You are a product manager shipping product without knowing how to write code, barely knowing how to review code.
I have zero technical background, did music in high school when Sonnet 3.5 came out.
I remember watching a YouTube video, building apps using Bolt or Lovable.
It basically felt like someone came up to me and said, you have superpowers now.
These days, you're using cursor with cloud code.
If you're non-technical, like me, code is terrifying.
But AI just makes so much possible.
In the next coming years, I think everyone's going to become a builder.
Titles are going to collapse, and responsibilities are going to collapse.
The main challenge people have is reviewing the code that AI has written.
It's very difficult for me to catch mistakes.
What I'll do is basically slash review.
This tells Claude to start reviewing its own code.
But what's even cooler is I have Codex as well as Cursor open.
I will have each of them review the code.
This comes back to this quote I think everyone's always hearing.
It's not that you will be replaced by AI.
You'll be replaced by someone who's better at using AI than you.
It's the best time to be a junior.
Contrary to what a lot of people are saying, how there's no more junior roles out there.
Yeah, that's true.
But also when else in history could you get out of school and just build a startup on your own?
Today my guest is Zevi Arnowitz.
Zevi's a PM at Meta.
Prior to that, he was a PM at Wix, and this is a truly remarkable conversation that every non-technical product person needs to hear.
Zevi is super young and has no technical background but, as a smart young, ambitious person, has learned how to use cursor and cloud code to build significant and real products completely on his own, and he's created his own very clever and effective workflow that everyone listening can copy.
To make that copying even easier, at the top of the show notes of this episode you can download all of the prompts and slash commands and start doing all of this yourself.
Zevi shows you how to work with Cursor to quickly add your ideas to Linear, to explore your idea with AI, how to develop your plan, how to then build the thing and then have different LLMs review your code and update your documentation, and then use all of this as a learning opportunity to develop your own sense of how things work.
I haven't stopped thinking about this conversation since we had it, and everyone needs to pay attention to what AI is unlocking for non-technical people.
A huge thank you to Tal Ravi for encouraging me to meet Zevi.
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 19 premium products for free for an entire year.
Including Lovable, Replit, Bold, Gamma, N8N, Linear, Devon, Postalk, Superhuman, Descript, Whisperflow, Perplexity, Warp, Granola, Magic Pattern, Drakehouse, ChatBRD, Mobbin, and Stripe Atlas.
Head on over to linneysnewsletter.com and click product pass.
With that, I bring you Zevi Arnewitz after a short word from our sponsors.
This episode is brought to you by 10Web, the company that pioneered AI website building before ChatGPT.
In the last three years, over 2 million websites have been generated with 10Web's vibe coding platform.
10Web's vibe coding platform is a powerful way to build websites.
Think of it as lovable for WordPress, front-end and back-end.
Users can build any website at any complexity.
E-commerce, portfolios, information websites, blogs.
And it comes with a WordPress admin panel and thousands of ready-to-use plugins.
10Web also offers website generation as an API, as a service for SaaS companies marketplaces, hosting providers, MSPs and agencies.
SaaS companies can embed it via API so that users can launch AI-generated sites directly inside of their platform connected to their own data.
Agencies and MSPs can get a white-label dashboard to manage clients and resell under their brand.
Hosting providers can self-host the API builder on their own infrastructure.
Check it out at 10webio.
Slash Lenny and use code Lenny for exclusive free credits and 30 off API or white-labeled solutions.
That's the number 10web.io slash Lenny.
Vibe Coding Platform as an API.
Today's episode is brought to you by DX, the developer intelligence platform designed by leading researchers.
To thrive in the AI era, organizations need to adapt quickly.
But many organization leaders struggle to answer pressing questions like, which tools are working?
How are they being used?
What's actually driving value?
DX provides the data and insights that leaders need to navigate this shift.
With DX companies like Dropbox Bookingcom, Adyen and Intercom get a deep understanding of how AI is providing value to their developers and what impact AI is having on engineering productivity.
To learn more, visit DX's website at getdx.com slash lenny.
That's getdx.com slash lenny.
Zevi, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.
Thanks for having me, Lenny.
I'm a huge fan of the show and tons of people that I've admired most and learned the most from I've been on here.
So it's a crazy moment for me.
I'm really excited for this.
I really appreciate that.
I want to start by reading actually a note I got about you from Tal Raviv, who is a previous podcast guest, many time newsletter collaborator, one of the most AI forward product managers that I know.
I've learned a ton from him.
So here's what he said about you when he introduced us.
Zevi is the most hands-on vibe coding PM I know.
And I personally learned so much from him.
His engineers at Meta ask him to teach them how to do what he does.
Every time we get coffee, I repeatedly get this feeling of everyone needs to be hearing this.
That's so nice.
And so that's the goal.
That's the goal of this conversation is to help more people hear what you figured out.
We're going to get very hands on.
We're going to do a lot of show versus tell, showing people what you've figured out about how to be a PM, a non-technical PM, building stuff.
I want to give people a little bit of background on you, because I think this is going to inspire a lot of listeners to feel like they can also do what we're about to show you.
It's going to look very advanced, but just give people a little bit of sense of just your background.
I'm very non-technical.
I have zero technical background, did music in high school.
A lot of Israelis do technology units in the army.
I was not in a tech unit.
And basically a year ago, I was traveling with my wife for three months in Asia and we were in Japan.
And that was around when Sonnet 3.5 came out.
And I remember watching a YouTube video.
I think it was either Greg Eisenberg or Riley Brown.
And they were basically building apps using... It was either Bolt or Lovable, just using AI.
And it was like a crazy moment for me because I was watching this and it basically felt like someone came up to me and said Hey Zevi, there's this cool new technology you should check out.
You should really give it a try.
Oh, and by the way, you have superpowers now.
And the second.
I got home from Japan I didn't even unpack my bags, ran to my computer, opened Bolt, opened an account and for the past year I've been building.
And the last thing I'll say on that is we talked about this a bit before we started recording, but I was prepping with Claude for the episode and I was trying to clarify what my goal is for this episode.
And Claude said, if people walk away thinking how amazing you are, you failed.
And if people walk away and open their computer and start building, you've succeeded.
So I really hope that we can inspire some people to do the same.
I love that so much.
I feel like that should be the goal for my podcast.
If you're like, I love that guest.
It's less of a win if it's just like I'm so inspired to do the thing that they figured out.
That is the real win.
I love Claude is the best.
I agree.
Okay.
So let's, let's dive in and give people with, let's start with kind of a high level overview of how you operate and use AI in your job.
What are the core tools and just what's kind of like the frame of reference for the workflow that you figured out and how you operate.
This all started where I was a projects power user.
I love projects, GPT projects.
Yeah, exactly.
GPT projects and cloud projects, which are basically a shared folder of chats which share both custom instructions and a shared knowledge base.
And I think it was around when GPT started using memory, where I thought it was interesting, but it really annoyed me because I do a bunch of different things.
Like I'm a terrible runner.
I'm a PM.
I was a student, a psychology student.
So I had all these different facets of life.
And.
What happened was the memory feature was mixing stuff up.
So I talked to GPT about running and it would say oh yeah, after this 5K you're going to crush all your next product reviews.
And it's like I mean okay, I understand that you have that in your memory, but it's just not relevant.
And projects basically allows you to compartmentalize and have things within the right context.
So...
Tracking back to the story I told when we came back from Japan, I started building this app.
