The end of product managers? Why LinkedIn is turning PMs into AI-powered “full stack builders”

Tomer Cohen:When we look at the skills required 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

Lenny Rachitsky:You're experimenting with a very different way of building product at LinkedIn that fully embraces what AI unlocks

Tomer Cohen:We call it the full stack builder model the goal itself is to empower great builders to take their idea and to take it to market regardless of their role in the stack and which team they're on it's really a fluid interaction between human and machine

Lenny Rachitsky: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

Tomer Cohen:Change management here is gonna 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 doesn't work this way

Lenny Rachitsky:There's always been this question is AI gonna just make people that are not amazing more amazing or is it gonna make amazing people even more amazing

Tomer Cohen:Top talent has this tendency of continuously trying to get better at their craft the key traits that I'm emphasizing for builders is

Lenny Rachitsky: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 build plus AI product team that can move really fast adjust to 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 Guestarch 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 a bunch of incredible products including a year free of Devin Lovable Replid Bolt Inuit and Linear Superhuman Descript Whisperflow Gamma Perplexity Granola Magic Patterns Raycast Chapyard D Mobbin and Stripe Atlas head on over to Lenny'snewsletter.com and click product pass with that I bring you Tomer Cohen after a short word from our sponsors my podcast guest and I love talking about craft and taste and agency and product market fit you know what we don't love talking about SOC two 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 two or ISO twenty seven zero zero one 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/Lenny 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 vibe coding tool because it's all in Figma you can use your team's existing design building blocks making it easy to create outputs that look good and feel real and are connected to how your team builds stop spending so much time telling people about your product vision and instead show it to them make code back prototypes and apps fast with Figma Make check it out at Figma.com/Leni

Lenny Rachitsky:Tomer thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast

Tomer Cohen:Thank you it's great to be back

Lenny Rachitsky:It's great to have you back I'm really excited to be chatting because you're experimenting with a very different way of building product at LinkedIn that fully embraces what AI unlocks kind of leans into what is now possible and to me 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 there's a lot of product leaders that are talking about AI what they can do it feels like you're actually doing this in a really really radical way and so I'm excited to learn from you to hear about this for listeners to understand what you're seeing what you've learned let me start with just why did you decide this was necessary why are you rethinking all of these things about how product has been built for a long time aka why do people need to pay attention to what we're about to

Tomer Cohen:Be talking about it really starts with kind of the basics for me technology has always been about empowerment it's not about what it does for us it's about what it enables us to do and now we have this amazing opportunity in my mind to make a development meritocracy and I think it's an opportunity but it's also a necessity right now and I want to put this in context where we're entering this phase where the time constant of change is far greater than the time constant of response basically means that change is happening faster than we're able to respond to it now LinkedIn has this unique view of the world of work so we actually have some pretty in my mind mind blowing stats to kind of put this in perspective when we look at the skills required to do your job by 2030 which is literally four years from now sounds a long time four years from now it will change by 70% so whether or not you're looking to change your job your job is changing the only question is do you keep it and then we look at organizationally the fastest growing jobs right now the most in demand jobs in the market are growing by north of 70% from last year's fastest growing jobs so there's a new kind of iteration of what you need as an organization to thrive and then you apply that to building products and you realize that 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 and what I love about this is when you think about the role of a builder which the builders are the heart of company the goal is actually quite simple the builder takes an idea and she brings it to life that's really the process and we all build those let's call them like best practices you research a problem really well you spec it out you design it you code it you launch it and you iterate that's basically it but what happens at many at scale companies LinkedIn included in many other companies over time that process became very complex very quickly so what happened we took every step and we expanded it to a lot of sub steps researching the problem became looking at for us 10 to 15 sources of information obviously talking to customers by doing data pools looking at feedback tickets in multiple sources social media interactions with customers we probably have 10 to 15 sources of information we go through before we kind of feel like we have researched the problem really really well think about reviews for product there is design reviews privacy reviews security reviews I can go on and on and on and each one of those sub steps actually has a valid reason to exist but when you add a whole thing together you're like oh my god this is why it takes to build a small feature multiple teams multiple code bases multiple sprints just to get it out to launch not talk about iterating which is actually where you see success you never see success in the launch itself so really the work itself is not complex but the process we made very complex and when I was digging in found it doesn't end there because somebody has to do all those sub steps so what happened is you actually move from process complexity to organizational complexity as well and then you actually led to micro specialization all those subsets are doing by somebody specific so from one builder have multiple functions obviously we have engineering product and design and you can start questioning those lines at least I am internally and from there have a lot of sub specialties it happens in every one of those functions but imagine design we have interaction design animation design content design research there's so many aspects to that so they're all valid but they all have people and that entire process basically means a lot of it's basically bloating it's complexity and then without noticing you end up with this massively complex we actually have this diagram that basically shows the process complexity organizational complexity together and usually people are mind blowing because they're working on one thing very specific but when you zoom out you have this overwhelming experience you're kind of thinking about and now we have this real opportunity to collapse the stack back app go back to craftsmanship rethink the product development life cycle which is where the full stack builder model comes to life

Tomer Cohen:Of your world today so whether you are a marketer right now or a seller or a recruiter an engineer engineering is where a lot of the investment is going in right now in terms of agents those jobs will change dramatically i remember i said my my life as an engineer even then it's changed materially after ten years and then the change we're seeing right now just thinking about in four years what does it take to actually engineer really really well would be dramatically different or to build software to build an artifact of some sort but it's true for almost every function it's not equal some job like nurses will see less impact but some jobs will see 95% impact

Lenny Rachitsky:There's also a stat that i don't think you mentioned here that i saw in the post when you first talked about this program that 70% of today's fastest growing jobs were not even on the list of jobs a year ago

Tomer Cohen:Yeah no this is the fastest growing job on the list were not there a year ago and then many of them don't even exist a decade or two ago there's actually some pretty amazing stats across the board

Lenny Rachitsky:Okay so let's talk about this program that you built tell us the name and then tell us the of the gist of what it is today and the vision of where you want it to be

