Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search)
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It feels like something has changed internally at Google just last week. Google Gemini hit the number one app in the app store. I feel like nobody saw this coming in. Google's mission around have any information be universally accessible. It's a very enduring, very motivating thing. And it feels like with the AI moment, we can actually achieve that more than ever before. What I'm feeling now is just an incredible sense of focus and urgency. Things have hit a tipping point where these models are now truly able to deliver for consumers. As Chachi BT emerged over the past couple of years as perplexity emerged, a lot of people were just like Google is dead. Nobody wants to sit through search results and click links. The core Google search isn't really changing in my opinion, we're not seeing that. People come to search for just ridiculously wide set of things. They want a specific phone number, they want a price for something, they want to get directions. I think the vastness of that is underappreciated by many people. AI is expansionary. There's actually just more and more questions being asked and curiosity that can be fulfilled now with AI. You've built a lot of very successful products and use this phrase, "embodying relentless improvement." You need to be the physical manifestation of two pieces of things. One is this relentlessness, like just complete effort that is always exerted in a direction of positive productivity. And the second is, make things better. You always make things better, you're never content. You build and launch stories at Instagram. Back in the day, it's quite controversial because it basically took what Snapchat was doing really well. And then like, "Hey, let's bring it to Instagram." Not every great thing is going to be invented by you. Facebook probably created the modern feed, but there's a feed for every single product. At the end of the day, you're kind of just robbing your user base of the opportunity to have a better product. Today, my guest is Robbie Stein, Robbie's VP of product for Google Search, and is responsible for essentially the entire Google Search experience, including the new AI overviews, AI mode, multi-modal AI experiences like Google Lens, the ranking algorithm, and a lot more. He's at the forefront of one of the biggest shifts in Google's history, and has already made a massive dent in Google's trajectory. He's also made a massive dent in the trajectory of Instagram, where he was head of product and led the launch of Instagram stories and reels and close friends, and through that, grew Instagram to half a billion daily active users. He's also on the founding team of Artifact with Mike Krieger and Kevin Systrom, started two companies of his own. Very few people have had this level of impact on two global consumer products at this scale, and Robbie shares all of the biggest lessons that he's learned about building great and successful consumer products, along with a bunch of insights into where Google is headed in the world of AI. A huge thank you to Bart Stein for suggesting topics for this conversation. If you enjoy 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 15 incredible products, including lovable, replicant, bolt, and they didn't linear, superhuman, Descriptless, proflow, gamma, perplexity, warp granola, magic patterns, raycast, chapter, D, and mobbin. Head on over to lennysnewsletter.com and click product pass. With that, I bring you Robbie Stein.
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