'Inside Google''s AI turnaround: AI Mode, AI Overviews, and vision for AI-powered

Lenny RachitskyIt feels like something has changed internally at Google. Just last week, Google Gemini hit the number one app in the App Store. I feel like nobody saw this coming.

Robby SteinGoogle's mission around have any information be universally accessible, this very enduring, very motivating thing, and it feels like with the AI moment, we can actually achieve that more than ever before. What I'm feeling now is just an incredible sense of focus and urgency. Things have hit a tipping point where these models are now truly able to deliver for consumers.

Lenny RachitskyAs ChatGPT emerged over the past couple of years, as Perplexity emerged, a lot of people were just like, "Google is dead. Nobody wants to sit through search results and click links."

Robby SteinThe core Google search isn't really changing, in my opinion. We're not seeing that people come to search for just ridiculously wide set of things. They want a specific phone number, they want a price for something, they want to get directions. I think the vastness of that is underappreciated by many people. AI is expansionary. There's actually just more and more questions being asked and curiosity that can be fulfilled now with AI.

Lenny RachitskyYou've built a lot of very successful products. You used this phrase: embodying relentless improvement.

Robby SteinYou need to be the physical manifestation of two pieces of things. One is just relentlessness, just complete effort that is always exerted in a direction of positive productivity. And then the second is make things better. You have to always make things better. You're never content.

Lenny RachitskyYou build and launch Stories at Instagram back in the day is quite controversial because it basically took what Snapchat was doing really well and then like, "Hey, let's bring it to Instagram."

Robby SteinNot every great thing is going to be invented by you. Facebook probably created the modern feed, but there's a feed for every single product. At the end of the day, you're just robbing your user base of the opportunity to have a better product.

Lenny RachitskyToday my guest is Robby Stein, Robby's VP of Product for Google Search and is responsible for essentially the entire Google search experience, including the new AI Overviews, AI Mode, multimodal AI experiences like Google Lens, the ranking algorithm, and a lot more. He's at the forefront of one of the biggest shifts in Google's history, and has already made a massive dent in Google's trajectory. He's also made a massive dent in the trajectory of Instagram where he was head of product, and led the launch of Instagram Stories and Reels and Close Friends, and through that, grew Instagram to half a billion daily active users. He's also on the founding team of Artifact with Mike Krieger and Kevin Systrom. Started two companies of his own. Very few people have had this level of impact on two global consumer products at this scale. And Robby shares all of the biggest lessons that he's learned about building great and successful consumer products, along with a bunch of insights into where Google is headed in the world of AI.

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Robby, thank you so much for being here, and welcome to the podcast.

Robby SteinThanks so much for having me.

Lenny RachitskyThis is such a cool week to be recording this podcast. So just last week, Gemini, Google Gemini hit the number one app in the App Store. I have it right here, it's still number one in the App Store. It's above ChatGPT. I feel like nobody saw this coming. I feel like everyone's always like, "Google, what have you guys been doing? You guys build all this amazing tech and why didn't you have anything working in consumer? Why is ChatGPT doing? Why are all these amazing companies doing better than Google?"

So first of all, let me just say congrats on, I know this isn't all you. I imagine you had some part in this, so just congrats.

Robby SteinMany, many more people, yes.

Lenny RachitskyIt feels like something has changed internally at Google. It feels like things are starting to really work, especially on the AI consumer side. So in terms of the growth, is Nano Banana the source of a lot of this recent growth or is there something else?

Robby SteinPeople are really excited about Nano Banana to be clear, very much so, but I think also people are recognizing that there's just so many cool things that you can do across the Google set of products and they've become quite powerful. I'm always shocked, even for things in search, people, we think they're very obvious. They sit right in the core search experience and then on X, I'll go look and like, "Oh, I just found out about this AI thing," and it seems very obvious, but I think a lot of people are just discovering quite how powerful these tools are.

Lenny RachitskyNow. So to go one level deeper, to your point, there's been all this incredible tech. You guys wrote the original transformers paper that have powered so much of the innovation and it's just like, "Where's Google been? And actually, why aren't they building the thing that's winning?"

What has changed? Is it just like, okay, has there been major reorgs? Has there been new leaders put in place? Is there just a new philosophy in the past couple of years that have led to this moment where Gemini is now the top app in the world?

Robby SteinYeah, I mean, look, I've been to Google now, this is my second time at Google, so I started at Google in 2007, done a bunch of things in between, and I've been back at Google now, so I can't speak to that whole period for many, many years back to today. But what I can tell you about what I'm feeling now is just an incredible sense of focus and urgency to deliver great products quickly. I think that that is in part leadership for sure. I think the people who are, we work very closely with our partners at DeepMind and Google DeepMind. We work very closely obviously across the organization and there's just an incredible group of people and also an incredible group of researchers and technical thinkers who've been thinking about this for a while. When you have that energy, and I think the product teams and the tech, the research groups are working really closely together, we're able to move and we're getting a lot done.

I don't think there's any one thing that has happened. I think that a lot of times people ascribe a lot of momentum to a one time change or a single person. I find a lot of this is actually this compounding effect when you think about just every month ruthlessly improving the product or the models and just every day getting better, and then it just hits this tipping point where people just like it, they use it more, they enjoy it. And that's more of the feeling that I've had is just we've had, I think the right investment and focus and then it just hit a moment where people are seeing the effects of that now.

Lenny RachitskyAs ChatGPT emerged over the past couple of years, as Perplexity emerged and all these other chatbots, a lot of people were just like, "Google is dead. Nobody wants to sit through search results and click links. Why not just get your answer right there?"

And it feels like that's not at all happening. It feels like you guys are doing just fine. What can you share about just the, I don't know, the state of Google search specifically, and then we'll talk about AI Mode. Just how is traffic going, how is search going considering all these things are out there, and just what are you seeing in the data since the launch of say ChatGPT?

Robby SteinYeah. Well, what's interesting is people come to search for just ridiculously wide set of things, like all kinds of things. They want specific phone number, they want a price for something, they want to get directions, they want to find a payment web page for their taxes. Every possible thing you can imagine. I think the vastness of that is underappreciated by many people. And what we see is that it's not changing. AI hasn't really changed those foundational needs in many ways, and what we're finding is that AI is expansionary, and so there's actually just more and more questions being asked and curiosity that can be fulfilled now with AI. And so that's where you get the growth.

All the core Google search isn't really changing, in my opinion. We're not seeing that, but you're getting this expansion moment. What we're seeing is a few examples is you can now take a picture of something and ask about anything you see. And Google Lens, one of the fastest growing products out there, it's growing 70% year-over-year increase in visual searches, which is already at a massive scale. It's billions and billions and billions of searching in that way.
But you can take a picture of your shoes, say, "Where can I buy this?"
Or take a picture of your homework, say, "I'm stuck on question two."
And then just take a picture of your bookshelf and say, "What are the books I should get based on these books?" And AI can help you with those things now, just an example of I think why there's so much growth left and why we're so excited.

Lenny RachitskyOkay, so you're not seeing the death of search.

Robby SteinNo.

Lenny RachitskyAnd along the same lines, you guys recently launched AI Mode, which I don't think enough people are talking about. I think you get there at google.com/ai, is that the right URL?

Robby SteinYep.
Fantastic. Okay, one of one, perfect eval.

Lenny RachitskyIt's perfect. Also, just if you go to it, there's these recommendations for things to ask it that are just like, "Wait, how did you know I care about this stuff?" So it's like, "Help me switch to product management," just on the front page.

I'm like, "How did you know?" And it tells you that it's based on your Google activity. Talk about just what people should know about AI Mode, maybe what they don't really understand about the power of this thing.

Robby SteinI can tell you there's three big components to how we can think about AI search and the next generation of search experiences. One is obviously AI Overviews, which are the quick and fast AI you get at the top of the page many people have seen, and that's obviously been something growing very, very quickly. This is when you ask a natural question, you just put it into Google, you get this AI now, it's really helpful for people.

The second is around multimodal. This is visual search and lens. That's the other big piece. You go to the camera in the Google app and that's seeing a bunch of growth. And then really with AI Mode, it really brings it all together. It creates an end-to-end frontier search experience on state-of-the-art models to really truly let you ask anything of Google search. You can go back and forth, you can have a conversation and it taps into and is specially designed for search. What does that mean?
And one of the cool things that I think it does is it's able to understand all of this incredibly rich information that's within Google. There's 50 billion products in the Google shopping graph, for instance. They're updated 2 billion times an hour by merchants with live prices. You have 250 million places in maps. You have all of the finance information, and not to mention, you have the entire context of the web and how to connect to it so that you can get context but then go deeper. You put all of that into this brain that is effectively this way to talk to Google and get at this knowledge. And that's really what you can do now.
You can ask anything on your mind and it'll use all of this information to hopefully give you super high quality and informed information as best as we can, and you can use it directly at this google.com/ai. But it's also been integrated into our core experiences too. We announced you can get to it really easily if you can ask follow-up questions of AI Overviews right into AI Mode now. Same for the lens stuff. Take a picture takes you to AI Modes, you can have this back, you can ask follow-up questions and go there too. So it's increasingly integrated experience into the core part of the product.

Lenny RachitskyI imagine much of this is wait and see how people use it, but what's the vision of how all these things connect? Is the idea continue having this AI Mode on the side, AI Overviews at the top and then this multimodal experience, or is there a vision of somehow pushing these together even more over time?

Robby SteinI think there's an opportunity for these to come closer together. I think that's what AI Mode represents, at least for the core AI experiences, but I think of them is very complimentary to the core search product. You should be able to not have to think about where you're asking a question ultimately, you just go to Google. Today, if you put in whatever you want, we're actually starting to use much of the power behind AI Mode right in AI Overviews. So you can just ask really hard, you could put a five sentence question right into Google search. You can try it and then it should trigger AI at the top. It's a preview, and then you can go deeper into AI Mode and have this back and forth. So that's how these things connect.

Same for your camera. So if you take a picture of something, "What's this plant?" Or, "How do I buy these shoes?" It should take you to an AI little preview. And then if you go deeper, again, it's powered by AI Mode. You can have that back and forth, so you shouldn't have to think about that. It should feel like a consistent simple product experience ultimately, but obviously this is a new thing for us, and so we wanted to start it in a way that people could use and give us feedback with something like a direct entry point like google.com/ai.

Lenny RachitskyI recently had Brian Balfour on the podcast and he showed this quote that's really stuck with me that I think about as you talk about all this, it was by Alex Rampell, this idea that startups is a game of getting distribution before incumbents can innovate fast enough.

And it feels like you guys are finally there where it's like, "Oh man, now here comes Google." I don't know if I have a question here, but it just feels like there's been all this time for people to find distribution, and now it's like, okay, now Google is coming.

Robby SteinWhat we found is that people are asking these questions in Google. They're trying to get this out of Google. And so if you can just have an AI that's powerful enough to answer a really hard calculation someone's trying to figure out, or take a picture of multiple choice homework question for a chemistry question, people are doing this. And so now that you have this really sophisticated AI that's based on our frontier models, we can just handle increasingly more and more stuff for people and so hopefully that's the more natural on ramp here. And then we just need to make it easy enough for people to use, because these are new products, and people are used to using Google in a specific way.

They type in keywords, we call it sometimes keyword ease, but you can actually use natural language in Google. That's the biggest shift. We're seeing people asking real long, hard, complex questions. You just don't think, "Oh, I can go to Google and type in what's a great place for a date night? I already went to these four restaurants. I'm looking for outdoor dining and my friend has this allergy." You could put that into Google. And I think that's the kind of thing that we're excited to continue to make easy for people.

Lenny RachitskyIt's interesting, and we've come around to back in the day there was Ask Jeeves, which was this whole just ask a question as if you're asking a human and then it'll give you a really good answer.

And then we moved into Google just, "No, no, just type the thing you want and figure out how Google likes it."
And now we're back to, "Okay, just ask your question and it'll give you a really good answer."

Robby SteinYeah, Ask Jeeves was surprisingly prescient on that, huh? They had material, they had something way before its time that we think looks to rally around now.

Lenny RachitskyOh, man. What's your take on this whole rise of AEO, GEO, which is this evolution of SEO? I'm guessing your answer is going to be just create awesome stuff and don't worry about it, but there's a whole skill of getting to show up in these answers. Thoughts on what people should be thinking about here?

Robby SteinSure. I mean, I can give you a little bit of under the hood how this stuff works because I do think that helps people understand what to do, but when our AI constructs a response, it's actually trying to, it does something called query fan-out where the model uses Google search as a tool to find to do other querying. Maybe you're asking about specific shoes, it'll add up and append all of these other queries like maybe dozens of queries and start searching basically in the background. And it'll make requests to our data back end, so if it needs real time information, it'll go do that. And so at the end of the day, actually something searching, it's not a person, but there's searches happening and then each search is paired with content. And so if for a given search your web page is designed to be extremely helpful and you can look up Google's human rater guidelines and read, it's a very long document that's been thoughtfully crafted for decades now around what makes great information.

This is something Google has studied more than anyone, and it's like, do you satisfy the user intent, what they're trying to get? Do you have sources? Do you cite your information? Is it original or is it repeating things that have been repeated 500 times? And there's these best practices that I think still do largely apply because it's going to ultimately come down to an AI is doing research and finding information. And a lot of the core signals, is this a good piece of information for the question? They're still valid, they're still extremely valid and extremely useful, and that will produce a response where you're more likely to show up in those experiences now.
I think the only thing I would give advice to would be think about what people are using AI for. I mentioned this as an expansionary moment. It seems to be that people are asking a lot more questions now, particularly around things like advice, or how to, or more complex needs versus maybe more simple things. And so if I were a creator, I would be thinking, what kind of content is someone using AI for? And then how could my content be the best for that given set of needs now? And I think that's a really tangible way of thinking about it.

Lenny RachitskyIt's interesting your point about how it goes in searches. When you use it, it's searching a thousand pages or something like that. Is that just a different core mechanic to how other popular chatbots work because the others don't go search a bunch of websites as you're asking?

Robby SteinYeah. This is something that we've done uniquely for our AI. It obviously has the ability to use parametric memory and thinking and reasoning and all the things a model does, but one of the things that makes it unique for designing it specifically for informational tasks, we wanted to be the best at informational needs, that's what's Google's all about, and so how does it find information? How does it know if information is right? How does it check its work? These are all things that we built into the model, and so there is a unique access to Google. Obviously, it's part of Google search, so it's Google search signals everything from spam, what's content that could be spam? And we don't want to probably use in a response all the way to, wow, this is the most authoritative helpful piece of information. We're going to link to it and we're going to explain, hey, according to this website, check out that information and then you're going to go probably go see that yourself. That's how we've thought about designing this.

Lenny RachitskyYou've worked on a lot of AI products at this point, and it's not just Google or Artifact and Instagram, you did a lot of AI stuff. What's something you've learned about building AI products that you find maybe people don't truly understand, maybe something that's surprised you by building successful AI products?

Robby SteinI think the most recent one, and this is true, something even within the last week or two, is that it's so obvious how human-like the interface is becoming with how you can communicate and steer AI. I think it used to be even just months back that you had to do a lot of work to get the AI to do the thing you're trying to get it to do, right? You had to do these incantations, you had to prompt in a really specific way. People would have all these hacks like, "Hey, act like you're a coach and you do these things," and you have to really push it, or to use a tool more on the technical side. You had to do post-training, you had to take this foundational model and you had to show it data, you had to train it and actually update its weights to do more sophisticated things.

Tell it, "Hey, here's documentation for an API. If you ever have a problem, ping this API. Here's the data," as if it's an engineer that you had that you could talk to and it would have no idea what to do with that, or it would have some idea and wouldn't really do it.
But increasingly, you can just use language. Almost if you were to write up an order, you could be like, "Wow, I'm a new startup. Here's my data internally. Here are the APIs to it. Here's the schema and the URL. Here's when to use it. By the way, make sure that if you get this kind of a question, you really make sure to get it right." And that'll end up doing a lot in the model.
The model's been now encoded to be able to say, "Okay, I'm going to use more reasoning or thinking budget for that kind of a question."
Or, "I'm going to use tools or code, use code execution in order to connect to this API I'm told about." That's a relatively new thing. So I think it's going to open up a lot of this democratization of accessing these models and building incredible things because you don't even need to do a lot. To get the most sophisticated outcomes increasingly, I don't think you need to do a lot of this heavy duty fine-tuning.

Lenny RachitskyIt makes me think about, I had this recent guest, Nesrine Changuel, on the podcast. She was a PM at Google, she worked on Google Meet, she was a delight PM working on at making products more delightful. And she talked about the reason Google Meet did so well and is now feels like it's killing Zoom is they compared the experience of Google meet to a human meeting versus making it the best possible video conference, make this as good as a human experience. And that's interesting what you're talking about, how that's almost the goal here with AI is just make you feel like you're just talking to a person.

Robby SteinExactly.

Lenny RachitskyMight be obvious, but think about that. Okay, let me zoom out and talk about, and let's talk about just broader lessons you've learned over the course of your career. You've built a lot of very successful products, which I've shared in the intro at this point.

Robby SteinMany also on the other side of the spectrum, we got the whole portfolio.

Lenny RachitskyOkay, perfect. We'll talk about some of that. I asked you as we were getting ready for this conversation, what's one thing you wanted to get across in this conversation? What's something you think would be really helpful for product builders to hear to help them build more successful products? And you used this phrase: embodying relentless improvement. Can you just talk about that? What does that mean? Why is this so important?

Robby SteinOf course, I mean, I think that you need to be the physical manifestation of two pieces of things. One is just relentlessness, just complete effort, but is always exerted in a direction of positive productivity. And then the second is make things better. You have to always make things better, you're never content. And I think this actually came out of a story, a little bit of a funny story where I was at Instagram at the time doing a big all team meeting, one of my first, and they had this icebreaker, what's one word to describe yourself?

And so in the backstage area, I texted my wife really quick. I was like, "Hey, just one word to describe me, first thing that comes to your mind."
And she just wrote back, "Dissatisfied."
I was chuckling in the back room because I was first of all kind of offended because I was like, "It's not loving, caring, something good?" And then I saw her little bubble thing.
She's like, "Okay, there's more." And then she wrote me this really thoughtful thing that was like, "It's not that you're just unhappy. It's like you want the world to be better. You're driven out of a deep desire. It's that you feel this sense of dissatisfaction with what the world gives you. You want to make it better, and you're pushed and motivated to do that."
And I thought about that after. And it wasn't until we built a bunch of products, some that didn't do well, some that have had a lot of really large success now, billions of people use them, where it felt like one of the big differences, obviously a lot of it is just the conditions of the product and a little bit of luck here and there too. But for the things that went well, there was always this spirit of just we're going to get it eventually if we just make two more moves to make it better. And then eventually, as I talked about before earlier in our conversation, you get this tipping point where it just tips over into being net useful to people because of just that amount of compounding effort that you put into something because you're just always so... You're the harshest critic and the most dissatisfied person in the room about your own work basically.
And I think that's really meaningful. And there's this other incredible story that Tony Fadell told on a TED Talk 10 years ago. You can look it up. I think it's something around Think Younger as a title. And he talks about what it means that as we grow up in age and become grownups, I have two little kids so that's something I think about a lot. We habituate to everything. We accept and we tolerate what the world gives us everywhere, and we just go, "Oh, that kind of sucks. Oh, well," we shrug our shoulders and we move on.
But if you don't do that and you ask, "Why? This sucks, why am I tolerating this and how do I make it better?" He has this incredible story about going grocery shopping, and he goes on for 10 minutes about this story almost it felt like where he talks about getting a piece of fruit like a plum or a peach, and how it has that sticker on it and it's got that sticker and who put that sticker there?
And then when you get home, you take your fruit out of your bag, you're ready to eat it, you're all excited, you stick your thumb under the sticker, it punctures the flesh. He goes into just incredible detail about how it punctures the flesh of the fruit. The sticker comes off now, the fruit's bleeding, then you flick the sticker. The sticker misses the garbage, you bend over and pick it up, you put the sticker back in.
And I was like, "Wow, that is embodying this mentality of just why is this here? How can this be better?" And I think the best product people, the best thinkers in the space, that's how they think, in my opinion.

Lenny RachitskyI imagine there are many examples of you doing this in the many products you worked on. Is there one that comes to mind as a good example of this inaction of this actually working really well and delivering something really huge?

Robby SteinI mean, honestly, a big thing is working on AI Mode. I think a lot of it was we saw in AI Overviews that people were trying to ask harder questions and we weren't able to answer a bunch of them, or AI Overviews just didn't show up. And so a bunch of us sat around and we're like, "Why can't you just do this for everything?"

Instead of saying, "Oh, we don't need to solve for that," or, "That's not something that's in the most addressable next thing."
It's like we actually saw people in the query stream putting the words AI at the end of their queries because they're trying to get the AI to do the thing. We would look at that and be like, "This is ridiculous. We need to build something here."
And that was one of the big motivations, was actually identifying that user problem, being very disgruntled on behalf of the user. We're just failing the user every day. We are not helping them actually get their thing better understood, and we're going to go build a whole thing because of it, because that's hard to do by the way, to build all of that. But it just was so obvious that that's what we needed to do.

Lenny RachitskyThere's two buckets of people. Let's say hypothetically, one bucket is just make things better, make amazing experiences, you're going to do great. There's another bucket that's like drive metrics, drive goals, hit our KPIs. I know what you're not saying is just work on things, just make things better, relentlessly, make things better. How do you just think about, I guess that overlap of okay, makes things better, but also here's what we really, here's the strategy, here's the vision. How do you think?

