Why every company now needs to think and operate like a lab team | Josh Woodward (Google Labs, Gemini, AI Studio)

Lenny Rachitsky (0:00)

My thesis is that every company needs to start thinking and operating like a labs team.

Josh Woodward (0:05)

Every company definitely needs a set of people, a team. Their job is to be at the frontier. They're the people who have like eight, $200 a month subscriptions on every.

Lenny Rachitsky (0:14)

Everyone has to get really good at trying a bunch of stuff with the latest models, figuring out what is now possible before your competition does, before a startup comes and eats your lunch.

Josh Woodward (0:22)

You've got to try to create a space where weird things can grow. If you look at the history of a large company who starts a lab, the lab is usually ineffective and fizzles out after about three to four years. You can't just nestle this under an existing business unit. It has to have its own kind of independence.

Lenny Rachitsky (0:41)

You've seen more ideas thrown at the wall and tried and prototyped than maybe anyone else. What are some patterns of where the best ideas come from?

Josh Woodward (0:49)

They very rarely come from design sprints. They don't come in conventional places. You can't microwave good ideas.

Lenny Rachitsky (0:55)

What skills are you finding are trending up in value?

Josh Woodward (0:59)

I'm actually looking a lot right now for people. What's their unlearning rate? How fast can they learn something and then walk away from it?

Lenny Rachitsky (1:06)

What's something that might surprise people about what product market fit looks like?

Josh Woodward (1:10)

When you're showing people early prototypes, you're looking at people's eyes. That is the metric.

Lenny Rachitsky (1:15)

What are signs that it's time to kill an idea?

Josh Woodward (1:18)

The team usually knows before the leader knows.

Lenny Rachitsky (1:22)

Today, my guest is Josh Woodward. Josh is head of Google Labs, the Gemini app, and AI Studio. He's been at Google for over 16 years, and his job is to experiment with and scale new AI products. My premise for this conversation and why I believe it is so valuable, is that every company is being forced to think and operate like a labs team. Because what is now possible is changing so quickly, you have to get very good at playing with the latest technologies, running tons of experiments, and uncovering new opportunities before your competition or startups do. Josh runs the longest lasting and biggest labs team in the world, and he shows a ton of very specific lessons about where the best ideas come from, how to know when to quit an idea, what it looks like when you have product market fit, what skills are becoming more valuable in today's era, why roles aren't actually blurring into one builder role, and so much more including some spicy stuff. A huge thank you to Steven Johnson, Sophie Miller, Jeff Huang, and Logan Kilpatrick for suggesting topics and questions for this conversation. Before we get into it, I've noticed a lot of people don't finish the episodes, which is totally fine, but you end up missing the best stuff. So to help you, I've created a new Lenny's Most Replayed Moments YouTube channel that is exactly that, the most rewatched and shared segments from our long form episodes. Check it out and subscribe at lennyspodcast.com/mostreplayedmoments.

There's also a link in the description. With that, I bring you Josh Woodward.

Josh, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.

Josh Woodward (2:57)

Thank you. So great to be here.

Lenny Rachitsky (2:59)

It's even better to have you here. I want to first lay out the premise for this conversation and I want to get your take if you agree with this.

Josh Woodward (3:06)

Yeah, yeah. Sounds good.

Lenny Rachitsky (3:06)

World view. So my thesis is that every company needs to start thinking and operating like a labs team because the underlying tech that we're all building on is changing so fast, which means what we can do is changing so fast, which means that now everyone has to get really good at trying a bunch of stuff with the latest models and basically figuring out what is now possible before your competition does, before a startup comes and eats your lunch.

So it feels like the skills that will matter more and more now are things that you all have gotten really good at, which is finding great ideas, figuring out how to run a ton of experiments, figuring out what to double down on, building teams that can operate this way, at the same time not distracting the rest of the company from all the shiny stuff and letting them focus. So broadly, does that resonate?