Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
OpenAI’s Head of Design: This is the best time in history to be a designer | Ian Silber
This episode appears to contain dynamically inserted ads. Transcript timestamps may be approximate.
I've been doing this sentiment survey of the tech workforce. Surprisingly, designers are just the most unhappy on every dimension. We're unclear right now. What is expected of a designer? Someone who might be classically trained in a certain way. Working now, feeling like, oh my gosh, I need to really change everything. You believe this is the best time in history to be a designer. We're all extremely early in this process. There's just a huge opportunity for our designers. Nobody should feel behind right now. I think that if you literally started today, you're going to have a leg up on pretty much. Most people, there's just so much opportunity to change the way we work to make great things. If you look at engineering, it's just a completely new job versus a few years ago. I'm curious how that translates to product design. Engineers have 10 or sometimes like 100x their productivity, but our design team has it. Because the design process still takes time. It's still sometimes you have to try a bunch of things and throw them out. Still very messy and fluid. We had a podcast with an out-of-design-clock code. Jenny Nguyen, she talked about there's been this traditional design process. Prototype, mock, test, research, iterate, and now there's just no time for that. There are certain features for chat to be tea where we really obsess and we really spend a lot of time. We try a hundred things and we're throughout '99 and we finally ship what. And other things, we really embrace building in public. We take big swings and then we learn quickly. You think AI will ever be an extremely good product designer? I think it already is an incredible product designer. Today my guest is Ian Silver, Head of Product Design at OpenAI. Ian's been in this role for three years now, which is a lifetime in AI time. Prior to OpenAI, he was at Artifact, the news app from the founders of Instagram that I absolutely loved. Before that he spent eight years at Instagram. The role of design is in such an interesting place right now. And Ian has such a unique and insightful and fascinating take on the future of product design. And what the AI tools that we use every day will look like in the future. A huge thank you to Solao and Joel Lowenstein for suggesting topics for this conversation. Before we get into it, don't forget to check out lenniesproductpass.com for a year free of the hottest and most beautifully crafted AI products in the world available exclusively to Lenny's newsletter subscribers. With that, I bring you Ian Silver. Ian, thank you so much for being here. I'm so excited to be here. Thanks for having me. I'm even more excited, something that I'm very excited to get your take on. I don't know if you've watched me doing this, but I've been doing this sentiment survey of the tech workforce over the past couple of years. I think it's the biggest survey of its kind, where basically survey people in tech about how they're feeling about their careers, their work, their roles, especially with the rise of AI this last year. And kind of surprisingly, designers and user researchers are just the most unhappy on every
Transcription truncated.