Robby SteinYeah, I don't think of them as an or. I think they have to be intersected because basically the way I think about it is you actually start with a problem or the inverse of that, which is a vision, but they're connected. Most great companies, most great products come out of a problem, but out of the problem becomes like, "Here's a better way." What if instead of this crappy thing or way of living or thing that we all tolerate and accept, some entrepreneur comes up and says, "What if we did this other thing?" So it comes out of this dissatisfaction and this sense of better that you need to make things better, but then you're going to build, and at the end of the day, you need your instrumentation to know if you're on the right track.

And that's where you bring tools like, okay, you build your first version of the product, do people like it? And then each product goes through its journey. The way understand that people like it is you scrutinize. Typically, you talk to people, but you also add some analytical tools there. You might look at something like a J-curve. This is the retention, the percentage of people still using the product day seven, day 30, day 90, and does it flatten or do people just drip out of there? Over time, it's just not exciting people. And that would go to zero if on a long enough timeline, no one's going to use it. You don't get past that, you toast right then. Okay, some people are doing it, okay, great. We need more people to do it, and it needs to be good enough that people talk about it and then it grows. And so that's another gate.
And then there's another one which is, well, how big can this get actually, is it a small thing? Is it a medium thing? And I think most companies, you have an aspiration of being big, but you can't start big. Everyone's got to go through that journey. No product has started big. Even ones that get big really quickly, even a week quickly, they had something. And then even internally, they started small. They started small with a hundred to 100 people, and so you have to be metrics focused, I think in order to know if you're doing the right thing.
And then the other thing is, on the other side of the spectrum, you're running a big thing, and there, you need metrics to be your guide. If your product, let's say, let's say our core metrics down 5% this week, it's like, well, what's going on? And so you be really close to root cause analysis there and say, "Well, actually it turns out that it's an issue. Is it in a region? Is it on a device? Is it in a demographic? Is it in a use case? Where does my problem lie?"
And then when you get to it, you understand the problem and then this improvement thing comes back where it's like, "Okay, I'm going to fix that thing. What's the treatment for that disease?" And then you're back to growth again, and so you need this and you always are looking at what's the system that I'm working on and what are my instruments? I'm a pilot to know if this thing is going and flying correctly, but then it doesn't tell you exactly what to do, you have to thank for yourself how to make it better. I can just show you a little bit of the way.

Lenny RachitskyI love that you just gave a master class on just how to prioritize and pick what to work on. I want to go on a quick tangent. Speaking of products that have done really well and become really big, Stories, you build and launched Stories at Instagram. It's quite an infamous product launch back in the day, it was quite controversial because it basically took what Snapchat was doing really well and then, "Hey, let's bring it to Instagram," and it was not great for Snapchat. Now that it was so long ago and just, it's so far in the past, I'm so curious just to hear about that time reflecting on just that decision, what you guys talked about, how you decided to go ahead with that and anything just, I don't know, you think about looking back at that.

Robby SteinI think there's a couple of really important lessons from that launch. And I mean we went on afterwards to launch Reels, a bunch of updates to direct messaging, we had feed rank game. There was just a huge era there when I was there between 2016 and 2021 or so where just so many new products got built. I think an interesting lesson in all of those, and particularly in Stories was you have to really understand why someone uses your product and know when something is actually an existential question because there's just a better format or a different way of doing something that has worked and works and you need to figure out what that might mean for you, because not every great thing is going to be invented by you. But I think that a lot of these things are, they can become formats that you can make your own and you need to learn from the world and what's happening out there in order for your product to always give the best thing to its users.

And so for Stories, we looked at Instagram like, what's the point of Instagram? It is sharing your life and connecting with people ultimately. And if there's a way to do that, that lowers the pressure because it doesn't have likes or it's just ephemeral format and it's optimized well for mobile because it's this full screen experience. It's a really great format and kudos to Snapchat for inventing it. We didn't think of that as a deterrent, that we had to go make Instagram photo clock. And actually, there were early versions of this idea where you try to take the core Instagram feed and make it ephemeral. And whenever you try to mix a core product that's very cemented in someone's mind and physically looks a specific way and you're trying to make, contort it to do something new, it's usually a bad recipe. And so we knew we needed to do something new and then it was so clearly was critical to the core essence of what the product could do, could fit in naturally.
But the question was how do we make it our own? And how do we build on this? And so if you think, there were a bunch of things that we did that made it Instagram. For example, it had different creative tools and it had things like neon drawing and these really sophisticated filters that people loved. We also looked at this talk about being dissatisfied. People took, a lot of times they want their main camera to take a picture of something and then they want to upload it to Instagram because they want to save it and they want it to be in a very high quality, high resolution photo, because it's a memory. And Snapchat at the time didn't allow you to upload photos, it was like you have to use the Snap camera. And so we made a bunch of decisions like that where why don't you just let people upload their photo? This is back to the dissatisfied point, that's frustrating.
Or there's another example where you couldn't pause if you were consuming a story. You couldn't pause it, it just would go through and be done because it was this ephemeral thing and you wanted to create safety. Why can't you just pause? It goes by too fast. So we added this pause, it's such a small thing, but you put your finger down to pause the story now. And so there were a whole set of those things that were shipped that made Stories feel Instagram. It wasn't like you just had some other thing. And then it turns out that worked incredibly well, and so much to the fact that someone on the team mentioned that they always felt like at the time, they didn't realize it, but it was almost like it was missing the story size holes at the top of the page and it completed the product in some weird way for them. And so that was, I think an important lesson.

Lenny RachitskyInstagram definitely got a lot of hate for that moment from a lot of founders. It was just like, "Hey, you guys just stole this idea and that sucks."

How did you guys just deal with that internally? It was just this is, "We got to do this. We got to focus on our shareholders and grow this thing," and that's how it goes sometimes?

Robby SteinI mean, I think it's more that we're focused on our users and the people who are loving Instagram and it's denying them the opportunity to have an easy way to just share a photo and have the thing go away. I mean, that's ultimately what we were trying to add. At the end of the day, that is a format that people adopt. In the same way that you think about feeds, I think we talked about this at the time too when we shipped it. Facebook probably created the modern feed, but there's a feed for every single product. There's a LinkedIn feed and there's a feed for DoorDash.

These things become core primitives quickly and formats, and then at the end of the day, you're just robbing your user base of the opportunity to have a better product if you're not making the best possible product for your use cases. And for Instagram, it's used differently. People use Instagram differently than they use other products. And it turns out that there were these experiences in WhatsApp and in Messenger and in many other social products over time, and they all were used differently actually, which is fascinating.

Lenny RachitskySomething else I want to talk about is you came into two products that were already doing really well, Instagram and Google. And on the Instagram side, a transformative growth and improvement. Google is happening, we're in the middle of the improvement and growth you're driving. Not a lot of people get to do this where they go into an existing product, make it grow significantly. A lot of people want to do this. They have a product that's been around for a long time. Hey, how do we make this grow and be more successful? Is there anything specifically that you've learned about just coming into an existing product, figuring out where the big opportunities are and then just hockey-sticking growth? Because this is what everyone wants to do.

Robby SteinThere's a couple lessons here. And I think, by the way, the first lesson is to be humble always because it's extremely incredible to be able to work on products that have such impact on people. I view product like golf, you're always one stroke away from shanking. And as soon as you think you're good, you're not, you don't know anything. The world changes quickly. You have to always be a servant to your user base and the people that are out there and learn from them. The first thing I always do and think about is you get in touch in terms of why are people using this product, and where are the areas of growth? And so usually even in a big product or a mature in a complex system, there's a part of it that's growing. There's a part of it that's mature, there could be a part of it that's declining or isn't growing as much.

Certainly in Instagram, there's been a big shift over the years of sharing into public very large broadcast posts and feed into these more lightweight formats like Stories and DM actually private sharing as well. And so you have to observe that because every month, every year, the world changes, people's needs change. First thing you do is you get a sense of what do people want out of this product? What's its true essence? I think a lot about this job to be done framework, which is one of the things that I'm a big fan of and Clayton Christensen's book on Competing Against Luck is one of my favorite books on this topic where you have to really be a student of causation. Why is someone using this product? What are they doing with it and what are they trying to get done with it?
And that usually leads you to do bigger next stage ideas, and it removes this belief that you need to solve the problem with the current tools. In the Instagram version, it was like you have to make a square photo do more for people. That would be how you increment the product. Or in Google's example, there's something very specific with the core search experience that needs to change, it's a subtle tweak. You have to think, well, what's the big thing? Someone's trying to ask a really hard question out of Google? What's the best way to do that for them? And so it makes you think more first principled and that's the first basis of this.
And then once from first principles, you're like, "Oh, this newer thing." And it could be a shift, it could be a new form. In many ways, the AI version of Google and Stories and Reels, they're all similar in that they're new formats in the world that people are expecting and wanting more of.
And by adding them, it becomes complementary, not replacement. And in both cases, Stories didn't replace Instagram, it expanded in the same way we're seeing for AI. And so what's interesting is then you think, well, how do I bring that into my world? You have this big mature product. The best way I've seen is by making it complimentary, having it be a core part of the experience, but clearly defined as a distinctive thing that has its own attributes associated with it because people think spatially. So if you have a feed and you have holes with pictures, they expect those holes to do things. And so if you make one of those holes with a little clock and that one goes away the next day or you can't like it or it operates differently than the other parts of your feed, it's going to be super confusing for people. It sucks.
And so you have to add product carefully, but it needs to feel coherent but different. Stories, it has similar aesthetic. It obviously uses your camera roll in the same way it works that you can share it in DM, it works in the system, but it has a different primitive in the same way Google AI, it's a full page experience that you can pop out now. You can have follow up conversation with it. People have a set of expectations you need to snap to for those use cases. And then you are constantly learning how to best make these new products work within your world.
You never just want to snap in something that's working, you have to make it work for your users, your expectations, and what people are trying to do with your product. It's actually one of the things I see people fail on the most is they assume something working for one system will work in your world, but someone else's system is on totally the types of users they have with the consumer expectation of that product, that's totally different set of expectations. You have to respect that and say, "What can we learn from that," and bring it here. I guess if you were to talk about the method that I've seen now or twice, I guess that's how these products have developed.

Lenny RachitskyI love this topic. It makes me think about just this balance. People always try to find between optimizing something they've already got versus trying to take a big bet on something. You've had so many examples where you've taken a big bet on something totally new and it's worked out incredibly well. Do you have just a heuristic in how you structure teams and prioritize across, okay, we have amazing Google experience today, what percentage of resources go into improving that versus trying something totally new?

Robby SteinThat's one where I actually do feel like the more analytical, systematic thinking helps a lot because you're trying to produce value in the world, you want to quantify it some way. And so if you're seeing this growth curve and you're trying to understand, wow, people are using it more and more to liken this product. And when products are young, they grow, and then eventually things mature. You can break out product suites and different features of products all along the same way. Certain features that are growing fast, other features that are not. You get to these points of just diminishing marginal return in every system where it feels like you could put 50 people on this project, it's just not going to dramatically move the needle. Part of it is this bottoms up thing with your own team being really thoughtful about what is the expected value of that investment, and knowing when it's starting to approach zero or diminishing marginal return.

And then when that happens, these are these moments that usually coincide with something fundamental changing. Either people's expectations, externally, market saturation, there's something happening where you need to adjust. You then find your next growth driver or set of drivers. That's where you need to go more first principled and try these new things more. Then when you land a new thing that creates this new little growth engine and then you put people on it and you optimize it because each change is like 10% win, 20% win, 4% win.
It's clearly still has so much value in headroom and to make it better for people, and you can see that in the data. And so that becoming, I talked about this instrumentation, it becomes your guide for knowing if you're making good calls. Otherwise, if you don't know where you're headed and you don't have a goal of what you're trying to do more quantitatively, it's really hard to know if the thing you're doing is mattering to anyone. I think I made the product better, but is anyone using it? Does anyone care? Or are we just congratulating ourselves? Ultimately you want to have impact on people and that's what matters.

Lenny RachitskySo it says essentially tracking S-curves on every product and understanding if you're in the plateau and if it's time to invest heavily somewhere else.

Robby SteinYes.

Maybe it would be helpful to talk about the journey of AI Mode, just how it emerged and the steps that you took to now it's just such a big part of the Google search experience. When did this start? How did you decide this is worth betting on? And then what are the steps to get it further and further rolled out?

Robby SteinI mean, I think it probably started earlier on with AI Overviews actually, which was the first way we brought generative AI to search. And in that world, we noticed that people were asking these questions and many people were actually trying to put natural language questions into search. And so how can you provide helpful context links to go deeper and make an AI that made sense for Google? That was our first version of these models that could do this for people. And then by building into that and seeing this observation around people wanting more of it, direct access to it, and then being able to ask follow-up questions. You need a new modality. It's going to be really hard to build all of that within the construct of the core search experience. And so that led us to have form a small team of folks, a few people that were technical leaders, a couple designers very small to just prove out what if there was on, almost blank screen, delete, make a little fresh doc with a blinker.

What if there's a new page and you can ask the question, you can ask whatever you want of it. You can tap right into the AI that was originally powering this top of the experience in search. But we invested in making it much more powerful in the ways I described before was in it could search for you. It had reasoning as a part of its model capability, it had multi turn context, so if you had a conversation with it could keep track of that context so it had some unique pieces to it. And what would happen if we tried that quickly. And we basically got, I mean, this was probably five to 10 people worth of people originally.

Lenny RachitskyAnd how long ago was this team formed?

Robby SteinThis was probably over the last year, last summer basically, into the fall.

Lenny RachitskyWow, so about a year ago.

Robby SteinYeah, maybe about a year ago. It was where maybe it started. We were really plugging away on it, and then we saw this little version of it emerge that wasn't very good, but it had this moments of brilliance. It's actually, again, it's kind of like golf where you hit the perfect shot and you're like, "Oh my God." You get that feeling where it's just everything worked. And I asked it a question about, I forget, I was doing something with my daughter and I was planning an experience and it found all this incredibly useful information about park information. It had links to go to the site and confirm a bunch of things. It had Google Maps information that for my daughter, you could walk up, it was walkable. There was early examples like this where it just, it blew me away of what it could find and how helpful it was.

It gave us conviction that we should go and go further. And obviously there's lots of people involved in this type of a decision, tons of support from leaders across the organization. But it just says a little working team that initially, you got to build something and then you have to feel it yourself and it is very entrepreneurial in that way. And then when you see it tangibly, you're like, "What's a version of that? That's good and that could work?" And that gave you hope. And so then we basically built it out and built the first version that launched in Labs basically.

Lenny RachitskySo the first big milestone was this is working. It was just a qualitative experience of, "Oh wow, this has really, there's magic here."

Robby SteinYes, it's working. And then we did bring it before labs actually to trusted tester group. There were maybe 500 people externally that we added onto it, and we had pings with them. Some of them were, we actually had friends and family. We tried to treat it a little more like a startup where, because we feel like you got to have people test it to tell you the truth, and tell you when it sucks, because it probably does.

And then they'd message you. So I had a friend who was loving it, but also hating it for lots of good reasons and would just be messaging me all the time, screenshots, "This broke, this broke, this makes no sense."
We had that for a while, and then we got to a point where it was feeling good, the trusted testers were liking it, reporting good stuff, and then we it to this Labs moment where anyone could turn it on and then we used that to make it better with real query data. We could actually see what people were using it for at more scale and so that could tune it to make it better. And then we launched it out to everyone, or at least in the US, and then we've now been on this journey to expand it to all countries and languages and have more people be able to access it.

Lenny RachitskyIt's incredible that Google went roughly in a year from idea to a significant change to the search experience that's AI powered. I think this is not what people imagine Google is like, and it feels like things are different and things have changed in how you guys operate. What has allowed this to happen so quickly? What's changed? Is it just top-down leadership, we need to get shit done, or is there something more?

Robby SteinNo, I mean I think it's interesting how organizations change. I think when you feel like there is a moment in time that is clearly critical to deliver for people, people are trying to get information from Google. We are not able to answer certain things or help people in certain ways and there's this technology that can do it, that creates urgency, and obviously there's lots of people building lots of things and the market's crazy and there's lots of things shipping all the time.

There's a really exciting and healthy moment for us to build and build quickly and I think it's just exciting to be able to capture that opportunity because I think people believe, and I certainly believe that the next year or so of product is going to establish how people use the next wave of products for many years. And so at least I can only speak for myself, I feel this obligation to our users to give them the best version of Google that's powered by AI and that gives them the full knowledge of everything Google knows about the world and information to people and accessible with AI. That's driving a lot of the excitement.

Lenny RachitskyYeah, it's such a good point that people are building their new habits. It's wild how many people just now rely on ChatGPT and how quickly that happened. And I could see Google being worried that, oh, shit, everyone's changing their habit from searching Google to searching ChatGPT. And the fact that now Gemini is number one. I was actually looking at the list of top, so in the top 15 apps, Google is I think five of them, a third. It's out of control, killing it. When people look at AI Mode versus ChatGPT or Claude or let's even say Perplexity, what's the way you think about the positioning of AI Mode versus these other tools? Is it trying to be a direct competitor or is it just like, "No, it's actually pretty different and here's what it's for?"

Robby SteinYeah, I mean AI Mode's a way to ask search anything you want. It's designed and specially created for information. And so really, it should give incredible helpful responses for the things that people come to Google for. Think about you're planning a trip, you're trying to buy something, you're working through a question for your research project. It needs information and that's really, it's less focused on things like creativity, although there's things that can do that are nice there. It can help you. Just like any kind of core AI product, you can ask it to rewrite something for you, it'll do that. But we are less focused on creativity, productivity, upload a spreadsheet and output graphs for me, we're not focused on that.

We're really focused on what people use Google for, and making an AI for that so that you can come to Google, ask whatever you want and get effortless information about that and context and links to then also verify, dig in and go to the authoritative sources ultimately that people want, and we hear from people. So those ends up becoming the distinct qualities of this product versus more of a chatbot. Maybe you would talk to it like you maybe even have a bit of a, "Hey, how are you doing today," with that chatbot that we have some of that, we see that a little bit, but people are usually coming for information. They're trying to learn something and we focused our product on that.

Lenny RachitskyGot it. Okay, AI Mode is not your therapist. Maybe zooming out again a little bit and reflecting on all the amazing products you've worked on, all the places you've worked, if you had to pick two or three just core product principles or philosophies that have helped you build such amazing and successful products, what would those be? What comes to mind?

Robby SteinI mean, there's typically three things I think about. If I were to write a book about how to build great products, there'd be three chapters. I mean there'd probably more than that, but three chapters.

Lenny RachitskyI love that. I love how short that would be. That's the ideal book.

Robby SteinI've thought about these three areas now for a while and it's like they're always consistently the three things. The first is deeply understand people, and I think we talked about this a little bit with the jobs to be done point and Clayton Christensen's book, which I loved around Competing Against Luck. It really helps you be a student of why someone ends up, in his words, hiring a product. Don't think of users as using your product. Think of users as hiring you to do something for them.

There's this famous quote, I think it's Theodore Levitt had, "People don't want a quarter inch drill, they want a quarter inch hole." So what is someone trying to do? You have to understand that deeply and then you can build an amazing product. And also by the way, when you go back, why someone not using your product?
And so it focuses on these techniques to extract causation. So he actually talks a lot about this interview. He calls it an interrogation where you talk to a user like, "Hey, why do you use my product? Where were you? Were you in bed? Were you at work? What were you doing?"
"Oh, I was talking to my wife in the morning."
"Okay, well, what brought it up?"
"Well, I guess I was reading the newspaper."
"Okay, well why?"
And then you have this aha moment like that when they first decide to use your product, he calls it the big hire. That is information that you obtain ends up becoming the most critical because that is what caused someone to use your product. And if you can study that and understand it, you'll be much more on your way than just building things that sound cool. And so that's the first chapter is deeply understand people.
Second is really around analytical rigor and understanding your problems. You have to understand your problems. And this got is a little bit of what we were talking about about root cause analysis and understanding, okay, the metrics are dropping. Why? If someone's not using your product, why? And really being able to dissect that to get to true root causes. It's like, well, they went all the way to the end and then bailed, and then you understand what turns out that it was most, we actually learned about this and there's a story in Close Friends at Instagram where it just totally failed at first in a bunch just when we shipped it. And it turned out that we looked at the data and people were only adding one close friend to their list because it was mistranslated as best friend in many markets. So people just put one person and then the probability that person saw it and wrote back to you was zero. It's a product which is broken. So it's like you got to understand your problems.
And then the third one's around really designing for clarity instead of cleverness. A lot of people are like, "Oh, we're going to differentiate the design," and we talked about this a little bit with Stories. We're going to make a new version of something, but if something's a standard and people understand it, if you lean into it, you're going to get so much leverage than if you reinvent it, and you have to be really thoughtful around when you reinvent and where you don't.
And I think on this one, there's this great, Don Norman's book. Obviously, Design of Everyday Things is a big one, but he has this incredible chapter in there about doors, and why is it that after all of these years you walk up to a door, and based on how they're designed at times, people still don't know if you should pull or push that door because if you try to build the as beautiful symmetric two handles on each side on a glass door, it doesn't communicate in for any information to you.
And there's lots of, I've seen all the time we've designed new icons when we could have used global icons like, "Oh, wouldn't it be so cool if we used a camera that's kind of a camera but is mostly an AI looking thing and then is mostly, but then has this dots in it that connects it to this other product?"
And you're like, people just, it's a camera. Just put the camera in. Maybe you could add a little thing to it, and that's how you get people to use your products. And if you do those three things, I think you typically can do well.
And then, sorry, the fourth one would be more of the coda is be humble. Constantly and always question yourself. Listen to others, listen to users and be open to being wrong.

