the people around the table, his his executive team and him. First.

27:56 He does not speak until everybody on round the table speaks. So he goes around to all his leads and said, What do you think? What do you think? What do you think? And I'm sitting there like I don't care what anyone think, I just wonder what basis thinks. But he wants to He wants to make sure that it's a team effort and that he's listening to what everybody in his organization Thanks.

28:17 And he always Spoke last. He is By far the smartest person I've ever met in my life. In that

28:25 I I worked a lot of smart people. But he's ability to go deep. In any domain. and nail the the core issue and remember. Like we would have quarterly meetings and from quarter to quarter, he would like remember things that he had talked about before. And then he would go into like the architecture of search.

28:47 And why are you doing it this way or that way? And And you're just like blown away that he knows that. But the thing that For me, the biggest takeaway from these meetings was his consistency. Which is he had principles.

29:00 that you it made it easier for you to operate in his company. Because you knew what he cared about. Because he always had these principles. Everything had to be customer driven. Everything had to be relevant for the customer. He hated icons.

29:14 That was just the thing. You had to like write what they were because people couldn't figure out what they are. So anytime you show an icon, he would get annoyed. But they were like so but you would go in and after a couple of meetings, you're like, Okay, I know what he's gonna ask about. I know how he's thinking and I know what his principles are, and I think those the consistency enables you to operate a large organization more effectively. And then there's one other thing that I I really remember was a very sm one of the few really small meetings I was in with him and we were presenting working on a a new product and I was like, you know, our competitors have like ten times as many people as we do on this. And he looked at me and he said

29:54 That is your advantage. And then he goes into his talk about how it's a hill and it takes seven years to build a product. You can't look at it in the near term. It's gonna you have to be in it for the long term. And I You can be sure I never went in and said I need a lot more resources. Uh.

30:13 So that was basis. Awesome. Stuart Again, I went to Slack because I wanted to work with Story But Butterfield. I think he is the best product thinker in the valley. Or he's not not kinda working in product right now. He's

30:29 Taking time off, but He's got this combination. of long term thinking in in the details. So in two thousand fourteen he wrote a master plan for Slack, which was Build a product people love.

30:41 Build a network. Um that's Lotconnect. Build a platform that makes all of your other SaaS products more valuable, this platform, and then do some magic AI stuff. The Magic AI stuff took a lot longer.

30:53 Uh but that was part of his plan early on, his magic yeah stuff. It literally was. There was a there was a grid with four boxes in two thousand and fourteen, and it never changed. That was his Master pain and what we worked on each year changed. But somebody recently asked me, Well, did he always like, you know, you guys did Slack Connect much later and like, yeah, that was always part of the plan. It was always part of his vision, so he saw.

31:17 Forward. In the vision, but he also was very much into the details. And I think the thing that I learned from him the most was the power of prototyping. And that even though he was such a great product thinker, he would always say I can't tell you if this is gonna work. I have to feel it.

31:33 I have to try it. And a mock up doesn't tell you what it's gonna feel like. And he would push people to do prototypes, not incremental. of just to get a feature out, but really to think Uh very soon after I

31:51 I started, we launched uh I hired a design lead, Ethan Iisman, and we And he led a redesign of the new information architecture for Slack. I worked with Ethan at RBB. Oh here. He was head of design for the search experience in the search team. Yeah, Ethan was awesome. And he came in and his first task was to work with Store on on this redesign.

32:10 And Stor came in and said, I want you to take Everything in the interface. And put'em behind one button. And everyone's like, That's never gonna work. And he's like, Do it.

32:22 Just do it. And so we had our prototypers. We had also engineers, front end engineers who were really good at prototyping, like literally took everything in the interface. and put it behind one button and he said, This is how you're gonna see what you really need in the interface. So we were never gonna ship that. But it was the beginning of the redesign.

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33:52 As a product leader, how do you think about just the time it takes to create a prototype in in something like this? You know, as a PM, I'm just like lot of times we don't have time to build this whole prototype. We gotta ship stuff, we gotta hit these calls, we got experiments to run. Let's just build it and see how it goes. How do you think about it? Make any time for something like that. If you're doing it right.

34:09 It'll be faster. And you need to have an engineering infrastructure that enables prototyping. So some engineering infrastructures are too heavy and they don't actually enable prototyping. Like we had a problem with our mobile apps. that it was too hard to prototype and we actually redesigned our mobile apps. Till we got to the point where it was easier because our desktop app was pretty easy to prototype.

34:32 But you have to have a layer of abstraction. that enables you to do that and you have to have engineers Who have a prototyping mindset. And if you build multiple things and you have this mindset is I'm willing to throw it away. You write code that you know is never gonna make it to production.

34:50 So you can get you can just crank it out much faster. And then you can see what works, and then you build the production type. Until you actually get to your end goal of something working. Faster. But you need the engineering team

35:04 To have the same mindset. the product and engineering have to work together and design,'cause design is just in it. in it as much as sometimes you can get Design engineers who are doing the prototyping. So your first prototypes are like Figma prototypes.

