Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
Why every company now needs to think and operate like a lab team | Josh Woodward (Google Labs, Gemini, AI Studio)
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- My thesis is that every company needs to start thinking and operating like a labs team. - Every company definitely needs a set of people, a team. Their job is to be at the frontier. They're the people who have like a $200 a month subscription on every-- - Everyone has to get really good at trying a bunch of stuff with the latest models, figuring out what is now possible before your competition does, before a startup comes and eats your life. - You've got to try to create a space where weird things can grow. If you look at the history of a large company who starts a lab, the lab is usually ineffective and fizzles out after about three to four years. You can't just nestle this under an existing business unit. It has to have its own kind of independence. - You've seen more ideas thrown at the wall and tried and prototyped than maybe anyone else. What are some patterns of where the best ideas come from? - They very rarely come from design spreads. They don't come in conventional places. You can't microwave good ideas. - What skills are you finding or trending up in value? - I'm actually looking a lot right now for people. What's their unlearning rate? How fast can they learn something and then walk away from it? - What's something that might surprise people about what product market fit looks like? - When you're showing people early prototypes, you're looking at people's eyes. That is the metric. - What are signs that it's time to kill an idea? - The team usually knows before the leader knows. - Today, my guest is Josh Woodward. Josh is head of Google Labs, the Gemini app and AI studio. He's been at Google for over 16 years and his job is to experiment with and scale new AI products. My premise for this conversation and why I believe it is so valuable is that every company is being forced to think and operate like a labs team. Because what is now possible is changing so quickly. You have to get very good at playing with the latest technologies, running tons of experiments and uncovering new opportunities before your competition or startups do. Josh runs the longest-lasting and biggest labs team in the world.
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