Tomer Cohen:Yeah so we call it the full stack builder model and the goal always start with the goal the goal itself is to empower great builders to take their idea and to take it to market regardless of their role in the stack and specifically which team they're on and the idea ultimately is to be able for that builder is to develop experiences end to end to combine skills and expertise across what was traditionally distinct domains to bring it all together and it's not a sequence of steps it's really a fluid interaction between human and machine that's how the way i see it and then when you look back at that product development life cycle from the idea the insight all the way to launch the key traits that i'm emphasizing for builders is where i want them to spend their time is where i think great builders should shine in so the idea of vision coming up with a compelling stance about the future empathy super critical right having a profound understanding of an unmet need communication is critical we see this a lot in job descriptions right now for almost every role but ability for you to align and rally others others around an idea creativity which for me is about coming out with possibilities beyond the obvious for example i don't think ai yet is great at creativity i think it's kind of in many ways brings back the things you might not know about but but it's not the kind of next level creativity which i think still humans are much better at and then ultimately what i think is the most important trait for a builder is judgment that's some people call it test making but it's making high quality decisions in what is complex ambiguous situations everything else i'm working really hard to automate really really hard and then when you think about the outcome it's not just about having more shots at the goal which i think people will go like oh the iteration speed is going to be very high yes but what you're really doing to an organization of at scale organizations is they're a lot more nimble a lot more adaptive a lot more resilient they can navigate the future they can actually match the pace of change to the pace of response and the analogy i have in mind is kind of navy seals you come to training they're all kind of learning they're cross trained across multiple areas what they specialize in is the mission

Tomer Cohen:And they operate in small pods and they're very nimble and you can assemble them very quickly i think that's going be the organization that will win in the future

Lenny Rachitsky:Okay so the simple idea if you were to just boil it down to a sentence the idea here is there's a builder who goes through the entire product development process essentially on their own they have an idea they research they do data they prototype design ship that's kinda like the vision of where this goes

Tomer Cohen:Yes but this has to be on their own it's not like it's not i still believe in teams

Lenny Rachitsky:Got they're just smaller teams

Tomer Cohen:Smaller teams and much more focused on the problem the mission per se versus actually one of the things we've done as an example we kind of started to do the idea of pods we're no longer large teams we assemble a team ideally a full stack builders coming together and it's less about can i have an engineer design pm working together and trying to go on this trio looking for folks who can flex across and then they tackle something for a quarter or so and then we kinda reassemble those two different pods that's like one example of another manifestation we're doing right now and seeing actually some great success in both in terms of velocity but also in terms of that focus and nimbleness of that team

Lenny Rachitsky:And it feels like the goal here and what you're trying to adjust and that broke as teams bloated is speed and adaptability and flexibility because going back to your original point that change is happening so much more quickly now that companies that have been building in this traditional way just can't compete

Tomer Cohen:Yeah it's not that you have to break the model i think the model is broken it's just this pace of change is helping us realize it

Lenny Rachitsky:Okay so then going back to the things that these builders still do versus what you want to automate so the list you shared is they're responsible for the vision empathy communication creativity and judgment

Tomer Cohen:Yes yeah and i would put a lot of the focus on the latter i think the kind of if you ask me at the end of the day what's the kind of most important trait i would say it's

Lenny Rachitsky:That judgment test making ability and then in terms of what you're automating what are some of the areas you've seen a lot of success in actually automating and where do you think this goes

Tomer Cohen:Yeah so i think just to kind of break it to pieces and i think this is if you were a startup right now in many ways you can start this way right there's no legacy code there's no legacy structure you run and in fact a lot of the startups i talk to that are build ai natively they are just working at full stack builders that's the way they start if you're at a company at a scale of ours and many others in the market you're like this is almost like a new production function and mindset that you have to do and there's really three components that we're working on one is platform the second one is the tools and the agents and lastly is the culture the platform one this is the kind of level of investment you have to do before this actually starts start to see all the benefits come accrue but the platform for us as an example is rearchitecting all of our core platforms so ai can reason over it so we're building kind of this composable ui components with server side that we actually build we're basically building for ai to be ready to bring it in so you can't just go and bring a third party tool and have it work on the linkedin stack in fact that's one of our biggest learnings it never works never works you have to bring it in and customize a lot of it working almost in alpha mode with those companies to make it work internally

Lenny Rachitsky:So this is essentially re architecting your code base to work more efficiently with ai is that one way to think about it

Tomer Cohen:Yes and in many ways working with those companies to adjust something in their stack to work with our stack as well the level

Lenny Rachitsky:When you say those companies meaning like the development agents like cursors and debens and such

Tomer Cohen:Yes and like or figma on design or you can think about the design systems is another example of that but you have to have that back and forth because they're not in many ways we haven't seen anybody be able to work off the shelf immediately on our code based design systems and unique context we have just to follow

Lenny Rachitsky:That thread briefly so there's figma that's interesting so basically the way figma exports and keeps your design system that has to change to work better with ai is what i'm

Tomer Cohen:You first need to know how to work with our design systems which is something there's there you know in many ways a lot of those companies are working on same with coding you need you can't doesn't work that you just bring it in and it just reasons over your code base really well we tried we are building that layer that basically allows it to do so whether it's copilot or cursor windsurf and so on

Lenny Rachitsky:Got it okay oh yeah copilot microsoft i get it i get it okay okay so that's the platform so that's an investment you guys have to make to make ai effective at building and doing all these things

Tomer Cohen:And then you have tools so tools is where you really build the agents i mentioned i wanna automate everything outside of those five traits that we talked about and then we're building a tool for that and then for that actually very similarly i can't just bring a tool from the outside and work so i'll give you an example one of our biggest things is building a trust agent trust is really important for us at linkedin there's a lot of unique vectors which trust plays at linkedin doesn't place anywhere else so we need to bring all of that know how and context and information base into that agent so we ended up building our own trust agent at linkedin

Lenny Rachitsky:And so what is this trust agent doing it's telling you when you're maybe exposing information that