The first thing I noticed was that these products were built in a way where and when I say these products, I mean Bolt and Lovable were built in a way where they were super eager to write code.
So their system prompt was your coding agent.
So when you'd write something, they'd straight away start coding.
So at the beginning of a project, this was super fun and exciting, because they just go and start building your app.
But later on, when things got more complex, this created much more problems, because planning is really important when you're implementing something technical.
And let's say you're implementing payments or something that's going to be a change to your database.
If the coding agent is just like all right, I got it, and just starts writing code, this always results in terrible things some really gnarly bugs that I had.
And to mitigate this, what I did was I created sort of a CTO.
So again, I'm not technical.
I have been in product for a while, but I know zero stuff about code.
So basically what I did was...
I created a CTO with the custom prompt of it being the complete technical owner of the project.
So I told it, I own the problem.
I own how we want the users to feel.
You're the complete owner of how this is going to be built.
I want you to challenge me.
I don't want you to be a people pleaser.
All these things that kind of mitigate the regular chat GPT isms.
I always think about this where, for some reason, the easiest way for me to think about AI is to imagine it as people.
And I think ChatGPT would probably be the worst CTO because it's such a people pleaser and it's so sycophantic, where I mean just a short story I had a few weeks ago.
I was trying to learn about Bunn JavaScript, which was acquired by Anthropic, and I was trying to understand what they do.
So I was talking to GPT, and this wasn't within my co-founder CTO project.
And I asked it if it's similar to a different framework that I have in my app called ZooStand, which nothing to do at all with what bun JavaScript does.
And basically GPT goes, oh yeah, it's exactly the same.
And then it started talking about what it meant.
And I was like, wait, no, these are not the same at all.
And it said like the most terrifying and hilarious thing.
He goes, oh, I'm sorry.
I thought you were just making this up and I was riffing with you.
And I was like, oh no, no, no, this is terrible.
So basically, if regular ChatGPT was a CTO, that would be the CTO who like, goes along with your dumbest ideas.
So creating the project allowed me to mitigate that.
So this is just to be super clear.
You have a ChatGPT project that you've given a prompt to be your CTO of your product.
And being a non-technical person, this is kind of like the thing you talk to when you're, and we'll get to what you're actually using to build when you have questions about architecture and decisions that are technical.
Yeah, so now I'll show my full workflow and I don't involve GPT anymore, but I definitely would recommend, even though the technology has gone.
So when I started this, there was no plan mode or ask mode.
It was just build on these products, on Lovable and Bolt, and they've progressed a ton.
A lot of what I had as workflows have become ingrained in these products, which is really interesting.
I would still recommend GPT start with a project, for first of all, the reason that I said and also it kind of puts you in a place where you're in a chatbot and not writing code.
So you take the time to converse and to learn, which I think is critical.
And the second thing is...
If you're non-technical like me, code is terrifying.
It's the scariest thing in the world to look at.
And I look at it as kind of like exposure therapy.
I think if you see this where I'm working, like in Claude or in Cursor, you might be excited to start using those.
But I would really recommend starting slow with a GPT project.
Um, beautiful UI, super simple.
Then maybe graduate to like a bolt or a lovable and then go to cursor in light mode slowly slowly, gradually ease in until you like open a terminal.
Uh, you know, go full dark mode, go full dev.
Um, so I would really recommend doing this gradually.
That is awesome advice.
And so just to be, uh, to be clear, these days you're using cursor with cloud code powering it.
And what I love about that is that you've never written code.
The way you put it, you're afraid of even looking at code.
You have to do exposure therapy.
And I love that Cursor is useful to you.
And what you're telling us is that graduating from a ChatGPT project that is kind of your technical co-founder, kind of taught you enough to feel more comfortable going straight to Cursor.
You said that you actually went to Boulder in lovable kind of an interim position.
And then you went to just straight to Cursor.
What's the reason to just go straight to Cursor?
Is it just because Cursor can do everything?
And once you get the hang of it, it's actually the most powerful tool?
Yeah, I think I graduated from each tool when I kind of outgrew it.
So Bolt was awesome until I was trying to connect payments to my app.
I kind of started losing it.
And then I graduated to Cursor.
And I've actually fallen in love with Cloud.
So I'm using Cloud Code, but that also runs within Cursor.
And I think this is Tal who told me this.
I'm not sure who he's quoting, but code is just words at the end of the day.
So it's just files on your computer.
So basically you can be working on the same project and carry it from app to app.
And especially now I can work with multiple models and apps on my project.
So start slow, but definitely there's a lot of places you can graduate to.
Awesome.
Okay.
Should we dive into a screen share showing how you operate?
Awesome.
I pulled up Cursor.
Can you see it?
Mm-hmm.
Perfect.
So within my code base, what you can see here on the left, these are all my code files.
Here on the right is Cursor.
So this is basically like having AI, which has access to all the code.
And here in the middle, I have Cloud Code running.
And what you can see here, I'm going to close cursor for a second.
What you can see here are all my slash commands.
Basically what slash commands are.
They are reusable prompts that I save within the code base that I can run by writing slash and then the name of the file.
So here you can see create issue, which is the first command that I'm going to use.
And basically what this tells, Claude.
It says the user has met development and thought of a bug or a feature and improvement.
Capture it fast so they can keep working.
And then it basically says, this is the format that I want you to capture the linear issue in.
And it explains a bunch of things, what exactly Claude needs to do to get there.
So the way I invoke this is basically I'll do slash create issue.
And this injects this prompt into Claude.
So it says, I'm ready to help you to capture this issue, what's on your mind.
So basically, when I'll do this is if I'm working on a big project and I suddenly come across a bug or have an idea that I don't wanna work on right now but I wanna work on later, I'll do this really quick.
And Claude's main goal is to quickly capture what I'm thinking about.
So quickly to run through my full workflow.
So basically it starts with creating an issue.
So this is the create issue slash command, which basically tells Claude that I'm in development, and it should quickly capture what I'm thinking about and create an issue within linear.
Then later on, when I wanna pick this up, I have the exploration phase.
Exploration phase is basically telling Claude, we're gonna only explore what we wanna solve here.
It could either pull from linear or I can just speak freely to it.
And what it will do is it will analyze and understand the issue and just ask clarifying questions.
The next phase after we've done finished exploration phase is we're gonna create a plan.
So you can see create plan.
This basically has a template that I love for creating a plans, and the output of this at the end of the day will be a Markdown file with our plan that we can end up building, along with code.
After creating the plan, we have execute plan.
After execution, we have review.
And then we have peer review, which is really cool and we'll get into later on.
And at the end, we update the docs.
So this is updating documentation and everything so that agents can write better code later on.
So I think what we'll do is we're going to build a feature live for my app, which I think is really cool.
But first, what I'd like to do is show you the app so you have some context.
So this is studymate.
It's a platform for students which allows them to upload um study materials and create uh interactive tests based on their own materials.
So here we can go to the top.
Uh, let's upload a PDF.
We can decide what pages we want to be quizzed on.
We can decide the number of questions, the difficulty level.
And basically what happens behind the scenes is we send the information the user uploaded along with the system prompt and any other augmentations.
The users decided to Gemini and we create a quiz.
These are challenging questions that are meant to assess comprehension.
You even have some hints.
And once we do a few of these, we can submit.
I got them right.
Yeah, terrible results.
And so just to be really clear about this, this is like a side business that you have an app that you built that's making money.
