LinkedIn’s product evolution and the art of building complex systems | Hari Srinivasan (LinkedIn)

**Hari Srinivasan** (0:00)
It was March 2020, and we were just watching COVID hit, and it was just this heartbreaking kind of moment where in the feed, you were seeing all these people by no fault of their own starting to post that they've lost their job.
We started seeing in our data, as you had some areas, like when the hospitality was really getting hit, but some areas, like customer service, that just couldn't hire enough.
And you'd think the marketplace would balance pretty quickly. You think, okay, maybe these people will start moving to other jobs, but it wasn't happening.
And a large reason behind it is people are used to looking for certain particular titles, and they didn't start realizing how other people could do this job. So we made a pretty big push on something we call Skills First Hiring. This was the idea that we could translate people's experiences into a set of skills. And by that, we could help them really start balancing the marketplace with a much different system, right? And so I think that the job market is rebalancing, but it's being done, the pathways are being done in a very different way that seems to be, you know, maybe a change that holds through these ups and downs. And that'll be very interesting to see.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:57)
Welcome to Lenny's Podcast, where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and growing today's most successful products. Today, my guest is Hari Srinivasan. This episode has a hilarious story. On Twitter, an account called thecuriouspm tagged me with a request to have someone from LinkedIn come on the podcast and talk about how they operate and what they've learned about building products that serve so many different types of customers. I replied asking for any suggestions for who he thought I should specifically talk to, and he suggested Hari Srinivasan by doing some research on LinkedIn. So I reached out to Hari, told him about this tweet, and he agreed. And so here's the episode. Hari's been at LinkedIn for eight and a half years, and he leads the Talent Solutions product team as VP of Product, which is also LinkedIn's biggest business and includes all of the hiring and learning products which you'll hear about in this episode.
In our chat, Hari shares what he's seeing change in the hiring market, what you can do to improve your odds of finding a job through LinkedIn, what he's learned about building and maintaining really complex systems like LinkedIn, tips for getting into product management, and some lessons from his own course on product management. Plus, we also talk about how LinkedIn has been able to become a real source of valuable content and a lot less cringe over the past couple years, which I've definitely noticed and I share in our chat. What a fun series of events that led to this episode. Big thank you to Jotun, hopefully I'm pronouncing your name correctly, the guy behind the curious PM account for making this all happen. With that, I bring you Hari Srinivasan after a short word from our sponsors.
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