#106: The rise of the full stack builder | Tomer Cohen (Former Chief Product Officer @ LinkedIn)

Welcome, welcome in everybody. Hello. Good afternoon, afternoon, good evening, good morning, depending on where you are in the world. Please let me introduce my hosts, our hosts for this afternoon, Tomer Cohen, former CPO at LinkedIn. Tomer recently stepped away from his role as chief product officer at LinkedIn after 14 years with the company, where he's still on as an advisor. Tomer hosts Building One podcast and is an advocate for the full stack builder mindset and how AI is reshaping product organizations. Ben Ares is a former Meta PM and a PM interview coach. He coached 200 plus PMs, 17,000 students. Ben teaches a popular Maven course that includes his AI co-pilot focused on product sense and analytical thinking interviews at top companies like Meta, OpenAI, Stripe, DoorDash, and many others. Ben also hosts, co-hosts rather, the Super Insider podcast and authors PM interview guides at InsiderLoops. And Ben is a frequent guest contributor on Lenny's newsletter. And with that, Tomer, Ben, welcome. I'll let you take it away. Thank you. Thanks for having us. And I'm really excited for the session today, Tomer. Same here. Cool. Okay. So I usually do these as, as meetings, but today we're doing a webinar. So I'm assuming it's going to be a little bit different for me. This is not going to be a, um, a slide heavy presentation today, but I just wanted to recap kind of like the agenda that people signed up for. So we all know what we're in, uh, what we're in for in our time together. Okay. So I think that the high level topics that we want to cover and, you know, hopefully, Tomer, it's going to end up doing most of the talking here. I'm just kind of kicking us off and moderating. But one thing we want to talk about is really how AI is reshaping the PM role. Uh, we want to talk about this whole full stack builder mindset. It's Tomer has done a bunch of content on it, and I find myself every week almost revisiting a lot of that content in my head and just like thinking about where, where this role is heading, where these different swim lanes are going. So hopefully we can really do a bit of a mind meld into the mindset here. And then a lot of people, especially people have been following my content, my course, um, want to really think about their career, how they should be thinking about career advancement, future-proofing their, uh, their experience to be relevant in this new world that we're heading into. So, uh, we're going to also get Tomer's thoughts on that. So with that, I'm going to stop sharing my screen and we're just going to kick off with a first question here for you, Tomer, and then we could see where the conversation goes. Sound good? Let's do it. All right. So you've talked about this full stack builder concept as a mindset versus like a specific necessary role or like a, a title. And maybe at one point it will become more formalized across the industry as a title. But can you talk a bit about what, what is that full stack builder mindset and why do you think that might be different than, you know, what people might be thinking about right now? Yeah. So maybe a bit of background, you know, in many ways, we're in this phase right now that we're really moving from technology being about empowerment to meritocracy, like where everybody with a great idea can bring it to life. And there's a unique moment in time that the, you know, the way I heard somebody phrase it, the time constant of change is far greater than the time constant of response. Basically means that change is happening faster than we're able to respond to it. And that basically means that there's no kind of blueprint or best practice to how you go about it with this change. You have to kind of go back to the kind of almost like the first principles of how you build and why you build and what you build to actually start with that notion. And then when I was doing this at LinkedIn and I can cover kind of how it started there, but when I was doing this at LinkedIn, I really thought about like, what is the builder's job? And it's actually quite simple when you think about it. The builder's job is to, you have an idea and you take it to market. That is the builder's job. And we added all these best practices in the meantime, right? There was the whole idea of researching the problem really well, then basically like designing the solution before you basically kind of build it and then doing a spec and then coding it and quality kind of doing a test and qualities and then taking it to market. All those kinds of best practices. But what happened is when you look at companies today and processes is that flow, which is very in a way seamless and good, just became very complex over time because we built so much kind of sub steps into it. Researching became a process of going over many, many inputs, right? Talking to customers, obviously and users, but also looking at tickets and customer support and social media. Like at LinkedIn, we had 15 input channels to go over. That's on itself. That's a days of work just to collect the input. And then you look at reviews. There is a design review, product review, trust review, security review. And those all exist for a certain reason. But when you go back to the idea of why they were created, they were created to fill a gap that we filled it by creating one more process element. So