That's just like a thing you vibe-coded having no technical experience.
Yeah, this is my weekend project.
Yeah, this is what I do on weekends.
Yeah, so you get basically deep explanations into why each question was wrong or each question was right.
And at the moment, StudyMate only has multiple choice questions.
And I was doing some competitor research over the last weekend and I saw competitors who had true or false questions and also fill in the blank questions, which I loved.
So I think that'd be really cool if we could build that live.
How's that sound?
I love it. crossing your fingers this will work.
I just want to highlight the stuff you shared right before this in Cursor.
So this is a huge deal, what you described here.
This is essentially what you've figured out is a way, as a person that has no idea how to write any code, how to build a product in Cursor as a product manager, using this series of slash commands that you've concocted, that you're going to be sharing with listeners.
They can download all these and just use them directly.
They don't have to figure out all these prompts that you've figured out.
Yeah, a hundred percent.
Basically what happened was I formulated the backbone of this uh with the CTO and it was basically within the system prompt of the CTO project that I had within GPT.
Uh, so it said step one, we do this step two, we do this and now I'll keep building.
And if I see something that happens over and over again, I'll just create a slash command and then it will be automated within the workflow.
Amazing.
So just to summarize this slash command.
So one is create an issue in linear. which I love.
Linear is awesome.
Shout out, Linear.
JASON MAYES.
That's also from, yeah, the product pass.
JASON MAYES.
From the product pass.
Oh, my god.
What a value.
OK, so step one is create the issue in Linear.
So it's a command.
So this prompt slash slash command you've created, just create issue.
Then it's explore, which is explore the idea.
Help me ideate on what this could be.
And this is Claude helping you think through the feature and product.
Then it's actually create the plan.
And so it's like the AI helping you build the plan to build the product.
Then it's actually execute, which is just build the thing.
And then there's this review, peer review step, which is awesome that you'll share.
And then there's document, update documentation based on the feature that we're adding.
Sweet.
Cool.
So let's... go ahead and start building.
So I'm gonna use WhisperFlow to dictate.
And basically this starts with slash create issue.
Um, so this basically sends that prompt, and I love this because I usually do this uh, during when I'm building something else.
So basically, it tells Claude that I'm mid building something and I don't have a lot of time to to to waste time on this.
So just ask some brief questions so that you have enough to capture within linear.
So I want to add. fill in the blank questions to StudyMate.
I want this to be 30% of tests to be generated as fill in the blank questions.
I want there to be six potential answers for two blank spots.
And of course there's only going to be two correct answers.
So one correct answer and two incorrect answers for each spot.
And I want the interface to be drag and drop.
So that's just basically, uh, a quick think of, of, of how I want this to work.
So it's gonna ask me a few questions.
Quizzes are a hundred percent.
Multiple choice questions structure, single sentence password, two blanks um and priority.
So one and two are correct.
And this is a not high priority.
Uh, it's a nice to have feature.
So now basically, what Claude is going to do is it's going to use MCP, which is basically a technology that was created by Anthropic, which gives AI the ability to use tools.
So this is connected to my linear.
So what it's going to do now is it's going to use everything we've said and create an issue within linear.
By the way, as this is loading, I just love the way you describe this, especially doing voice mode.
It's like exactly how you would talk to an engineer describing a feature.
Here's what I want.
And then they ask you questions.
Here's the clarification.
Yeah, so at first, when I was doing this with the CTO, I would do it with ChatGPT voice mode.
And that was crazy.
That was like, literally felt like ideating with a person.
It would push back, ask questions, and maybe one day, you know, the coding tools will get there too.
But that was exactly, it really felt like sitting with my CTO.
Great.
So created STU88.
So if we open up linear now, we should be able to see Uh, let's see where STU ADA.
There it is.
Uh, fill in the blank questions with drag and drop interface.
So it has a TLDR.
It has the current state.
It did a little bit of research on the code base.
I think, um, expected outcomes, some context.
So yeah, so this is basically ready for me to pick up when I'm interested in building.
So now let's say a few days go by, I finished the current project I'm working on.
I can pick it up.
So when I pick it up, I do slash exploration phase, which is what we said.
And then instead of pressing enter, I'll press tab and I'll show you this.
So basically exploration phase.
What it does is it will take an argument.
This is basically a placeholder within the prompt which allows me to enter something that is extra context for the AI.
So I can say here, linear STU 88, which is referencing the ticket.
And now what it's going to do is it's going to go, it's going to fetch the linear ticket.
And what's the idea?
What's the goal of the exploration phase?
This is kind of on the idea.
Exactly.
So it's both for the CTO to deeply understand the problem that we're trying to solve and also understand the current state of the code base.
What files need to be affected and how is the best way to implement this technically?
And usually what happens is right now, Claude's just basically reading a bunch of files, understanding the basic code.
Structure of the code.
And then it's going to come back with a bunch of clarifying questions that will decide how we end up implementing this.
So it's like, it feels like it's talking to your engineering manager.
Exactly.
Exactly.
100%.
This is how I think about it.
And you said that your CTO, so you used to use ChatGPT prompt to have a CTO in there.
Now the CTO is living inside here in Cursor.
Yeah, because of the way the tools have developed and they've become so good at both exploration and code execution.
So now it's just kind of a habit that I call it a CTO, but it's basically all in one.
The same agent will both do the exploration and write the plan and end up executing the code.
Got it.
So basically it's called code.
Is there like a prompt you gave it to act like that, to act like the right kind of CTO?
Yeah, so within the Cloud MD, which is basically the system prompt that's loaded within Cloud's context.
In every conversation I have some basic stuff like this is our workflow.
This is how we work.
Within exploration phase, I want you to challenge my thinking, all kinds of stuff like that.
That can be loaded within the Cloud MD file.
Cool.
One last question before we move on here, just because I'm thinking about it as this happens.
The linear issue that you generated, how often is it actually great and ready?
How often do you have to edit it?
What's like the quality of the linear ticket that it generates?
Because, you know, a lot of people are like probably wondering, just like oh, these terrible linear issues are being created by AI.
Are they actually any good?
It's completely different because I'm a company of one.
So a lot of the context is within here and there's no need for me to like talk to other teams and understand.
It's basically very accessible.
And also I can easily see when Claude understood something wrong.
I don't want to say that I would create linear issues at work like this, but definitely if you're building your own side project, they're pretty quality.
And also, it just kicks off when I want to start working on it.
I wouldn't say it's ready to be built.
It's ready to start being explored.
Got it.
So it's just the beginning of an idea.
Actually, let's come back, after we go through this flow, how you would approach this if you were at say, Meta or another, maybe a smaller company.
How this workflow might work at a larger company that isn't just your own startup.
Yeah, interesting.
Let's come back to that.
Cool.
All right, so this is Claude coming back.
I have a comprehensive understanding of the code base.
I thoroughly analyzed StudyMate Live code base and understand the current system, feature requests and key areas that it's identified.
Usually, I'd spend a lot of time going over this because this is super, super important.
But just for the sake of development right now, we're going to brush through this.
Now Cloud basically comes back after it's gone through the code base and understood the way it currently works.
It's basically telling me what the current understanding is.
So it's talking about how the app is set up at the moment, how the data is structured, what it understood from the feature request.
And what it has identified as key areas.
And then it asks me some questions.