Lenny RachitskyI love these. On that third point, I feel like AI Mode as the name is such a good example of clarity. What is this? This is AI Mode.

Robby SteinWe talked about it internally. If you look at it in the tab, it's like everyone know, it's like you see it and you'll know what it is or we could call it something random, but then what is that? And now you're working against yourself.

Lenny RachitskyIf I were to reflect back these three pieces of basically this is the book you would write to help people build more successful products, it's understand the problem you're solving for people deeply. What's the job they're hiring you to do? I love the, it's lowercase jobs to be done. It's not like the rigorous whole thing that everyone-

Robby SteinExactly. Lowercase for sure.

Lenny RachitskyOkay. This is just like why are people hiring your product to solve a problem for them? What problem are they solving? So it's like basically figure out what problem they're having then very, through data, understand the problem and whether you are solving it. And then it's just keep it really simple. Clarity over cleverness essentially.

Robby SteinExactly, yes. And be humble.

Lenny RachitskyAnd be humble. Yes. Okay, important. Is there an example that we haven't talked about that shows this in action of just, cool, here's the problem we found. Here's how we figured out this is the solution and if we're succeeding, and then here's a very simple way of solving it?

Robby SteinI mean honestly, this Close Friends example, I can give you more from Instagram days was really wild. It took two or three years to get Close Friends to work, and I think people, it totally failed originally. This is the product that lets you add a private list of people and then you can post to your story and then only those people see it. It's like this very exclusive private space so you can feel really comfortable sharing maybe more.

Lenny RachitskyOh, green circle.

Robby SteinGreen circles, yes. It's one of the most popular, at least when I was there, was one of the most popular features of Stories and did really well, but it totally failed. And I think what we found out was that you actually used a bunch of these techniques here. So one was we first thought about it as an overall system problem and you could add a Close Friends post for anything. So you could do a feed post or a Stories post, and you also had a close friend's profile. You could see, if Lenny went to Robby's page, we were Close Friends, you would just be like, "Oh, you get to see extra stuff from me on my profile too."

So we shipped it, we thought it would be great. This is the be humble part, wasn't great, had a bunch of, it was just super confusing. You would see this really beautiful photo and then in the feed right after it, this blurry, very vulnerable moment someone's trying to share with their friends, just felt so out of place and weird for the reason people use feed. And then it was just confusing because it had an extra little green thing on it, but it was like that got a green thing and the Stories one didn't. If you open the story, it had a green thing inside the story, and people were just so confused.
And it had this other issue with the list where you're like, "Okay, the list doesn't work because it's mistranslated and people don't get it." I think it was actually called originally favorites, I want to say, and that encouraged people to just do two people on it. But then the way that it worked was, so this gets to the framework, I guess. So deeply understand people. What are people trying to do with this?
What they're trying to do is share a vulnerable thing and be like, "Hey, I'm lonely. Hey, what's going on? Are people up?" And it feels very much like a friend group thing.
And if you only have two people on it, the job that we're doing is actually connecting you to your friends. And if you don't get a DM back, it's broken. And so really what we're doing is getting you a DM and we're getting you connection. We're getting you a sense of being connected to your Close Friends. That is the job.
It's actually everything Clayton Christensen talked about in the book is there are utility jobs and there are emotional jobs. People usually discount the emotional ones a lot. This was really an emotional thing as much as it was utility one, and so product's broken, right? And people don't even know that it's a close friend story, they just see the little head because you have to click on it to see the thing. And so it just, people stopped using it.
We went through and we did these revs where we would simplify it and we would update it and we would go through this change list. Okay, take this out, take this out, change the name, here. And then we saw it was that it was working really well for people who added 20 to 30 people to their list. Because what would happen is you put 30 people on your list and then two of them would write back to you on DM and now you have closed the loop and you feel connected to those people. It's a winning thing. And so we designed the whole system around that, and also only worked in Stories. We were looking at the data, we were trying to understand where it was working and where it was failing, and then we updated the name to Close Friends so it didn't feel like favorites. So it wasn't three people, it's 20.
In the list, we built this list builder where we recommended a set of people based on some cool algo that was created by an engineer. And then we updated the design to put the green ring on the outside of the story so that this was the design for clarity. We were being cute. We thought, I think at the time it was like, "Oh, it's a secret story or something, and if you open it, you see it."
It just was not clear to people. And so we put the green ring on the outside so that users would see it in the tray and be like, "Ooh, what's that little green guy?"
And then they'd click on it and be like, "Oh, this is a private story for me." That system worked and did incredibly well, and that was the process we followed from a total flop to something that was very successful.

Lenny RachitskyThat is an awesome example. And this took two or three years, you said this process?

Robby SteinYeah, it took a while. That was actually one of the longest projects we worked on, but that actually came, the reason we did it was when we asked people to understand people like, "Why aren't you posting to your story? What's preventing you from doing it?"

And everyone had some version of, "Well, my ex is on it. I have a teacher on it. Oh, a friend that kind of is judgy is on it."
It was like this commonality was audience problem. Someone had an issue with people watching them. And so that gave us conviction to go this hard at it for so long because we knew that that was a core problem with the product.

Lenny RachitskyWas this connected to the Finsta, Rinsta trend also?

Robby SteinIt was actually. I think that informed us. Everyone had a Finsta and there was a Binsta.

Lenny RachitskyWas is a Binsta?

Robby SteinBest friend Insta.

Lenny RachitskyI see.

Robby SteinDifferent, it's this layering of people 20 Finstas down to your partner, Pinsta, and then it's basically like, I made that up. I don't know if it's true, but I'm sure it was out there somewhere. We were like, "Wow. People clearly are trying to hack Instagram basically to create these private smaller group settings, and so we should just make a product."

Lenny RachitskyHow did you actually do this testing? Was it rolled out to some percentage? Was it rolled out in New Zealand or whatever?

Robby SteinYeah, we rolled it out in a few other countries, exactly.

Lenny RachitskyOkay,

Robby SteinGot it. We had a basket of countries that we tried it in and then we would do research. I think it was Australia was one of the first ones for that one.

Lenny RachitskyOkay. I was going to ask if you can share the country. So Australia.

Robby SteinI think that was one of the earlier ones, yeah, but every time you ship something there's a slightly different reason why.

Lenny RachitskyOh, interesting. So it's not always Australia gets all the new stuff.

Robby SteinNo, although it sometimes is. Australia and Canada get a lot of stuff just because easier for the teams to see feedback from them.

Lenny RachitskyYeah, speak English.

Robby SteinYeah, exactly.

Lenny RachitskyAwesome, okay, let me go in a different direction and talk about something that you have a hot take on. There's a lot of talk these days about lean teams, small teams, just creating limited resources, not hiring at all. You have an opposite perspective of you actually need a lot of resources to build really big breakthroughs. Talk about your experience there.

Robby SteinYeah, I mean I think there's obviously, depends on what you're trying to build and there's been famously small teams building big impact products, but I think there's this cult of lean, scrappy, fast, throw away your product quickly, keep moving. And I think at some level it's true for internal conviction, but to build a product that works for a lot of people that is based on a technological breakthrough. A lot of times, I see teams just give up to early or under invest in the product, and obviously the space matters. And if you're building a single product that is a way to, I don't know, do something with a digital app that's fairly straightforward, that's going to be different than building a robotics company. So what you're building does change.

But even for software, I mean I think for really hard technical problems, think about the amount of time and effort it took for teams to build a foundational model, and how many years and hundreds and hundreds of people that were needed for that to happen. And you think about these large companies that have had huge impacts on people, and I think particularly for bigger companies internally, something I've seen is it's almost too scrappy because it never gets enough momentum. The product never gets good enough internally and then it just dies on the vine. Whereas if you put more people on it, you have to be careful not to put too many too soon. But I see the opposite more true where people hold on to small teams too long and then you, either takes forever to get to the thing you're looking for.
This Close Friends example I mentioned this actually was a small team. One of the reasons it took us forever was it kept the team so small and scrappy. That loop cycle was so short and by a startup age you'd be dead probably. So you can maybe do that in a bigger company, but as a startup, I don't know if you have that leisure. And so I think you need to actually think what is the group I need to build a version that's great. And from first principles, really think about it instead of just embracing blindly, okay, we're going to be the two of us until this thing has escaped velocity market fit, which it's not always true.

Lenny RachitskyThis is definitely counter to the narrative we see on Twitter. Anything you can share about just the heuristic you use to decide here's how long to keep it small? I know there's not going to be this step 1, 2, 3, but just like what I'm hearing is start small to prove out the concept designer PM engineer maybe. When do you find that makes sense to go big?

Robby SteinYeah, I think that it's mostly when you've hit the conviction moment. I think there's two big milestones. There's internal conviction. For yourself, do you believe in it? And you believe in it because there's some external validation, your friends, you put 20 friends on it. And by the way, I found out very quickly building startups that if you put 20 friends on something, they're not going to do you that many favors. They're not going to use a product every single day because they're your friend 30 days in, 60 days in, 90 days in. They're not using your product unless you're doing something that's useful to them. And so you get all of this feedback and you're seeing people really enjoy it. You get to that moment.

And then I think that's not a product that would win externally because if you were to ship it, it's broken, doesn't work great. And then you need to, I think invest enough to make the best version of it or as good a version as you can to get it out the door and to ship it. And I think that that, it's like you want to build the right product eventually is the mentality and you can only really do that with the right group.

Lenny RachitskyI'm going to take us to a recurring segment on the podcast that I call AI Corner.

Robby SteinOkay.

Lenny RachitskyWhat's some way that you've found use for AI in your work, in your life that is really interesting, really helpful, maybe other people can be inspired by?

Robby SteinI think one of the coolest trends ever is how AI is affecting multimodal visual and inspirational needs for people. And we're early in this and I think this is something that I'm actually working on as a project as well, but right now if you think about what AI has done in large part, it was born and grew up in this text modality, it was chat. And so for a long time, if you were to ask it to help you, what's a cool way to redecorate your bookshelf behind you? It's going to describe that to you in text, because that's what it knows. But increasingly, AI is going to be liberated to help in every possible modality.

This is something that we've seen a lot with this explosive use of Google Lens and our image search and image features and with this deep understanding, and what I'm actually starting to use internally and some things that we're excited about more coming up that we actually announced at I/O that we're going to going to be building more of was how AI can help with inspiration, how AI can help with shopping and helping you really get things done that are more in the inspiring bucket of needs versus these core utilities like code, math, homework side of things.
And I'm really excited for things that are coming where you can ask it for inspirational tasks and it's starting to do really fascinating things in terms of what I'm seeing and hopefully we'll share more on that soon. But I think the one thing I can share is there's a visual version of AI Mode that basically we talked about at I/O, and so you can reference some of those keynotes, but that's in the process of being rolled out.

Lenny RachitskyMysterious.

Robby SteinAnd so you're going to be able to now ask what's a mid-century modern beautiful office design with dark themes? It'll be able to produce this image board that's inspirational and you can do multi-turn with it. And so you'll be able to go and say, "Actually, I want more of a light theme, more creamy, more California, more coastal vibe." And it'll do that and it'll understand that and it'll actually see the images and be able to turn with you in the way that text works, which is going to be really cool. So I think that's going to be one of the more exciting things that will be new to AI soon.

Lenny RachitskyWhat I'm hearing is Nano Banana integrated into AI Mode. Recipe for success.

Robby SteinWell, it's a little different than Nano Banana because Nano Banana is an image editor. This is more like helping you find images on the web, so it's a little bit more like AI inspiration, AI image search, and allowing you to then talk with two effectively visual responses with natural language. So that's going to I think, be a little bit different than edit this photo so that it changes it. Although potentially an interesting idea too, to have an ability to take a picture of your living room. And I think AI will help with that too ultimately.

Lenny RachitskyPinterest is in trouble, feels like this is what people use Pinterest for. Here's all the inspiration. Now it's just AI doing it all. By the way, Nano Banana, where does this name come from?

Robby SteinI don't actually, I forget that. There's a story somewhere. I forget it now honestly. But the team I think came from a scrappy, fun group of people building this and they wanted to go for something fun for folks to-

Lenny RachitskyYeah, it feels like that's a part of the reason things have started to work. There's just more fun and delight and random crazy stuff coming out.

Robby SteinIt does. It feels a little more like when I was at Google the first time through right now where you just have so much stuff and this kind of fun curiosity happening where people want to try things and ship things and yeah, hopefully that continues.

Lenny RachitskyYeah, it feels like Veo 3 would be even more successful if it had a wacky name. And I like that this is the opposite of your advice of clarity. I don't know what Nano Banana is, but it worked.

Robby SteinYeah, it's the other thing. No advice is right universally, right? But yeah, Nano Banana.

Lenny RachitskyRobby, is there anything else that you wanted to share? Anything else you want to leave listeners with as a final nugget of wisdom before we get to a very exciting lightning round?

Robby SteinThis concept: be curious. I think of embodying everything as like it's really about curiosity. It's about wanting to know why everything is the way it is. Why is someone doing something? Why does someone have a different opinion than I do? Why might this not be working? And the people who really have that level of intense curiosity and they chase things down until they know, I think you're well served by that. That would be my only parting thought.

Lenny RachitskyLet me follow that thread actually, because it's maybe the most trending term on the podcast over the past few months is curiosity. It comes up a lot when I ask people, what are you teaching your kids and embracing with the rise of AI and curiosity comes up all the time. Is there anything that helps you? Is it just like I am good at this and I am curious innately and I'm just, "This is valuable." Is there anything you can share that helps you or others around you embody that and actually be curious?

Robby SteinWell, I mean AI is obviously the ultimate curiosity engine, and that's what's so cool is you can now ask anything and just get information. And so I find that people just appreciate just how much they can learn about whatever they want. But also, I think that a lot of this also comes down to studying what you want to know about, and knowing where the branches of knowledge live there. A lot of times I'll read old papers and PDFs that are free online on a statistics thing if I want to learn about that and I think people under appreciate those. There's analog old school great learning and AI can help you discover them. I'm using AI, I'm particularly at Google to help discover all these cool links and things to read, but I find that that is an interesting hybrid where it's not just AI but really going to original sources more. I find that these books I mentioned on the chat here, I find that you need a blend of all of those things to ultimately really get to the bottom of things ultimately.

Lenny RachitskyActually reading the thing, not just reading the summary of the thing.

Robby SteinYes.

Lenny RachitskyLet me actually ask you this question I've been asking all these people that are at the cutting edge of AI. You have kids, is there anything you're thinking about and leaning into helping them learn, develop as AI emerges and becomes a big part of the world?

Robby SteinThe biggest thing I'm doing, I have younger kids, so the biggest thing I'm doing is they're using live versions of AI that they just talk to now much more. And so funny enough, we actually just launched search live actually out of Labs this week. And so you can talk to search in a live AI setting, which is conversational voice. Voice on when you're driving, you can just talk all the knowledge I talked about where you can do with Google, you can talk to it in a normal conversation with your voice. And I found that to be incredibly accessible for kids.

And I hear all my kids come home, they're like, "Can I talk to Google about something?"
"What do you need? What do you need to say?"
And then they go to my app, they hit the live button and they just start talking to it. They want to know about animals, they want to know about certain, I don't know, history things. They learn about something in school, and it's so natural to learn in that way that I think that that's helping them become much more AI native than any other thing I'm doing.

Lenny RachitskyLife as a parent is going to be way too easy now whenever kids have questions, "Just go talk to the AI," but I don't think that's bad. So this is within the Google search app. There's a live, how do you access this?

Robby SteinYeah, that's exactly right. You go to Google app, so there's one of the apps in the App Store you mentioned. You open Google and there's a button now that's live on it, right on the home screen. And if you tap on, it's a live version of AI Mode that you can just talk to. It's a full screen experience, and we'll say start talking.

Lenny RachitskyIn the show notes, I'm going to link to this project that somebody built, Eric Antonow, which I love. It basically shows you how to put a little speaker into a little stuffed animal and you connect the speaker to, it could be Google Live or it could be ChatGPT, whatever you like, in voice mode. And you put it on your shoulder, you get a little magnet that attaches, and your kids could talk to this parrot, for example, and you could tell it, "Talk in a pirate voice," and so they're talking to his pirate.

Robby SteinOh, that's really funny. Okay, that's really cute.

Lenny RachitskyIt takes 15 minutes. You could get an X-Acto knife and sew it and stuff and it's fun. I made one for my nephew and he was looking for treasure with this parrot.

Robby SteinThat's really adorable, I'm definitely going to look into that.

Lenny RachitskyRobby, with that, we've reached our very exciting lightning round. I've got five questions for you. Are you ready?

Robby SteinAll right, I'm ready.

Lenny RachitskyWhat are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people?

Robby SteinI mean, definitely the two I mentioned here. Clayton Christensen, Competing Against Luck. Don Norman, Design of Everyday Things. But I also really love this for fiction, Aurora, which is this book David Koepp wrote. It's about electromagnetic pulse in the sun that knocks out, it's fiction for just fun. And it was a really fun beach read and apparently it was going to be made into a Netflix show, it didn't work out. I don't know. It was sad to see that fall apart, but so it's a really fun book.

Lenny RachitskyThere's a book along those lines that I love, they're making a movie of it right now called Hail Mary.

Robby SteinOh, I'm in the middle of reading that right now.

Lenny RachitskyOkay, awesome.

Robby SteinYes.

Lenny RachitskyOf the same mind.

Robby SteinYes.

Lenny RachitskyYeah, they're making a movie of it. How about that?

Robby SteinIn the middle of reading it. It's getting wacky where I am right now, but I'm excited to see where it goes.

Lenny RachitskyIt gets wackier. The ending especially wacky.

Robby SteinOh, really? Okay.

Lenny RachitskyJust prepare yourself.

Robby SteinOkay.

Lenny RachitskyWhat is a recent movie or TV show you've really enjoyed?

Robby SteinI love The Bear. I think that's just absolutely awesome show. Dune, of course. And I thought the new Top Gun is a little old now, but I think the new Top Gun was so fun and awesome.

Lenny RachitskyIs there a product you've recently discovered that you really love? It cannot be AI Mode.

Robby SteinI'm going to use a non-digital product.

Lenny RachitskyPerfect.

Robby SteinI'm super into this new pillow that I got called Purple Pillow, and I've been recommending it to everyone at work. We're on a pillow chat now. It's a thing. It's like you talk about what pillows we're getting, but it's this really cool thing where it's got this new technology of this honeycomb polymer that's inside and so it supports you and it has these little micro holes so it doesn't get hot. It's really cool. Big fan. Strongly recommend Purple Pillow.

Lenny RachitskyI've never heard of this thing, I am excited. I recently got an avocado pillow, focusing on low toxins.

Robby SteinOh, those are good. I've heard good things about those too, yeah.

Lenny RachitskyOkay, I got to join this pillow. Pillow talk is a great name for it by the way.

Robby SteinYou're into pillows too. That's great.

Lenny RachitskyHuge.

Robby SteinI love bedding.

Lenny RachitskyNo, I'm just joking.

Robby SteinYeah, great.

Lenny RachitskyBut I did upgrade my pillow. This is not Mr. Pillow, whatever that guy is, right? Is that guy that, there's like a controversial pillow guy. Okay.

Robby SteinNo.

Lenny RachitskyOkay. Purple Pillow. I'm going to ask AI Mode.

Robby SteinYeah, you should.

Lenny RachitskyThis.

Robby SteinDefinitely.

Lenny RachitskyNext question. Do you have a favorite life motto that you find yourself coming back to in life?

Robby SteinThis is be curious. I think I almost named a company Curious. I just think it's a really awesome, there's one thing in life. It's that in terms of getting things done, in terms of understanding the world, people, your kids, your family. You always just want to know more and question things outside yourself, not feel like you have all the answers. I think that's really important.

Lenny RachitskyI love that. Final question, okay, so speaking of startups, you started a company called Stamped back in the day, it got acquired by Yahoo. I hear there's a story where you got Justin Bieber on your app and that was a big deal and a big inflection in the success of the app. Can you just tell that story?

Robby SteinYeah, it's a wild story. Just to scene set a little bit. I was 25 right after Google being an IC PM in New York with some Google friends building this company. So very early on, and maybe in a good way and no idea what I was doing. But basically we decided that the concept of Stamped was to put your stamp on your favorite things, get recommendations from friends and from people that you trust. And so you think of a Twitter feed, but it's all stuff that people think is cool.

Lenny RachitskyWhich products.

Robby SteinIt's like books, restaurants, food. Products, exactly.

Lenny RachitskyPillows, possibly.

Robby SteinPillows could be on there. I would totally stamp this pillow and then you could discover it. And one of the cold star problems was obviously you want a group of people that are on it that are already using it, that could have some tastemaker type folks. We had a bunch of people that were chefs and we had people who were literary folks. And then we wanted to get a couple people that were more musicians, artists, and these influential folks.