35:18 And then you get prototypes on real data. I I had a I when I was at Google one of our teams, the front end team, I remember we got We hired a bunch of prototypers and our head of front end engineering said to me one day, This is my secret weapon. This is how we move faster. Mm-hmm. So

35:34 I do think it's a mindset shift and a tech stack. Sure. It's also g we're gonna talk about AI later, but it's also getting easier. to build prototypes with AI. There's this video recently that went around on Twitter where an eight year old girl was building an app and

35:48 In like forty five minutes she build like a chat bot using this protocol cursor. So I think that'll unlock a lot of Great product. Uh on opportunities and just accelerate the sort of work. I asked about Jeff Bezos and Stuart Butterfield.

36:03 I'm curious if there's another leader you've worked with that maybe is less known. that you also learned a ton from that might be worth Talking about I think that there are people who are really, really good At what they do.

36:16 So Mark Benioff is An amazing marketer. He's So I like his marketing mind. So we after the acquisition I I got the opportunity to

36:30 be on stage with him at Dreamforce or'cause you know Flack was a new shiny thing, so of course Flack was gonna be in the keynote. And so I was in the uh Benny of Kino two years in a row. And so I watched how he approaches his keynote. And the whole thing around Dreamforce. I mean Dreamforce is

36:50 Incredible. at the impact that it has on the ecosystem. And so I think that as a Product people don't think of him. As much

37:00 But as his marketing abilities are I re Amazing what he's done. I've written posts about how various companies got started and Salesforce's story. always comes to mind where they go to like

37:12 conferences with us like no software, mascot walking around. And I remember they did something around one of their competitors or they just like created some real controversy around someone Well they went in to their competitors conference and stood outside their competitors' conference. It was uh this is in the uh beyond software. So this is in his book that that he wrote about the early phases of of Salesforce and Tays guts.

37:37 He pushes the envelope. Mm. I love that. It's it's like a really good point that people don't think of Mark Benioff as a marketer. And that's interesting that that's the one of the maybe the main thing you took away from me was just the power of marketing and the skill. He approaches

37:51 His marketing presentations like a product person approaches their building their product. Amazing. Okay. Speaking of former colleagues. Uh I

38:02 Asked one of your former colleagues, named Fuzzy Ghost. He's now the CTO of Notion. You work with them, I believe, at Slack. And a Google. And then Google. Wow, okay, so I asked them what to ask you.

38:13 And he said that you're amazing at Building strong cross functional relationships, especially with engineers. I know you used to be an engineer, so I get where that skill comes from. What can you Teach people about building stronger cross functional relationships. Especially PMs.

38:30 to build better relationships with our engineers, designers, other folks on their team. Probably the most important thing that a product leader does because if you have great ideas of what to build, but you can't get them built. then you go nowhere. So Uh so one make sure you're somewhere where you have a good engineering partner. So Cal Henderson was a co founder and CTO of Slack, and like I couldn't have asked for a better engineer.

38:54 It does it. And you You need to that has to be part of your evaluation criteria. That you meet. Um

39:03 Value. your engineering partner before you join and or you know that it's not the right one and the organization is willing to to make a change. So that can happen too. You can go in and understand that there that something has to change, but But that is a very, very important thing of what you're doing and what you're assessing when you go in. And then I think what's really important is that you're aligned. You understand your roles and responsibilities and where you're gonna divide and conquer and where you're gonna be aligned. You don't want any of this

39:31 like people in the organization, they asked mom, they asked dad and they got different opinions and playing one against the other, like that doesn't work. So one goo have to know that you're not gonna do that. So if somebody would ask me something that was in Cal's domain, I'd be like, Did you talk to Cal? I would never try and go around him. So we were very clear on You're gonna drive this.

39:51 I'm gonna drive this and if it was unclear, we would talk and we would say, Okay, who's gonna who's gonna take this one? And we would do all our reviews together. And so all of the OKR reviews, all of the ex we had weekly exec reviews Um we had the Updates on our our OKRs. So we did them all together, but I knew like here's the things that he was gonna ask the questions on and dig D.

40:15 And then when I was he would take a back seat, but of course we could ask questions on in each other things, but I knew that he was taking ownership. And he knew what I was taking ownership of. But I think the bottom line was respect. Is that you have to respect and trust.

40:31 that they actually will follow up. And what they say w the well and cow and fuzzy. Or like Amazing that I would go to Fuzzy and be like, Hey, we need more mobile engineers'cause this one product is not gonna ship and we and he's like

40:44 I'm on it. Got it. That was all I needed to do. And like obviously he couldn't do it, he'd come back to me and like, hey, there's gonna be a problem. But it was like just things got Done. That's that's the best part of it.

