“When you can build anything, and you can build anything so easily, building something great actually is now a unique value add. And taste is now really important. Someone who can really pull the signal from the noise… And when this is so easy, someone who can bring people together and drive consensus and turn chaos into order becomes really important, because speed can basically introduce chaos if you're not able to bring clarity and structure to that.”
Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth · In-Depth Interviews · November 2026
Context
Lenny Rachitsky asked about the trend of product managers becoming more valuable again. Doshi, who heads product for Google's Gemini models, agrees and argues that when building is cheap, the scarce skills shift to taste and getting people aligned.
Transcript
…If you think about like search or the Gemini app or, you know, YouTube or labs, but also working with external customers to really understand where are they going? What are their needs? What would meaningfully change their experience? And how do we actually build that flywheel of feedback too?
…out what is worth building, what problems people have that are worth solving, what it great looks like, what good looks like once you're done. Aligning people behind one cohesive vision. Is that something you're noticing? Thoughts on that kind of PM ascendance that is starting to happen again.
I like the phrase PM ascendance. I'm going to use that. Yeah, I think, I mean, I think you actually said it very well, right? Which is, I think, look, I'm obviously biased because I am a PM. So I would like to believe that, you know, PM Ascendance is here and we're back. But I actually think, you know, exactly what you said, which is when you can build anything and you can build anything so easily, building something great actually is now a unique value add, right? And taste is now really important. Someone who can come in and actually really pull in what is the signal from the noise, right? And what is that insight that will actually unlock a great experience? And that is truly what a good PM does, right? Is bring that insight and help unlock. I think the other part that you noted that I particularly feel in a place like Google, where we are building a number of products, is again, when this is so easy, someone who can bring people together and drive consensus and turn chaos into order, I think becomes actually really important because, in the absence of that, and the ability to build as quickly as we now can, speed can basically introduce chaos if you're not actually able to kind of bring clarity to that and bring structure to that.
So, on that, as you're hiring PMs these days, is there anything you look for more and more, kind of a skill that might be trending up in the PMs that you hire that you think is really important to be really successful? Or just broadly, skills that you find are really important to be successful in…
Yeah, I mean, I think more and more so, we are looking for PMs who, for lack of a better way of putting it, like understand the vibes of our models or other models. Like, I want PMs who have an opinion, who are playing with these models every day, who have their own use cases for how they judge…
This is awesome. Okay, so vibes, evals, adaptive. I want to poke at these a little bit. So, with evals, say someone doesn't really know how to write an eval, how to approach writing an eval, their first eval. What are some tips to start getting better at the skill of writing evals?
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