My co-founder and I just basically got the contact of Scooter Braun, who's Justin's manager, and we just sent out an email and we were like, "Hey, we're in New York. We're going to be in LA tomorrow." I think we said something, I don't remember all the details, but it was something like tomorrow.

Lenny RachitskyAnd you were not going to be in LA tomorrow.

Robby SteinNo, no.

Lenny RachitskyOkay.

Robby Stein"Do you happen to be there?"

And he just wrote back some one line thing like, "Meet me at this hotel for breakfast at something."
And we're like, "Oh, okay."
We literally went immediately to the airport. I just remember just basically going straight to the airport, flying to LA meeting with him. We gave him the whole pitch, we showed him the product, and then he was like, "Okay, I think this would be super cool. We can be involved and maybe you can help be an advisor."
And we ended up going back and meeting with Justin and showing him the product and even filming some little clips with him. It was actually really funny and it was a really fun moment. And obviously he was using it to stamp his favorite stuff. And so people would go, "Oh, Justin's into this song, or he is into this stuff," and would post that.
It was one of the ways that we got lots of people to try out and see what we were doing. That's a little extra scrappy moment in time, but I think it embodies a good lesson. Just do it now, be scrappy, be immediate. Intense urgency usually wins over thinking about it for a long time, and that's certainly proved to be true on that one.

Lenny RachitskyIncredible story, thank you for sharing that. So many lessons to take away. Two final questions, where can folks find online if they want to reach out, maybe learn more about what you're doing and how can listeners be useful to you?

Robby SteinYeah, I think on X @rmstein is probably the best single place. And then to be helpful, send me feedback. DM me, just mention me, ping me, let me know problems with Google products, with AI in general, but also just anything. As I said before, you have to always listen to people understand their experiences, so ping the ideas and feedback. That's the best way to be helpful.

Lenny RachitskyWow. What an onslaught you're about to receive of feedback on the search experience.

Robby SteinNo problem. Yes, please do.

Lenny Rachitsky"Robby, why is this link second? Why is my site not at the top?" I can only imagine the kind of stuff people complain about. Robby, thank you so much for being here.

Robby SteinThank you, it was great.

Lenny RachitskyIt was great. Bye, everyone.

Robby SteinTake care.

Lenny RachitskyThank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating, or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcasts.com. See you in the next episode.

Lenny RachitskyIt feels like something has changed internally at Google. Just last week, Google Gemini hit the number one app in the App Store. I feel like nobody saw this coming.

Robby SteinGoogle's mission around have any information be universally accessible, this very enduring, very motivating thing, and it feels like with the AI moment, we can actually achieve that more than ever before. What I'm feeling now is just an incredible sense of focus and urgency. Things have hit a tipping point where these models are now truly able to deliver for consumers.

Lenny RachitskyAs ChatGPT emerged over the past couple of years, as Perplexity emerged, a lot of people were just like, "Google is dead. Nobody wants to sit through search results and click links."

Robby SteinThe core Google search isn't really changing, in my opinion. We're not seeing that people come to search for just ridiculously wide set of things. They want a specific phone number, they want a price for something, they want to get directions. I think the vastness of that is underappreciated by many people. AI is expansionary. There's actually just more and more questions being asked and curiosity that can be fulfilled now with AI.

Lenny RachitskyYou've built a lot of very successful products. You used this phrase: embodying relentless improvement.

Robby SteinYou need to be the physical manifestation of two pieces of things. One is just relentlessness, just complete effort that is always exerted in a direction of positive productivity. And then the second is make things better. You have to always make things better. You're never content.

Lenny RachitskyYou build and launch Stories at Instagram back in the day is quite controversial because it basically took what Snapchat was doing really well and then like, "Hey, let's bring it to Instagram."

Robby SteinNot every great thing is going to be invented by you. Facebook probably created the modern feed, but there's a feed for every single product. At the end of the day, you're just robbing your user base of the opportunity to have a better product.

Lenny RachitskyToday my guest is Robby Stein, Robby's VP of Product for Google Search and is responsible for essentially the entire Google search experience, including the new AI Overviews, AI Mode, multimodal AI experiences like Google Lens, the ranking algorithm, and a lot more. He's at the forefront of one of the biggest shifts in Google's history, and has already made a massive dent in Google's trajectory. He's also made a massive dent in the trajectory of Instagram where he was head of product, and led the launch of Instagram Stories and Reels and Close Friends, and through that, grew Instagram to half a billion daily active users. He's also on the founding team of Artifact with Mike Krieger and Kevin Systrom. Started two companies of his own. Very few people have had this level of impact on two global consumer products at this scale. And Robby shares all of the biggest lessons that he's learned about building great and successful consumer products, along with a bunch of insights into where Google is headed in the world of AI.

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Robby, thank you so much for being here, and welcome to the podcast.

Robby SteinThanks so much for having me.

Lenny RachitskyThis is such a cool week to be recording this podcast. So just last week, Gemini, Google Gemini hit the number one app in the App Store. I have it right here, it's still number one in the App Store. It's above ChatGPT. I feel like nobody saw this coming. I feel like everyone's always like, "Google, what have you guys been doing? You guys build all this amazing tech and why didn't you have anything working in consumer? Why is ChatGPT doing? Why are all these amazing companies doing better than Google?"

So first of all, let me just say congrats on, I know this isn't all you. I imagine you had some part in this, so just congrats.

Robby SteinMany, many more people, yes.

Lenny RachitskyIt feels like something has changed internally at Google. It feels like things are starting to really work, especially on the AI consumer side. So in terms of the growth, is Nano Banana the source of a lot of this recent growth or is there something else?

Robby SteinPeople are really excited about Nano Banana to be clear, very much so, but I think also people are recognizing that there's just so many cool things that you can do across the Google set of products and they've become quite powerful. I'm always shocked, even for things in search, people, we think they're very obvious. They sit right in the core search experience and then on X, I'll go look and like, "Oh, I just found out about this AI thing," and it seems very obvious, but I think a lot of people are just discovering quite how powerful these tools are.

Lenny RachitskyNow. So to go one level deeper, to your point, there's been all this incredible tech. You guys wrote the original transformers paper that have powered so much of the innovation and it's just like, "Where's Google been? And actually, why aren't they building the thing that's winning?"

What has changed? Is it just like, okay, has there been major reorgs? Has there been new leaders put in place? Is there just a new philosophy in the past couple of years that have led to this moment where Gemini is now the top app in the world?

Robby SteinYeah, I mean, look, I've been to Google now, this is my second time at Google, so I started at Google in 2007, done a bunch of things in between, and I've been back at Google now, so I can't speak to that whole period for many, many years back to today. But what I can tell you about what I'm feeling now is just an incredible sense of focus and urgency to deliver great products quickly. I think that that is in part leadership for sure. I think the people who are, we work very closely with our partners at DeepMind and Google DeepMind. We work very closely obviously across the organization and there's just an incredible group of people and also an incredible group of researchers and technical thinkers who've been thinking about this for a while. When you have that energy, and I think the product teams and the tech, the research groups are working really closely together, we're able to move and we're getting a lot done.

I don't think there's any one thing that has happened. I think that a lot of times people ascribe a lot of momentum to a one time change or a single person. I find a lot of this is actually this compounding effect when you think about just every month ruthlessly improving the product or the models and just every day getting better, and then it just hits this tipping point where people just like it, they use it more, they enjoy it. And that's more of the feeling that I've had is just we've had, I think the right investment and focus and then it just hit a moment where people are seeing the effects of that now.

Lenny RachitskyAs ChatGPT emerged over the past couple of years, as Perplexity emerged and all these other chatbots, a lot of people were just like, "Google is dead. Nobody wants to sit through search results and click links. Why not just get your answer right there?"

And it feels like that's not at all happening. It feels like you guys are doing just fine. What can you share about just the, I don't know, the state of Google search specifically, and then we'll talk about AI Mode. Just how is traffic going, how is search going considering all these things are out there, and just what are you seeing in the data since the launch of say ChatGPT?

Robby SteinYeah. Well, what's interesting is people come to search for just ridiculously wide set of things, like all kinds of things. They want specific phone number, they want a price for something, they want to get directions, they want to find a payment web page for their taxes. Every possible thing you can imagine. I think the vastness of that is underappreciated by many people. And what we see is that it's not changing. AI hasn't really changed those foundational needs in many ways, and what we're finding is that AI is expansionary, and so there's actually just more and more questions being asked and curiosity that can be fulfilled now with AI. And so that's where you get the growth.

All the core Google search isn't really changing, in my opinion. We're not seeing that, but you're getting this expansion moment. What we're seeing is a few examples is you can now take a picture of something and ask about anything you see. And Google Lens, one of the fastest growing products out there, it's growing 70% year-over-year increase in visual searches, which is already at a massive scale. It's billions and billions and billions of searching in that way.
But you can take a picture of your shoes, say, "Where can I buy this?"
Or take a picture of your homework, say, "I'm stuck on question two."
And then just take a picture of your bookshelf and say, "What are the books I should get based on these books?" And AI can help you with those things now, just an example of I think why there's so much growth left and why we're so excited.

Lenny RachitskyOkay, so you're not seeing the death of search.

Robby SteinNo.

Lenny RachitskyAnd along the same lines, you guys recently launched AI Mode, which I don't think enough people are talking about. I think you get there at google.com/ai, is that the right URL?

Robby SteinYep.
Fantastic. Okay, one of one, perfect eval.

Lenny RachitskyIt's perfect. Also, just if you go to it, there's these recommendations for things to ask it that are just like, "Wait, how did you know I care about this stuff?" So it's like, "Help me switch to product management," just on the front page.

I'm like, "How did you know?" And it tells you that it's based on your Google activity. Talk about just what people should know about AI Mode, maybe what they don't really understand about the power of this thing.

Robby SteinI can tell you there's three big components to how we can think about AI search and the next generation of search experiences. One is obviously AI Overviews, which are the quick and fast AI you get at the top of the page many people have seen, and that's obviously been something growing very, very quickly. This is when you ask a natural question, you just put it into Google, you get this AI now, it's really helpful for people.

The second is around multimodal. This is visual search and lens. That's the other big piece. You go to the camera in the Google app and that's seeing a bunch of growth. And then really with AI Mode, it really brings it all together. It creates an end-to-end frontier search experience on state-of-the-art models to really truly let you ask anything of Google search. You can go back and forth, you can have a conversation and it taps into and is specially designed for search. What does that mean?
And one of the cool things that I think it does is it's able to understand all of this incredibly rich information that's within Google. There's 50 billion products in the Google shopping graph, for instance. They're updated 2 billion times an hour by merchants with live prices. You have 250 million places in maps. You have all of the finance information, and not to mention, you have the entire context of the web and how to connect to it so that you can get context but then go deeper. You put all of that into this brain that is effectively this way to talk to Google and get at this knowledge. And that's really what you can do now.
You can ask anything on your mind and it'll use all of this information to hopefully give you super high quality and informed information as best as we can, and you can use it directly at this google.com/ai. But it's also been integrated into our core experiences too. We announced you can get to it really easily if you can ask follow-up questions of AI Overviews right into AI Mode now. Same for the lens stuff. Take a picture takes you to AI Modes, you can have this back, you can ask follow-up questions and go there too. So it's increasingly integrated experience into the core part of the product.

Lenny RachitskyI imagine much of this is wait and see how people use it, but what's the vision of how all these things connect? Is the idea continue having this AI Mode on the side, AI Overviews at the top and then this multimodal experience, or is there a vision of somehow pushing these together even more over time?

Robby SteinI think there's an opportunity for these to come closer together. I think that's what AI Mode represents, at least for the core AI experiences, but I think of them is very complimentary to the core search product. You should be able to not have to think about where you're asking a question ultimately, you just go to Google. Today, if you put in whatever you want, we're actually starting to use much of the power behind AI Mode right in AI Overviews. So you can just ask really hard, you could put a five sentence question right into Google search. You can try it and then it should trigger AI at the top. It's a preview, and then you can go deeper into AI Mode and have this back and forth. So that's how these things connect.

Same for your camera. So if you take a picture of something, "What's this plant?" Or, "How do I buy these shoes?" It should take you to an AI little preview. And then if you go deeper, again, it's powered by AI Mode. You can have that back and forth, so you shouldn't have to think about that. It should feel like a consistent simple product experience ultimately, but obviously this is a new thing for us, and so we wanted to start it in a way that people could use and give us feedback with something like a direct entry point like google.com/ai.

Lenny RachitskyI recently had Brian Balfour on the podcast and he showed this quote that's really stuck with me that I think about as you talk about all this, it was by Alex Rampell, this idea that startups is a game of getting distribution before incumbents can innovate fast enough.

And it feels like you guys are finally there where it's like, "Oh man, now here comes Google." I don't know if I have a question here, but it just feels like there's been all this time for people to find distribution, and now it's like, okay, now Google is coming.

Robby SteinWhat we found is that people are asking these questions in Google. They're trying to get this out of Google. And so if you can just have an AI that's powerful enough to answer a really hard calculation someone's trying to figure out, or take a picture of multiple choice homework question for a chemistry question, people are doing this. And so now that you have this really sophisticated AI that's based on our frontier models, we can just handle increasingly more and more stuff for people and so hopefully that's the more natural on ramp here. And then we just need to make it easy enough for people to use, because these are new products, and people are used to using Google in a specific way.

They type in keywords, we call it sometimes keyword ease, but you can actually use natural language in Google. That's the biggest shift. We're seeing people asking real long, hard, complex questions. You just don't think, "Oh, I can go to Google and type in what's a great place for a date night? I already went to these four restaurants. I'm looking for outdoor dining and my friend has this allergy." You could put that into Google. And I think that's the kind of thing that we're excited to continue to make easy for people.

Lenny RachitskyIt's interesting, and we've come around to back in the day there was Ask Jeeves, which was this whole just ask a question as if you're asking a human and then it'll give you a really good answer.

And then we moved into Google just, "No, no, just type the thing you want and figure out how Google likes it."
And now we're back to, "Okay, just ask your question and it'll give you a really good answer."

Robby SteinYeah, Ask Jeeves was surprisingly prescient on that, huh? They had material, they had something way before its time that we think looks to rally around now.

Lenny RachitskyOh, man. What's your take on this whole rise of AEO, GEO, which is this evolution of SEO? I'm guessing your answer is going to be just create awesome stuff and don't worry about it, but there's a whole skill of getting to show up in these answers. Thoughts on what people should be thinking about here?

Robby SteinSure. I mean, I can give you a little bit of under the hood how this stuff works because I do think that helps people understand what to do, but when our AI constructs a response, it's actually trying to, it does something called query fan-out where the model uses Google search as a tool to find to do other querying. Maybe you're asking about specific shoes, it'll add up and append all of these other queries like maybe dozens of queries and start searching basically in the background. And it'll make requests to our data back end, so if it needs real time information, it'll go do that. And so at the end of the day, actually something searching, it's not a person, but there's searches happening and then each search is paired with content. And so if for a given search your web page is designed to be extremely helpful and you can look up Google's human rater guidelines and read, it's a very long document that's been thoughtfully crafted for decades now around what makes great information.

This is something Google has studied more than anyone, and it's like, do you satisfy the user intent, what they're trying to get? Do you have sources? Do you cite your information? Is it original or is it repeating things that have been repeated 500 times? And there's these best practices that I think still do largely apply because it's going to ultimately come down to an AI is doing research and finding information. And a lot of the core signals, is this a good piece of information for the question? They're still valid, they're still extremely valid and extremely useful, and that will produce a response where you're more likely to show up in those experiences now.
I think the only thing I would give advice to would be think about what people are using AI for. I mentioned this as an expansionary moment. It seems to be that people are asking a lot more questions now, particularly around things like advice, or how to, or more complex needs versus maybe more simple things. And so if I were a creator, I would be thinking, what kind of content is someone using AI for? And then how could my content be the best for that given set of needs now? And I think that's a really tangible way of thinking about it.

Lenny RachitskyIt's interesting your point about how it goes in searches. When you use it, it's searching a thousand pages or something like that. Is that just a different core mechanic to how other popular chatbots work because the others don't go search a bunch of websites as you're asking?

Robby SteinYeah. This is something that we've done uniquely for our AI. It obviously has the ability to use parametric memory and thinking and reasoning and all the things a model does, but one of the things that makes it unique for designing it specifically for informational tasks, we wanted to be the best at informational needs, that's what's Google's all about, and so how does it find information? How does it know if information is right? How does it check its work? These are all things that we built into the model, and so there is a unique access to Google. Obviously, it's part of Google search, so it's Google search signals everything from spam, what's content that could be spam? And we don't want to probably use in a response all the way to, wow, this is the most authoritative helpful piece of information. We're going to link to it and we're going to explain, hey, according to this website, check out that information and then you're going to go probably go see that yourself. That's how we've thought about designing this.

Lenny RachitskyYou've worked on a lot of AI products at this point, and it's not just Google or Artifact and Instagram, you did a lot of AI stuff. What's something you've learned about building AI products that you find maybe people don't truly understand, maybe something that's surprised you by building successful AI products?

Robby SteinI think the most recent one, and this is true, something even within the last week or two, is that it's so obvious how human-like the interface is becoming with how you can communicate and steer AI. I think it used to be even just months back that you had to do a lot of work to get the AI to do the thing you're trying to get it to do, right? You had to do these incantations, you had to prompt in a really specific way. People would have all these hacks like, "Hey, act like you're a coach and you do these things," and you have to really push it, or to use a tool more on the technical side. You had to do post-training, you had to take this foundational model and you had to show it data, you had to train it and actually update its weights to do more sophisticated things.

Tell it, "Hey, here's documentation for an API. If you ever have a problem, ping this API. Here's the data," as if it's an engineer that you had that you could talk to and it would have no idea what to do with that, or it would have some idea and wouldn't really do it.
But increasingly, you can just use language. Almost if you were to write up an order, you could be like, "Wow, I'm a new startup. Here's my data internally. Here are the APIs to it. Here's the schema and the URL. Here's when to use it. By the way, make sure that if you get this kind of a question, you really make sure to get it right." And that'll end up doing a lot in the model.
The model's been now encoded to be able to say, "Okay, I'm going to use more reasoning or thinking budget for that kind of a question."
Or, "I'm going to use tools or code, use code execution in order to connect to this API I'm told about." That's a relatively new thing. So I think it's going to open up a lot of this democratization of accessing these models and building incredible things because you don't even need to do a lot. To get the most sophisticated outcomes increasingly, I don't think you need to do a lot of this heavy duty fine-tuning.

Lenny RachitskyIt makes me think about, I had this recent guest, Nesrine Changuel, on the podcast. She was a PM at Google, she worked on Google Meet, she was a delight PM working on at making products more delightful. And she talked about the reason Google Meet did so well and is now feels like it's killing Zoom is they compared the experience of Google meet to a human meeting versus making it the best possible video conference, make this as good as a human experience. And that's interesting what you're talking about, how that's almost the goal here with AI is just make you feel like you're just talking to a person.

Robby SteinExactly.

Lenny RachitskyMight be obvious, but think about that. Okay, let me zoom out and talk about, and let's talk about just broader lessons you've learned over the course of your career. You've built a lot of very successful products, which I've shared in the intro at this point.

Robby SteinMany also on the other side of the spectrum, we got the whole portfolio.

Lenny RachitskyOkay, perfect. We'll talk about some of that. I asked you as we were getting ready for this conversation, what's one thing you wanted to get across in this conversation? What's something you think would be really helpful for product builders to hear to help them build more successful products? And you used this phrase: embodying relentless improvement. Can you just talk about that? What does that mean? Why is this so important?

Robby SteinOf course, I mean, I think that you need to be the physical manifestation of two pieces of things. One is just relentlessness, just complete effort, but is always exerted in a direction of positive productivity. And then the second is make things better. You have to always make things better, you're never content. And I think this actually came out of a story, a little bit of a funny story where I was at Instagram at the time doing a big all team meeting, one of my first, and they had this icebreaker, what's one word to describe yourself?

And so in the backstage area, I texted my wife really quick. I was like, "Hey, just one word to describe me, first thing that comes to your mind."
And she just wrote back, "Dissatisfied."
I was chuckling in the back room because I was first of all kind of offended because I was like, "It's not loving, caring, something good?" And then I saw her little bubble thing.
She's like, "Okay, there's more." And then she wrote me this really thoughtful thing that was like, "It's not that you're just unhappy. It's like you want the world to be better. You're driven out of a deep desire. It's that you feel this sense of dissatisfaction with what the world gives you. You want to make it better, and you're pushed and motivated to do that."
And I thought about that after. And it wasn't until we built a bunch of products, some that didn't do well, some that have had a lot of really large success now, billions of people use them, where it felt like one of the big differences, obviously a lot of it is just the conditions of the product and a little bit of luck here and there too. But for the things that went well, there was always this spirit of just we're going to get it eventually if we just make two more moves to make it better. And then eventually, as I talked about before earlier in our conversation, you get this tipping point where it just tips over into being net useful to people because of just that amount of compounding effort that you put into something because you're just always so... You're the harshest critic and the most dissatisfied person in the room about your own work basically.
And I think that's really meaningful. And there's this other incredible story that Tony Fadell told on a TED Talk 10 years ago. You can look it up. I think it's something around Think Younger as a title. And he talks about what it means that as we grow up in age and become grownups, I have two little kids so that's something I think about a lot. We habituate to everything. We accept and we tolerate what the world gives us everywhere, and we just go, "Oh, that kind of sucks. Oh, well," we shrug our shoulders and we move on.
But if you don't do that and you ask, "Why? This sucks, why am I tolerating this and how do I make it better?" He has this incredible story about going grocery shopping, and he goes on for 10 minutes about this story almost it felt like where he talks about getting a piece of fruit like a plum or a peach, and how it has that sticker on it and it's got that sticker and who put that sticker there?
And then when you get home, you take your fruit out of your bag, you're ready to eat it, you're all excited, you stick your thumb under the sticker, it punctures the flesh. He goes into just incredible detail about how it punctures the flesh of the fruit. The sticker comes off now, the fruit's bleeding, then you flick the sticker. The sticker misses the garbage, you bend over and pick it up, you put the sticker back in.
And I was like, "Wow, that is embodying this mentality of just why is this here? How can this be better?" And I think the best product people, the best thinkers in the space, that's how they think, in my opinion.

