Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
Why LinkedIn is turning PMs into AI-powered "full stack builders” | Tomer Cohen (LinkedIn CPO)
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When we look at the skills we acquired to do your job, by 2030, it will change by 70%. So whether or not you're looking to change your job, your job is changing. In order to stay competitive, you actually have to go back to some first principles, go back to the drawing board and reimagine what it means to be building. You're experimenting with a very different way of building product at LinkedIn that fully embraces what AI unlocks. We call it the full stack builder model. The goal itself is to empower great builders to take your idea and to take it to market, regardless of their role and the stack and which team they're on. It's really a fluid interaction between human and machine. This feels like this could be a model for how a lot of companies operate and how product ends up being built in the future. Change management here is going to be a critical part. It's not enough to give them the tools. You have to build the incentives programs, the motivation, the examples to how you do it. I see a lot of companies roll out their agents and just expecting companies to adopt. It hasn't worked this way. There's always been this question, is AI going to just make people that are not amazing, more amazing, or is it going to make amazing people even more amazing? Top talent has this tendency of continuously trying to get better at their craft. The key trait that I'm emphasizing for builders is today my guest is Tomer Cohen, longtime chief product officer at LinkedIn, who is piloting a new way of building that I think will become a model for how companies operate in the future. It's called the full stack builder program. And essentially the idea is to enable anyone, no matter their function, to take products from idea to launch. They've scrapped their APM program and replaced it with an associate full stack builder program. They've introduced a new career path with the title full stack builder that anyone from any function can become. And as you'll hear in the conversation, they've built a bunch of internal tools and agents and processes to basically build a human plus AI product team that can move really fast, adjust the change quickly, and do a lot more with a lot less. If you're looking for inspiration for how to rethink how your team operates, and to lean into what AI is unlocking for teams and companies, this episode is for you. A huge thank you to Shira Gessarch for suggesting topics for this conversation. If you enjoyed this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It helps tremendously. And if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get a year free of a bunch of incredible products, including a year free of Devin, lovable, replet, bolt in it and linear superhuman, descriptless, proflow, gamma, perplexity, warp granola, magic patterns, raycast, chapter, D mob and stripe atlas. Head on over to lennysnewsletter.com and click product pass. With that, I bring you Tomer Cohen after a short word from our sponsors. My podcast guests and I love talking about craft and taste and agency and product market fit. You know what we don't love talking about? SOC 2. That's where Vanta comes in. Vanta helps companies of all sizes get compliant fast and stay that way with industry leading AI, automation, and continuous monitoring. Whether you're a startup tackling your first SOC 2 or ISO 27001 or an enterprise managing vendor risk, Vanta's trust management platform makes it quicker, easier, and more scalable. Vanta also helps you complete security questionnaires up to five times faster so that you can win bigger deals sooner. The result? According to a recent IDC study, Vanta customers slashed over $500,000 a year and are three times more productive. Establishing trust isn't optional. Vanta makes it automatic. Get $1,000 off at vanta.com/lenn. This episode is brought to you by Figma, makers of Figma Make. When I was a PM at Airbnb, I still remember when Figma came out and how much it improved how we operated as a team. Suddenly, I could involve my whole team in the design process, give feedback on design concepts really quickly, and it just made the whole product development process so much more fun. But Figma never felt like it was for me. It was great for giving feedback and designs, but as a builder, I wanted to make stuff. That's why Figma built Figma Make. With just a few prompts, you can make any idea or design into a fully functional prototype or app that anyone can iterate on and validate with customers. Figma Make is a different kind of
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