40:56 You talked about being aligned, which uh I love and I fully have seen that power of that of you and your engine manager, design manager being aligned on And You tell me if I'm wrong, but specifically on what goals that you're trying to achieve, what success looks like. Things like that.

41:11 Are there any tactics you found to create that alignment? And Also if I if there's anything else you want to add to the point I just made about what it is you're specifically aligned on, that'd be great. One, do you gotta spend a lot of time together. I mean, there isn't kind of a way around that and you have to document things and make sure that you've talked it through. And if you don't agree with something and you're not sure it's a priority, you have to speak up.

41:34 And you can't just be like, Okay, whatever and then go to somebody in your team and be like oh God that That CTO, like why did he make this decision? Like that just doesn't work. So I'm a very direct person. So if I don't think that something is the right priority or is working, I will Be very clear. We had different forms, so I'll be very tactical here on the forms that

41:55 That Cal and I had to get. Perfect. I So we had um We used okay to to drive our processes. And we would have the teams present OKRs to us.

42:06 When the team got too large, it got to be too much time to go through every team's okay reviews. So we had them. We had a Slack channel for each team. There are okay ourselves a planning channel for each one. And people would Prz uh post a doc and then a Slack video. of going through the major points.

42:23 And we had a time limit of how long they were allowed to be. And they would say, Here's here's the our OKRs, here's the things that you would pay attention to. And then Cal and I would do a marathon and we would watch them all together. And Room sitting there watching them together. Correct.

42:39 And uh and then we would like say are we uh do we have any follow up questions? Then we put in channel our follow up questions. and to the team and sometimes there would be there'd be like five to ten teams that we would than have a follow up meeting with. We would say there's things that we that are this is like a really high priority project, or there are a lot of questions that we have. And then we would do meeting, but we were always doing those meetings together. So that was the okay I reviews of getting the alignment And by asking the questions we could then

43:06 By it just being us, we could kinda dig into the team. And oh we had we each had a chief of staff, so it was the two of us plus our two chiefs of staff. And which they also did a divide and conquer and they worked really well together. Uh, they're both long time slash employees. So for years they They had one had been an engineering director and one had been a T PM. Uh

43:26 And then we w every Monday we had a Monday meeting where we reviewed the progress on the Topo Cairs. And red, yellow, green, and don't talk through the green ones, only talk through the red ones, and what are the issues. And again. Both there.

43:41 And then we had a weekly uh meeting with the four of us. uh where we would just go through Any issues in the organization, what's going on, what's not. And the four of us is you, the CTO, the chiefs of staff.

43:54 Yeah. And sometimes we would invite people like There was an issue with QA, so we'd have the QA leader come in and present to us. But we tried to limit the number of meetings with like Teams.

44:05 So it'd be like the OKR the Monday meeting was the big meeting. that you had to be there and you had to be able to talk to your project. And that was it. There's so much. Awesomeness here. I love the idea of this async.

44:16 share your plan and a video instead of meetings with everyone in real time. And you could just do a lot of the stuff async. We iterated every quarter, just like you iterate on a product. So every quarter we would say, Did the okay air planning work? Or not? And then we would adjust. So we got to the point where

44:32 At one point we added up all the hours of OKI reviews and all the people in them and it was like Some insane number, like three hundred and something, and we're like, This has gotten out of hand. And so then we're like, We have to do something drastic. And that's when we move them to Async. It was also right after Slack clips launched.

44:50 I got it. That's the video feature. Very cool. And then I don't know if you're uh you launched Huddles, right? Slack Huddles your Yeah. Did you use that as a part of this or eventually just get people into a little huddle asynchronously and talking? Sometimes, absolutely. We would be in the reviews and we would huddle with somebody to ask a quick question. We use huddles all the time. I still do. I love huddles.

45:09 Love it. Uh one crazy thing about Slack is people in Slack don't actually use email internally, right? It's like all in Slack. It's like the actual vision of Slack working within Slack. No A. Unless you're dealing with somebody external and now it's mostly Slack and Act anyway.

45:24 Wow. That's amazing. Okay. Uh I have one more question around product stuff and then I want to talk about AI. So I was reading your newsletter. on Sub Stack, which we'll link to and

45:35 You share this really interesting insight that I've experienced myself that Uh, I'll quote you here. One of the mistakes that I see a lot of product product managers make is they over index on people who are gonna be unhappy. with the products they're launching. And You basically your advice is not to worry so much about making users unhappy, which I think is counterintuitive. Counterintuitive to some people.

45:56 You just talk about this lesson and I'd love to hear what product you launch that made people unhappy that you realized, oh, maybe we don't need to worry about this as much. I saw it more when yeah, you unlaunch things. You take things away. There's always some set of users that are using a feature that nobody else does. And then you take it away and they're super unhappy.

46:19 But there are more people you're gonna make it. Happy. So you get a product manager gets caught in this trap. I've The vocal minority.