Lenny RachitskyI imagine there are many examples of you doing this in the many products you worked on. Is there one that comes to mind as a good example of this inaction of this actually working really well and delivering something really huge?

Robby SteinI mean, honestly, a big thing is working on AI Mode. I think a lot of it was we saw in AI Overviews that people were trying to ask harder questions and we weren't able to answer a bunch of them, or AI Overviews just didn't show up. And so a bunch of us sat around and we're like, "Why can't you just do this for everything?"

Instead of saying, "Oh, we don't need to solve for that," or, "That's not something that's in the most addressable next thing."
It's like we actually saw people in the query stream putting the words AI at the end of their queries because they're trying to get the AI to do the thing. We would look at that and be like, "This is ridiculous. We need to build something here."
And that was one of the big motivations, was actually identifying that user problem, being very disgruntled on behalf of the user. We're just failing the user every day. We are not helping them actually get their thing better understood, and we're going to go build a whole thing because of it, because that's hard to do by the way, to build all of that. But it just was so obvious that that's what we needed to do.

Lenny RachitskyThere's two buckets of people. Let's say hypothetically, one bucket is just make things better, make amazing experiences, you're going to do great. There's another bucket that's like drive metrics, drive goals, hit our KPIs. I know what you're not saying is just work on things, just make things better, relentlessly, make things better. How do you just think about, I guess that overlap of okay, makes things better, but also here's what we really, here's the strategy, here's the vision. How do you think?

Robby SteinYeah, I don't think of them as an or. I think they have to be intersected because basically the way I think about it is you actually start with a problem or the inverse of that, which is a vision, but they're connected. Most great companies, most great products come out of a problem, but out of the problem becomes like, "Here's a better way." What if instead of this crappy thing or way of living or thing that we all tolerate and accept, some entrepreneur comes up and says, "What if we did this other thing?" So it comes out of this dissatisfaction and this sense of better that you need to make things better, but then you're going to build, and at the end of the day, you need your instrumentation to know if you're on the right track.

And that's where you bring tools like, okay, you build your first version of the product, do people like it? And then each product goes through its journey. The way understand that people like it is you scrutinize. Typically, you talk to people, but you also add some analytical tools there. You might look at something like a J-curve. This is the retention, the percentage of people still using the product day seven, day 30, day 90, and does it flatten or do people just drip out of there? Over time, it's just not exciting people. And that would go to zero if on a long enough timeline, no one's going to use it. You don't get past that, you toast right then. Okay, some people are doing it, okay, great. We need more people to do it, and it needs to be good enough that people talk about it and then it grows. And so that's another gate.
And then there's another one which is, well, how big can this get actually, is it a small thing? Is it a medium thing? And I think most companies, you have an aspiration of being big, but you can't start big. Everyone's got to go through that journey. No product has started big. Even ones that get big really quickly, even a week quickly, they had something. And then even internally, they started small. They started small with a hundred to 100 people, and so you have to be metrics focused, I think in order to know if you're doing the right thing.
And then the other thing is, on the other side of the spectrum, you're running a big thing, and there, you need metrics to be your guide. If your product, let's say, let's say our core metrics down 5% this week, it's like, well, what's going on? And so you be really close to root cause analysis there and say, "Well, actually it turns out that it's an issue. Is it in a region? Is it on a device? Is it in a demographic? Is it in a use case? Where does my problem lie?"
And then when you get to it, you understand the problem and then this improvement thing comes back where it's like, "Okay, I'm going to fix that thing. What's the treatment for that disease?" And then you're back to growth again, and so you need this and you always are looking at what's the system that I'm working on and what are my instruments? I'm a pilot to know if this thing is going and flying correctly, but then it doesn't tell you exactly what to do, you have to thank for yourself how to make it better. I can just show you a little bit of the way.

Lenny RachitskyI love that you just gave a master class on just how to prioritize and pick what to work on. I want to go on a quick tangent. Speaking of products that have done really well and become really big, Stories, you build and launched Stories at Instagram. It's quite an infamous product launch back in the day, it was quite controversial because it basically took what Snapchat was doing really well and then, "Hey, let's bring it to Instagram," and it was not great for Snapchat. Now that it was so long ago and just, it's so far in the past, I'm so curious just to hear about that time reflecting on just that decision, what you guys talked about, how you decided to go ahead with that and anything just, I don't know, you think about looking back at that.

Robby SteinI think there's a couple of really important lessons from that launch. And I mean we went on afterwards to launch Reels, a bunch of updates to direct messaging, we had feed rank game. There was just a huge era there when I was there between 2016 and 2021 or so where just so many new products got built. I think an interesting lesson in all of those, and particularly in Stories was you have to really understand why someone uses your product and know when something is actually an existential question because there's just a better format or a different way of doing something that has worked and works and you need to figure out what that might mean for you, because not every great thing is going to be invented by you. But I think that a lot of these things are, they can become formats that you can make your own and you need to learn from the world and what's happening out there in order for your product to always give the best thing to its users.

And so for Stories, we looked at Instagram like, what's the point of Instagram? It is sharing your life and connecting with people ultimately. And if there's a way to do that, that lowers the pressure because it doesn't have likes or it's just ephemeral format and it's optimized well for mobile because it's this full screen experience. It's a really great format and kudos to Snapchat for inventing it. We didn't think of that as a deterrent, that we had to go make Instagram photo clock. And actually, there were early versions of this idea where you try to take the core Instagram feed and make it ephemeral. And whenever you try to mix a core product that's very cemented in someone's mind and physically looks a specific way and you're trying to make, contort it to do something new, it's usually a bad recipe. And so we knew we needed to do something new and then it was so clearly was critical to the core essence of what the product could do, could fit in naturally.
But the question was how do we make it our own? And how do we build on this? And so if you think, there were a bunch of things that we did that made it Instagram. For example, it had different creative tools and it had things like neon drawing and these really sophisticated filters that people loved. We also looked at this talk about being dissatisfied. People took, a lot of times they want their main camera to take a picture of something and then they want to upload it to Instagram because they want to save it and they want it to be in a very high quality, high resolution photo, because it's a memory. And Snapchat at the time didn't allow you to upload photos, it was like you have to use the Snap camera. And so we made a bunch of decisions like that where why don't you just let people upload their photo? This is back to the dissatisfied point, that's frustrating.
Or there's another example where you couldn't pause if you were consuming a story. You couldn't pause it, it just would go through and be done because it was this ephemeral thing and you wanted to create safety. Why can't you just pause? It goes by too fast. So we added this pause, it's such a small thing, but you put your finger down to pause the story now. And so there were a whole set of those things that were shipped that made Stories feel Instagram. It wasn't like you just had some other thing. And then it turns out that worked incredibly well, and so much to the fact that someone on the team mentioned that they always felt like at the time, they didn't realize it, but it was almost like it was missing the story size holes at the top of the page and it completed the product in some weird way for them. And so that was, I think an important lesson.

Lenny RachitskyInstagram definitely got a lot of hate for that moment from a lot of founders. It was just like, "Hey, you guys just stole this idea and that sucks."

How did you guys just deal with that internally? It was just this is, "We got to do this. We got to focus on our shareholders and grow this thing," and that's how it goes sometimes?

Robby SteinI mean, I think it's more that we're focused on our users and the people who are loving Instagram and it's denying them the opportunity to have an easy way to just share a photo and have the thing go away. I mean, that's ultimately what we were trying to add. At the end of the day, that is a format that people adopt. In the same way that you think about feeds, I think we talked about this at the time too when we shipped it. Facebook probably created the modern feed, but there's a feed for every single product. There's a LinkedIn feed and there's a feed for DoorDash.

These things become core primitives quickly and formats, and then at the end of the day, you're just robbing your user base of the opportunity to have a better product if you're not making the best possible product for your use cases. And for Instagram, it's used differently. People use Instagram differently than they use other products. And it turns out that there were these experiences in WhatsApp and in Messenger and in many other social products over time, and they all were used differently actually, which is fascinating.

Lenny RachitskySomething else I want to talk about is you came into two products that were already doing really well, Instagram and Google. And on the Instagram side, a transformative growth and improvement. Google is happening, we're in the middle of the improvement and growth you're driving. Not a lot of people get to do this where they go into an existing product, make it grow significantly. A lot of people want to do this. They have a product that's been around for a long time. Hey, how do we make this grow and be more successful? Is there anything specifically that you've learned about just coming into an existing product, figuring out where the big opportunities are and then just hockey-sticking growth? Because this is what everyone wants to do.

Robby SteinThere's a couple lessons here. And I think, by the way, the first lesson is to be humble always because it's extremely incredible to be able to work on products that have such impact on people. I view product like golf, you're always one stroke away from shanking. And as soon as you think you're good, you're not, you don't know anything. The world changes quickly. You have to always be a servant to your user base and the people that are out there and learn from them. The first thing I always do and think about is you get in touch in terms of why are people using this product, and where are the areas of growth? And so usually even in a big product or a mature in a complex system, there's a part of it that's growing. There's a part of it that's mature, there could be a part of it that's declining or isn't growing as much.

Certainly in Instagram, there's been a big shift over the years of sharing into public very large broadcast posts and feed into these more lightweight formats like Stories and DM actually private sharing as well. And so you have to observe that because every month, every year, the world changes, people's needs change. First thing you do is you get a sense of what do people want out of this product? What's its true essence? I think a lot about this job to be done framework, which is one of the things that I'm a big fan of and Clayton Christensen's book on Competing Against Luck is one of my favorite books on this topic where you have to really be a student of causation. Why is someone using this product? What are they doing with it and what are they trying to get done with it?
And that usually leads you to do bigger next stage ideas, and it removes this belief that you need to solve the problem with the current tools. In the Instagram version, it was like you have to make a square photo do more for people. That would be how you increment the product. Or in Google's example, there's something very specific with the core search experience that needs to change, it's a subtle tweak. You have to think, well, what's the big thing? Someone's trying to ask a really hard question out of Google? What's the best way to do that for them? And so it makes you think more first principled and that's the first basis of this.
And then once from first principles, you're like, "Oh, this newer thing." And it could be a shift, it could be a new form. In many ways, the AI version of Google and Stories and Reels, they're all similar in that they're new formats in the world that people are expecting and wanting more of.
And by adding them, it becomes complementary, not replacement. And in both cases, Stories didn't replace Instagram, it expanded in the same way we're seeing for AI. And so what's interesting is then you think, well, how do I bring that into my world? You have this big mature product. The best way I've seen is by making it complimentary, having it be a core part of the experience, but clearly defined as a distinctive thing that has its own attributes associated with it because people think spatially. So if you have a feed and you have holes with pictures, they expect those holes to do things. And so if you make one of those holes with a little clock and that one goes away the next day or you can't like it or it operates differently than the other parts of your feed, it's going to be super confusing for people. It sucks.
And so you have to add product carefully, but it needs to feel coherent but different. Stories, it has similar aesthetic. It obviously uses your camera roll in the same way it works that you can share it in DM, it works in the system, but it has a different primitive in the same way Google AI, it's a full page experience that you can pop out now. You can have follow up conversation with it. People have a set of expectations you need to snap to for those use cases. And then you are constantly learning how to best make these new products work within your world.
You never just want to snap in something that's working, you have to make it work for your users, your expectations, and what people are trying to do with your product. It's actually one of the things I see people fail on the most is they assume something working for one system will work in your world, but someone else's system is on totally the types of users they have with the consumer expectation of that product, that's totally different set of expectations. You have to respect that and say, "What can we learn from that," and bring it here. I guess if you were to talk about the method that I've seen now or twice, I guess that's how these products have developed.

Lenny RachitskyI love this topic. It makes me think about just this balance. People always try to find between optimizing something they've already got versus trying to take a big bet on something. You've had so many examples where you've taken a big bet on something totally new and it's worked out incredibly well. Do you have just a heuristic in how you structure teams and prioritize across, okay, we have amazing Google experience today, what percentage of resources go into improving that versus trying something totally new?

Robby SteinThat's one where I actually do feel like the more analytical, systematic thinking helps a lot because you're trying to produce value in the world, you want to quantify it some way. And so if you're seeing this growth curve and you're trying to understand, wow, people are using it more and more to liken this product. And when products are young, they grow, and then eventually things mature. You can break out product suites and different features of products all along the same way. Certain features that are growing fast, other features that are not. You get to these points of just diminishing marginal return in every system where it feels like you could put 50 people on this project, it's just not going to dramatically move the needle. Part of it is this bottoms up thing with your own team being really thoughtful about what is the expected value of that investment, and knowing when it's starting to approach zero or diminishing marginal return.

And then when that happens, these are these moments that usually coincide with something fundamental changing. Either people's expectations, externally, market saturation, there's something happening where you need to adjust. You then find your next growth driver or set of drivers. That's where you need to go more first principled and try these new things more. Then when you land a new thing that creates this new little growth engine and then you put people on it and you optimize it because each change is like 10% win, 20% win, 4% win.
It's clearly still has so much value in headroom and to make it better for people, and you can see that in the data. And so that becoming, I talked about this instrumentation, it becomes your guide for knowing if you're making good calls. Otherwise, if you don't know where you're headed and you don't have a goal of what you're trying to do more quantitatively, it's really hard to know if the thing you're doing is mattering to anyone. I think I made the product better, but is anyone using it? Does anyone care? Or are we just congratulating ourselves? Ultimately you want to have impact on people and that's what matters.

Lenny RachitskySo it says essentially tracking S-curves on every product and understanding if you're in the plateau and if it's time to invest heavily somewhere else.

Robby SteinYes.

Maybe it would be helpful to talk about the journey of AI Mode, just how it emerged and the steps that you took to now it's just such a big part of the Google search experience. When did this start? How did you decide this is worth betting on? And then what are the steps to get it further and further rolled out?

Robby SteinI mean, I think it probably started earlier on with AI Overviews actually, which was the first way we brought generative AI to search. And in that world, we noticed that people were asking these questions and many people were actually trying to put natural language questions into search. And so how can you provide helpful context links to go deeper and make an AI that made sense for Google? That was our first version of these models that could do this for people. And then by building into that and seeing this observation around people wanting more of it, direct access to it, and then being able to ask follow-up questions. You need a new modality. It's going to be really hard to build all of that within the construct of the core search experience. And so that led us to have form a small team of folks, a few people that were technical leaders, a couple designers very small to just prove out what if there was on, almost blank screen, delete, make a little fresh doc with a blinker.

What if there's a new page and you can ask the question, you can ask whatever you want of it. You can tap right into the AI that was originally powering this top of the experience in search. But we invested in making it much more powerful in the ways I described before was in it could search for you. It had reasoning as a part of its model capability, it had multi turn context, so if you had a conversation with it could keep track of that context so it had some unique pieces to it. And what would happen if we tried that quickly. And we basically got, I mean, this was probably five to 10 people worth of people originally.

Lenny RachitskyAnd how long ago was this team formed?

Robby SteinThis was probably over the last year, last summer basically, into the fall.

Lenny RachitskyWow, so about a year ago.

Robby SteinYeah, maybe about a year ago. It was where maybe it started. We were really plugging away on it, and then we saw this little version of it emerge that wasn't very good, but it had this moments of brilliance. It's actually, again, it's kind of like golf where you hit the perfect shot and you're like, "Oh my God." You get that feeling where it's just everything worked. And I asked it a question about, I forget, I was doing something with my daughter and I was planning an experience and it found all this incredibly useful information about park information. It had links to go to the site and confirm a bunch of things. It had Google Maps information that for my daughter, you could walk up, it was walkable. There was early examples like this where it just, it blew me away of what it could find and how helpful it was.

It gave us conviction that we should go and go further. And obviously there's lots of people involved in this type of a decision, tons of support from leaders across the organization. But it just says a little working team that initially, you got to build something and then you have to feel it yourself and it is very entrepreneurial in that way. And then when you see it tangibly, you're like, "What's a version of that? That's good and that could work?" And that gave you hope. And so then we basically built it out and built the first version that launched in Labs basically.

Lenny RachitskySo the first big milestone was this is working. It was just a qualitative experience of, "Oh wow, this has really, there's magic here."

Robby SteinYes, it's working. And then we did bring it before labs actually to trusted tester group. There were maybe 500 people externally that we added onto it, and we had pings with them. Some of them were, we actually had friends and family. We tried to treat it a little more like a startup where, because we feel like you got to have people test it to tell you the truth, and tell you when it sucks, because it probably does.

And then they'd message you. So I had a friend who was loving it, but also hating it for lots of good reasons and would just be messaging me all the time, screenshots, "This broke, this broke, this makes no sense."
We had that for a while, and then we got to a point where it was feeling good, the trusted testers were liking it, reporting good stuff, and then we it to this Labs moment where anyone could turn it on and then we used that to make it better with real query data. We could actually see what people were using it for at more scale and so that could tune it to make it better. And then we launched it out to everyone, or at least in the US, and then we've now been on this journey to expand it to all countries and languages and have more people be able to access it.

Lenny RachitskyIt's incredible that Google went roughly in a year from idea to a significant change to the search experience that's AI powered. I think this is not what people imagine Google is like, and it feels like things are different and things have changed in how you guys operate. What has allowed this to happen so quickly? What's changed? Is it just top-down leadership, we need to get shit done, or is there something more?

Robby SteinNo, I mean I think it's interesting how organizations change. I think when you feel like there is a moment in time that is clearly critical to deliver for people, people are trying to get information from Google. We are not able to answer certain things or help people in certain ways and there's this technology that can do it, that creates urgency, and obviously there's lots of people building lots of things and the market's crazy and there's lots of things shipping all the time.

There's a really exciting and healthy moment for us to build and build quickly and I think it's just exciting to be able to capture that opportunity because I think people believe, and I certainly believe that the next year or so of product is going to establish how people use the next wave of products for many years. And so at least I can only speak for myself, I feel this obligation to our users to give them the best version of Google that's powered by AI and that gives them the full knowledge of everything Google knows about the world and information to people and accessible with AI. That's driving a lot of the excitement.

Lenny RachitskyYeah, it's such a good point that people are building their new habits. It's wild how many people just now rely on ChatGPT and how quickly that happened. And I could see Google being worried that, oh, shit, everyone's changing their habit from searching Google to searching ChatGPT. And the fact that now Gemini is number one. I was actually looking at the list of top, so in the top 15 apps, Google is I think five of them, a third. It's out of control, killing it. When people look at AI Mode versus ChatGPT or Claude or let's even say Perplexity, what's the way you think about the positioning of AI Mode versus these other tools? Is it trying to be a direct competitor or is it just like, "No, it's actually pretty different and here's what it's for?"

Robby SteinYeah, I mean AI Mode's a way to ask search anything you want. It's designed and specially created for information. And so really, it should give incredible helpful responses for the things that people come to Google for. Think about you're planning a trip, you're trying to buy something, you're working through a question for your research project. It needs information and that's really, it's less focused on things like creativity, although there's things that can do that are nice there. It can help you. Just like any kind of core AI product, you can ask it to rewrite something for you, it'll do that. But we are less focused on creativity, productivity, upload a spreadsheet and output graphs for me, we're not focused on that.

We're really focused on what people use Google for, and making an AI for that so that you can come to Google, ask whatever you want and get effortless information about that and context and links to then also verify, dig in and go to the authoritative sources ultimately that people want, and we hear from people. So those ends up becoming the distinct qualities of this product versus more of a chatbot. Maybe you would talk to it like you maybe even have a bit of a, "Hey, how are you doing today," with that chatbot that we have some of that, we see that a little bit, but people are usually coming for information. They're trying to learn something and we focused our product on that.

Lenny RachitskyGot it. Okay, AI Mode is not your therapist. Maybe zooming out again a little bit and reflecting on all the amazing products you've worked on, all the places you've worked, if you had to pick two or three just core product principles or philosophies that have helped you build such amazing and successful products, what would those be? What comes to mind?

Robby SteinI mean, there's typically three things I think about. If I were to write a book about how to build great products, there'd be three chapters. I mean there'd probably more than that, but three chapters.

Lenny RachitskyI love that. I love how short that would be. That's the ideal book.

Robby SteinI've thought about these three areas now for a while and it's like they're always consistently the three things. The first is deeply understand people, and I think we talked about this a little bit with the jobs to be done point and Clayton Christensen's book, which I loved around Competing Against Luck. It really helps you be a student of why someone ends up, in his words, hiring a product. Don't think of users as using your product. Think of users as hiring you to do something for them.