Tomer Cohen:You need so when you build a spec you build an idea you walk through the trust agent and it'll basically tell you how what are your vulnerabilities what harm vectors potentially you're introducing or will be introduced as a result of that and i had our head of trust build it so the head of craft for every area is building their own agent as an example have one of our features for job seekers is called open to work if you're looking for a job can put an open to work

Lenny Rachitsky:A little green little and green thing on the

Tomer Cohen:Actually it's great signal i'm seeing some great success from it people are helping each other the community really thrives around helping each other but at the same time it introduces a trust vector for bad actors because they're open to work people who are looking for a job are potentially more vulnerable to scams than other folks so being able to think about how do we prevent all of those ahead of time so we walked that spec from a couple of years ago through the trust agent not only was it able to find all the stuff we initiated at the beginning but all the holes that we did not catch until later so that's a great example of something that actually worked really well that's one the other one is a growth agent as an example again linkedin has a very unique actually we have an incredible growth team growth process we've kind of funneled all of our unique loops our funnels our tests of the past everything into this growth agent and now you can basically rock your respect for it your idea for it and it will not just allow you to do it better it will actually critique how good is your idea this is something we cannot bring off the shelf it's very unique to linkedin so we had to invest dramatically in it and one thing which is using it right now which is almost

Tomer Cohen:I wasn't thinking about it at the beginning but our UXR team, our UER team, like the user research team is usually using that growth agent to understand out of all the things that are basically surfacing for members which one has the biggest growth opportunity to have the biggest impact. That was not in the cards when we thought about that idea but teams are basically funneling those ideas into this one. An example is a research agent. So research agent basically is trained on the personas of our members. You can think about like a small business owner, a job seeker and so on and it's using not just world knowledge, it's using all the research we've done in the past, all the support tickets coming in so it's pretty good at understanding that persona at LinkedIn. So one example we had is a team came out with a spec, they weren't aware we had the research engine yet. I asked the research agent for a small business owner what did he think about the marketing spec we had and it critiqued it extremely well, actually in many ways shifted the direction of the team to focus on other integration tools we can focus on but it's very hard to have that visibility to all that corpus of knowledge inside of the company. That's another example. We have an analyst agent trained on how you basically can query the entire LinkedIn graph which is enormous. Instead of relying on your SQL queries or data science teams you can use the analyst agent. All of those I would say are, I would call them still MVP plus plus. The goal for us in the next couple of months to basically roll them out externally. Externally means internally at LinkedIn.

Lenny Rachitsky:Not as the new product lines. Okay, so many questions. One is just how are you building this? Like is there a platform you're using? What does it take to build an agent at LinkedIn? Is it all internal tools? Is there third party use?

Tomer Cohen:It's a great call so I think we've been experimenting with a lot of tools and I would say for a lot of those kind of knowledge corpus agents we're using everything from Copilot Enterprise to ChatGPT Enterprise. By far though the most important part was basically our own customization of it. That's been where we saw the biggest gains. You even like building the orchestrator across those because you don't want to use, you want the agents to start falling to each other. The trust agent should kind of work with the growth agent and go do a back and forth versus doing it more sequentially. So we've done a lot of work internally to make it happen. This is why I think it does require that level of investment. And then in some cases let's talk about the design agent that we're working with. We're working with multiple companies to try and understand which product works best for us and interestingly enough, and this is another learning, different teams gravitate to different products. So that's something we'll have to resolve and think about how we do this really well because ultimately we were trying to kind of simplify the process as much as possible but that's like a, that was a big learning for us and how which tools we use and how we basically integrate them in.

Lenny Rachitsky:Got it, so like you might have an amazing Figma agent but some teams want to use a different design tool.

Tomer Cohen:Yeah so like you know we've kind of experimented with Figma and Subframe and Magic Patterns and so on and we saw people gravitating depending on the function, their level of visibility, their know how of the tool before they're gravitating to different tools and ultimately I don't want to have eight design agents in the company so we have to like converge into at least a few and I think it's similar across many areas because a lot of those agents are trying to solve similar end goal but they're doing it very differently and what you'll see that ultimately I don't think there's gonna be a winner takes all because the starting point of the customer or the user will dictate a lot how simple they are for that use case.

Lenny Rachitsky:Super interesting. The other interesting takeaway here is you're designing very specific agents that are one job to be done. Is that a very intentional decision? Did you try an agent that just is super intelligent on all these things?

Tomer Cohen:Ultimately we'll do an orchestrator, we're gonna really do orchestrator across but we did want to be able to rate and grade those agents really well and how they're doing and I think there is a level of expertise now. We're kind of building this in a way where we'll be able to mask a lot of those. You might not know that there's a trust agent, you might have, we call this internally the product jammer agent that basically does your product jam which is a process we do internally. You might just use the product jam engine and that product jam engine will work with all the other agents but now we're starting with that building blocks until we build our orchestrating layer across.

Lenny Rachitsky:Another interesting takeaway from what you've been sharing is that so much of the work has gone into the beginning of the product development process just like helping you craft the right requirements, clarify trust and then here's product jam, here's the research we've done and I imagine it's because coding has already been accelerated with all these AI tools. Talk about just like why that's maybe where most of the investment's gone and where you've seen the most impact so far.

Tomer Cohen:A 100%. Our coding investment has gone started a while back and those are full into place. We have our coding agent. In fact, we kind of stage it into two parts of it. There is the idea to design part and then there's the code to launch part. The code to launch part has gotten a lot of attention and we're wreaking some big inroads there. Everything from the coding agent to what we call the maintenance agent. When you have a failed build it will do it for you. In fact think we're close to 50% of all those builds being done by the maintenance agent and the QA agent.

Lenny Rachitsky:Wow, so this is when a break builds instead of engineers hopping on the issues.

Tomer Cohen:You can still go and finish your coffee before you have to go and redo the build again. Extremely cool. But we haven't had much investment until we kind of launched this program in the idea to design area and that's a material part of work. It's also where the quality a lot of the work comes from at least before you start to go into the coding phase. The idea is to empower everybody so if you're an engineer you can basically use all those tools at the front of the process and be able to be a full stack builder.

