Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
Interviews with world-class product leaders and growth experts to uncover concrete, actionable, and tactical advice to help you build, launch, and grow your own product.
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“Engineers are becoming sorcerers” | The future of software development with OpenAI’s Sherwin Wu
<p>Sherwin Wu leads engineering for OpenAI’s API platform, where roughly 95% of engineers use Codex, often working with fleets of 10 to 20 parallel AI agents.</p><p></p><p>We discuss:</p><p>1. What OpenAI did to cut code review times from 10-15 minutes to 2-3 minutes</p><p>2. How AI is changing the role of managers</p><p>3. Why the productivity gap between AI power users and everyone else is widening</p><p>4. Why “models will eat your scaffolding for breakfast”</p><p>5. Why the next 12 to 24 months are a rare window where engineers can leap ahead before the role f...
The rise of the professional vibe coder (a new AI-era job) | Lazar Jovanovic (Professional Vibe Coder)
<p>Lazar Jovanovic is a full-time professional vibe coder at Lovable. His job is to build both internal tools and customer-facing products purely using AI, while not having a coding background. In this conversation, he breaks down the tactics, workflows, and framework that let him ship production-quality products using only AI.</p><p></p><p>We discuss:</p><p>1. Why having no coding background can be an advantage when building with AI</p><p>2. Why most of your time should go to planning and chat mode, not prompting</p><p>3. What to do when you get stuck: his 4x4 debugging...
A child psychologist’s guide to working with difficult adults | Dr. Becky Kennedy
<p>Dr. Becky Kennedy is a clinical psychologist, the bestselling author of Good Inside, and the founder of a parenting platform used by millions. Known for her practical, psychology-based approach to parenting, Dr. Becky shares how the same principles that help parents raise resilient children can make you a much more effective leader. In this conversation, she breaks down why all human systems—whether families or companies—operate on the same fundamental principles, and how understanding these dynamics can make you more effective in every relationship.</p><p></p><p>We discuss:</p><p>1. Why repair—not perfection—defines strong leadersh...
Marc Andreessen: The real AI boom hasn’t even started yet
<p>Marc Andreessen is a founder, investor, and co-founder of Netscape, as well as co-founder of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). In this conversation, we dig into why we’re living through a unique and one of the most incredible times in history, and what comes next.</p><p></p><p>We discuss:</p><p>1. Why AI is arriving at the perfect moment to counter demographic collapse and declining productivity</p><p>2. How Marc has raised his 10-year-old kid to thrive in an AI-driven world</p><p>3. What’s actually going to happen with AI and jobs (spoi...
5 questions to ask when your product stops growing | Jason Cohen (2x unicorn founder)
<p>Jason Cohen is a four-time founder (including two unicorns, one being WP Engine) and an investor in over 60 startups, and has been sharing his lessons on company building at A Smart Bear for nearly 20 years. In this episode, Jason shares his methodical five-step framework for diagnosing stalled growth—a problem that faces almost every team.</p><p></p><p>We discuss:</p><p>1. Jason’s five-step framework: logo retention, pricing, NRR, marketing channels, target market</p><p>2. A small tweak that’ll double response rates on your cancellation surveys</p><p>3. Why “it’s too expensive” is almost never the real rea...
The non-technical PM’s guide to building with Cursor | Zevi Arnovitz (Meta)
<p>Zevi Arnovitz is a product manager at Meta with no technical background who has figured out how to build and ship real products using AI. His engineering team at Meta asks him to teach them how he does what he does. In this episode, Zevi breaks down his complete AI workflow that allows non-technical people to build sophisticated products with Cursor.</p><p></p><p>We discuss:</p><p>1. The complete AI workflow that lets non-technical people build real products in Cursor</p><p>2. How to use multiple AI models for different tasks (Claude for planning, Gemini for UI)<...
How to show up in any room with a low heart rate: Silicon Valley’s missing etiquette playbook | Sam Lessin
<p>Sam Lessin is a partner at Slow Ventures, a former VP of Product at Facebook, and a two-time founder who’s now teaching etiquette to Silicon Valley’s founders. In this unconventional episode, Sam explains why proper etiquette has become a vital skill for founders in 2026—especially as technology becomes more central to society and trust becomes harder to build. His etiquette book and courses have become surprisingly popular, teaching founders how to “show up in a room with a low heart rate” and quickly build trust.</p><p></p><p>We discuss:</p><p>1. Why etiquette matters</p><p>2. Sam’s...
Why most AI products fail: Lessons from 50+ AI deployments at OpenAI, Google, and Amazon
<p>Aishwarya Naresh Reganti and Kiriti Badam have helped build and launch more than 50 enterprise AI products across companies like OpenAI, Google, Amazon, and Databricks. Based on these experiences, they’ve developed a small set of best practices for building and scaling successful AI products. The goal of this conversation is to save you and your team a lot of pain and suffering.</p><p></p><p>We discuss:</p><p>1. Two key ways AI products differ from traditional software, and why that fundamentally changes how they should be built</p><p>2. Common patterns and anti-patterns in companies that build st...
The high-growth handbook: Molly Graham’s frameworks for leading through chaos, change, and scale
<p>Molly Graham has worked for some of tech’s most effective leaders, including Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, Chamath Palihapitiya, and Bret Taylor. Today she leads Glue Club, a community for leaders navigating rapid scale, growth, and change. She’s best known for her “Give away your Legos” framework and her collection of practical mental models for leading through hypergrowth.</p><p></p><p>We discuss:</p><p>1. “Give away your Legos”: a framework for scaling yourself as a leader</p><p>2. “J-curves vs. stairs”: the two paths of career growth, and why you should pick the scarier path</p><p>3. “The waterl...
We replaced our sales team with 20 AI agents—here’s what happened | Jason Lemkin (SaaStr)
<p>Jason Lemkin is the founder of SaaStr, the world’s largest community for software founders, and a veteran SaaS investor who has deployed over $200 million into B2B startups. After his last salesperson quit, Jason made a radical decision: replace his entire go-to-market team with AI agents. What started as an experiment has transformed into a new operating model, where 20 AI agents managed by just 1.2 humans now do the work previously handled by a team of 10 SDRs and AEs. In this conversation, Jason shares his hands-on experience implementing AI to run his sales org, including what works, what doesn’t, a...