46:30 And the number of people using your product depends on what phase. Are you a Google, are you a Slack, are you a Glean, but number of people using your product today. Is usually unless you're a Google. far smaller than the number of people who are gonna be using your product tomorrow. So design it for the people the bigger number of people who are gonna be using it tomorrow. Like if you have to redo the UI

46:50 And you know, the like who move my cheese, people will be unhappy. But all the new people are gonna be like, This is so much easier. Then Do it. and deal with

47:00 the people who are unhappy. But the trick is you have to be respectful. When you have to be transparent and you have to explain. You have to go to people and say This is why we made this change and you have to be authentic.

47:15 You can't be dismissive and you can't have marketing speak. You have to really say Here's here's for real why and you have to listen to it listen to your audience. You don't wanna Alienate your early uh users.

47:28 Because Most people like if you made a good decision on why you moved this or why we like stopped using Slack calls and moved to huddles and like you have to do it over time and give people choice and then give'em enough time to move. So you have to do it in the right way. But

47:46 If people feel heard it makes a difference and I've I have an example that's not a product example, but I think is a really good one. It's a leadership example. So is when I was at Google There was always a controversy about something. But there was a controversy about it was like blogger or something. I can't even remember what it was. It was like we Needed change.

48:06 And uh there was an engineer in my in my or then we were like fifty thousand people at this time. With an engineer in my team and I see engineer was like super unhappy about the gene. And I knew Rachel Westbone. She was in charge of all of PR and global policy at Google. So huge job. And uh I emailed Rachel and I'm like, Hey Do you have like an FAQ or something that I can help me'cause I don't know why you made this change and

48:31 that I can help explain to the engineer and my team. She did not respond to my email. She picked up the phone and she called him. I had no idea she was she did this. She just called this I see engineer.

48:42 And she listened to him. And she heard why he was upset. And she explained. Her reasoning. He was so blown away.

48:50 That she called him. that he completely changed his opinion and then he told everyone else in the art. And so it had this effect. And I learned a lot from watching her do that. Like

49:03 She never even told me she did it, like Later. She just She just did it. You just Yeah. You're authentic.

49:10 You listen to people and you're transparent. It's so funny. This reminds me of a book I'm reading a parenting book I'm reading right now that a former guest recommended called Listen. And the core Thesis of the book is when your kids are acting up or there's they're getting off track.

49:25 So much of What they need is is of sense that you're connected to them, a connection which is Rooted in you listening to them. And small these. I don't know if this is is uh the same one or a different one. It's

49:38 How to talk so your kids will listen and how to listen so your kids will talk. Maybe it's the new name of that book. But it's so good and it's so true in everything and also in products. So whether you're in a forum and explaining to customers, whether you're enterprise customers You're explaining, you're hearing them out, people want to understand.

49:58 Uh amazing. So many applications of just the power of listening. Okay. Well, uh not quite a segue, but let's talk about AI. Your Kind of at the epicenter of AI now with clean. How do you anticipate AI will change

50:14 our jobs and product. What do you think people maybe aren't recognizing it, realizing it? What have you seen? I'm gonna give you a little bit of my history with AI to get to that point. So actually

50:27 When AI was a completely different technology stack, I have a master's in AI. So I started like working in AI when I it's evolved so much. And then of course at Google using it for autocomplete and search and And there it's It's transformed so many times. But then with this last transformation of Gen AI, and that's what brought me to to Glean of seeing this like meeting lots of AI companies like wow.

50:51 This is really gonna transform how we work. And it's just fascinating seeing these products. I I was kind of one of those people like, Oh yeah, it's gonna be so far away until like I saw GPD three. And I think A AI

51:09 It's we are underestimating how much it's gonna change how we work. It's not gonna be sudden from today to tomorrow because people They haven't figured it out yet. They kinda haven't figured out how exactly to leverage it.

51:23 But the people who have Are gonna be so far ahead. They're gonna be far ahead of everyone else because they're gonna be working faster, they're gonna be working better. And in five to ten years, I think the lines between product managers and engineers and designers are gonna blur. Because AI will enable product managers to build prototypes, to build designs, designers to

51:46 to build a to build a pro like Figma already has their Figma AI. You can press a button and you can get your initial prototype working. You've got all the cult pilots. So they're not White there. There's you still like with co pilot or with cursor, you need to Be an experienced engineer to know when it's getting it wrong. But they're gonna keep getting better.

52:08 So I think um people have to be careful about not getting left behind. But their jobs aren't gonna go away. They're just gonna change. And we're gonna I'm I'm of a believer that we're just gonna have a lot more software. But I talk to engineers and to PM saying, Yeah, I tried that, it doesn't really work and then go back to how I worked before.

52:28 And that's a that's a dangerous spot to be in, I think. For people that get anxiety hearing this, where they're feeling they're gonna be left behind. And like, Oh my God, I don't know enough time to do this or I don't know what I'm doing here. Give me advice for how Some what's something someone can do to

52:46 Not fall behind. Use the products. Like This is what good PM should do. Period.