So it's asking about the scope, it's asking about the data model, the UX UI of the feature, how it should be validated, how it should be graded, what changes need to be happened to the AI system prompt, and all kinds of questions about the app.
I've prepared answers to all these questions beforehand because I don't think we all want to sit through this.
So I'm just going to paste that in and we'll see what Claude says.
Awesome.
I love it.
And I love just scanning those questions I was asking.
It's like such smart, sophisticated, important questions instead of just, cool, here I go.
I'm going to build it.
Yeah, and I think this is the big difference between just vibe coding and going along with the vibes and really building serious apps.
I spend a lot, a lot of time going back and forth and understanding.
Also a very cool slash command that I haven't showed yet is learning opportunity, which basically, when something is really difficult for me to understand, I'll understand.
Uh, do slash learning opportunity and then talk about what i want to learn, and this basically primes claude and says i am a technical pm in the making, i have mid-level engineering knowledge, i understand architect, architecture and basically i want you to explain what we're currently working on uh using the 80 20 rule.
So this is a great way to learn.
I would definitely take this and every time you kind of see something that you don't fully understand, i would definitely use this uh to learn Great.
So Claude basically comes back and says how it understands the current data model and how it's going to implement.
Yeah, so it's ready to create the plan.
So basically what I'm going to do now is I'm going to go and do slash create plan.
And while Claude's doing this, I'm going to show really quick what this looks like.
So basically...
These plans are from a template that I found on Twitter.
I forgot who it was, but it was just a template that really resonated with me.
And it's basically saying based on our exchange, create a markdown file.
That will be the plan include clear minimal, concise steps, track the status.
So this basically has status trackers on each task that Claude updates as it's going through.
And it will have a TLDR, some critical decisions that we've made, and the plan itself.
So Claude's finished writing the plan.
So...
We'll be able to look and see exactly what the plan is.
So it has a TLDR.
It has the critical decisions we've made and the tasks broken down.
And this is a perfect plan.
And it's also a really good way to write this, because a lot of times I'll use different models to execute certain stuff.
So...
Cursor has an amazing model called Composer, which is super fast.
So a lot of things that are not that complex, I'll use Composer.
Gemini 3 that just came out is unbelievable at UI.
So a lot of times I'll split the plan into backend and frontend and then I'll have Gemini just read the plan and do the front end.
Um, so having this as a markdown file is really good.
And also going forward.
It's really good to have within the app so that um later on, if an agent is writing code in a certain area, I can see what's already been done there.
Um, so what we're going to do now is we're going to execute the plan.
So now I think we're going to do this with cursor just cause a composer is so fricking fast.
So what we can do is basically just say execute and then we can tag the file, and composer is ridiculously fast.
So that's it.
It's off.
It basically understands what the plan is and it's going to go ahead and start writing the code.
Let me ask you a question while this is happening.
Awesome.
I have many questions, so this is a good time to ask a few of them.
You said that Lovable and Bolt and other apps in that space are just not enough to build really serious apps and you had to move to Cursor to do that.
Tell us more about that.
What's the limitation you ran into with those products and why you switched to Cursor?
I started using Cursor and Cloud Code a few months ago, and I haven't looked back.
But at that time, these teams have been moving like crazy.
So I don't want to say I wouldn't trust them.
I don't know what the current state is.
But for me it was basically the issue of I felt that Bolt was being very opinionated on how I should do things.
And I felt like my knowledge has gotten to a point where I can graduate and be more in control.
By the way, I think that the main difference between all these tools is basically the harness.
So the models are all the same models.
I'll run Cloud within Cursor, I'll run it within Cloud Code.
And it's also the models that... Cloud is also the model that is underlying Bolt and Lovable.
But basically...
Bolt and Levelable will add a bunch of levels in the middle that will take all kind of guesswork and hard decisions out for the user.
So the user doesn't have to make these hard decisions.
So it's also very easy to build.
But the flip side of that is that you have less control.
And basically Cloud Code is just taking Cloud and shoving it straight in your code system and giving it full tools and to do whatever it wants.
But also with that comes a lot of decisions that you need to make.
So I don't know if you can't build really amazing production apps using Bolt or Lovable now, but I think basically, if you want the most cutting edge abilities of the models and you want to be able to make all the decisions on your own, it's probably best to be on one of these tools.
What I'm feeling and hearing is that planning work that you did, that's the stuff, that Lovable Bolt and would you put Replit in that bucket too.
Yeah.
Yeah, for sure.
Lovable, Bolt, Replit, Base44.
V0.
Yeah, V0, all same bucket.
So essentially, they're doing that planning for you.
And as you said, they're very opinionated.
They're trying to make it easy.
So it's just like, here's how to do it.
Here's the way we think is best for people.
And what you're saying is, once you're trying to get a little more serious about it or want to go in a different direction, you don't have the power to change how they plan.
So Cursor lets you do that.
Yeah, I don't want this to come out like I'm badmouthing them.
Base44, let's say.
Yeah, Base44 does an amazing job at basically taking all the complex guesswork out of building product and just allows you to just, you know, go with the vibes and build.
But it will do sign in with Google for you and it will do a database.
But then you don't have decisions on what database am I using?
Do I need sign in with Google this way or another way?
It would just do it out of the box.
So that's basically the trade off there.
Awesome.
Shout out, uh, mayor, the, uh, founder of baseball.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He's amazing.
Uh, i just love how this is like, the way you're like uh, flinging what's the word slinging?
Slinging models like gemini 3 for front, like i love that you have.
You've never written any code and you're just like cool, he's gemini for this and claw for this and i'm just working on cursor talking to this uh cto, helping you build stuff and build like significant product.
Yeah, I mean, we just live in the craziest of times where basically, the world changes once a week.
It feels like
And there is just no boundaries.
You can use all of these just on your regular MacBook or regular laptop and everything.
I have these moments.
I call them time machine moments, which is basically this week.
For instance, I was prepping for the podcast using Claude with a project.
I was fully localizing StudyMate from Hebrew to English, which I did in two days, which would probably take a dev team weeks.
And I was building a personal site which went from no domain no nothing to live on a domain within an hour and a half.
And I was doing all three of these in parallel.
And there was a point where basically all three of the agents were running.
So I didn't have anything to do.
I just had to let them think.
And these are like the time machine moments, where I feel like I was in the future and I just stick my head out of the time machine.
And whoever's next to me, like at the moment, it was my wife.
I'll just say, we live in the future.
And she'll be like, huh, what?
And I'll be like, no, no, don't worry about it.
But it's just basically so crazy that all these things are just... an API away.
You can use anything.
So I think it's an awesome time to be curious and optimistic and hardworking.
These are my favorite kinds of podcast guests people that are living in the future, figuring out all these things, and then are just kind of come back, as you said, poke your head out of the rocket ship and just like hey, here's this thing that I figured out.
Here's where we're going.
Yeah.
Best time to be alive.
Um, so awesome.
So it looks like it's finished.
Um.
So now what we're going to do is we're going to run the app locally and we'll be able to see uh, what uh composer ended up building, and we're going to see if anything else is needed.
Um, on our end, to maybe do some manual review.
Does that sound good?
Sounds great.
And I love that was like I don't know a few minutes where.
If it was a human engineer it'd be like days, maybe a week, for work.
Yeah, for sure.
Now, a composer, like the one thing is it's just so, so blazing fast, keeps you in flow.
So yeah, full features take minutes.
And that probably costs like a couple bucks in AI credits.