There's this famous quote, I think it's Theodore Levitt had, "People don't want a quarter inch drill, they want a quarter inch hole." So what is someone trying to do? You have to understand that deeply and then you can build an amazing product. And also by the way, when you go back, why someone not using your product?
And so it focuses on these techniques to extract causation. So he actually talks a lot about this interview. He calls it an interrogation where you talk to a user like, "Hey, why do you use my product? Where were you? Were you in bed? Were you at work? What were you doing?"
"Oh, I was talking to my wife in the morning."
"Okay, well, what brought it up?"
"Well, I guess I was reading the newspaper."
"Okay, well why?"
And then you have this aha moment like that when they first decide to use your product, he calls it the big hire. That is information that you obtain ends up becoming the most critical because that is what caused someone to use your product. And if you can study that and understand it, you'll be much more on your way than just building things that sound cool. And so that's the first chapter is deeply understand people.
Second is really around analytical rigor and understanding your problems. You have to understand your problems. And this got is a little bit of what we were talking about about root cause analysis and understanding, okay, the metrics are dropping. Why? If someone's not using your product, why? And really being able to dissect that to get to true root causes. It's like, well, they went all the way to the end and then bailed, and then you understand what turns out that it was most, we actually learned about this and there's a story in Close Friends at Instagram where it just totally failed at first in a bunch just when we shipped it. And it turned out that we looked at the data and people were only adding one close friend to their list because it was mistranslated as best friend in many markets. So people just put one person and then the probability that person saw it and wrote back to you was zero. It's a product which is broken. So it's like you got to understand your problems.
And then the third one's around really designing for clarity instead of cleverness. A lot of people are like, "Oh, we're going to differentiate the design," and we talked about this a little bit with Stories. We're going to make a new version of something, but if something's a standard and people understand it, if you lean into it, you're going to get so much leverage than if you reinvent it, and you have to be really thoughtful around when you reinvent and where you don't.
And I think on this one, there's this great, Don Norman's book. Obviously, Design of Everyday Things is a big one, but he has this incredible chapter in there about doors, and why is it that after all of these years you walk up to a door, and based on how they're designed at times, people still don't know if you should pull or push that door because if you try to build the as beautiful symmetric two handles on each side on a glass door, it doesn't communicate in for any information to you.
And there's lots of, I've seen all the time we've designed new icons when we could have used global icons like, "Oh, wouldn't it be so cool if we used a camera that's kind of a camera but is mostly an AI looking thing and then is mostly, but then has this dots in it that connects it to this other product?"
And you're like, people just, it's a camera. Just put the camera in. Maybe you could add a little thing to it, and that's how you get people to use your products. And if you do those three things, I think you typically can do well.
And then, sorry, the fourth one would be more of the coda is be humble. Constantly and always question yourself. Listen to others, listen to users and be open to being wrong.

Lenny RachitskyI love these. On that third point, I feel like AI Mode as the name is such a good example of clarity. What is this? This is AI Mode.

Robby SteinWe talked about it internally. If you look at it in the tab, it's like everyone know, it's like you see it and you'll know what it is or we could call it something random, but then what is that? And now you're working against yourself.

Lenny RachitskyIf I were to reflect back these three pieces of basically this is the book you would write to help people build more successful products, it's understand the problem you're solving for people deeply. What's the job they're hiring you to do? I love the, it's lowercase jobs to be done. It's not like the rigorous whole thing that everyone-

Robby SteinExactly. Lowercase for sure.

Lenny RachitskyOkay. This is just like why are people hiring your product to solve a problem for them? What problem are they solving? So it's like basically figure out what problem they're having then very, through data, understand the problem and whether you are solving it. And then it's just keep it really simple. Clarity over cleverness essentially.

Robby SteinExactly, yes. And be humble.

Lenny RachitskyAnd be humble. Yes. Okay, important. Is there an example that we haven't talked about that shows this in action of just, cool, here's the problem we found. Here's how we figured out this is the solution and if we're succeeding, and then here's a very simple way of solving it?

Robby SteinI mean honestly, this Close Friends example, I can give you more from Instagram days was really wild. It took two or three years to get Close Friends to work, and I think people, it totally failed originally. This is the product that lets you add a private list of people and then you can post to your story and then only those people see it. It's like this very exclusive private space so you can feel really comfortable sharing maybe more.

Lenny RachitskyOh, green circle.

Robby SteinGreen circles, yes. It's one of the most popular, at least when I was there, was one of the most popular features of Stories and did really well, but it totally failed. And I think what we found out was that you actually used a bunch of these techniques here. So one was we first thought about it as an overall system problem and you could add a Close Friends post for anything. So you could do a feed post or a Stories post, and you also had a close friend's profile. You could see, if Lenny went to Robby's page, we were Close Friends, you would just be like, "Oh, you get to see extra stuff from me on my profile too."

So we shipped it, we thought it would be great. This is the be humble part, wasn't great, had a bunch of, it was just super confusing. You would see this really beautiful photo and then in the feed right after it, this blurry, very vulnerable moment someone's trying to share with their friends, just felt so out of place and weird for the reason people use feed. And then it was just confusing because it had an extra little green thing on it, but it was like that got a green thing and the Stories one didn't. If you open the story, it had a green thing inside the story, and people were just so confused.
And it had this other issue with the list where you're like, "Okay, the list doesn't work because it's mistranslated and people don't get it." I think it was actually called originally favorites, I want to say, and that encouraged people to just do two people on it. But then the way that it worked was, so this gets to the framework, I guess. So deeply understand people. What are people trying to do with this?
What they're trying to do is share a vulnerable thing and be like, "Hey, I'm lonely. Hey, what's going on? Are people up?" And it feels very much like a friend group thing.
And if you only have two people on it, the job that we're doing is actually connecting you to your friends. And if you don't get a DM back, it's broken. And so really what we're doing is getting you a DM and we're getting you connection. We're getting you a sense of being connected to your Close Friends. That is the job.
It's actually everything Clayton Christensen talked about in the book is there are utility jobs and there are emotional jobs. People usually discount the emotional ones a lot. This was really an emotional thing as much as it was utility one, and so product's broken, right? And people don't even know that it's a close friend story, they just see the little head because you have to click on it to see the thing. And so it just, people stopped using it.
We went through and we did these revs where we would simplify it and we would update it and we would go through this change list. Okay, take this out, take this out, change the name, here. And then we saw it was that it was working really well for people who added 20 to 30 people to their list. Because what would happen is you put 30 people on your list and then two of them would write back to you on DM and now you have closed the loop and you feel connected to those people. It's a winning thing. And so we designed the whole system around that, and also only worked in Stories. We were looking at the data, we were trying to understand where it was working and where it was failing, and then we updated the name to Close Friends so it didn't feel like favorites. So it wasn't three people, it's 20.
In the list, we built this list builder where we recommended a set of people based on some cool algo that was created by an engineer. And then we updated the design to put the green ring on the outside of the story so that this was the design for clarity. We were being cute. We thought, I think at the time it was like, "Oh, it's a secret story or something, and if you open it, you see it."
It just was not clear to people. And so we put the green ring on the outside so that users would see it in the tray and be like, "Ooh, what's that little green guy?"
And then they'd click on it and be like, "Oh, this is a private story for me." That system worked and did incredibly well, and that was the process we followed from a total flop to something that was very successful.

Lenny RachitskyThat is an awesome example. And this took two or three years, you said this process?

Robby SteinYeah, it took a while. That was actually one of the longest projects we worked on, but that actually came, the reason we did it was when we asked people to understand people like, "Why aren't you posting to your story? What's preventing you from doing it?"

And everyone had some version of, "Well, my ex is on it. I have a teacher on it. Oh, a friend that kind of is judgy is on it."
It was like this commonality was audience problem. Someone had an issue with people watching them. And so that gave us conviction to go this hard at it for so long because we knew that that was a core problem with the product.

Lenny RachitskyWas this connected to the Finsta, Rinsta trend also?

Robby SteinIt was actually. I think that informed us. Everyone had a Finsta and there was a Binsta.

Lenny RachitskyWas is a Binsta?

Robby SteinBest friend Insta.

Lenny RachitskyI see.

Robby SteinDifferent, it's this layering of people 20 Finstas down to your partner, Pinsta, and then it's basically like, I made that up. I don't know if it's true, but I'm sure it was out there somewhere. We were like, "Wow. People clearly are trying to hack Instagram basically to create these private smaller group settings, and so we should just make a product."

Lenny RachitskyHow did you actually do this testing? Was it rolled out to some percentage? Was it rolled out in New Zealand or whatever?

Robby SteinYeah, we rolled it out in a few other countries, exactly.

Lenny RachitskyOkay,

Robby SteinGot it. We had a basket of countries that we tried it in and then we would do research. I think it was Australia was one of the first ones for that one.

Lenny RachitskyOkay. I was going to ask if you can share the country. So Australia.

Robby SteinI think that was one of the earlier ones, yeah, but every time you ship something there's a slightly different reason why.

Lenny RachitskyOh, interesting. So it's not always Australia gets all the new stuff.

Robby SteinNo, although it sometimes is. Australia and Canada get a lot of stuff just because easier for the teams to see feedback from them.

Lenny RachitskyYeah, speak English.

Robby SteinYeah, exactly.

Lenny RachitskyAwesome, okay, let me go in a different direction and talk about something that you have a hot take on. There's a lot of talk these days about lean teams, small teams, just creating limited resources, not hiring at all. You have an opposite perspective of you actually need a lot of resources to build really big breakthroughs. Talk about your experience there.

Robby SteinYeah, I mean I think there's obviously, depends on what you're trying to build and there's been famously small teams building big impact products, but I think there's this cult of lean, scrappy, fast, throw away your product quickly, keep moving. And I think at some level it's true for internal conviction, but to build a product that works for a lot of people that is based on a technological breakthrough. A lot of times, I see teams just give up to early or under invest in the product, and obviously the space matters. And if you're building a single product that is a way to, I don't know, do something with a digital app that's fairly straightforward, that's going to be different than building a robotics company. So what you're building does change.

But even for software, I mean I think for really hard technical problems, think about the amount of time and effort it took for teams to build a foundational model, and how many years and hundreds and hundreds of people that were needed for that to happen. And you think about these large companies that have had huge impacts on people, and I think particularly for bigger companies internally, something I've seen is it's almost too scrappy because it never gets enough momentum. The product never gets good enough internally and then it just dies on the vine. Whereas if you put more people on it, you have to be careful not to put too many too soon. But I see the opposite more true where people hold on to small teams too long and then you, either takes forever to get to the thing you're looking for.
This Close Friends example I mentioned this actually was a small team. One of the reasons it took us forever was it kept the team so small and scrappy. That loop cycle was so short and by a startup age you'd be dead probably. So you can maybe do that in a bigger company, but as a startup, I don't know if you have that leisure. And so I think you need to actually think what is the group I need to build a version that's great. And from first principles, really think about it instead of just embracing blindly, okay, we're going to be the two of us until this thing has escaped velocity market fit, which it's not always true.

Lenny RachitskyThis is definitely counter to the narrative we see on Twitter. Anything you can share about just the heuristic you use to decide here's how long to keep it small? I know there's not going to be this step 1, 2, 3, but just like what I'm hearing is start small to prove out the concept designer PM engineer maybe. When do you find that makes sense to go big?

Robby SteinYeah, I think that it's mostly when you've hit the conviction moment. I think there's two big milestones. There's internal conviction. For yourself, do you believe in it? And you believe in it because there's some external validation, your friends, you put 20 friends on it. And by the way, I found out very quickly building startups that if you put 20 friends on something, they're not going to do you that many favors. They're not going to use a product every single day because they're your friend 30 days in, 60 days in, 90 days in. They're not using your product unless you're doing something that's useful to them. And so you get all of this feedback and you're seeing people really enjoy it. You get to that moment.

And then I think that's not a product that would win externally because if you were to ship it, it's broken, doesn't work great. And then you need to, I think invest enough to make the best version of it or as good a version as you can to get it out the door and to ship it. And I think that that, it's like you want to build the right product eventually is the mentality and you can only really do that with the right group.

Lenny RachitskyI'm going to take us to a recurring segment on the podcast that I call AI Corner.

Robby SteinOkay.

Lenny RachitskyWhat's some way that you've found use for AI in your work, in your life that is really interesting, really helpful, maybe other people can be inspired by?

Robby SteinI think one of the coolest trends ever is how AI is affecting multimodal visual and inspirational needs for people. And we're early in this and I think this is something that I'm actually working on as a project as well, but right now if you think about what AI has done in large part, it was born and grew up in this text modality, it was chat. And so for a long time, if you were to ask it to help you, what's a cool way to redecorate your bookshelf behind you? It's going to describe that to you in text, because that's what it knows. But increasingly, AI is going to be liberated to help in every possible modality.

This is something that we've seen a lot with this explosive use of Google Lens and our image search and image features and with this deep understanding, and what I'm actually starting to use internally and some things that we're excited about more coming up that we actually announced at I/O that we're going to going to be building more of was how AI can help with inspiration, how AI can help with shopping and helping you really get things done that are more in the inspiring bucket of needs versus these core utilities like code, math, homework side of things.
And I'm really excited for things that are coming where you can ask it for inspirational tasks and it's starting to do really fascinating things in terms of what I'm seeing and hopefully we'll share more on that soon. But I think the one thing I can share is there's a visual version of AI Mode that basically we talked about at I/O, and so you can reference some of those keynotes, but that's in the process of being rolled out.

Lenny RachitskyMysterious.

Robby SteinAnd so you're going to be able to now ask what's a mid-century modern beautiful office design with dark themes? It'll be able to produce this image board that's inspirational and you can do multi-turn with it. And so you'll be able to go and say, "Actually, I want more of a light theme, more creamy, more California, more coastal vibe." And it'll do that and it'll understand that and it'll actually see the images and be able to turn with you in the way that text works, which is going to be really cool. So I think that's going to be one of the more exciting things that will be new to AI soon.

Lenny RachitskyWhat I'm hearing is Nano Banana integrated into AI Mode. Recipe for success.

Robby SteinWell, it's a little different than Nano Banana because Nano Banana is an image editor. This is more like helping you find images on the web, so it's a little bit more like AI inspiration, AI image search, and allowing you to then talk with two effectively visual responses with natural language. So that's going to I think, be a little bit different than edit this photo so that it changes it. Although potentially an interesting idea too, to have an ability to take a picture of your living room. And I think AI will help with that too ultimately.

Lenny RachitskyPinterest is in trouble, feels like this is what people use Pinterest for. Here's all the inspiration. Now it's just AI doing it all. By the way, Nano Banana, where does this name come from?

Robby SteinI don't actually, I forget that. There's a story somewhere. I forget it now honestly. But the team I think came from a scrappy, fun group of people building this and they wanted to go for something fun for folks to-

Lenny RachitskyYeah, it feels like that's a part of the reason things have started to work. There's just more fun and delight and random crazy stuff coming out.

Robby SteinIt does. It feels a little more like when I was at Google the first time through right now where you just have so much stuff and this kind of fun curiosity happening where people want to try things and ship things and yeah, hopefully that continues.

Lenny RachitskyYeah, it feels like Veo 3 would be even more successful if it had a wacky name. And I like that this is the opposite of your advice of clarity. I don't know what Nano Banana is, but it worked.

Robby SteinYeah, it's the other thing. No advice is right universally, right? But yeah, Nano Banana.

Lenny RachitskyRobby, is there anything else that you wanted to share? Anything else you want to leave listeners with as a final nugget of wisdom before we get to a very exciting lightning round?

Robby SteinThis concept: be curious. I think of embodying everything as like it's really about curiosity. It's about wanting to know why everything is the way it is. Why is someone doing something? Why does someone have a different opinion than I do? Why might this not be working? And the people who really have that level of intense curiosity and they chase things down until they know, I think you're well served by that. That would be my only parting thought.

Lenny RachitskyLet me follow that thread actually, because it's maybe the most trending term on the podcast over the past few months is curiosity. It comes up a lot when I ask people, what are you teaching your kids and embracing with the rise of AI and curiosity comes up all the time. Is there anything that helps you? Is it just like I am good at this and I am curious innately and I'm just, "This is valuable." Is there anything you can share that helps you or others around you embody that and actually be curious?

Robby SteinWell, I mean AI is obviously the ultimate curiosity engine, and that's what's so cool is you can now ask anything and just get information. And so I find that people just appreciate just how much they can learn about whatever they want. But also, I think that a lot of this also comes down to studying what you want to know about, and knowing where the branches of knowledge live there. A lot of times I'll read old papers and PDFs that are free online on a statistics thing if I want to learn about that and I think people under appreciate those. There's analog old school great learning and AI can help you discover them. I'm using AI, I'm particularly at Google to help discover all these cool links and things to read, but I find that that is an interesting hybrid where it's not just AI but really going to original sources more. I find that these books I mentioned on the chat here, I find that you need a blend of all of those things to ultimately really get to the bottom of things ultimately.

Lenny RachitskyActually reading the thing, not just reading the summary of the thing.

Robby SteinYes.

Lenny RachitskyLet me actually ask you this question I've been asking all these people that are at the cutting edge of AI. You have kids, is there anything you're thinking about and leaning into helping them learn, develop as AI emerges and becomes a big part of the world?

Robby SteinThe biggest thing I'm doing, I have younger kids, so the biggest thing I'm doing is they're using live versions of AI that they just talk to now much more. And so funny enough, we actually just launched search live actually out of Labs this week. And so you can talk to search in a live AI setting, which is conversational voice. Voice on when you're driving, you can just talk all the knowledge I talked about where you can do with Google, you can talk to it in a normal conversation with your voice. And I found that to be incredibly accessible for kids.

And I hear all my kids come home, they're like, "Can I talk to Google about something?"
"What do you need? What do you need to say?"
And then they go to my app, they hit the live button and they just start talking to it. They want to know about animals, they want to know about certain, I don't know, history things. They learn about something in school, and it's so natural to learn in that way that I think that that's helping them become much more AI native than any other thing I'm doing.

Lenny RachitskyLife as a parent is going to be way too easy now whenever kids have questions, "Just go talk to the AI," but I don't think that's bad. So this is within the Google search app. There's a live, how do you access this?

Robby SteinYeah, that's exactly right. You go to Google app, so there's one of the apps in the App Store you mentioned. You open Google and there's a button now that's live on it, right on the home screen. And if you tap on, it's a live version of AI Mode that you can just talk to. It's a full screen experience, and we'll say start talking.

Lenny RachitskyIn the show notes, I'm going to link to this project that somebody built, Eric Antonow, which I love. It basically shows you how to put a little speaker into a little stuffed animal and you connect the speaker to, it could be Google Live or it could be ChatGPT, whatever you like, in voice mode. And you put it on your shoulder, you get a little magnet that attaches, and your kids could talk to this parrot, for example, and you could tell it, "Talk in a pirate voice," and so they're talking to his pirate.

Robby SteinOh, that's really funny. Okay, that's really cute.

Lenny RachitskyIt takes 15 minutes. You could get an X-Acto knife and sew it and stuff and it's fun. I made one for my nephew and he was looking for treasure with this parrot.

Robby SteinThat's really adorable, I'm definitely going to look into that.

Lenny RachitskyRobby, with that, we've reached our very exciting lightning round. I've got five questions for you. Are you ready?

Robby SteinAll right, I'm ready.

Lenny RachitskyWhat are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people?

Robby SteinI mean, definitely the two I mentioned here. Clayton Christensen, Competing Against Luck. Don Norman, Design of Everyday Things. But I also really love this for fiction, Aurora, which is this book David Koepp wrote. It's about electromagnetic pulse in the sun that knocks out, it's fiction for just fun. And it was a really fun beach read and apparently it was going to be made into a Netflix show, it didn't work out. I don't know. It was sad to see that fall apart, but so it's a really fun book.

Lenny RachitskyThere's a book along those lines that I love, they're making a movie of it right now called Hail Mary.

Robby SteinOh, I'm in the middle of reading that right now.

Lenny RachitskyOkay, awesome.

Robby SteinYes.

Lenny RachitskyOf the same mind.

Robby SteinYes.

Lenny RachitskyYeah, they're making a movie of it. How about that?

Robby SteinIn the middle of reading it. It's getting wacky where I am right now, but I'm excited to see where it goes.

Lenny RachitskyIt gets wackier. The ending especially wacky.

Robby SteinOh, really? Okay.

Lenny RachitskyJust prepare yourself.

Robby SteinOkay.

Lenny RachitskyWhat is a recent movie or TV show you've really enjoyed?

Robby SteinI love The Bear. I think that's just absolutely awesome show. Dune, of course. And I thought the new Top Gun is a little old now, but I think the new Top Gun was so fun and awesome.

Lenny RachitskyIs there a product you've recently discovered that you really love? It cannot be AI Mode.

Robby SteinI'm going to use a non-digital product.

Lenny RachitskyPerfect.

Robby SteinI'm super into this new pillow that I got called Purple Pillow, and I've been recommending it to everyone at work. We're on a pillow chat now. It's a thing. It's like you talk about what pillows we're getting, but it's this really cool thing where it's got this new technology of this honeycomb polymer that's inside and so it supports you and it has these little micro holes so it doesn't get hot. It's really cool. Big fan. Strongly recommend Purple Pillow.

Lenny RachitskyI've never heard of this thing, I am excited. I recently got an avocado pillow, focusing on low toxins.

Robby SteinOh, those are good. I've heard good things about those too, yeah.

Lenny RachitskyOkay, I got to join this pillow. Pillow talk is a great name for it by the way.