then you zoom out and you're seeing this, what was supposed to be a very seamless idea to execution notion to becoming this massive behemoth of processes that happens in a company. And if you worked, it doesn't matter from a startup to a large company, we've all seen that. And then that process complexity led to organizational complexity, right? Somebody has to do all those jobs. So then we hired people to fill all of those sub tasks. And that created more complexity because there's more handoffs and more interaction. So then, you know, when you zoom out and look at this behemoth called product development, you're realizing that the idea of insight to execution to market just got lost in this incredible amount of complexity that happens in the, not just the process, but also the organization. And now with the idea of a full stack builder, you can actually collapse the stack back up to that original building blocks. Somebody has an idea and she's able to research, design it and take it to market pretty quickly. So that's behind the goal of the full stack builder. And what's great about it, it's not just the benefit for the individual, it's the benefit for the organization because when I have a team of full stack builders, I can create them on the fly. I can start tackling emerging priorities. I can basically pivot based on direction really quickly and they can compliment each other really, really well. Got it. So what I'm hearing is the maybe decade or two decades that kind of preceded the last year and a half or so, because this is all very emergent, right? Like all these changes are super recent. So maybe until maybe a year, year and a half ago, we ended up building these very bloated, large organizations that required a lot of cross-functional support to get anything done. A lot of alignment, a lot of consensus building. And then there was this like growing specialization in every part of the machine so that you, if you needed to get some research done to get something out, there was a bottleneck basically stopping that project until the research resource could get to it, that kind of thing. And what what's happening right now, and I want to, right after this transition and how you saw this actually play out at LinkedIn, but what you noticed is an opportunity to maybe make the way that the teams work more modular to create smaller, more agile teams that can each do the entire work that used to require this like bloated team to be able to accomplish. And therefore, if there's like a new priority that emerges or something like that, you don't have to kind of throw out six months of planning for 200 people to kind of make space for that, but you can actually carve out one, maybe two individuals and go from idea to something in market. That's getting learnings quicker than you, you could have done on your own before, unless you had like a top 0.0001% engineer or something that was like a great designer and PM. Like, you know, there, there are these very special people that we read about sometimes like I'm thinking, I'm thinking about the guy that designed the, uh, the original iPhone keyboard. And there's a, there's a book written about that. I think it's called a creative selection. And there's one guy who like designed it, did all the product reviews, you know, coded it and everything and presented to Steve jobs. But those stories, the reason there's a book about that is because it's so rare. I think it's not that that common to see, but now we might start seeing a lot more of that. So, um, am I, am I, by the way, before I ask you about how you guys rolled this out at LinkedIn, is there anything in my kind of like recap or reading back to you that you feel is maybe like missing any of the, the essence of kind of like your thoughts on this? No, I think it captures this really, really well. I think in general, you know, for us, we've been very early to let's call it to the GPT four moment, which was kind of done at the friction point of what's possible. And I remember, I remember that day clearly when, uh, we had like an, uh, a few of us met with Sam and Greg in the What I'm hearing is basically watching people work and kind of hearing their thoughts on why they do things a certain way. What's their internal monologue as they're using a tool, kind of like sitting on their shoulder and watching them complete a task or watching them deconstruct a problem is one of the best ways of really getting to know how someone is wired for this world that we're in because if you just relied on what they tell you that they can do or what they just tell you what they've done, but they don't show you that there's a big blind spot there. Yeah, I think that, and you asked me before about like where things are headed. I think we can, we know for sure that like agents will talk more to each other. There'll be a team of agents, like that will be built. So like, I don't necessarily trying to hire for somebody who can just connect agents to each other. I would like somebody who can do that plus apply judgment or know that agents will connect and they will, you know, build an orchestration layer on top of it, or they'll build a judgment layer on top of that. I think if you play the long arc, like there's some clearly some stuff that will get solved whatever the next six months or nine months or so on. Got it. So the things that if you were to predict, like if you were to hire someone today and say, based on