Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna
This episode appears to contain dynamically inserted ads. Transcript timestamps may be approximate.
There's a lot of talk about productivity gains through AI. There's this camp of people that are like so overhyped. Nothing's working, nobody's actually adopting this at scale. But you see a significant amount of games. We find engineering teams that are very, very AI-forward are reporting about eight to 10 hours save per week. Whenever I hear a stat like this, I think an important element is this is the worst it will ever be. This is now the baseline. The truth is the value is changing every day, so you need to ride that wave along with it. There's a story I heard you share on a different podcast where there's an engineer who has Goose Watch him. He'll be talking to a colleague on Slack or an email, and they'll be discussing some feature that they think is useful to implement. A few hours later, he'll find that Goose has already tried to build that feature and opened a PR for it on Git. What level of engineer is most benefiting from these tools? What's been surprising and really amazing? The non-technical people using AI agents and programming tools to build things, the people that are able to embrace it, to optimize for their particular workday and their particular set of tasks are really showing the most impact from these tools. How do you think things will look in a couple of years in terms of how engineers work that's different from today? All these LLMs are sitting idle overnight and on weekends while humans aren't there, there's no need for that. They should be working all the time. They should be trying to build in anticipation of what we want. What's maybe the most counterintuitive lesson you've learned about building products or building teams? A lot of engineers think that code quality is important to building a successful product. They do have nothing to do with each other. Today, my guest is Donji Prasana. Donji's Chief Technology Officer at Block, where he oversees a team of over 3,500 people. With Donji's leadership, Block has become one of the most AI-native large companies in the world and has basically achieved what many Eng and product leaders are trying to achieve within their companies. In our conversation, we chat about their internal open source agent called Goose, that by their measure is saving employees on average eight to 10 hours a week of work time, and that number is going up. How AI specifically making their teams more productive and the teams that are benefiting most?
Transcription truncated.