52:54 always be using new products. It's not a unique thing for AI. When mobile came out PMs needed to be using mobile apps all the time. to try them out, see what the UIs are, see what's working and w what isn't. And the same goes even more for AI. Use Chat GPT. If your organization has clean, use clean. Use

53:12 Claude, try Mall. Like, try them and see what they do. Um Thank you. uh product manager I know. who is more forward thinking and loves playing with new products.

53:23 And he had this use case that like blew me away. So he said And this was like a couple months ago, so before It was right when Gemini had expanded the context window. So his product had a Discord channel.

53:37 And he took the transcript. From the Discord train. channel, which was huge, right? And he fed it into Gemini. The entire channel.

53:46 And then used it to ask questions. Like What is the sentiment of my product? What is the most requested uh feature, what are the things people are unhappy with? Like this never would have occurred to me. I was like, that is so smart. And he's like, it was like a gold mine,'cause do you know how long it would have taken him to read? And we just wouldn't have done it, right?

54:06 So you're think about like for the argument, Oh, I'm too busy, well, if you use these products You're actually eight. not gonna you're gonna it's gonna be leverage on your time. So you get a lot of articles sent to you.

54:19 Summarize them. You use AI to summarize the articles. Uh we use gong at Glean to record our all s all our sales calls. We have a Glean app that will Read all the Kong transcripts? But

54:33 then in a spreadsheet in um in a certain format of who the A is Et cetera, and then summarize all the talk requested features from all the gone gone calls. And we it took a while to get it right. Like at first it would the the summarization, the prompt wasn't good enough and would give us features that like our salespeople would recommend.

54:53 and didn't distinguish that this was actually the customer. So you have to tweak it. It's not gonna work out of the box. But then we got it to the point where it worked and Make these things. Really save time. And you have to use your creative juices as a piano.

55:09 To figure out How it can help you and have patience. To iterate and keep trying. Because The models that we have today.

55:20 Can do a lot already. Yeah. I love your example of the PM and what they did with the Discord channel. Is there anything else along those lines that either you've done To

55:30 leverage some AI tool to be more productive or focus on your team. I've done to be more productive, either product leaders or other folks. So many examples. Um So one that I did really recently is I wrote uh I wrote a prompt in in Glean to help me get the status of

55:49 Features. And like we have a launch cow and you can look at launch cow and we'll say a date. But then like, is it really the day? What are the outstanding issues? So It will look at our launch pal. And it will look at see if there are any open gear tickets.

56:03 What the Slack conversations are. to see and the customers who are beta testing it and bring all these together to tell me Okay. Launch date is this according to LaunchDale, but here are all the open issues and here are the open conversations that people are talking about. So then it can tell give me the confidence level of the future looking. So I can run the prompt, just put in the name of the feature.

56:25 and get like so I don't have to read all of these channels. So this is a prompt that I built like Two weeks ago. Because we're advancing our prompting capabilities. And so I was testing it out. And I was like, Oh, I could do this.

56:38 So that's like Alright. And that's another example. and uh engineers are using it for automating part of the incident management. of like I got an incident, how do I see

56:51 all of were there previous incidents that were similar to it, were there not? And so these are the type of things you can look at to say I To to help you. Um but

57:02 Like the simplest simplest is There's so much news. Let me just s like paste in all these things and and and summarise them like As a product manager at Glean, here are all the latest news. What do I have to care about? Mm.

57:16 What's what's impacting me and potentially competitive to any of the products that I have. And putting that into, say, Clotter Jet GPT you're saying. Yeah. Yeah, I think that just I think that beginning of the prompt is something a lot of people don't know is the power of just giving It a a role.

57:34 Like you are a product manager at Glean. from that perspective, give me this summary versus just summarize this. And that ends up being really powerful. Right. A hundred percent. And you can compare and like What is Claude you know

57:47 PR saying that's like they just uh launched uh cloud enterprise. How is cloud enterprise different from OpenAI enterprise? And what are like'cause it these things i they again, you can do it yourself. But these micro improvements in your productivity

58:03 Um Help? There's a I for my newsletter I interviewed Claire Vaux who came out with chat PRD. And so pe product managers are using it. We're just starting to evaluate it internally, it's I haven't personally used it yet, but It's super cool, and you can use chat BRD chat.

58:20 GPT to to do a PRD. And Chad PRD gives it's more templatized and more frameworks of O of how to do that. Um These again, these things are gonna keep getting better.

58:32 Claire's been on the podcast. She's gonna be speaking at the Lenin Friends summit coming up October twenty fourth. And uh yeah, and she uh a crazy statue shared is she's making six figures off this product that she builds on the weekends, Chad PRD. So cool. Incredible. But it also shows what you can build with eye. Right. It's just her. I think she just recently hired some engineers to help because she has She has like three kids, uh CTO and

58:55 Watch Darkly and just uh is building this on the side, making hundred thousand plus dollars. Incredible. Uh I wanna add one a couple of things here. So one is uh For folks looking for ideas for how to use AI tooling for their PM job. Uh there's a couple of posts I've written.