Robby SteinYou're into pillows too. That's great.

Lenny RachitskyHuge.

Robby SteinI love bedding.

Lenny RachitskyNo, I'm just joking.

Robby SteinYeah, great.

Lenny RachitskyBut I did upgrade my pillow. This is not Mr. Pillow, whatever that guy is, right? Is that guy that, there's like a controversial pillow guy. Okay.

Robby SteinNo.

Lenny RachitskyOkay. Purple Pillow. I'm going to ask AI Mode.

Robby SteinYeah, you should.

Lenny RachitskyThis.

Robby SteinDefinitely.

Lenny RachitskyNext question. Do you have a favorite life motto that you find yourself coming back to in life?

Robby SteinThis is be curious. I think I almost named a company Curious. I just think it's a really awesome, there's one thing in life. It's that in terms of getting things done, in terms of understanding the world, people, your kids, your family. You always just want to know more and question things outside yourself, not feel like you have all the answers. I think that's really important.

Lenny RachitskyI love that. Final question, okay, so speaking of startups, you started a company called Stamped back in the day, it got acquired by Yahoo. I hear there's a story where you got Justin Bieber on your app and that was a big deal and a big inflection in the success of the app. Can you just tell that story?

Robby SteinYeah, it's a wild story. Just to scene set a little bit. I was 25 right after Google being an IC PM in New York with some Google friends building this company. So very early on, and maybe in a good way and no idea what I was doing. But basically we decided that the concept of Stamped was to put your stamp on your favorite things, get recommendations from friends and from people that you trust. And so you think of a Twitter feed, but it's all stuff that people think is cool.

Lenny RachitskyWhich products.

Robby SteinIt's like books, restaurants, food. Products, exactly.

Lenny RachitskyPillows, possibly.

Robby SteinPillows could be on there. I would totally stamp this pillow and then you could discover it. And one of the cold star problems was obviously you want a group of people that are on it that are already using it, that could have some tastemaker type folks. We had a bunch of people that were chefs and we had people who were literary folks. And then we wanted to get a couple people that were more musicians, artists, and these influential folks.

My co-founder and I just basically got the contact of Scooter Braun, who's Justin's manager, and we just sent out an email and we were like, "Hey, we're in New York. We're going to be in LA tomorrow." I think we said something, I don't remember all the details, but it was something like tomorrow.

Lenny RachitskyAnd you were not going to be in LA tomorrow.

Robby SteinNo, no.

Lenny RachitskyOkay.

Robby Stein"Do you happen to be there?"

And he just wrote back some one line thing like, "Meet me at this hotel for breakfast at something."
And we're like, "Oh, okay."
We literally went immediately to the airport. I just remember just basically going straight to the airport, flying to LA meeting with him. We gave him the whole pitch, we showed him the product, and then he was like, "Okay, I think this would be super cool. We can be involved and maybe you can help be an advisor."
And we ended up going back and meeting with Justin and showing him the product and even filming some little clips with him. It was actually really funny and it was a really fun moment. And obviously he was using it to stamp his favorite stuff. And so people would go, "Oh, Justin's into this song, or he is into this stuff," and would post that.
It was one of the ways that we got lots of people to try out and see what we were doing. That's a little extra scrappy moment in time, but I think it embodies a good lesson. Just do it now, be scrappy, be immediate. Intense urgency usually wins over thinking about it for a long time, and that's certainly proved to be true on that one.

Lenny RachitskyIncredible story, thank you for sharing that. So many lessons to take away. Two final questions, where can folks find online if they want to reach out, maybe learn more about what you're doing and how can listeners be useful to you?

Robby SteinYeah, I think on X @rmstein is probably the best single place. And then to be helpful, send me feedback. DM me, just mention me, ping me, let me know problems with Google products, with AI in general, but also just anything. As I said before, you have to always listen to people understand their experiences, so ping the ideas and feedback. That's the best way to be helpful.

Lenny RachitskyWow. What an onslaught you're about to receive of feedback on the search experience.

Robby SteinNo problem. Yes, please do.

Lenny Rachitsky"Robby, why is this link second? Why is my site not at the top?" I can only imagine the kind of stuff people complain about. Robby, thank you so much for being here.

Robby SteinThank you, it was great.

Lenny RachitskyIt was great. Bye, everyone.

Robby SteinTake care.

Lenny RachitskyThank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating, or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcasts.com. See you in the next episode.

Lenny Rachitsky感觉谷歌内部好像有些东西真的变了。就在上周，Google Gemini 冲到了 App Store 第一名。我觉得没人料到会这样。

Robby Stein谷歌一直以来的使命，都是让任何信息都能被普遍获取，这件事非常持久，也非常有驱动力。到了 AI 这个阶段，我们比以往任何时候都更接近实现它。现在给我的感觉，就是一种前所未有的专注和紧迫感。模型已经真正到了能为消费者创造价值的拐点。

Lenny Rachitsky过去几年里，ChatGPT 出来了，Perplexity 也出来了，很多人都在说：“谷歌完了。没人想再盯着搜索结果一条条点链接了。”

Robby Stein在我看来，Google Search 的核心其实没怎么变。我们并没有看到人们只问那些特别狭窄的问题。大家还是会找具体电话号码、查价格、问路线。我觉得很多人低估了搜索场景的广度。AI 是扩张性的，它让更多问题被提出来，也让更多好奇心得到满足。

Lenny Rachitsky你做过很多很成功的产品。你用过一个说法，叫“具身化的持续改进”。

Robby Stein你得把两件事真正活出来。第一是 relentless，也就是持续、彻底、不松劲地把全部力气朝着正向产出去使。第二是把东西做得更好。你必须一直让它变得更好，不能满足于现状。

Lenny Rachitsky你当年在 Instagram 推出 Stories，这件事当时争议很大，因为它基本上就是把 Snapchat 做得很好的东西拿过来，然后说：“好，咱们把它带到 Instagram。”

Robby Stein不是每个好东西都得由你自己发明。Facebook 可能创造了现代信息流，但每个产品都需要自己的 feed。说到底，你只是在剥夺用户获得更好产品的机会。

Lenny Rachitsky今天我的嘉宾是 Robby Stein，他是 Google Search 的产品副总裁，负责几乎整个 Google 搜索体验，包括新的 AI Overviews、AI Mode、多模态 AI 体验，比如 Google Lens、排序算法等等。他站在 Google 历史上最大的一次转型前沿，也已经在 Google 的发展轨迹上打下了很深的烙印。他还在 Instagram 做过产品负责人，带着团队推出了 Instagram Stories、Reels 和 Close Friends，把 Instagram 推到了日活 5 亿。他也是 Artifact 的创始团队成员之一，和 Mike Krieger、Kevin Systrom 一起做过那家公司，自己也创过两家公司。很少有人能同时对两个全球级消费产品产生这么大的影响。Robby 今天会分享他在打造优秀、成功消费产品上的很多经验，也会聊很多关于 Google 在 AI 时代会走向何方的洞见。

[中间的赞助与订阅口播已略去]
Robby，谢谢你来做客，欢迎来到播客。

Robby Stein谢谢邀请。

Lenny Rachitsky这期播客选在这个时间录，真的太巧了。就在上周，Google Gemini 冲到 App Store 第一名。我现在看了一眼，它还是第一名，还在 ChatGPT 前面。我真觉得没人料到会这样。大家总是会说，谷歌，你们到底在干嘛？你们有这么厉害的技术，为什么消费者侧却没有真正跑出来？为什么是 ChatGPT？为什么这些很强的公司做得反而比谷歌更好？

先说一句，恭喜你。我知道这不只是你一个人的功劳，但我想你肯定也出了不少力，真的恭喜。

Robby Stein是很多很多人的功劳，没错。

Lenny Rachitsky感觉谷歌内部真的有些东西变了，尤其是 AI 消费产品这边，开始真正跑起来了。那从增长上看，Nano Banana 是最近这波增长的主要来源吗，还是还有别的因素？

Robby Stein当然，大家对 Nano Banana 确实非常兴奋，这点没错。但我觉得，更多人也开始意识到，Google 这一整套产品里有很多很酷的东西，而且这些产品已经变得非常强大。哪怕在搜索里也是这样，我们觉得很显眼的功能，很多人其实根本不知道。它们就在核心搜索体验里，但我去 X 上看，经常会看到有人说：“哦，我刚发现这个 AI 功能。”明明我们觉得很明显，但很多人其实才刚刚意识到这些工具有多强。

Lenny Rachitsky再往深一层说，按你的说法，谷歌有这么多惊人的技术。你们还写出了最早那篇 transformer 论文，推动了这么多创新。那问题就来了，谷歌去哪了？为什么没有把最后胜出的东西做出来？

到底发生了什么？是组织大重组了吗？换了新领导吗？还是过去几年出现了什么新的理念，才让 Gemini 走到今天这一步，成了世界第一的 App？

Robby Stein是的。我现在是第二次在谷歌了，第一次是 2007 年加入，后来做过一些别的事，现在又回来了。所以更早那段很长的历史我不能代表所有阶段去说。但我现在能告诉你的，是我此刻感受到的东西：一种强烈的专注和紧迫感，大家都在很快地交付好产品。我觉得这部分当然和领导层有关。我们和 DeepMind、Google DeepMind 的伙伴合作非常紧密，也和整个组织的很多团队合作得很深，还有一大批非常优秀的人，以及一直在思考这些问题的研究者和技术人才。只要这种能量到位，产品团队、技术团队、研究团队又能紧密协作，我们就能快速推进，做成很多事。

我不觉得是某一个单点事件造成的。很多人总喜欢把势头归因于某次变动，或者某个人。但我更愿意把它理解成一种持续叠加的效果：每个月都死磕着把产品或模型做得更好，每一天都在变好，最后就到了一个拐点，大家开始真正喜欢它、使用它、享受它。对我来说，更像是这种感觉。我们之前就有投入、有专注，然后终于到了一个时刻，外界开始真正看到这些投入带来的效果。

Lenny Rachitsky随着 ChatGPT、Perplexity 还有其他这些聊天机器人出现，很多人都在说：“谷歌死了。没人想再看搜索结果、再点链接了。为什么不直接把答案给我？”

但事实看起来完全不是这样。你们好像一切都还不错。你能不能说说 Google Search 现在具体是什么状态，再往后我们再聊 AI Mode。考虑到这些新东西都出来了，搜索流量、搜索本身到底怎么样？你们从 ChatGPT 出现以后看到了什么数据？

Robby Stein有意思的是，人们会来搜索各种各样、极其广泛的问题，什么都问。查一个具体电话号码、查价格、查路线、找税务付款页面，任何你能想到的事都会问。很多人低估了这种广度。我们看到的情况是，这些基础需求并没有变，AI 并没有从根本上改变它们。相反，AI 其实是在扩张需求，让更多问题被提出来，也让更多好奇心得到满足，这就是增长的来源。

所以我认为，Google Search 的核心并没有变。我们没看到它被取代。相反，出现的是一个扩张性的时刻。比如现在你可以拍一张东西，直接问你看到的一切。Google Lens 是目前增长最快的产品之一，视觉搜索年增长达到了 70%，而且这是在已经很大规模的基础上继续增长。它每年都是几十亿、几十亿、再几十亿次的搜索。
你可以拍一张鞋子照片，问“我去哪儿能买到这个？”
或者拍一道作业题，说“我卡在第二题了。”
又或者拍一下书架，问“基于这些书，我还应该看什么？”AI 现在已经能帮你做这些事了。这也是为什么我觉得增长空间还很大，也是我们这么兴奋的原因。

Lenny Rachitsky所以你并没有看到搜索走向衰亡。

Robby Stein没有。

Lenny Rachitsky顺着这个话题说，你们最近上线了 AI Mode，我觉得聊这个的人还不够多。入口应该是 google.com/ai 对吧？

Robby Stein对。
太棒了，完美，1/1，满分评测。

Lenny Rachitsky确实很完美。还有，如果你进去，会看到一些推荐你可以问它的问题，我当时就想：等等，你怎么知道我会关心这些？首页上甚至直接有“帮我转去产品经理”这种提示。

我当时心想：“你怎么知道的？”它还会说这是基于我的 Google 活动。你能不能讲讲 AI Mode 到底是什么？也许还有一些大家没真正理解的点，这个东西究竟有多强。

Robby Stein我可以从底层给你讲一下，我们怎么理解 AI 搜索和下一代搜索体验。有三大部分。第一当然是 AI Overviews，也就是你在页面顶部看到的那个快速 AI 概览，很多人都已经见过了。它增长非常快。你只要用自然语言提问，直接扔进 Google，就能立刻拿到 AI 答案，这对很多人来说非常有用。

第二部分是多模态，也就是视觉搜索和 Lens。这是另一大块。你打开 Google App 的相机功能，增长也非常快。再往上就是 AI Mode，它把这些东西真正整合到一起，形成一个端到端、基于最先进模型的前沿搜索体验，让你真的可以对 Google Search 说任何问题。你可以来回追问，可以对话，而且它是专门为搜索设计的。什么意思呢？
它很酷的一点是，它能理解 Google 里那些极其丰富的信息。比如 Google Shopping Graph 里就有 500 亿个商品，商家每小时会用实时价格更新 20 亿次。地图里有 2.5 亿个地点。还有金融信息，更不用说整个网页的上下文，以及怎么把这些信息连起来，让你先获得上下文、再继续往深里问。你把这些全都放进这个“大脑”里，本质上就是一种跟 Google 对话、调取知识的方式，而这正是你现在能做到的事情。
你可以问任何你脑子里的问题，它会尽可能利用这些信息，给你高质量、足够有依据的答案。你可以直接在 google.com/ai 上用它。不过它也已经被整合进我们的核心体验里了。我们已经宣布，你可以从 AI Overviews 里直接继续追问，然后无缝跳到 AI Mode。Lens 也是一样。拍张照片就能把你带到 AI Mode，你可以继续追问、继续深入。所以它正在越来越深地融入产品的核心部分。

Lenny Rachitsky我猜这里面很多东西都还是在观察用户怎么用，但从整体愿景上看，这些东西未来会怎么连接？是继续保留侧边的 AI Mode、顶部的 AI Overviews，再加上这个多模态体验，还是说你们有某种想法，把这些东西进一步合并？

Robby Stein我觉得这些东西是有机会更靠近的。我想 AI Mode 代表的至少是核心 AI 体验，但我把它看成和核心搜索产品高度互补。你不应该再去想“我现在到底该在哪里问问题”，最终你只要去 Google 就行。今天如果你随便输入什么，我们其实已经开始把 AI Mode 的一部分能力直接用到 AI Overviews 里了。也就是说，你完全可以直接在 Google Search 里问一个很长、很难的五句问题。你可以试试，然后它应该会先在顶部触发 AI 概览，作为预览，再让你继续深入到 AI Mode 里，来回追问。所以这就是这些东西之间的连接方式。

相机也是一样。如果你拍一张植物，问“这是什么植物？”或者拍一双鞋问“我怎么买到这双鞋？”，它应该先给你一个 AI 预览。然后如果你继续往下，背后还是 AI Mode 在驱动。你可以这样来回切换，所以你根本不该去操心这些层级。最终它应该是一种一致、简单的产品体验。不过显然，这对我们来说还是个新东西，所以我们一开始想先用一个像 google.com/ai 这样的直接入口，让大家先用起来，再把反馈给我们。

Lenny Rachitsky我最近在播客上请了 Brian Balfour，他提到一句话，一下子就让我记住了。是 Alex Rampell 说的：创业公司本质上就是在拿分发优势赛跑，趁 incumbents 还来不及快速创新之前先把分发拿到手。

我现在感觉你们终于到这一步了，就像在说：“哦，谷歌终于来了。” 我不确定我这里是不是在提问，但就是有种感觉：大家已经给了很多年去找分发，而现在轮到谷歌上场了。

Robby Stein我们观察到的是，人们本来就在 Google 里问这些问题。他们就是想从 Google 里把答案掏出来。所以如果你有一个足够强的 AI，能回答那种很难的计算题，或者帮人拍一张多选化学作业题，那人们确实就在这么做。既然你现在有了建立在前沿模型上的更高级 AI，我们就能帮人处理越来越多的事情，所以这应该就是更自然的入口。与此同时，我们还得把它做得足够容易用，因为这些都是新产品，而人们已经习惯了以一种特定方式使用 Google。

大家以前是输入关键词，我们有时候把这叫 keyword ease。但其实你完全可以在 Google 里用自然语言。这才是最大的变化。我们看到人们开始问很长、很难、很复杂的问题。你根本不会下意识觉得：“哦，我可以去 Google 输入一个适合约会的地方？我已经去过四家餐厅了，我想要户外用餐，而且我朋友对某种食物过敏。” 但你其实完全可以把这些直接输进去。我觉得这正是我们想继续让它变简单的方向。

Lenny Rachitsky这很有意思，我们也算是绕回来了。以前有个 Ask Jeeves，整套思路就是像问人一样问一个问题，然后它给你一个很好的答案。

后来我们转向 Google，变成：“不不，你就输入你想要的东西，然后想办法让 Google 看懂。”
现在又回来了，变成：“好，你直接问问题，它会给你一个很好的答案。”

Robby Stein对，Ask Jeeves 在这件事上其实挺有先见之明的，对吧？他们做出了一个远远超前于时代的东西。现在我们看到的，正是大家重新开始围绕它形成共识的方向。

Lenny Rachitsky说到 AEO、GEO 这波 SEO 的演进，你怎么看？我猜你会说“把内容做扎实就行，别太焦虑”，但现在确实有一整套让答案里出现自己的方法。你觉得大家应该怎么想这件事？

Robby Stein当然，我可以稍微讲一点底层机制，因为我确实觉得这有助于大家知道该怎么做。当我们的 AI 生成回答时，它会做一种叫 query fan-out 的事，就是模型把 Google Search 当成工具去做更多查询。比如你在问一双鞋，它可能会顺手派生出几十个相关查询，在后台同时搜索。然后它会向我们的数据后端发请求，所以如果它需要实时信息，就会去取。说到底，真正发生的是搜索，不是人在搜，但确实有很多搜索在发生，而每次搜索都会配一份内容。所以如果你的网页对某个搜索特别有帮助，你就可以去看 Google 的 human rater guidelines，那是一份很长的文档，几十年来一直在认真打磨，讲什么才算好信息。

这件事上，Google 研究得比任何人都多。它关心的是：你有没有满足用户意图？有没有来源？有没有引用你的信息？这是不是原创的，还是把同样的话重复了五百遍？这些最佳实践我觉得依然大体适用，因为最后还是要靠 AI 去做研究、找信息。很多核心信号，比如“这是不是对这个问题有用的信息”，现在依然有效，而且依然非常有价值。这样一来，你的内容就更有可能出现在这些体验里。
我唯一想给的建议是，想一想人们到底在用 AI 做什么。我前面说过，这是一个扩张性的时刻。看起来人们现在问的问题更多了，尤其是建议类、how-to 类，或者更复杂的需求，而不只是很简单的事情。所以如果我是创作者，我会去想：别人会拿 AI 来完成什么？那我怎样才能让我的内容，最适合这种需求？我觉得这是个非常具体、也很实用的思路。
你说到搜索的方式很有意思。你用的时候，它好像会搜一千个网页之类的。这和其他热门聊天机器人是不是核心机制就不一样？因为别的产品不会在你提问时去搜一堆网站？

Robby Stein对，这是我们为自家 AI 单独做的一套设计。它当然也有参数记忆、思考、推理这些模型本来就有的能力，但我们在专门面向信息任务做设计时，想把它做成信息需求里最强的工具，这本来就是 Google 最擅长的。那它怎么找信息？怎么判断信息对不对？怎么检查自己的工作？这些都被我们直接做进了模型里。所以它对 Google 有一种独特的接入方式。毕竟它本身就是 Google Search 的一部分，因此会利用 Google Search 的信号，从垃圾内容、可能是 spam 的内容，到最权威、最有帮助的信息，都会纳入判断。我们会链接到那份信息，还会解释“根据这个网站来看，请去看看这条信息”，然后你大概率会自己去验证。这就是我们当初设计它的方式。

Robby Stein我觉得最近这一两周最明显的一点，就是你已经能很直观地感受到，和 AI 沟通、引导它的方式，正变得越来越像在和人交流。几个月前，你还得花很多功夫才能让 AI 做你想让它做的事。你得念咒一样地写提示词，而且必须非常具体。大家还会想各种小技巧，比如“嘿，假装你是个教练，然后按这个方式做事”，你得很用力地推它。更偏技术一点的话，你还得做后训练，得把基础模型拿过来，喂数据、训练它，真的更新权重，才能让它做更复杂的事。

比如你会告诉它：“这是一个 API 的文档。如果你遇到问题，就去 ping 这个 API。这是数据。” 你像在跟一个工程师说话，但它其实根本不知道该怎么处理，或者即使有点概念，也做不太出来。
但现在越来越多事情，你只要用语言说清楚就行。几乎就像写一份工作说明：“我是一个新创业公司。这里是我们的内部数据。这里是相关 API。这里是 schema 和 URL。这里是使用时机。顺便说一下，如果你遇到这种问题，一定要确保答对。” 这些东西会在模型里起到很大作用。
模型现在已经被编码成可以判断：“好，这类问题我需要多花一点推理预算。”
或者：“我需要用工具或代码，去执行代码连接到这个 API。” 这是一件相对新的事。所以我觉得这会打开很多可能性，让更多人能接触到这些模型、做出很厉害的东西，因为你甚至不需要做太多。想得到最复杂的效果，越来越不需要那种重度的微调了。