Lenny Rachitsky:How long did it take to get this kind of in place for you to actually form your first team to build these initial agents and some of this back end redo the code base sort of thing?

Tomer Cohen:I announced this internally end of last year. We really kind of started working but it was more setting up the teams and the processes internally. We had our first MVPs of those agents I think like four to five months after it was really trained would say but really the work itself has been kind of couple of months of dedicated work. A lot of it has been getting all the corpus of data together cleaning it up. That's actually a good learning as well like it's not great to just give it access to your drive and say reason all over this knowledge base. It actually does a very poor job understanding importance of the past and putting weights on stuff you actually want to think about specifically what the context window you wanna give it to and what's the knowledge base that you wanna have it focus on. So even cleaning up let's call them gold examples or golden examples to learn from has been one of the biggest learnings. Just reasoning over your entire knowledge base did not work.

Lenny Rachitsky:Yeah that makes sense. There may be just like a researcher with a strong opinion about something that you disagree with and it wouldn't know. It's like oh of course this is data this is fact.

Tomer Cohen:Exactly and then it doesn't always understand like ties to original specs to success you have to actually build this is a really interesting way when you think about how you bring those tools in you can't just bring them in you have to know what you feed them with and what you feed them with is not just access I see a lot of people just focus on the connectivity and integration and it reminds me of the this is almost like this is actually more than ten years ago when I was co rebuilding the team co rebuilding the feed at LinkedIn and we started from scratch and I had to literally sit down and filter through examples of what is a good professional post on LinkedIn and what is not

Tomer Cohen:This was like weeks of work getting up with that golden sample of examples but for the most important part was fitting at the right data not all the data so it requires work this is where I would say like many companies who are thinking about this phase and I do a lot of sessions today with CPOs and CEOs on this process you have to put this initial work to get the gains after I mean I think by the way I think there's I think there's a a takeaway there in generally with AI even if you're learning it for the first time and so on whether it's Cursor or whether it's design if it's Figma or other tools or Lovable you should be ready to invest those hours before you start seeing yourself pick up in velocity and quality which will come up but you have to invest that time

Lenny Rachitsky:This episode is brought to you by Miro every day new headlines are scaring us about all the ways that AI is coming for our jobs creating a lot of anxiety and fear but a recent survey from Miro tells a different story 76% of people believe that AI can benefit their role but over 50% of people struggle to know when to use it enter Miro's innovation workspace an intelligent platform that brings people and AI together in a shared space to get great work done Miro has been empowering teams to transform bold ideas into the next big thing for over a decade today they're at the forefront of bringing products to market even faster by unleashing the combined power of AI and human potential guests of this podcast often share Miro templates I use it all the time to brainstorm ideas with my team teams especially can work with Miro AI to turn unstructured data like sticky notes or screenshots into usable diagrams product briefs data tables and prototypes in minutes you don't have to be an AI master or to toggle yet another tool the work you're already doing in Miro's canvas is the prompt help your teams get great work done with Miro check it out at miro.com/lenny that's miro.com/lenny what's the current state of the pilot how large is it how many teams are doing it what kind of stuff have you shipped just give us a sense of today's world

Tomer Cohen:Yeah so we are I wouldn't say we are yet at a very high sample rate where it's kind of a high percentage of the organization but we have a substantial part of the organization already using it to provide a lot of the feedback we're seeing a lot of great examples so the way I think about the benefits is a function of experimentation volume multiplied by quality how how good are those experiment experiments divided by the time it takes to actually pull them out like idea to launch so on saving times we're seeing whether it's PMs designers engineers saving hours of work a week right now whether it's the analyst agent we talked about or the prototyping really quickly or the product jamming experience has been a big part of that on the quality side we're seeing insights discussions just be much much better and by the way quality and time sometimes they help each other because it's high quality you don't have to spend as much time on something so we are seeing that applied in and the volume I wouldn't say we had a rate where I'm seeing a high percentage organization doing it yet but this will come once we we haven't GAed this internally it but will come in the next couple of of of months because we have all the the stuff in place but we're seeing designers and PMs picking up bugs directly from the you know from the from Jira tickets pushing them in something we haven't seen before and there's just an appetite for everybody who just joined so in fact the biggest thing right now is everybody wants access everybody wants access to the tools to be able to do it together and we just wanna make sure it's good enough to make sure the whole organization could do it really well

Lenny Rachitsky:So how is it that you're piling it is it there's a some number of people have access to these agents and they just work the way they've worked with access to these tools or is there like a team dedicated this is the way you work now and this is it and we'll see what happens

Tomer Cohen:So it's a recall so basically we have a team building it's the core team building kind of the FSB track across all of R and D FSB full stack builder and then there are pockets and pods of teams using it so basically we are looking at specific areas that we're basically giving it to the condition there is they give feedback as a response for that they make the tool better so it's not just access we want people who will use it it's always one of your early adopters would be the ones who helped you ship the product really well so we're doing this in a pod model right now so it's like

Lenny Rachitsky:A pod within a larger team like a designer PM engineer kind of group within all is there an example you have like a part

Tomer Cohen:Of LinkedIn that's trying this out yeah so if I think about some of our teams whether it's actually just launched Symantec people search and the Symantec job search as well that team was using part of those tools to actually help build it so that team actually this was PMs building their own dashboards with those tools without waiting for design resources to to come in then we have a design team who is now already you know this started really from the manager kind of rolling this out and in many ways what I tell this team is don't wait for the official GA you know start start doing it start kind of leaning in we're seeing designers of that team starting to push kind of PRs which never happened before and now other teams they wanna do this as well so it's it's starting with this kind of grassroots experience there is I would say there's the the places I've been very formal I would say the beginning has been the top the product executive teams basically removed from functional leaders design PM BD and so on to product areas leaders and they basically rock across the stack and they also go for three sixty with all of those functions to see if they're really able to do a full stack building experience then we're also launching at kind of like the junior side a new program called the associate product builder program where we basically we used to have our APM program which this is about it's ending this year and then starting January we're gonna start having our APB program and they're gonna come into LinkedIn we're gonna teach them how to code design and PM at LinkedIn they're gonna go through a pretty rigorous training process and then they're gonna join those pods and gradually we're gonna grow that program to be material part of LinkedIn as well