59:10 That I'll link to in the show notes just to put that out there just A bunch of PM sharing, here's what I've done. with these various tools. Another thought I love you to get your take on. There's a lot of fear that

59:20 The PM job will be. Replaced by AI. And I've recently realized that it's the opposite. I think the PM role. is the best positioned to thrive in the world of AI because if you just think about you have a tool that can just build a thing for you.

59:35 Just like you're staring at this blank thing and that can build anything for you. Which function would you think would have the best chance of building some of asking it what of what to build and how to articulate what to build best. To me it's clearly product people.

59:49 they're best at figuring out what to build, what matters most, where the impact's gonna be, what customers need. Not to say other functions don't also have these skills, but I feel like of all functions, PMs have the Most I love to get your take on that. I I think that AI the one thing it's not good at is being creative. Mm. So if you're a PM

1:00:06 who's doing the kind of route work. It's gonna take your job away. But if you're a PM who actually is strategic and can pull the pieces together and be creative and think how you do something that is gonna differentiate because it's not gonna give you that weak.

1:00:23 It'll say here's what customers are asking for. Here are the problems today. But you have to figure out how to solve it. So in some ways it might weed out the good from the bad PMs. There's Are a significant number of PMs.

1:00:35 who are more like just execution. And I think that part of the job hopefully will be lowered because I hope a lot more of the execution will be will be able to automate like updating Jira and like, you know, all these things that just take time.

1:00:52 And creating even little like launch cows, which PMs have to do manually now. So hopefully a lot of that work goes away. And then people can be more creative. And I think designers and PMs are kind of gonna blend because the best designers I've worked with. are product thinkers and a lot of really good PMs can also design. Depends on the what what kind of product you're PMing for

1:01:13 But so I agree with the caveat. that it will become harder to be a great Wait, say more about that. It'll be harder to be a great PM because Uh The

1:01:25 Many PMs are doing things that are mostly like project management and that's the stuff that you Yeah, let me rephrase. It's not gonna be harder to be a great PM, but to be a PM, the The not so good PM's jobs will go away. The great PMs will still have. Great jobs.

1:01:40 Yeah. Yeah, totally hear you. So there's in a sense there might be fewer You might need fewer PMs. But I think that applies in theory to every function. You might engineers, fewer designers. I don't think you'll need fewer. I think you'll be able to do more things.

1:01:54 So like think about every company, uh our head of sales came to me the other day and you need to hire more engineers because we just have so many things we need to build. Like when have you ever worked in a company where you thought that like You didn't need more H. Like you always want people to build more stuff. So I don't think you're gonna need fewer.

1:02:13 I think you're just gonna get so much more done. A lot of people are building AI into their product. Glean is obviously an example. Which integrates LLMs which innately are non deterministic. And Hard to know if they're gonna provide anything.

1:02:27 Good. Sometimes something really dumb comes out. Do you have any advice on working with these very complicated systems that don't necessarily you can't control. And building them into your products. Anything you've learned that might be helpful. My first week at Glean.

1:02:42 was eye opening in learning some of these things. But let me first just Explain what Glean does for people who may not know. Well. So Gleo started his enterprise search. Which

1:02:53 Reads. content of all your SaaS apps. So it reads the content from Microsoft, Google, Slack, Salesforce, Jira, like any SaaS tool that you use. It indexes it and enables you to search. So it started as just an enterprise search. Then when and using AI. So it was an AI search using BERT models and using uh uh Vector embeddings in two thousand nineteen. Because the early engineers at Glean

1:03:18 Came from Google. And Google created Bert to enhance search. And so it was obvious that they would be using ML techniques for search. Then Chat uh GPT three came along.

1:03:30 and they added an actual l language interface, a chat interface, so you can ask the question in natural language. And get an answer and it Basically as a knowledge graph of the organization, so you can ask any question, think of Chat GPT for your enterprise. Ask any question about your own. So search people understand.

1:03:47 Church. because they understand Google and you put in a query and then you've you refine it. But chat interfaces people still don't really know how to use. If you look at the stats from ChatGPT, from what I understand

1:04:02 I the retention is fairly low. Like people use it, they play with it, and then they don't get back to it because it's not in their workflow and they have a hard time figuring out. what they can and can't do for it. What I when I got to Gleam The first week

1:04:18 I met with the assistant quality team. And one of the biggest issues they have is people you trying to use Gleam for things that there's like no way it could know. Like, what should my top priority be next week when Like we don't even know what your priorities are.