I don't even look.
I mean, I used to be so stingy about paying for products.
And now I'm just basically I look at it all as tuition, you know, as like stuff that I'm paying for learning.
So I don't know how much it costs, but it's definitely worth it.
That explains why they're the fastest growing products in history.
100%.
Your marketing website sets the tone for your brand and is the one touch point that every single one of your customers sees.
In today's age, if you're still having a hard time making small changes and simple updates to it, you're doing something wrong.
That is why so many companies, from early-stage startups to Fortune 500s, including companies like DoorDash Zapier, Proplexity and Eleven Labs, turn to Framer, the website builder that turns your com from a formality into a tool for growth.
Thank you.
Framer has programs for startups, scale-ups and large enterprises to make going from idea to live site as easy and fast as possible.
Learn how to turn your website into a growth engine from a Framer expert, or get started building for free today at framercom.
Slash lenny.
That's framer.com slash lenny.
Rules and restrictions may apply.
So now we have this feature, which basically we built, and I can ask it to make some changes because it's running locally.
And once it's ready, I'll be able to ship it to users.
So now the next phase.
After I've Q8 it and basically tested it manually, I'll have Claude review its own work.
So what I'll do is I'll reopen Claude code.
I love this because this is one of the things that comes up a lot on this podcast is writing code is now so easy.
The main challenge people have is reviewing the code that AI has written.
And what you're doing here is you're having Claude review its own code.
Yeah, so this is another thing where it's very difficult for me to catch mistakes.
So my review process has gone through a bunch of iterations to really be as good as possible and to catch as many things as possible.
So I'll always manually QA at first to make sure if I can see any mistakes that Claude made.
And then what I'll do is basically slash review.
And this tells Claude to start reviewing its own code.
But what's even cooler and something that I'm really proud of is I will usually do multiple reviews and I'll have Codex, which is ChatGPT's competitor to Cloud Code, as well as Cursor open.
And I will have each of them review the code.
And then what I do is I have a slash command called peer review, which is really interesting.
And basically what it does is it's going to take Claude, which is usually the agent who I'm working with.
And just to put this in a mental model, this is basically my dev lead that I'm working with.
I will take the slash command is basically saying, you're the dev lead on this project.
Other team leads within the company have looked at your code and reviewed it and found these issues.
Don't take what they said at face value.
The reason is you have more context than them and you led this project.
You need to either explain why the stuff they found are not real issues and wrong, or fix them yourself.
And it's really cool because the way I look at these things is I look at the models, I try to imagine them as people And I can really tell you how each one of these would be as a real human.
Because they have... Yeah, each model has such distinct characteristics.
So let's say Claude, she would be the perfect CTO.
Like...
She's very communicative.
She's very smart.
She doesn't just go with the flow and do whatever you tell her.
She's very opinionated, but also super collaborative, which is, I think, why I'm always drawn to Claude, because I need to do so much learning.
And it's your dream, a very communicative, but very opinionated dev lead.
But then there's also Codex.
So I use Codex 5.1 Max, whatever, I don't know.
They're not the best at naming models.
But GPT's model.
I always imagine it as the best coder within the company, who comes to the office with a hoodie and sandals and sits in a dark room.
And you basically only bother him when you have the worst bugs.
And you say, listen, we have this bug.
And it will just close the door for two hours and come out and say, I fixed it.
And you're like, wait, what?
You're going to tell us what happened or what?
And he's like, don't worry about it.
I fixed it.
It's like really not communicative, but it solves all the worst problems.
And let's say Gemini is like a crazy scientist who's super artsy, super talented at designing.
But if you sit next to it and watch it work, it's terrifying.
Like you would fire that person instantly.
Yeah.
This might be just my experience, but when I'm using Gemini within anti-gravity, which is Google's new competitor, to cursor,
When it's writing code, you can see the steps it's taking and it's terrifying.
Like you'll say, I want you to redesign the top of the dashboard.
And you're looking at its thought process and it will say oh, first things first.
I'll delete the dashboard.
And then it'll be like, nope, that was a mistake.
I'll bring it back.
And then it will say, oh, can I edit the database?
And you're like, no, do not edit the database.
You're just doing a redesign.
And then it will end up designing something beautiful.
So the way there is like a roller coaster and very scary, but at the end of the day, Gemini is very good at design.
So I think that using all these models and basically playing to their strengths and mitigating their weaknesses by using other models is a game changer for me.
So I'll do peer review a bunch of times and I'll have other models review other models' code and kind of have them fight it out basically.
Like sometimes a clock code will get really sassy and be like.
This has been raised for the third time.
And for the third time, I'm telling you, this is not an issue.
This is by design.
So it's just a really cool, cool thing that I've added.
And I haven't seen many people doing it.
That is such an incredible rant slash way to understand what's going on.
Okay, awesome.
So we just ran the review.
So show us what we saw there.
And let's actually try this peer review.
I'm really excited to see what you learned there.
Yeah.
So basically, Claude has reviewed its code and it's found a bunch of bugs.
A critical bug it found in the prompt.
Uh, some high bugs, some medium bugs.
And now what I'll do is I'll do the same thing with the other models.
So Codex has a built in code review that you can do, or I just like to say review uh, all the code in this branch.
Of course, branch is referring to the GitHub branch that we're working on.
We're not working on the live code base.
And then I'll do this with composer, say with, we can do, let's do it with composer one.
So I'll do a slash review here as well.
And basically, these are both going to run and do a in-depth review similar to what Claude does.
But again, because of the differences between the models, they're all going to catch different things and they're all going to look differently.
And this is a really cool way to work.
It's basically if you had other team leads within the company review the code.
Here, you can see how fast Composer is.
I think GPT probably will take a bunch of time.
Like I said, it's in his own dark room right now reviewing code, and we'll come back in a few minutes.
Uh, We can let these run.
And we don't actually have to go through the whole process.
But is the idea, once you get these results you run peer review and you copy and paste kind of these results.
Is that the idea?
Exactly.
I'll copy and paste the results.
I'll do peer review.
And then I'll say dev lead one and then paste from one of the models.
And then I'll say dev, lead two and paste from the other model and basically have them fight it out until I feel like we have no more issues.
Incredible.
For me, this is super important because I'm not technical and I'm not a developer.
And I'll also use slash learning opportunity a bunch during this to learn about stuff that I don't understand or don't fully grasp.
Incredible.
What a clever solution to solving this code review problem, where it's like I don't know what you're, I don't know how to recode.
So what am I going to even, yeah.
Yeah.
Okay, incredible.
Let's, let's wrap up this kind of this workflow.
Is there anything else that's important in this workflow?
And again, all this stuff is going to be available, where people can just plug this stuff into their cursor account and use it themselves.
100%.
The one thing I'll say is that I think, just like working in general with AI, and even just like working on any product, doing constant postmortems is critical.
So a lot of times we'll find all these kind of bugs, or maybe Claude will fail to execute something correctly.
And at the beginning, when I started vibe coding, I would basically just keep running at it like running at the wall and until it worked.
And once it worked, I was like, all right, awesome.
This works.
Let's Updating documentation and tooling is one of the biggest hacks for productivity.
So when Claude will fail to do something, or I'll see this really bad bug that shows that Claude really didn't understand something, I'll ask it what in your system, prompt or tooling made you make this mistake?
And cloud will kind of like go introspective and think of what made it create that mistake.
And then I'll say, okay, great.