Lenny Rachitsky:Wow so this might be the future of the APM program is this full stack builder APM ish program

Tomer Cohen:In many ways we're taking we've built some pretty amazing I'm really excited for that group wish I could join it but we build amazing training for them and in many ways we're gonna use that training to think about how we roll it across the organization we're kind of using the lens of you have great technical skills but you're not an engineer at a company yet or you have great design taste but you haven't designed a skill in company yet and we're gonna teach you how to do it at LinkedIn but the training we're gonna use a lot to kind of extend across the company as well

Lenny Rachitsky:Okay so you have these programs these pilots and these pods and you said what you're looking at to see if this is something you roll out is experiment velocity times quality times time

Tomer Cohen:Divided by time

Lenny Rachitsky:Divided by time okay got it and I guess I know it's early but just you said you're seeing that it's saving teams a few hours a week at this point something like that

Tomer Cohen:Yeah and I think the feedback has been the most important part right when you kind of the way to think about this is just like you build a product so we're building this product internally and you wanna experiment with some kind of early adopters who will give you feedback and the feedback has been amazing in fact some our top talent are the ones who are using this the most at LinkedIn and the feedback from them has been incredible in terms because they're they're also willing to spend the time and and give the the the feedback as well and the response from them has been incredible in terms of like the quality of their output the time they're spending on this to get the the value back their desire to kind of be part of this and actually scale this and make this even better so that's where a lot of the excitement has been from how they're using it and the quality we've seen there I would say in six months or so we'll be able to see a lot more of the organization use it and you'll start seeing kind of those top line numbers will grow as well

Lenny Rachitsky:That is a really interesting insight that the top performers are finding the most success because there's always been this question is AI gonna just make people that are not amazing more amazing or is it gonna make amazing people even more amazing and it sounds like it's likely the latter.

Tomer Cohen:Yes and it's it's it's in many ways it's surprising it's not surprising I've seen this also when we were it's surprising because you would you want everybody else to be part of this and lean in I think top talent has this tendency of continuously trying to get better at their craft and this innate need to be at the cutting edge of how you build and I think we're seeing this here as well this is why you know I've I've I've had this phrase I say with the team that if we build all those tools will they use it and I know by now the answer is no it's not enough to give them the tools to use it you have to build the incentives programs the motivation the examples to how you do it they need to see other people being successful as well and I've seen this also when we're shifting LinkedIn from a desktop company into a mobile company it was a very similar process it's very hard change management here is gonna be a critical part I think I see a lot of companies roll out their agents and just expecting companies to adopt doesn't work this way some will adopt that tends to be kind of your cutting edge 5% of talent that just wants new tools and they have a bias for change but the vast majority needs to work for change management in how they do it and that requires being a lot more thoughtful about the cultural aspect of it which is by far for me the biggest and most important thing to do.

Lenny Rachitsky:Yeah I wanna spend time there and it's very like it makes a lot of sense why people don't spend time here because they have so much to do they gotta ship things they got their days are already busy you have to now carve out time to learn this new tool that'll not pay off for a while so I get why people are like okay I'll get there I'll use it someday but you know they don't this idea of culture this is when I saw you kind of share this initially this is the third piece of making this successful so there's like the platform of getting the code base ready for people for AI to work with then there's the tool like the agents you've talked about and then there's the culture is there more there that you can share of just like what has actually worked in helping get people on board one thing I heard is like creating a little bit of FOMO of okay only a few people can use this hmm you have to sign up to get an access what's worked in getting people to get on board.

Tomer Cohen:Yeah I I think this is where I emphasize to people that getting everything done the platforms the tools is not going to be sufficient it's a prerequisite for this to work but not sufficient for this to work because it really requires you to invest a lot in the cultural aspects of how do you get people to lean into this one and this one might feel slow at first but I've seen this before with our transformational thinking from desktop to mobile and and once it picks up it actually maintains very high velocity one you know people are really incentivized by how you define expectations for them so to think about what is the expectation of somebody in the role.

Lenny Rachitsky:Are so changing performance review sort of things.

Tomer Cohen:Very much so so everything from how you hire to calibration and evaluation and one thing I wanna see there early is this kind of AI agency and fluency like I mentioned the tools are there the question is would you use them because the tools will be good enough but not great at the beginning right that's the classic thing of every good MVP tool they're good enough but they're not great and then you kind of wanna build that agency to make the tool better like we're in this kind of notion of we're gonna make this better for LinkedIn together two is piloting success inside of your organization that's the pod model where you're showing that you know not only this could work it's actually having success so we have even our partnerships team our beauty team being able to kind of go instead of like relying on waiting for an engineer to help build the developer portal and build kind of the connectors there literally the you know one of our head of partnerships just went and did it himself didn't even delegate to his team and the goal is to say hey I can do it you can do it as well those examples are really really powerful I even talked about the associate product builder program where we are going to be very focused on training I think that will send a really strong message across the organization people will see this talent and what they can do and I think that will create that movement but celebrating wins in all hands highlighting people and showing those examples one example we've seen recently people really looked at it in a surprise lens but then it kind of I think really opened up a lens for them we had somebody in our user research team we had an opening for a PM on the growth team and and we kind of that role was open for a while and she said I feel I can do it and she used all these tools this is a user researcher becoming a growth PM not usually the career path you see but she was excited about the area she used all those tools and she's now a growth PM on the team so and really you can start thinking about her more as a full stack builder ultimately but seeing those openings and then highlighting those to people actually people are doing this has been a great example of it and then just making sure that those tools are accessible people can provide feedback you share a lot has been an incredible part of this it's not enough to be top down directive that this is how we wanna work people wanna feel like there are success stories they feel like it's worth their time it feels it's a movement they wanna be part of and then ultimately they can see successes in how they do it.