1:04:36 And But then there's golden cases. That are just Amazing. So we're not the the example of refining queries and search took years for people to understand how to do. And it took a lot of features of like,

1:04:50 autocomplete and refinements at the bottom of the page. So we need to build in those things to guardrails to help with the change. To help suggest Oh, Lenny, here's what you could do. Here's a

1:05:05 Here's a prompt to find out the status of your feature that Tamar built. So how do you give people guardrails? So that they're that they understand what is gonna work and what isn't gonna work. Because this whole I don't know what I can ask.

1:05:20 And then on top of that the non deterministic. Like an enterprise CIO. We'll go use chat GPT on the weekend, but they come to work and they expect their software to be determined. So

1:05:30 How do you how do you help educate users about that? And then the other thing I'll say about using LMs Is the industry is transforming so rapidly. Think you need to make sure that your product gets better. as yellow limbs get better.

1:05:48 And uh Too many people are building things to make up and compensate for the LMs. That all that work is gonna go away. So It's okay to do it to understand that it's gonna go away, but that can't be your differentiator.

1:06:01 you have to understand that your differentiator is something That it will continue to be there. As the LMs get better and smarter. And as part of that, because the LMs get so much smarter, everyone else will become awesome. And

1:06:16 To keep up, you need something that is actually outside of the LM that continues to differentiate you and is better than what other people are doing. Well, yeah, that your whole product gets better as the LMs get better. Yeah.

1:06:28 And that I think is it's a it's a frame of A frame of mind? of how you approach the value add you're you're having. Awesome. Tamar to close out our conversation, is there anything else that

1:06:43 We did not cover that you think is important to share or you think might be helpful to leave listeners with. Before we get to our very exciting lightning round. I in my decades of working in tech have never been working in an environment that's moving so quickly. And it's really exciting.

1:07:00 I mean it's super energizing and it's also scary. But You have to change how you're working. You have to change how you're working so that you can Keep up.

1:07:10 Because It is gonna be it's it's gonna be an interesting decade ahead. with all these new tools that are coming out. And Staying ahead will be hard.

1:07:22 But it's also there's so much I think richness and opportunity here. So I advise people to Get in the thick of it. And try it out.

1:07:32 Because you'll be surprised at how much How many products we can build? I love that. I I can't help but drill in uh one level. Deeper, is there anything you found to help you stay ahead and s help you stay you know, aware of what's happening. Are there like newsletters you find useful, chad, podcast that just like help you s

1:07:51 keep up to date on where things are going. Is it like a person you look to like hey What's new? There are definitely like AI newsletters that I look at. There's AI podcasts that I listen to. I now have a commute, so in some ways that's good because I get to keep up on the AI podcast. So I just try and listen. I'm I'm trying to build some prompts for myself to make it easier to say Like Taken.

1:08:13 To I haven't perfected this, but the chat GPT voice mode. where you can load it somebody who just I just hired a at Glean with saying he does this. He loads up stuff before his commute and then he'll be like summarized. these articles and then he can ask questions to it. So I I need to up my game there. Uh but I definitely have a a list of

1:08:36 Like Ben Spites and The Neuron and uh I love I like those are good summaries and like I like Gill and Sarah Goes podcast I listen to, Cognitive Revolution. There's Uh there is a uh kind of too many of'em right now, but I I pick and choose. Also, okay, we'll link to those ones you just mentioned in in the show notes. The Lad Gill and Sarah Groves podcast. It's called No Priors. I was actually just listening to it on the way here. Sarah is gonna also be at Lenny's Inference Summit.

1:09:03 She's gonna be moderating a panel between Uh Kevin Will and uh Mikey Krieger. Who are the CPOs of Anthropic and OpenAI. So there we go. Another quick plug for Lenny and Friends Summit.com. No, I think it's LennySummit.com. Awesome. Yeah.

1:09:17 With that tomorrow, we've reached our very exciting lightning round. Are you ready? I am ready. Okay, let's do this. First question, what are two or three books that you have recommended most to other people? So one book was recommended to me.

1:09:31 By Shishir, the CEO of Coda. Uh when I started at Slack. He recommended the book Switch. How to change things when change is hard by uh Chip and Dan Heath. And

1:09:44 It's such a good buck. And it's about like how do you set a path for people? to follow into the whole elephant and the rider. So setting the path, but yet motivating people to go down the path. And I read it and we had an all hands about like there was I don't even remember the topic. It was something that we were like all up in arms about that we had to do.

1:10:06 And I had just read the book and after the all hands I went up just Stuart and I'm like, You did that all wrong. Okay. You need to read this book. That is not how to get people. Motivated.

1:10:17 And he read the book and he's like, You're right. So it just changes how you think in organizations to A fact change. So that's on the kind of organizational leadership and one book I really liked. was uh team of rivals.

1:10:32 Uh it's a it's a book about and putting together his cabinet. in during the civil war. One, I just learned a lot about the civil war that I didn't really know. And it's about again, a book about leadership and it's

1:10:49 Uh Is fascinating. Don't think anyone's recommended either of these, so Love'em. Next question, do you have a favorite recent movie or TV show you've really enjoyed?