Let's update your tooling and documentation so that this mistake never occurs again.
And I do this every time I'm either building an internal tool or anything.
And.
I think this is just like working.
You end up doing a bunch of mistakes and then end up releasing the feature to users.
So you're like, all right, it's a big success.
But going back and, even when you've succeeded, looking and understanding what you did and what you could have done better is critical.
And also using AI, this is probably one of the biggest unlocks.
Going back to your prompts, understanding what was not good enough, iterating on them and then seeing how AI's responses get better.
I think that's probably one of the most important things and one of the things that divides between people who are like okay with using AI and the people who actually know how to use it.
That is such good advice.
So what I'm hearing is, when the models do something dumb, make a mistake, you ask it to reflect on what the mistake it made was.
And then you update the slash command prompts with that knowledge so that in the future it's not making that same mistake.
And it just keeps getting better.
These things just keep getting smarter and smarter.
So you're building up this really incredible prompt that just gets better and better.
Exactly.
Not always.
The slash commands, it will sometimes update different documentation or its tooling.
But basically, it's understanding what the root cause of the mistake that the AI made and fixing it.
Awesome.
So the models are getting smarter, and then there's also the other parts of your workflow can get smarter, as you find flaws in the way it does stuff.
100%.
Yep.
Amazing.
OK.
Is there anything else there before I move in a couple other directions?
I think that's it.
I think we covered pretty much everything.
Basically, just to wrap this up, what I do is I do a bunch of code review and then update the documentation so that everything is documented.
So the next time I try to build a feature in this area, there won't be any mistakes.
And then I'll do a bunch of testing.
I'll do some user testing as well before I release this to general availability.
Obviously, we're not going to release this.
This was just a show, but hopefully, maybe by the time the podcast comes out, I'll have done this correctly and release the feature.
It's incredible that this was not possible, I don't know, two years ago, maybe a year ago.
You are a product manager, shipping a product without knowing how to write code, barely knowing how to review code.
You said you're afraid of looking at code.
As a product manager, you're building a product in Cursor using all of these different AI models.
You're making money with this product.
This is like, we're so used to this now, but it's insane what is now possible.
It's the best time to be alive.
100%.
I think that I understand the fear, but AI just makes so much possible.
Just a quick side note here.
My brother, who I'm building one of the apps with, is an entrepreneur.
He has a beautiful business that helps old people and seniors understand to use technology and AI better.
And he's basically... doing the same kind of learning as me.
And he's replaced all of the tools he was paying for.
I think he was paying for Zapier and Airtable.
And he's basically built like a full-fledged CRM system and automation system for his business, completely alone.
So I mean, for the people who are curious optimistic hardworking, this is the best time to be a builder.
And what I love about this conversation we're having here is it feels like the biggest barrier for a lot of people is like how do I get started?
What exactly do I do?
I open up Cursor.
It looks very intimidating.
I don't know how to write code.
I don't know how to build stuff.
I don't know about databases.
And so you're going to be sharing all these slash commands and basically this whole workflow with the audience.
Yeah.
And like I said, just start at GPT.
Start in GPT.
Tell it what your idea is.
Tell it to explain to you what are even the first steps of thinking.
What are the decisions you need to make?
And just be...
Like be inquisitive, learn, don't rush things.
It's very important to just dive in and really spend the time to learn.
And you share this, one of your slash commands is learning opportunity.
And it's how you learn a lot of these things.
Just like teach me this thing of how this database issue works.
Exactly.
Okay, there's a couple directions I want to make sure we touch on.
One is coming back to a question I asked earlier about how this might work at a larger company.
Say it's not like meta, but just like, I don't know, a thousand person company, 500 people.
How much of this can you plug and play into a workflow as a PM at a larger company?
What would be your advice for someone that may want to start trying to ship code, at least showing people what's possible?
I think that first making your code base AI native is a really important step.
And I think this needs to be done by technical people.
So basically my code base has a ton of just plain text in it.
So it will have a bunch of markdown files that explain to agents how to work in certain areas of the code base and high level structure so that the agents navigate through the code base easier.
And I think that if this is set up in a really good way, I still don't think uh like PMs should be shipping heavy uh database chain migrations or any like big project.
But you know, contained UI uh projects, especially if you just build it, create the PR and send it to a dev to like do the final finishes.
Uh, I think that's definitely something that's possible.
And I think we're going to see that a lot in the next coming years.
I think basically everyone's going to become a builder, so should be really interesting.
Okay, so your advice here is, as a PM, maybe don't go right to cursor.
Start building shipping, trying to ship features to production, especially complicated features.
Do you think we'll get there?
Do you think in a couple of years, PMs will be doing this and it'll feel less scary and crazy?
If there are PMs.
Yeah, I think titles are going to collapse and responsibilities are going to collapse and everyone's just going to be building.
I definitely think that the models, the context window is getting bigger.
The models are getting smarter.
And I definitely see how PMs or any other background can be writing.
At the moment, I wouldn't wait for that.
I would use this as a collaborative learning opportunity to work with your dev team.
It's going to be difficult.
A lot of developers are very, very skeptic about the current state.
And I think that it's going to be a lot of sales work on your end to convince.
But if you're able to convince and I think, teams that are really sold on this and want to take the time to work on their workflow about how can our team become more AI native, I think that these teams are going to probably be successful a few years in the future and they're going to look back at the few weeks they spent setting this up as the best time they spent.
Let me ask you another question around just the job of a PM.
One of the biggest fears people have with these AI tools for PMs for every function, I imagine is just they.
You start to rely on these things.
Your skills start to atrophy.
You're producing all this slop that looks great.
Cool.
Amazing strategy.
Now, it's actually not at all good.
Or these linear tickets are just products that are like half baked.
What's your take on kind of these two parts of just, like, how has this impacted your craft as a PM?
Do you feel like this is weakening your skills because you're so reliant on these tools?
And just how do you keep the quality of this stuff up and not just like meh, it's just a bunch of AI-generated slop.
I have a very strong disagree to this, and I've heard it a bunch.
I remember when I started using Tower of Eve has like this whole course on building a PM co-pilot using projects, which is probably one of the best courses that you can take.
And when I started working with my own co-pilot, I remember people at work looking and saying like oh, so you're basically outsourcing your thinking.
And to me, that's just the worst way to look at it.
And I think for some reason these people usually have a high correlation with the kind of person who doesn't like to show their presentation when it's only 10 done or doesn't want to ask for help a lot.
I think that there is a misconception with a lot of PMs that the job is always having the right answers and being the smartest person in the room.
And at least how I was trained and how I believe the role of the PM is, it's the exact opposite.
It's basically harnessing anything that can get us as quick as possible to delivering the right solution to users.
And I just think this is like that really smart person that has context or your mentor or whatever, but is just always available and doesn't judge you and can really help you.
So if you're using it to just create your outputs and then putting them out there, I mean yeah, that's AI slot, but it's also human error.
I think it's really important that you own your own outputs.
If you put anything out there or show something in a product review and you say oh sorry, that was built by AI, that's your mistake.
I think if you use these intentionally and really take the time to understand how to use AI in the correct way, it's one of the biggest game changers that will make you much better as a PM.
And another thing here is that, especially for more junior PMs, it allows you to play at such a higher level than you would normally.
I think that at Wix I wasn't thinking of what's the marketing strategy of the company and how will the onboarding be completely revamped within the whole product?