Lenny Rachitsky:I love this kinda comparison to the shift to mobile that seems like we all went through that and there's all these stories of companies requiring you to show mobile mocks that's the only way we're gonna operate now everything you have to ship has to be on mobile and it's interesting how similar this is to them to that experience and so a few things you just shared here just to kind of summarize some of the things that have worked for you showing wins celebrating wins showing people what other folks are doing with AI tools creating a program that people enroll into and make it a little bit exclusive this performance review piece is really interesting because that really will change people's behavior as here's how we get promoted have you actually already made that change to the PM I guess it's every track I imagine not just product management have you already made that change or is it kind of like a work in progress.

Tomer Cohen:So there was two aspects to it once I moved kind of my team my directs would do three sixty for them so their three sixty was you know if you came from PM you had the designers on your team rate you and so that kind of that was that had its own and then we shared those with them and that had its own kind of motivation but then we broadly took it across so when we hire right now we look for those and then this upcoming cycle we do a biannual it's that's gonna be part of the performance evaluation piece and we announce it to everybody and for what it's where people are excited to show and and they're excited to know how they're gonna be it's always about like I just I wanna know how I'm being rated or valued so just being able to show those examples has been a big part of it the other thing I would say like it takes time for this program in its formality to roll out across the entire organization and I was intentionally not trying to be quick at rolling this out to everybody because I think that just dilutes the value of it really quickly because it's not about I could care less about your title I care about how you work calling you a full stack builder is not what I'm looking for changing your mindset to a full stack mindset is what I'm looking for you're thinking you can do the whole thing you're looking at those tools and looking at how to do it so one of the things I've said is like if you're looking for a formal reorg or declaration to start building differently you're waiting too long like look my biggest thing is here's a permission for me to just not wait and just go so whether or not you have the right tools or not go build the tool use a tool from the outside bring it in show those examples in many ways prove that you are a full stack builder in mindset before anything else come to mind that just naturally will happen and that's also where we've seen some of our best talent just goes and leans a lot into.

Lenny Rachitsky:I love that I was gonna actually mention that quote someone you shared you worked with told me exactly that quote you just shared so I'm glad you brought it up of just if you're waiting for a reorg you're not thinking about it the right way how do you encourage people to actually play with these tools on their own are you just like go take a few days to play with AI is it just try it or is is there anything formal you've seen of just like getting people to more try this on their own without joining this program.

Tomer Cohen:A lot of the tools we've made we've been sharing them regularly we've done all like a few of my all hands have been all about how to use those tools but then at the same time we're kind of inviting have you found a new tool that works really well for you like share it show it again could be slack it could be messages teams and so on how you do it but like the idea is really to start getting that investment in how things work actually I think in general you can feel overwhelmed by tools right now by recipes and how to do things like you know what's what's your prompt and what's my prompt but really it's finding something that kind of works really well that you can gravitate around and kind of reinvest in that's been those areas but I think we we've had this invitation to go and explore and and go and bring in stuff that you think are great and in many ways like you know bring others along in the journey it's it's one of one good way to kind of make the influence much bigger than a few folks who are doing really well with this are there.

Lenny Rachitsky:Any surprises on the negative side that have come out of this of PRD is just feeling like AI driven people slowing down unexpectedly is there anything that surprised you of just like okay this is actually not great.

Tomer Cohen:Yeah we mentioned a few of them like we I was hoping for some tools to work off the shelf really well hmm it was never the case.

Lenny Rachitsky:Because we had to invest quite a lot never the case.

Tomer Cohen:Never the case we had to invest quite a lot and again part of it is we just have a lot of legacy information and code base and knowledge and designs and so on so if you know a lot of the companies we work with are seeing this as a great growth opportunity for them as well to invest but I do think it's it's a big area of investment as well we talked about not just giving access to all of your contacts which we started with and like we were like oh here's access to all the drive all information failed miserably and hallucinates like crazy people gravitate towards different tools our goal was to converge on tools but that was pretty hard and then I think.

Tomer Cohen:In terms of quality we've just seen better quality but I think it's because again where we are in the stage is still the early adopters and they're doing a few iterations in terms of how to do it but I would say like the tooling adoption is hard and then I think for some people this is important for me to kind of state some people do not wanna be full stack builders and that's completely okay some people see themselves in specialization and I think specialization has a place and a role so I don't didn't want the message to be across the organization I expect everybody to be a full stack builder I do not I think there are system builders that empower full stack builders and then you have people who are specialized but I don't think we need as many specialized people as we did in the past

Lenny Rachitsky:I didn't actually realize this until just now so this is is this like their title now instead of product manager engineer they're full stack builder

Tomer Cohen:We have a full stack builder title formally inside of the organization and we are gradually putting people in that bucket

Lenny Rachitsky:There's so a whole career ladder that's forming there's a whole okay that's a that's a bigger deal than I even thought so where are you finding these folks mostly coming from like product engineering design I imagine it's a mix but just is there a kinda most common trend

Tomer Cohen:It's a mix I would just kind of people listening I would just think about like just go over your org and imagine who can do it who can right now flex across those functions whether it's engineering design product even bd and what you'll find is there's already quite a few

Lenny Rachitsky:It can fix across interesting are there any functions you think are especially successful at this not to play any favorites but I don't know are you finding like okay or you could also not highlight any specific

Tomer Cohen:Yeah I I think it's like I think it's a mental model of how you do it I think you know if I were to play like what's the hardest craft to potentially learn I think design has a lot more work to get the design agents to be really really good so I think designers have a little bit of a leg up in terms of others learning their craft and then the the vice vice versa but I honestly think it's a mindset I've seen I've seen designers code I've seen pms kind of design and do well and this is why I think like when you kind of step back and you think about people in your organization and who can flex I think you'll see them show up in many areas and what I think you'll find there is they have the agency they're leaning into new things they have the fluency like they're already building new experiences and they have that growth mindset that they just wanna get better so they're it doesn't matter what they learn at school or what's their what label somebody put on them when they join the company

Lenny Rachitsky:What I love about a lot of this is this is the it's the easiest time to transition between different product roles than it's ever been designs moving to pm and or just moving to this new role it's like it makes it so much easier to like you said that researcher became a growth pm