1:11:00 I don't know if you like British murder mysteries. I don't know either. It's kind of a ni niche niche thing, but there's there's a uh a guy named Anthony Horowitz and the latest series he did was called Nagpie Murders and it's just like kind of an intricate story. So I enjoyed it. Very niche, but amazing.

1:11:23 Do you have a favorite product you've recently discovered that you really like? Well, I'm gonna give two. One is Tech and one is non tech. Um so non tech.

1:11:32 I really like dark chocolate. A really good dark chocolate that's simple, like no frills, none of this, just dark chocolate. I discovered this chocolate called the zoo chocolate. And it's um It's a guy in Oakland who makes it himself s super niche. He was selling at the farmers market. And uh it's just like if you were like a simple

1:11:59 Like no knots, no anything, just in case. great pride in the beans and resources I'm from. Wow. It's called B busy with a bee. Yeah, the zoo as in Kiss in French. Um Okay.

1:12:12 And then on the tech side I mean the honest answer is Glean. Is I was listening to your podcast with Nikita, who said that people over twenty two don't use new products except at work and that like stuck with me and uh I uh

1:12:30 The products new products I usually use are at work and I use Glean ten, fifteen times a day. Like I use it so much and it change the way I unboarded, it changed the way I work. I like I just Even like the simplest questions, you don't bother people, you don't you don't interrupt people on Slack, you're like

1:12:47 You know, what's the latest status with this deal? What's the last time we talked to them? I meet somebody at a conference, and I can quickly say, Have we ever talked to this company before? And I can just get an answer. And or without asking an engineer, Where's the latest design doc? I it's just It has really transformed how I work.

1:13:04 So I know I know it's cheating in that it's the product I work on it, but it's the actual honest Is the actual honest answer. Uh, and for folks that haven't heard of Glean, it's one of the most successful B to B A I companies out there, right? It's like a very large successful business and company that if you haven't checked it out, you should definitely check it out. As our investors say it's one of the AI companies that's actually making money.

1:13:28 Mm-hmm. Very few of those. Awesome. Two more questions. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to repeat yourself, share with friends or family and worker in life?

1:13:41 I have one that my father told me when I was being really indecisive about what college to go to. Um, he was really kinda bored of the conversation and he said There are no right decisions. You make a decision right. And it is so true, cause you never know what's gonna happen in life. You just have to commit.

1:14:02 To whatever you're doing. And have no regrets about it. You can't be like, Oh, you know, ten years later, what if I had taken that job over there? It's like you you make you make your success based on how you approach the decisions that you've made. Yeah.

1:14:18 So it's if you feel regret about something This is a good one to pull out of just I will make this the best I can make it, and that's all the best I can do. You're gonna move forward. Move forward. I love that.

1:14:32 Last question. I know you're a parent. I'm a new parent. I have a fourteen month old at this point. Is there A piece of parenting advice that you learned early on that you think might be helpful to me, or folks that are new parents, or something you've just learned yourself that you think might be helpful. Fourteen months. I think the best

1:14:48 Parenting. Book I read. besides the how to talk to your kill listen, how to listen to your kill talk is Uh They get called.

1:14:58 Healthy sleep habits, happy baby. Like We are much happier when we sleep well. We perform better at work when we sleep well.

1:15:07 Children need to sleep. Like so making sure that they sleep well and sometimes that's like I did the whole sleep training, like cry until he fall asleep and Uh My kids still speak to me, so it was okay. And so you you just like that is like

1:15:24 The basic things like Make sure that their basic needs are met. And then as they grow up Share your life with them. Uh so a piece of advice I was given was

1:15:37 Kind of analogous to talk so your kids listen is When they come home from school, you can't just say how was your day? Say, You know what? I did the Podcast with this person, and it was super interesting because they talked about this or that, or I'm massively screwed up, and I should have asked them this or that. And they'll be like, Oh my God, I was at school today and this is what happened. Like if you share

1:15:58 Your life. With them? They will share their life with you. Such good advice. I really appreciate it.

1:16:04 Tamar, thank you so much for being here. You're awesome. We got through so much great stuff. Everything else hoping we get through. Two final questions, where can folks find you if they want to read up on more stuff that you share and just follow you online? And how can listeners be useful to you? Uh find me on LinkedIn. And I have a uh sub stack called practical intelligence where I've been

1:16:25 Interviewing practitioners who are working with AI was my way of learning. I started when I was a V C. Uh trying to continue doing it. Uh and uh how can they be helpful if you're a customer of Glean? I'd love to know what you think, what works and what doesn't work. What's the best way to share that with you? Is it like message you on LinkedIn?

1:16:44 Subscribe subscribe. Message on LinkedIn or comment on your on uh on your buttons. Yeah, those probably be the two ways. Awesome. Tamar, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having me. Bye everyone.

1:17:01 Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show. at Lenny's podcast dot com. See you in the next episode.

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