But I mean on my side product I can just do whatever decisions I want and think of the strategy and marketing and the messaging.
And this is basically just getting me reps, which is one of the most important things at the beginning of your career.
So I understand the fear that you outsource certain stuff and you're not owning 100% of everything.
But I think the upside is so much more valuable.
And I think the only way that AI makes you worse at your job is if you're using it wrong.
Is there anything that you've learned about reducing the sloppiness of the output?
Just like a tip for keeping the quality high of the stuff that it produces.
Similar to people setting up ai for success for the task at hand.
So like if i just brought in you know uh, a junior to to write a deck or something and i didn't give it any guideline, i just said give a strategy deck.
He would probably just go online and find you know, top strategy deck and and just reproduce that, which is basically what ai is doing.
It's basically just fed all of the internet.
So Instead of that guiding it and giving it context on what your style of writing is and what you're trying to solve and all these different things, I think that's probably one of the biggest unlocks.
So that's just a quick tip.
And also, Cursor has a slash command called dslop, which is basically going back over the code.
I don't know if this is integrated into the product yet, but it's on Twitter.
Their founders have been talking about this.
So that's definitely something I would run after just to make sure that no slop is left behind.
That is so funny.
The slop.
Okay.
One more question which may lead to something else, but kind of going in a whole different direction.
You used AI to help you actually interview for the job that you got at Meta.
Talk about how you did that, because a lot of people right now are struggling to find a job, reading about all these people using AI to help them interview.
You actually did it.
What did you use?
What worked?
I feel like the analogy here is I have 12 nieces and nephews and you can see how people who have grown up in a different world, how their mind is formed differently.
So if you ask me, how do you answer a phone?
I'll do this.
But a child now, when you say, how do you answer the phone?
They'll do this.
They'll do the iPhone answer.
And I feel like people who are growing up now in their professional lives were the same, just with ai.
So every time i'm faced with a new challenge or problem, i think ai first how to solve it.
So meta reached out and said they'd like me to interview straight away.
I opened up a project, um within claude.
I started looking online for all the best information out there, things that i resonated with.
I took a ton of frameworks and and stuff from ben eras, who's written a guest post, uh for you, who I think is one of the best minds out there right now.
And basically I created a project which was my coach, which I would come and consult what to do at each phase.
I would mock interview with, and this was amazing.
Also, I created a game in base 44, which helped me.
I was really struggling with segmentation within the product questions.
So thinking of the correct segments, and So I basically just created a quiz game which creates questions and different segmentations, and I have to choose.
Um, so this was like, I spun this up.
It's a web app that I would play sometimes when I was on the bus to work.
So basically uh, I think Ben talks about this a bunch, so I don't like just go read Ben's stuff, but just creating a project and feeding it with all the best information on the internet and then mocking a bunch.
I will say that the biggest game changer for me was doing human mocks.
So cold outreaching to people on LinkedIn and having them do actual mocks for me.
I think that at the end of the day, especially for the meta PM prep, which is super competitive and difficult I think there's no way to get around that.
That is so cool.
They use that post.
I wasn't aware.
We're going to link to it.
And in that post, Ben shares all these prompts.
You can feed ChatGPT to help you prepare for interviews, do mocks online.
It's a really important point to say that.
Those take you to a point, but it's actually better to use humans.
I actually have a post coming out soon, in collaboration with Noam Segal, about how everyone's using AI to interview.
And one of the most interesting ways I've heard people and that we found in this research was that people use it to get feedback.
They record the interview and then it gives them feedback.
Here's where you could have done better.
Here's what you missed because the feedback loop is so missing.
No one ever tells you, here's what you did badly in this interview.
No one tells you that.
And AI can do that.
So I'll add two things to that.
One, which is exactly this.
So I'll mock with AI.
Also, I did something really cool where there's a question bank online free by Louis Lin, which basically is an always updating bank of questions that people are asked in real interviews.
And I basically used...
Uh, Comet, which is the perplexities browser.
And I had the agent run all kinds of analysis on like what the most asked questions are.
And that's how I knew how to prioritize what questions I would mock.
Um, and then, at the end of these mocks, I would um tell Claude, within the project um, you're my coach and I don't want you to make me feel good.
I want you to make me, um, as ready as possible for these interviews.
So give me feedback, like you said.
And the other thing that I did was really cool was some questions where I didn't have time to mock.
I would ask Claude to play the candidate.
And then it would just give me a really good answer.
And I could also learn from that, like learning from someone who does a perfect answer.
Oh, man.
I really love the way you phrased it.
That people kind of in your generation.
The default is I have something I need to do.
Let's go to AI immediately and help me prepare for this thing, help me figure it out.
Yeah.
And this comes back to this quote that I always think about, which I think everyone's always hearing, but it's such an important quote that it's not that you will be replaced by AI for a long time.
It's you'll be replaced by someone who's better at using AI than you.
I agree.
And that's what these conversations are for to help people keep up with all that and to learn some of these skills and again see where the future is going and start to learn how to get there yourself.
OK Zevi, before we get to a very exciting lightning round, I'm going to take us to a recurring segment on this podcast I call Failure Corner.
And why I love this segment is people come on this, you know, just even this conversation.
It's like all these amazing things you figured out.
Everything's going so well.
People rarely hear the things that don't go well.
And those are often the most interesting and impactful stories.
So the question is just what's a story of a time you failed in your career?
And what did you learn from that experience?
Yeah, I love this.
I love Failure Corner.
Big, big fan.
So I'll tell a story about when I started at Wix.
So basically, I started within Wix's student program.
And straight out of the student program, you get put into a certain team.
So I was in the editor, which is the core product of Wix.
And the other PMs were just the best editors.
PMs almost at Wix like this, for other people had much more experience than me and they were ridiculously good.
And I remember coming in and thinking, like my first product review, I'm going to blow these people's socks off.
They're not going to believe how good of a PM I am.
And I basically didn't really share what I was thinking.
I would work tons of hours alone.
And I was like, I'm going to kill this product review.
They're going to be so impressed.
And I ended up failing miserably.
My product review was not good.
It wasn't the format they expected.
They had a ton of questions that I missed.
And I felt awful when it was over.
I was like, oh, you're such an idiot.
And I saw that everyone was like, all right, cool.
Yeah, just come back in two weeks and we'll keep getting at this.
And I understood in that moment that They had zero expectation of me being a 10X PM, but the expectation of me was being a 10X learner.
And the second I understood that, my whole mindset shifted.
And I think this is probably the best tip that I give now to junior PMs is basically be the best learner you can be at the beginning.
No one expects you to know all the answers and no one expects you to be good.
So basically what I did was I took each person on the PM team there was four other PMs and I assessed what their strength is and use them as a mentor for that.
So Nery was still my mentor till today.
He has the best product sense of anyone I've met.
Oya is super, she's like a methodology expert.
She just thinks in frameworks.
Yara, who is the head of product.
I basically can look at a product and then instantly understand, like the third and fourth order effects of them, the system thinking.
So every time I had an issue with one of these areas, I would come to one of them and consult them.
And this does two things.
First of all, I learned a ton.
And the second thing is that when the next time, the next product review, my success felt to them like their success.
Because it wasn't this kid who's trying to show us up how cool he is.
It was like our mentee kind of making us all proud.
And it was such a great shift for me.
And basically, at the end of the day, I really excelled through this.
That is an awesome story.