Tomer Cohen:And this is probably my biggest advice slash motivation I give to the team because what I tell them is ultimately by the way this is for me as well like I think about it in the same way it's the it's the the incentives for you are so aligned with the organization of what we're asking for right because this is we we need you to change we wanna be a more agile adaptive resilient organization that can deal with the pace of change but you want as well for your own career you want to be at the cutting edge of how you build so the incentives are really aligned between what you need for your own career and what the organization needs you to to do so there's that that permission to go and do it for me is ideally kind of a tailwind in what they wanna do more than anything else

Lenny Rachitsky:Maybe a last question for people that are inspired and like okay this is what we need to be doing any just tips for someone starting down this road to be successful at trying something like this at their company

Tomer Cohen:I would say like I would start with the I would start with the notion of like how do you wanna bring like there's just structure I would think about the the platform you need to build the tools you wanna bring and then I would spend a lot of time on the culture platform and tools I think would be again a prerequisite but not sufficient and the culture aspect is really important I would think a lot about how you bring people along so for for one of the learnings we had that probably I will do differently right now if I were to redo this program was for a while was working very closely with my core team on it the core kind of full stack building team that were in charge of building all this material but the organization was always asking questions what's going on who is doing it what are the tools and in retrospect we could have done a lot more in the flow to just show them and get them to already use early tools or be aware of it versus doing a small team on the side so it's okay to start with a small team I think it's really important but at the same time just making sure there's like visibility across the whole thing is really powerful being patient and being willing to invest I always give this example of like we always give this example of like oh look at this startup they built this in a week yes you can build a startup in a week right now if you start from scratch it's actually not hard but when you are trying to transform a large organization you wanna have this impatient about the goal and you have a high ambition but being very thoughtful and patient about how you bring it to life and the key things you have to invest in if you don't invest in your platform I just don't see how this could be a successful outcome if you don't invest in customizing the tools for you then you're just gonna get vanilla generic agents from the outside so being aware of the investment and making sure you actually allocate resource to it this is kind of the classic be willing to invest upfront so you can reap the benefit after versus saying hey you know why am I not seeing us moving into two x the productivity in a week that's not going to be this way you can see it with some people but starting to collect those examples and starting to really think about the transformation is really key

Lenny Rachitsky:This is so incredibly cool I know that a lot of cpos and heads of product and all kinds of leaders are reaching out to you trying to figure out what you've learned how to do this I love that we went deep on all these things just final question is there anything else that we haven't shared that you think might be helpful for listeners to hear or maybe just to double down on before we get to our very exciting lightning round

Tomer Cohen:Whether you're in an organization you're waiting for your leader to roll this out or you're a leader trying to roll this out I would not wait like the the first thing I've done which I thought in retrospect was really hopeful is I did not I did announce this upfront we are going through this mode like we're starting in pockets we're starting in pods we're building the tools but we're going is this is the mountain we're going to go after and in many ways we're gonna make it great I also announced that this is not just an end state it's a kind of continuous progress there's no state we're gonna get to as much as continuously just trying to be better and in many ways to compete you just wanna be better than others in how you build because the the for the version of building will look completely just for form itself every few years or so so do not wait really focus on the progress you're making overcommunicate with your team not just the vision but also the progress you're making almost like holding yourself responsible if you're a leader give yourself kpis you share with your own teams or okrs and if you're inside of the organization and I would say whether or not your cpo or your ceo is announcing this type of program go do it or join an organization that does it so you can be at the cutting edge of of how you build in the future

Lenny Rachitsky:Tomer with that we've reached our very exciting lightning round I've got five questions for you are you ready

Lenny Rachitsky:I'm ready.

Tomer Cohen:I love to gift trios of books that I really like so my current trio is they're very diverse in topics so apologies if it's not falling all into tack but the first one is called Why Nations Fail it's a book I read a decade ago even more and the authors of it just won the Nobel Prize last year and it basically talks about why does some nations succeed and some fail and it's not the usual explanations we go for which is oh it's culture it's natural resources it's the it's the kind of religion this is you know a lot of those kind of tends to be the kind of immediate excuse that people have it kind of falls into two camps are they extractive or inclusive institutions can people participate broadly and opportunity is shared or there are institutions that basically are supposed to be attracting from many and give to some so it's just an incredible way to just think about how you build a nation and for us at LinkedIn we think a lot about the idea of opportunities so how you build a product as well and it's just a good way to kind of move away from easy explanations into like what really makes a country really successful as well second book it's called Outlive it's really about the it's kind of like the author Peter Artya talks about the idea of medicine three o which is really the notion of building personalized medicine which I think in the world of AI will become incredible in the future but it's all those it's called as categories that you should think about for your life so you can just optimize your health as much as possible and goes for everything through you know fitness to diet to kind of the biggest health factors you should think about but it's a it's a great long book and then lastly

Lenny Rachitsky:In my bookshelf behind me.

Tomer Cohen:Here you go.

Lenny Rachitsky:It's up top you can actually see it I think.

Tomer Cohen:And then lastly it's a book that also came out many years ago but it's called The Beginning of Infinity which I really like by Deutsch and it's it's it's just wasn't an easy read for easy read for me but I love the idea in fact especially in products I love the idea of cause and effect like really finding great explanations for how things happen and then building on top of that your next iterations and this book really pushes on the idea of explanations that only once we have a clear understanding of what things happened then we can have breakthroughs on top of that but until we get to a point of clear scientific breakthroughs we are not going to make significant progress but when you do that it's really almost like infinite progress you can make on top of that.

Lenny Rachitsky:Naval's always talking about that last book I think I bought it and I just

Tomer Cohen:It was it was just a hard read as read at least for me it wasn't an easy read but it's a very powerful read.

Lenny Rachitsky:Awesome is there a favorite recent movie or TV show you really enjoyed?

Tomer Cohen:Can I do a podcast?

Lenny Rachitsky:Absolutely.