that, regardless of what happens to agentic workflows and AI models and kind of like all the things we know are just going to accelerate and get better and better, the thing that you're, you would bet on to be a good proxy for their ability to thrive in that future world would be, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I'm hearing things like their ability to think critically about the output they get from AI systems and to plan before executing and to really understand the system before building it or implementing it. That's not going to go away for you. It sounds like taste and judgment, like basically focusing on the right problems at the right time, you know, not doing something just because they can, but they ask themselves, should we do this or is this the right time to do this? Those kinds of things. Anything else that you'd say is like a really good proxy for that, them being great in the future? I think on the building side, kind of from a builder mindset, I think things like vision, like vision should come from human beings developing a compelling sense about the future that you want to rally the organization around. That is inherently a human centric skill and it's learnable, but you have to invest in that. Empathy. AI can mimic empathy, but it doesn't have empathy. I hope we all understand that. So I think understanding the problem really well, going deep on the nuances of the problem. This is where I see, you know, I have a podcast where I interview great builders and bar none everybody has tremendous empathy for the problem they're trying to solve. It's so clear to understand it 360. It's like, it's so clear when I talk to them about it. Communication. You still need to rally others around what you're trying to do. Rally the organization, align the organization. That's not going to come from AI. Creativity. I know people, some people might actually might put some doubt into that, but actually I think imagining possibility beyond the obvious is, will come from humans. And then you mentioned judgment taste, which ultimately is about making high quality decisions in situations which are somewhat ambiguous or complex. Those are for me are like the five traits, human centric traits that builders should chime in. Got it. And I'm realizing I probably should have clarified this earlier, but I mean, I do believe in the concept of like the future is not evenly, it's like here, but it's not evenly distributed yet. I think it's something that I always think about. Do you think in the future there will be no PMs? There will be no designers. There will be no engineers. There will be only like many, many kind of like full stack builders and like these small teams that are full stack. Or do you still think in that there's room for full stack builders to coexist with these like traditional dedicated roles? Yeah. So I think it was like three archetypes. I think you'll see the system builders. Those are the ones that basically are building the infrastructure, the platforms to allow for full stack builders to operate. So like people who are developing the models or, you know, the chips or so on that basically allow for everything else to sit on top. Like the designers that build the design system so that everything feels consistent when people are building. Very much so. Or on the tech side, for example, at LinkedIn, we build a layer on top of our code base that allows our code base to interact with AI much easier, but in a much easier way. Those are kind of more of the system builders in the system that allow everybody else, allow the full stack builders to thrive. And you have the full stack builders and they're able to work across the stack end to end. And then you have specialists. And I think specialists are still necessary. You might be the best in the world in motion design. Your idea there is like, you know, you're going to push the envelope on motion design and what's possible. But if before we had a lot more specialists in organizations and any organization had many specialists into it because we had to fill all those sub blocks. I think that's going to be more of a very unique role. And folks who will be in a specialist role really needs to be one of the best people in their craft to be able to get that role. Like the analogy is playing in the symphony, right? At the end of the day, only a few of you get to play in the symphony. And that's the level of craft you have to get there. But for me, in many ways, it's the rise of the generalist, the full stack builder. Yeah. Another visual that was coming to mind for me, because like when I was at Facebook, you know, we had all these like platform teams, you know, like horizontal teams that are serving a bunch of kind of like teams that have dedicated parts of the product that they own or specific problems that they're tasked with solving for specific segments. And those were like product teams. And so you always had this kind of interesting interplay where like there was platform teams and everyone's like, what are the platform teams doing and why does it matter? And it would only really matter, matter when a product team took what they built and actually did something with it and they get to be like, look at all this impact that we drove. So it's what I was picturing as you're talking is like, maybe we still have, it's like super important for us to have these horizontal teams that are building out platform capabilities