And this idea of learning is such a good thread throughout this whole conversation that AI is good at getting stuff done, but it's also really good at helping you learn how to do the thing and to be this partner, this thought partner, the way you talked about the interview process you went through and this learning opportunity, slash command.
So awesome.
Great story.
Zevi, okay.
Before we get to our very exciting lightning round, is there anything else that you wanted to share?
Anything you want to leave listeners with?
Yeah, so kind of to tie back into the first thing I said, where if people walk away thinking Zevi's so cool, then I've failed here.
I think that it's just the best time to be alive.
I think it's the best time to be a junior, contrary to what a lot of people are saying, how there's no more junior roles out there and people get out of school and you can't find a role.
Yeah, that's true.
But also when else in history could you get out of school and just build a startup on your own with a couple of friends, completely bootstrapped?
And I see more and more people.
Towards the end of my time at Wix, I was interviewing and I saw more and more people building their own stuff with AI.
And I think contrary to what a lot of people think, it's the best time to be a junior.
It's the best time to be a learner.
And I think if any listener is listening to this and you're a curious person, you're a, I want to say kind, I'm not sure, but if you're a kind person and a good communicator, you have such an unfair advantage and you can give more value to companies than most people who have 20 years of experience.
So I really hope people get inspired by this and start killing it with their projects.
Amazing.
So many ways to be inspired from this conversation.
Zevi, with that, we've reached our very exciting lightning round.
I've got five questions for you.
Are you ready?
Yep, let's do it.
What are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people?
So I'll take one from each kind of genre.
So in like fiction, I love The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand, one of my favorite books.
Really makes you think, really makes you feel.
Business books, I'm a big fan of Shoe Dog, The Nike Story.
I just finished reading that.
So it's amazing.
It's great.
It's great.
Yeah, I love Shoe Dog.
And then more on, like the psychology side Mindset by Carol Dueck, who coined the term growth mindset.
It's just such an amazing book.
It kind of sounds like a self-help book, but then you understand that it's completely psychological and is based on research.
And that book completely changed my life.
Really, I was always with a fixed mindset.
And then after reading that, I kind of understood that it was something holding me back.
And since then, I've been really, really trying to cultivate a growth mindset.
So I really recommend everyone reading that.
Again, connects to that thread of the way you described it, being a 10x learner versus a 10x doer.
Okay, next question.
Favorite recent movie or TV show you have really enjoyed?
Yeah, actually, my wife is really into film, so we watch a lot of TV.
It's probably our favorite together time.
I just finished watching The Pit, which was amazing.
It was really good.
And my first recommendation to everyone is, if you haven't seen Severance, run to see Severance, one of my favorite shows.
Is there a favorite product that you have recently discovered that you really love?
This is a good question.
I'm always trying new products.
Like I'll always have three or four browsers installed on my computer and all this different kind of stuff.
And I recently discovered a Loom alternative.
I was kind of disappointed with Loom.
They were taking so much money and the product, I don't know, I just didn't love it.
And there's an open source alternative called Cap, which is just really well crafted.
You can see that the person was like, Really sweating the details.
And it's just a really, really great alternative.
So I've been using that recently.
There's also a product called Supercut that I love.
That's also a Luma alternative.
Shout out.
Okay, two more questions.
Do you have a favorite life motto that you find yourself coming back to in work or in life?
Yeah, I'm kind of between two right now.
One, which is like become a Twitter meme, basically, which is you can just do things.
I feel like that is basically going always in my head every time I do something, that I'm just shocked at the speed and ability to do things now.
So you can just do things.
And the second one I stole from my brother.
His motto is nobody knows what the fuck they're doing.
And I just love that.
And I think it kind of makes you take life more lightly.
So, yeah, nobody knows what the fuck they're doing.
I think people see these companies on the outside and it feels like everything they've got all figured out.
And if you're ever on the inside of a company that's doing really well, you're like how is this staying on the rails?
How is this still a thing that is working?
It doesn't make any sense.
It's all about to fall apart.
Yeah.
Okay, last question.
You've had a long entrepreneurial thread throughout your career.
There's a couple other real world businesses you've started in the past.
You did a thermal clothing business and then like a hummus delivery thing.
So maybe pick one of those and just tell the story of what that's about.
Yeah, I'd love to.
Really fun that you asked about this.
So I'll tell the thermal clothing because I think it's really cool.
So in high school I was selling thermal clothes in 10th grade for one of my sister's friends or something.
And basically, it was just packs of thermal clothing, shirt and pants.
I grew up in Jerusalem, so it's a bit chillier there.
So it was perfect for the weather.
And in 10th grade, when I was selling them, they were like $20, $25 a piece.
And I was making like $4 a sale.
And if you look in the food chain, I was like sixth or seventh down the line.
So this was like crazy margins.
So during the summer, I thought about it like, I should just go straight to the importer.
So throughout the summer, I called the importer.
And at first, he was really, really mad.
He was like, No, you have to work for me for years to get to this state.
And I said, Listen, man, I'm finishing school soon.
This is not going to be my career, either do it or not.
And We basically negotiated throughout the whole summer.
And this was also like how I did things before ChatGPT.
So he would like throw out something.
He'd say, oh, the import tax has gone up.
And I'll just search Google like import tax Israel and like start reading.
And I'll be on the phone with him and I'll be like, hey, I would just basically stall.
And then I'd somehow come back with a with a challenge.
And I ended up getting a really great price, like $12.50 a piece.
So I was making like 100% profit.
And I spread throughout a bunch of different schools.
Each school I had the coolest people in school selling for me.
And then a really fun thing that I did was we had a really awesome basketball team.
And like our basketball team would basically be 30 points up within the first half.
And it kind of got boring for the crowd.
So I wrote a song, like a basketball chant, about thermal clothes that basically has my number within it.
And like, The end of it was, um, if you join in now, we'll give you a discount.
And it like, it was with drums and everything.
And still, when I go to Jerusalem, I know, like some people who I don't even know like know my number by heart, because they know it by the tune.
And sometimes when I walk in Jerusalem, people will stop me and say like, Hey, it's thermals heavy.
So that was just a really cool experience.
Um, as a kid, this explains so much, such a, just the marketing genius of that move.
Oh man.
Okay, Zevi, this was incredible.
Two final questions.
Where can folks find you if they want to reach out and maybe follow up on some of the stuff?
We'll link to the scripts and prompts and all that in the show notes so you don't have to read that.
And then how can listeners be useful to you?
Awesome.
So I've been helped throughout my whole career a ton.
So I love helping any way I can.
So reach out on LinkedIn or on X. I really love to help whoever I can.
How can you use listeners be useful to me?
So if you're a student, try study mate.
Tell me what you think.
If you're in Israel and you are not using dictation yet, try the board to text.
Tell me what you think.
Amazing.
I just love how much you're giving away and how useful this can be to so many people.
So again, we'll link to that in the show notes.
Zevi, you're awesome.
Thank you so much for being here.
Thank you so much for sharing so much.
This is going to help, I think, a lot of people.
And I think it's going to help people get over the hump on.
Okay, I see all these people doing cool stuff.
Here's how I can actually do this stuff.
So thank you so much for being here and for sharing so much.
Thank you for having me.
And if you build something cool with some stuff that I learned here, hit me up, send me.
I'd love to see.
Amazing.
Zevi, thank you so much for being here.
Thank you.
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 Lenny's podcast.com.
See you in the next episode.