Tomer Cohen:So there's a podcast in it's in Hebrew it's called One Song and it picks a song that you know generally is ideally popular and then it goes really deep on the origin and the history of the song and I love it I just I love music and it just dissects songs so well it does a great job also in kind of bringing to life the story behind it so for me it just goes back to like you thought the song was about something but then it goes really deep into the actors behind the song and sometimes it's the words chosen or it's the how the lyrics match the the music itself and I just really enjoy that one.

Lenny Rachitsky:There's a podcast called Song Exploder I believe that is a similar concept that's not in Hebrew in English that I'll point people to if you love that one.

Tomer Cohen:It's awesome.

Lenny Rachitsky:Is there a product you've recently discovered that you really love? Could be an app, could be some clothing, could be a kitchen gadget, tech gadget.

Tomer Cohen:Can it be a product I want to have? I think it's actually really easy to do.

Lenny Rachitsky:I love that. This is a product thinking one zero one, just the vision of what you want to see.

Tomer Cohen:So in my car right now there's Alexa built in, which is great because the kids can ask for songs all day long and it's a whole show inside of the car. But one of my favorite things to do, and I've been doing it for well over two years, is I go in and I go into voice mode, attach EPT, yeah attach EPT, and then we just have a conversation and that's just friction. I would love to have on my steering wheel a button that invokes my AI friend that can sit next to me in the passenger seat and I've, you know, I just think that would be such a, I actually think it will transform rides for people. Just that movement, that's just like elimination of friction will transform the experience for me.

Lenny Rachitsky:On that note, I recently discovered Teslas actually do this now. If you hold the right wheel, Grok appears and you could talk to Grok, so it's here.

Tomer Cohen:The AI.

Lenny Rachitsky:Has arrived. Yeah, I was just like did it by accident and then it's okay.

Tomer Cohen:So for me, if you, if anybody from Rivian is listening, bring us.

Lenny Rachitsky:Rivian is falling behind, yeah, and it's, and like, and you have to use Grok. It'd be cool if you could switch to different AIs just to, because it has like a personality, like I don't just give me information, I don't need you to laugh and give.

Tomer Cohen:Me chills. Need did to spend some time with it before or did it have any memory from, did you bring any memory into it?

Lenny Rachitsky:There's a logged out version and then you could just log in and it connects to your account. Yeah, it's extremely cool. No one's talking about it. It's crazy because I don't know if they launched it fully but it just appeared.

Tomer Cohen:Do you talk in the car a lot to it?

Lenny Rachitsky:I don't use it that much to be honest but I like I should my wife just doesn't love Grok I think the brand of Grok is like a specific brand and so she's like don't talk to Grok in here with me.

Tomer Cohen:I love voice mode so I

Lenny Rachitsky:Use this all the time yeah I love voice mode too it just interrupts too often that's the issue there right.

Tomer Cohen:Can by the way you can set it up you can basically say like hey yeah let me finish.

Lenny Rachitsky:I now know that I'm learning so much okay two more questions do you have a life motto that you often find useful in work or in life.

Tomer Cohen:I think last time I talked about it I most associated here with I might be wrong but I'm not confused although I don't say it as much anymore but I think the one I love you know mindset is like a second religions for us at home and one thing I love about there's like a phrase there that is becoming is better than being which I think ties into the FSB mode a little bit which is you're always in you know progress mode iteration mode it's not about getting reaching a state it's about the journey the process that's what you should fall in love with it's about continuously growing and evolving without the negativity of it or there's no sense of FOMO there it's just this continuous thing if I look back a year from now and I look back how much did I grow like how much do I know what skills to do that again like where are becoming better like how do I feel like you know number version twenty twenty six versus twenty twenty five what's the delta there and I kind of love that as a way of thinking.

Lenny Rachitsky:A great segue to our final question by the time this episode comes out it won't be a secret that you're leaving LinkedIn after fourteen years a legendary run you joined way before the acquisition you helped them integrate you just like the way LinkedIn was perceived fourteen years ago is so radically different from the way it is today like it's actually really fun and interesting to be there versus how people for a long time felt about LinkedIn so I guess the question just how you feeling and what's next what I imagine you're gonna get a lot of calls from a lot of people but what are you planning.

Tomer Cohen:Yeah so I feel proud it's been an incredible ride at LinkedIn you know the way I've got to know about LinkedIn deeply the very first time was when I moved to the valley and I you know went to a lecture at Stanford about social networks in 2008 and and Reid was there and he talked about the power of being a professional communities online and I was very nerdy about it and thought it was incredible vision had no plans to join and actually started my own company after but as like would have it found myself joining a few years after and just thought the mission was incredible so in many ways it aligned with my purpose and and just was an incredible ride to be here and I also feel very grateful I shared this with the company recently I was starting to take learnings from my experiences here a lot of it from were from tough situations we had a lot of you know tough situations at LinkedIn and you know hard calls and late nights but you learn so much from those and I'm just incredibly grateful and I'm excited I'm excited I love I have a bias for change I have a bias for kind of positioning myself in a in a in a place where I can learn the most and and learn a lot and it's it's incredible it's an incredible time to build so I'm just excited to be thinking of new problem sets and new areas where I can go deep on and invest in the get the next decade in.

Lenny Rachitsky:I think it's gonna take a long time for you to not feel like you're working at LinkedIn and to like forget about all the things that you have been worrying about for so many years.

Tomer Cohen:You know after you build something for such a long time and I think you and I talked about it at one point that like I think one of the best traits for a builder is to become very passionate with what they're building really care not not about the job it's really care about the product when you feel the pain when somebody complains and and you kind of have this continuous discontent then it's like for me it's the notion of like you know raising a baby so yeah it's hard it will be hard I will always think of LinkedIn as as one of the babies I helped grow.

Lenny Rachitsky:Well I'm excited to have you back someday when you figure out what you wanna do next or and or start whatever you're doing I love that this was an excuse to get to know you Tomer thank you so much for being here.

Tomer Cohen:It was great to be here thanks Lenny.

Lenny Rachitsky:Bye everyone thank you so much for listening if you found this valuable you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts Spotify or your favorite podcast app also please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast you can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com see you in the next episode.