that allow everyone else to work much more independently in a modular fashion and that full stack model. But maybe instead of 20 person cross-functionally staffed product teams, there's a bunch of these like one to two, you know, person full stack builder teams. But maybe those are not the teams we want building the platform, right? Like those are the people that are better doing the full stack integration. Very much so. And then they all specialize. I think what you'll see with the full stack builders is they specialize on the problem, not the function. So they'll be really, really good about their problem they're trying to solve. Because that's where the domain expertise about the customer problem and, you know, that 360 view of the problem is really valuable. Exactly. That's where the real, like instead of like becoming great at learning every piece of Figma you can do, like, you know, get, like you build more empathy with your customer base. You understand exactly what they're after. You spend more time with them versus kind of doing the bureaucracy of your, of your job. That for me is a big win on the entire ecosystem. Amazing. Okay, cool. I think we've, we've established now a really strong foundation for like, what is this full stack builder? What's the relationship between that and some of these historical roles that we, that we're used to thinking about as specialists? Kind of transitioning into more of like the, maybe like career planning part of this conversation. So in my mind, there's people that really love what they're doing. They're not looking to make a move. They're bought into everything you've been talking about here, Tomer. And they want to make sure that they're doing the right things to level up in their current role because they don't want to fall behind. They want to do, they don't want to leave money on the table as far as impact. They just want to be as good as they can be in their current role. And there's gonna be other people that are thinking about, Hey, like, I'm not going to be in my current role for much longer, or I'm on the market right now thinking about my next role. How do I position myself to be a full stack builder? So maybe we could start with, with that first bucket and draw on any of your experience, you know, whether at LinkedIn or just in general, things you've observed, you know, over the last few years, but what would you tell someone in a role right now for how they can really start to like get closer into this full stack builder? Yeah. I think whether or not you're thinking about changing your role, your role is changing. So I think that's like a really important, you know, if you, if you work for a great company or even not like your, your role is going to change, it's going to change fast if the company is innovative and ambitious, but it's going to change anyway. In fact, we, we did this survey last year and by 2030, I know 70% of the skills required to do a role on average will, will change. So that's like a massive Thinking it the whole way. And are there still internal reviews that kind of control like staffing to get support from some of those specialists and other functions? So it's a great question. So I think in general, when you think about a product development lifecycle, you can start seeing kind of blocks kind of merging, right? So like, it's usually like in the product itself, the R&D cycle, like kind of there's from the idea to design spec and then kind of like design spec to actual kind of live product. And I would say a lot of the work that has been accelerating has been downstream because AI coding is so much powerful right now. So I think engineers are getting a lot more productive at a much faster clip. And then I think the upstream side of like idea to spec to design, not in the same velocity. So you have like execution on the coding side happening much faster than on the upstream side. Like this is, this is, we still need better design and so on and product tools to get that cycle to go much, much faster. So it's not completely in concert at this point. So you're seeing more throughput on the downstream side of the world. That means that there's still work to be done to connect it. But ultimately, again, you don't have to be a prophet to understand this will also start moving really fast and then it's really about orchestrating the whole thing together. And then on the go-to-market side, I think it's a very similar thing. Like if you start to double click, you have inbound sales, outbound sales, you have a performance marketer, a brand marketer, and so on. And that is a whole motion of a go-to-market motion that you can start collapsing as well together. So what you'll see is you'll see that, you know, you see a go-to-market, you know, full stack. I think somebody even used that term I saw recently, and then you see a builder full stack and then they'll start emerging together. And again, whenever this is like a thought process I do for myself, I go back to, I start a company tomorrow. What's the first person I need? First person I need is a builder, somebody who has an idea and they're able to bring it out to life. And then if I need one more person, like what do I need? I need a marketer, somebody who can market that product and take it out. And then, then you grow from there. But if I'm looking at my two most important skill sets, it's the builder and the marketer coming together. And then eventually