Connect your Claude, Codex or OpenClaw for full transcripts on millions of podcasts. Two week free trial, cancel anytime.

Start free trial →
BM Blair Metcalf On Lenny's Newsletter

“A visual designer turned out to be one of our best prototypers. An animator turned out to be one of our best prototypers. And what it seems like is these people are like great directors. They have huge context. They can describe all of the things. They are vulnerable and they try things without like worry of failing.”

Lenny's Newsletter · Product & Design · October 2026

“A visual designer turned out to be one of our best prototypers. An animator turned out to be one of our best prototypers. And what it seems like is these people are like great directors. They have huge context. They can describe all of the things. They are vulnerable and they try things without like worry of failing.” — Blair Metcalf, Lenny's Newsletter

Context

Claire Vo asked who prototypes most with Reddit's internal AI prototyping tool. Metcalf says adoption is 100% across UX and product, more than 150 people, with a near-even split between designers and product managers, but the standouts came from unexpected roles.

Transcript

Lenny's Newsletter
Blair Metcalf

Right. So internally, they're all public. That's amazing. Yeah. We need to add that. We should add some. So you can work under the skunkwork.

Claire Vo

…the radar. I don't know. I kind of like this idea of like everything's public. You can kind of see what people are messing around with. I'm curious who is prototyping the most? Like our designers prototyping the most? Our product managers prototyping the most? Like who is prototyping the most?

Blair Metcalf

Yeah, so it's a mix of designers and product. We have 100% adoption in UX and product, but there are like some surprising folks that show up. Like a visual designer turned out to be one of our best prototypers. An animator turned out to be one of our best prototypers. And what it seems like is these people are like great directors. They have huge context. They can describe all of the things. They are vulnerable and they try things without like worry of failing. But yeah, it's a mix. It's almost a perfect mix over design and product, over 150 people.

Claire Vo

This episode is brought to you by Firecrawl, which gives your AI agents data from the web and beyond. Your agents can search and scrape the web while accessing Alexandra's rapidly expanding library of over 100 million index sources and more than 200 data providers, all through one connection.…

Blair Metcalf

Right. Yeah. And so this is a part that we're working on also. But long story short, these go into like leadership reviews. Leadership uses them, clicks through them. And, you know, you're getting feedback live. You're getting feedback in Slack. But we want to add, you know, you can comment live on…

Claire Vo

Got it. And so, do you feel like this has changed? What has this changed in terms of, you know, is it velocity? Is it quality? Like, craft? Where do you feel like the impact to how you build products has been felt the most?

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

More from Lenny's Newsletter