Lenny Rachitsky@lennysan11h ago

Now that the Lenny & Friends Summit is a few weeks behind us, I’ve had a chance to reflect on the day. Here are the themes and takeaways that have stuck with me most: 1. There’s a huge need for (curated) IRL events right now I’ve rarely felt this much PMF for anything I’ve done. It’s wild. My sense is that the more time we spend working with agents, the lonelier the work becomes, and the more we need to find a place to connect with other humans. I heard this theme more than anything else from attendees: - “Things are certainly different now, but underneath all this technology, we’re still just ancient humans looking for connection.” —Charlie Koch - “I left filled with gratitude for the experience, the conversations, and the reminder that even in a role that can sometimes feel lonely, we don’t have to figure everything out alone.” —Hemanth Babu Shekar - “I left feeling genuinely sparked by what’s possible, and also a little less alone in figuring out what comes next.” —Attendee - “I left this conference having fallen in love with product all over again.” —Jenny Zhao 2. Nobody has it figured out Should we be building software factories? Are roadmaps over? Should PMs be shipping to production? We had speakers take both sides of these debates throughout the day. But what everyone agreed on is that there’s no one way to do it. My takeaway is we’re all still figuring it out, and the best way to do that is together. We heard this theme from both speakers and attendees: - “The answer that we have come to is: it depends. It depends what type of product it is. It depends on what phase in the product it is.” — @TYehoshua, Atlassian - “We don’t know the answer. We don’t think anyone knows the answer. We’re all going to discover it. And we’re all fundamentally on the same team.” —Ami Vora, Anthropic - “This is just one way. There’s so many ways to build products. You probably heard 10 other ones today that were just as valid as this one. You should decide on what makes sense for you.” — @rmstein, Google Search - “The best practices have not been written yet. We get to do that.” — @lil_dill, Stripe 3. It’s never been easier to build something nobody wants As building gets easier, choosing the right thing to build, knowing what good looks like, and caring enough to fix it are becoming increasingly important for successful product teams. Almost every speaker touched on this theme: - “And now we can ship all our bad ideas, like congratulations to us.” — @clairevo, How I AI -“If almost anything you can think of can get built, it’s more clear to me than ever that the actual true value of PM is around judging. It’s around taste. It’s around doing something extremely well.” — @rmstein, Google Search - “They’re not impressed if we animated something with Three.js and Blender in 30 minutes. They are impressed by us solving their problems and clever touches in the details that show we anticipated their needs.” — @lil_dill, Stripe - “The output is not the product. Customers are not buying the lines of code.” — @karrisaarinen, Linear - “Is this useful or is it just new? It’s a big thing you need to differentiate.” — @danshipper, Every 4. The PM job is expanding, not disappearing Instead of the PM, eng, and design circles of the Venn diagram collapsing into one “builder,” each role is instead evolving and expanding. - “Roles are overlapping, but they are also expanding. . . . Everyone can do so much more than they could do before.” — @TYehoshua, Atlassian - “PMs will absolutely evolve and expand their role to not just the product organization but the marketing organization, the sales organization, the growth organizations, the operational organizations. PMs will become GMs, and they will own the actual business outcome and lead the entire function.” — @geoffintech, Ramp - “I build and change the pricing page. I build prototypes, I deploy to production myself. I do the user research, I do the analysis, I do all of the optimizations.” — @ElenaVerna, Lovable 5. It’s important to be reminded of what’s possible—and to raise our ambitions One of the most inspiring parts of the experience for me, and for a lot of people at the Summit, was to be surrounded by people at the top of their craft, demonstrating what great looks like. This is especially important now that AI allows us (and forces us) to be a lot more ambitious. - “If we only use AI to make the things that we already make just faster, then we are definitely missing out on the most interesting part. AI can help us raise the ceiling, not just the floor.” — @lil_dill, Stripe - “The biggest constraint is honestly people’s understanding and ability to absorb what you’re giving them.” — @thenanyu, OpenAI - “I think next year is the ambition game. . . . What experiments can I run in two weeks, three weeks, that would have taken us a year last time?” — @clairevo, How I AI - “Other conferences collect a bunch of people seeking validation that what they were doing in product wasn’t too off the mark. Whereas this group set the bar for what’s possible.” —Attendee To get a taste of what the day was like, I’ve pulled my favorite messages from attendees: https://afterglow.lennyssummit.com/ Also, a little slideshow. It’ll warm your heart. 👇