you can imagine a world where that could be one person and then you really have that kind of utopian view of the one person billion dollar companies kind of thing. Yeah. Okay, so the last question is, if someone ends up running into interpersonal conflict as these lanes are blurring, for example, like a PM getting pulled into the design world, that's the question they're experiencing some of the, any advice for just resolving that interpersonal conflict right now? Yeah, thank you for who asked it, because it's a really real question. And I would be surprised if you're not running into friction, because again, change is hard. And for some people, it's not about the task you're trying to do by blurring the lines and crossing over. It's really about what it means for them. And that's the fear that kind of hidden behind it. I think this is ultimately a skill set of communication and being able to interact with others. And this is why I think of this as two ways I would kind of attack this problem. One is top down. How do you get leadership, not bought in, but pushing down the mandate of moving to this model and then actually examples of showing people being able to do so. And if somebody is worried about you stepping into their lane, I would have a conversation with them and say, hey, I would like to experiment with this. And depending on your style, some people ask more for forgiveness than permission. Some people are, they're great communicators so they can rally others around an idea and do it. But I would say, but if you find it over time, and this is important, you find it over time, like you don't see change, cultural change in the organization. You still see like lanes staying put. You don't see that mindset being built into my role should evolve because the whole market is evolving and I'm getting staying put in my area. That's not a great environment for you. That's not a thriving environment for you. And I would rethink what environment you want to be part of. But it is a lot about getting the leadership. You know, my, I would leave somebody wrote. You know, when I was, I was fortunately part of the mobile revolution at LinkedIn where we basically changed the company from a desktop first company to a mobile first company. And that was the one who was mandated with that change. Obviously with a big team, it was very hard for me. And one of the biggest unlocks was not a better plan, was not more conversations, was being able to get the CEO to do a top-down mandate of mobile is going to be the most, the thing we're going to focus on the fur. Then from that, I had the plan ready and we were able to execute together as a team and so on. But it was very frustrating until I got, you know, ready to get the leadership to basically be not only bought in, but pushing it down. So that's a lot of, I would say, effort and mindset, but you need to be able to, and there's obviously there's more around how to, to get it done in the organization, but you have to be able to fight for it internally. Cool. Thank you. Thank you so much. This was way better than I could have hoped. So thank you so much for doing this. If folks want to learn more from Tomer, I believe Jen shared his LinkedIn. Probably shouldn't have a hard time finding Tomer on LinkedIn given, given his LinkedIn relationship, but Tomer Cohen there. And then Tomer, you also have a podcast called Building One that people can go follow. It's great. I love it. Yeah. Quick, quick plug for it. The whole idea there is there's no one way to build. Everybody is inherently different builders. So the whole idea is to spot a spotlight, very unique builders, how they build differently and then really inspire others to find what's their mojo, what's makes them unique and how to build great products with them. Awesome. Everyone should go check that out. And then Tomer, if you have to drop, you know, we'll, we'll let you go. I'll just kind of tell folks about a couple of things that I'm promoting if they want to go deeper with me. But thank you so much for doing this with us. We really appreciate it. Thank you, everybody. Thank you. All right, we'll let you go. Thank you. If folks are getting ready for interviews, you know, this conversation is very career oriented, parts of it at least, and you're looking to pass product sense and analytical thinking interviews, they're still happening. I suspect it will be changing quite a bit in the next six to 12 months, but for many companies, they're still largely unchanged. My self-paced PM interview bootcamp is going to be a really good fit for you. And you can get $100 off the price with Lenny's list if you want to go to Maven. We'll include the link to that. And then if you're getting ready for interviews at companies like OpenAI, Google, Stripe, DoorDash, Figma, and Uber, I've been spending the last six months with my good friend and podcast co-host Mark Baselga putting together these very researched, highly researched, and basically every week we're verifying them with people on the inside, guides for PMs to navigate the interview process at these top companies. You can go to insiderloops.com and learn more about that if you're interested. With that said, I think that's the end of our session. Jen, anything else you want to cover before we let everyone go? All good. Thanks for joining, everybody. Thanks to Tomer. Ben, great session. All right, everybody. See you later. Thank you. Thank you. Bye-bye.