Lenny Rachitsky这让我想到我最近请过的一位嘉宾，Nesrine Changuel。她以前是 Google 的 PM，做过 Google Meet，也做过让产品更有“愉悦感”的 PM。她说过，Google Meet 之所以做得那么好、现在甚至有点在“干掉 Zoom”，是因为他们比较的对象不是别的视频会议产品，而是“像一次真人会议的体验”。他们要做的是让它尽可能接近人类开会的感觉，而不是只追求一个最强的视频会议工具。你刚才说的其实很像：AI 的目标差不多就是让人感觉你在跟一个人说话。

Robby Stein没错。

Lenny Rachitsky这可能挺显而易见的，但确实值得好好想一想。好，我先跳出来，聊聊你整个职业生涯里学到的更广泛的经验。你做过很多非常成功的产品，这些我在开场里也都提到了。

Robby Stein也有不少在另一边的作品，我们整个产品组合还挺完整的。

Lenny Rachitsky好，完美，那我们就聊聊这些。刚开始准备这期节目时我问过你，希望这次对话里最想传达的一件事是什么，什么最能帮助产品人做出更成功的产品。你用了一个说法，叫“具身化的持续改进”。你能讲讲这是什么意思吗？为什么这件事这么重要？

Robby Stein当然。我觉得你得把两件事真正活出来。第一是 relentless，也就是那种完全不松劲、持续往前推的劲头，而且这种劲头必须始终指向正向产出。第二是 make things better，就是永远要把事情做得更好。你不能满足现状。

这其实来自一件有点好笑的小事。当时我在 Instagram，正在开一次很大的全员会，那算是我参加的前几次之一。会上有个破冰问题：用一个词形容你自己。
我在后台赶紧给我太太发消息：“就一个词，第一时间想到什么？”
她回我：“dissatisfied（不满足、总觉得不够好）。”
我当时在后台都笑出来了。说实话，第一反应还有点受伤，因为我心想：“就不能是 loving、caring 之类好听点的吗？” 然后我又看到她正在输入。
她又补了一段很认真的解释，大意是：这不是说你一直不开心，而是你真心想让世界变得更好。你有一种很深的驱动力。你对世界给你的现状有一种不满足感，而这种不满足会推动你去改善它。
后来我想了很久。直到我们做了很多产品，有些没做成，有些后来特别成功，被很多人用到，才更明显地意识到：成功的那些产品背后，往往都有一种“我们再多做两步，它就会更好”的精神。当然，很多时候也和产品所处的条件、一些运气有关。但那些做得好的东西，最后都靠这种持续叠加的努力，慢慢跨过拐点，变成真正有用的产品。你会成为自己作品最严苛的批评者，也是房间里最不满足的人。
我觉得这非常重要。Tony Fadell 十年前在 TED 上讲过一个很棒的故事，你可以去搜一下，我记得标题大概是 Think Younger。他讲的是，随着我们长大，成年人会怎样习惯和容忍这个世界给我们的一切。我有两个小孩，这件事我经常会想到。我们会对很多东西习以为常，觉得“啊，这破事就这样吧”，耸耸肩就过去了。
但如果你不这样，你会问：“为什么？这明明很烂，为什么我要忍？怎么才能让它更好？” 他讲了一个去超市买水果的故事，讲了差不多十分钟，细到一个像李子或桃子的水果上为什么会有个贴纸，谁把贴纸贴上去的。
等你回到家，准备把水果拿出来吃，手指一按贴纸，纸会把果肉戳破。他描述得特别细：果肉被刺破了，水果开始渗汁，然后你把贴纸一弹，贴纸飞进了垃圾桶，或者没飞进去，你还得弯腰去捡，再把它扔回去。
我当时就在想，这真是在具身化地表达一种思维方式：为什么这里会有这个东西？这件事能不能做得更好？我觉得最好的产品人、这个领域里最好的思考者，基本都是这么想的。

Lenny Rachitsky我猜你在自己做过的很多产品里，都能举出这种例子。有没有哪个例子最能体现这种思路，而且最后真的带来了很大的结果？

Robby Stein老实说，一个很大的例子就是做 AI Mode。我们看到 AI Overviews 里，用户会问越来越难的问题，但很多问题我们答不上来，或者 AI Overviews 干脆不出现。所以我们一群人坐下来就想：为什么不能把这件事做到底？

不能老是说“这个不用解决”“这个还不是最该做的事”。
因为我们真的看到有人会在查询后面直接加上“AI”两个字，就是想让 AI 来替他们做这件事。看到这个我们都觉得，这太离谱了，必须在这儿做点什么。
这就是我们做这件事的一个大动力：我们真的是在替用户感到不爽。我们每天都在让用户失望，没有真正帮他们把问题理解清楚，所以我们干脆直接去做一个完整的东西。顺带说一句，这件事很难，整个系统都要重新搭。但它又实在太明显了，明显到我们必须这么做。

Lenny Rachitsky人其实可以分成两类。假设一类人的逻辑就是“把东西做得更好，做出很棒的体验，你就会成功”；另一类人会说“拉指标、冲目标、打 KPI”。我知道你不是在说只要埋头做东西、拼命改进就行。你怎么理解这中间的重叠？也就是，既要让东西更好，又要有清晰的战略和方向，你怎么想？

Robby Stein我不觉得这两者是非此即彼。它们必须交叉在一起。因为我理解产品的方式，通常都是从一个问题开始，或者反过来，是从一个愿景开始，但它们本质上是连着的。大多数伟大的公司、伟大的产品，都是从一个问题出发的，但从问题里会长出一个“更好的办法”。如果不是现在这种糟糕的东西，或者这种我们一直在忍受的生活方式，而是换一种做法呢？于是有人会说：“我们能不能做点别的？”

所以它来自这种不满足感和“还能更好”的意识。但接下来你还是得去构建产品，最后你需要有仪表盘，知道自己是不是走在正确轨道上。
这时候就要看规模问题了。一个产品一开始很小、很成熟、还是会继续扩张？我觉得大多数公司当然都有做大的愿望，但一开始不能想着做大。每个产品都得经历那个过程，没有哪个产品一上来就是大的。即使那些很快做大的产品，它们起步也一定是很小的，内部也是从小团队、小范围开始的。所以你得对指标非常敏感，才能知道自己是不是在做对的事。

Lenny Rachitsky这其实就是我想听到的：一个关于怎么取舍、怎么决定该做什么的高手课。

### 中文译文

Robby Stein另一面则是，当你在运营一个很大的产品时，指标就得成为你的指南。如果比如我们核心指标这周掉了 5%，那就要问，怎么回事？

这时你要贴着根因分析往下看：是某个地区的问题？某个设备的问题？某个人群的问题？某个使用场景的问题？问题到底出在哪？
等你把问题搞清楚，那个“持续改进”的逻辑又回来了：好，我现在要修这个问题。那这个病该怎么治？然后你又回到增长轨道上。所以你需要的，是一直知道自己在操作哪个系统，以及你手上的仪表盘是什么。我像飞行员一样，得靠这些仪表知道飞机有没有正常飞，但它不会直接告诉你该怎么飞，你得自己判断怎么把它做得更好。我只能帮你指个大概方向。

Lenny Rachitsky我很喜欢你刚才这段，简直是在给人上“怎么优先级排序、怎么选事情做”的大师课。我想稍微岔开一下。说到那些做得特别好、最后变得很大的产品，Stories 就是其中一个。你当年在 Instagram 推出 Stories，这在当时是个很有名的产品发布，也很有争议，因为它基本上就是把 Snapchat 做得很好的东西拿来，然后说“好，我们把它带进 Instagram”。这对 Snapchat 来说当然不太友好。现在都过去这么久了，我特别想听听你回头看那段时间时的想法，当时你们怎么想、怎么讨论、最后怎么决定做这件事，还有你现在回头看会想些什么。

Robby Stein那次发布里有几个很重要的教训。后来我们还做了 Reels、DM 的一堆更新，还有 feed 的排序之类的东西。那是我在 Instagram 的那几年，大概 2016 到 2021 左右，产品迭代非常密集，很多新东西都在那段时间做出来了。这里面一个很重要的教训，尤其在 Stories 上，就是你得真正理解一个人为什么用你的产品，也要知道什么时候这事已经变成了生死问题，因为世界上可能已经有了一个更好的格式，或者一种更好的做事方式。你得弄清楚这对你意味着什么，因为好东西不一定都得由你发明。但很多东西最终会变成一种格式，而你可以把它变成自己的东西。你得从外面的世界、从正在发生的变化里学习，才能一直给用户最好的东西。

所以在 Stories 上，我们看 Instagram 的核心是什么？本质上就是分享生活、和别人建立连接。如果有一种方式能把这个动作做得压力更小，因为它没有点赞、是更短暂的形式，而且全屏体验在移动端也特别适合，那它就是个很好的格式。Snapchat 发明了它，这点值得尊敬。我们并没有觉得那意味着“那我们就去做 Instagram 版的照片锁屏”。其实一开始也有一些早期方案，想把 Instagram 的主 feed 做成短暂内容。但你如果试图把一个已经深深刻在人们脑海里的核心产品，硬拗成另一种形态，通常会搞砸。所以我们知道必须做一个新东西，而且它得天然贴合这个产品的核心。
问题只剩下：怎么把它做成我们自己的样子？怎么继续在这个基础上发展？于是我们做了一堆让它“像 Instagram”的设计。比如不同的创作工具，还有霓虹画笔、很多大家很喜欢的高级滤镜。我们也回到前面那个“不满足”的思路去看问题。很多人会想用手机主相机拍一张照片，再上传到 Instagram，因为他们想保存下来，想要高质量、高分辨率，因为那是回忆。可 Snapchat 当时不允许上传照片，你必须用它的 Snap 相机。所以我们做了很多这样的决定：那为什么不让人直接上传照片呢？这正是“这事很烦”的典型。
还有一个例子是，以前你在看 Story 的时候不能暂停。它会一条接一条自动播放，因为它本来就是短暂的东西，你是想制造一种安全感。但为什么不能停一下？它跑得太快了。于是我们加了暂停。这个功能很小，但现在你只要把手指按下去，Story 就会停住。后来我们把这些小改动都做了进去，Stories 才真正有了 Instagram 的感觉。它不是一个生硬拼接的别的产品。最后它真的非常成功，成功到团队里有人说，当时自己一开始没意识到，但后来回头看，感觉像是页面顶部少了那个 Story 的圆点，补上之后整个产品在某种奇怪的意义上才完整了。这是我觉得很重要的一个教训。

Lenny RachitskyInstagram 当时因为这件事被很多创始人骂得很惨，大家都说：“你们这就是抄了这个点子，这不对。”

你们内部是怎么处理这种声音的？是不是就想：“我们得做这个，我们得专注股东回报，得把这事做大”，然后事情就是这么运转的？

Robby Stein我觉得更准确地说，我们当时更关注的是用户，以及那些喜欢 Instagram 的人。我们在做的是：不给他们一个很方便的方式去发一张照片，然后让内容消失。说到底，我们就是想补上这个格式。事实上，格式本身就是会被用户接受的。你看 feed 也是这样，我们当时也提过这件事。Facebook 可能发明了现代信息流，但每个产品都会有自己的 feed。LinkedIn 有 feed，DoorDash 也有 feed。

这些东西很快就会变成核心原语和格式。如果你不为自己的使用场景做出最好的产品，说到底就是在剥夺用户获得更好产品的机会。Instagram 的使用方式本来就和别的产品不一样。后来你会发现，WhatsApp、Messenger 和很多其他社交产品也都是这样，它们的使用方式其实都不同，这很有意思。

Lenny Rachitsky我还想聊一个点：你进入的两个产品，Instagram 和 Google，本来就已经做得很好了。在 Instagram 上，你做出了变革性的增长和改进。Google 这边，现在你正在推动的是增长和改进正在进行中。不是很多人有机会去接手一个已经存在的产品，然后把它做得明显更大。很多人其实都想这么做：手上有个老产品，怎么让它增长、怎么让它更成功？你有没有关于“接手一个现有产品，找出大机会，然后把增长做起来”的经验？这其实是很多人都想知道的。

Robby Stein这里面有几个经验。先说第一条：一定要保持谦逊，因为能做这种对很多人都有影响的产品，本身已经非常难得。我把产品看得像高尔夫，永远差一杆就可能打偏。你一觉得自己很厉害了，其实你什么都还不懂。世界变化很快，你必须一直做用户的仆人，向外面的用户学习。我的第一步，永远都是先搞清楚：人们为什么在用这个产品？哪里在增长？

通常即使是一个大产品、一个成熟而复杂的系统，也会有某一部分在增长，某一部分已经成熟，某一部分可能在下滑，或者不怎么涨了。Instagram 很明显，过去这些年里，分享方式从公开的大广播帖子和 feed，转向了 Stories 这种更轻量的形式，还有 DM 这种私密分享。你必须观察这种变化，因为每个月、每一年，世界都在变，人的需求也在变。第一步是先理解：用户到底想从这个产品里得到什么？它的真正本质是什么？
我很受 jobs to be done 这个框架影响，也很喜欢 Clayton Christensen 那本《Competing Against Luck》。它特别能帮助你成为一个“因果”的学生。为什么有人会用你的产品？他到底在做什么？他想完成什么任务？
这通常会把你带向下一阶段更大的想法，也会让你不再执着于“必须用现在这些工具去解决问题”。拿 Instagram 来说，原来的思路可能只是“得让一张方形照片发挥更多作用”，这就是渐进式改进。但像 Google 这样的例子，核心搜索体验里其实有某些很具体、很关键的地方需要变化，哪怕只是很细微的调整。你得先回到第一性原理去想：这件事真正的大方向是什么？用户是在问一个特别难的问题，那最好的回答方式是什么？
接着你会发现，这些新东西很像一个新格式。在很多方面，Google 的 AI 版本、Stories、Reels 都是一样的：它们都是世界里出现的新格式，而人们会期待它们、也想要更多。
一旦你把它加进去，它就不是替代，而是互补。Stories 没有替代 Instagram，而是把 Instagram 扩展开了。AI 也是一样。你接着就会想，怎么把这个东西带进我自己的世界？对于一个已经很成熟的大产品来说，最好的方式，是把它做成核心体验的一部分，但同时要清楚地把它定义成一个有自己属性的东西，因为人是按空间去理解产品的。你如果有个 feed，里面一个格子是照片，用户就会预期那个格子做点什么。如果你把其中一个格子做成一个小钟，第二天就消失，或者它不能点赞，或者它和 feed 的其他部分都不一样，用户会非常困惑。
所以你得很谨慎地加产品，但它必须是连贯的，同时又是不同的。Stories 有类似的美学，也能用相机胶卷，能在 DM 里分享，和系统是连着的，但它有一个不同的原语。Google AI 也是一样，它是一个全页体验，你现在可以把它弹出来，还能和它继续对话。用户对这些场景会有一套预期，你得顺着这个预期去做。然后你会一直学习，去找怎样才能把这些新产品最好地融进你的世界里。

Lenny Rachitsky这其实就是我想听到的：一个关于怎么取舍、怎么决定该做什么的高手课。

Robby Stein另一面则是，当你在运营一个很大的产品时，指标就得成为你的指南。如果比如我们核心指标这周掉了 5%，那就要问，怎么回事？

这时你要贴着根因分析往下看：是某个地区的问题？某个设备的问题？某个人群的问题？某个使用场景的问题？问题到底出在哪？
等你把问题搞清楚，那个“持续改进”的逻辑又回来了：好，我现在要修这个问题。那这个病该怎么治？然后你又回到增长轨道上。所以你需要的，是一直知道自己在操作哪个系统，以及你手上的仪表盘是什么。我像飞行员一样，得靠这些仪表知道飞机有没有正常飞，但它不会直接告诉你该怎么飞，你得自己判断怎么把它做得更好。我只能帮你指个大概方向。

Lenny Rachitsky我很喜欢你刚才这段，简直是在给人上“怎么优先级排序、怎么选事情做”的大师课。我想稍微岔开一下。说到那些做得特别好、最后变得很大的产品，Stories 就是其中一个。你当年在 Instagram 推出 Stories，这在当时是个很有名的产品发布，也很有争议，因为它基本上就是把 Snapchat 做得很好的东西拿来，然后说“好，我们把它带进 Instagram”。这对 Snapchat 来说当然不太友好。现在都过去这么久了，我特别想听听你回头看那段时间时的想法，当时你们怎么想、怎么讨论、最后怎么决定做这件事，还有你现在回头看会想些什么。

Robby Stein那次发布里有几个很重要的教训。后来我们还做了 Reels、DM 的一堆更新，还有 feed 的排序之类的东西。那是我在 Instagram 的那几年，大概 2016 到 2021 左右，产品迭代非常密集，很多新东西都在那段时间做出来了。这里面一个很重要的教训，尤其在 Stories 上，就是你得真正理解一个人为什么用你的产品，也要知道什么时候这事已经变成了生死问题，因为世界上可能已经有了一个更好的格式，或者一种更好的做事方式。你得弄清楚这对你意味着什么，因为好东西不一定都得由你发明。但很多东西最终会变成一种格式，而你可以把它变成自己的东西。你得从外面的世界、从正在发生的变化里学习，才能一直给用户最好的东西。

所以在 Stories 上，我们看 Instagram 的核心是什么？本质上就是分享生活、和别人建立连接。如果有一种方式能把这个动作做得压力更小，因为它没有点赞、是更短暂的形式，而且全屏体验在移动端也特别适合，那它就是个很好的格式。Snapchat 发明了它，这点值得尊敬。我们并没有觉得那意味着“那我们就去做 Instagram 版的照片锁屏”。其实一开始也有一些早期方案，想把 Instagram 的主 feed 做成短暂内容。但你如果试图把一个已经深深刻在人们脑海里的核心产品，硬拗成另一种形态，通常会搞砸。所以我们知道必须做一个新东西，而且它得天然贴合这个产品的核心。
问题只剩下：怎么把它做成我们自己的样子？怎么继续在这个基础上发展？于是我们做了一堆让它“像 Instagram”的设计。比如不同的创作工具，还有霓虹画笔、很多大家很喜欢的高级滤镜。我们也回到前面那个“不满足”的思路去看问题。很多人会想用手机主相机拍一张照片，再上传到 Instagram，因为他们想保存下来，想要高质量、高分辨率，因为那是回忆。可 Snapchat 当时不允许上传照片，你必须用它的 Snap 相机。所以我们做了很多这样的决定：那为什么不让人直接上传照片呢？这正是“这事很烦”的典型。
还有一个例子是，以前你在看 Story 的时候不能暂停。它会一条接一条自动播放，因为它本来就是短暂的东西，你是想制造一种安全感。但为什么不能停一下？它跑得太快了。于是我们加了暂停。这个功能很小，但现在你只要把手指按下去，Story 就会停住。后来我们把这些小改动都做了进去，Stories 才真正有了 Instagram 的感觉。它不是一个生硬拼接的别的产品。最后它真的非常成功，成功到团队里有人说，当时自己一开始没意识到，但后来回头看，感觉像是页面顶部少了那个 Story 的圆点，补上之后整个产品在某种奇怪的意义上才完整了。这是我觉得很重要的一个教训。

Lenny RachitskyInstagram 当时因为这件事被很多创始人骂得很惨，大家都说：“你们这就是抄了这个点子，这不对。”

你们内部是怎么处理这种声音的？是不是就想：“我们得做这个，我们得专注股东回报，得把这事做大”，然后事情就是这么运转的？

Robby Stein我觉得更准确地说，我们当时更关注的是用户，以及那些喜欢 Instagram 的人。我们在做的是：不给他们一个很方便的方式去发一张照片，然后让内容消失。说到底，我们就是想补上这个格式。事实上，格式本身就是会被用户接受的。你看 feed 也是这样，我们当时也提过这件事。Facebook 可能发明了现代信息流，但每个产品都会有自己的 feed。LinkedIn 有 feed，DoorDash 也有 feed。

这些东西很快就会变成核心原语和格式。如果你不为自己的使用场景做出最好的产品，说到底就是在剥夺用户获得更好产品的机会。Instagram 的使用方式本来就和别的产品不一样。后来你会发现，WhatsApp、Messenger 和很多其他社交产品也都是这样，它们的使用方式其实都不同，这很有意思。

Lenny Rachitsky我还想聊一个点：你进入的两个产品，Instagram 和 Google，本来就已经做得很好了。在 Instagram 上，你做出了变革性的增长和改进。Google 这边，现在你正在推动的是增长和改进正在进行中。不是很多人有机会去接手一个已经存在的产品，然后把它做得明显更大。很多人其实都想这么做：手上有个老产品，怎么让它增长、怎么让它更成功？你有没有关于“接手一个现有产品，找出大机会，然后把增长做起来”的经验？这其实是很多人都想知道的。

Robby Stein这里面有几个经验。先说第一条：一定要保持谦逊，因为能做这种对很多人都有影响的产品，本身已经非常难得。我把产品看得像高尔夫，永远差一杆就可能打偏。你一觉得自己很厉害了，其实你什么都还不懂。世界变化很快，你必须一直做用户的仆人，向外面的用户学习。我的第一步，永远都是先搞清楚：人们为什么在用这个产品？哪里在增长？

通常即使是一个大产品、一个成熟而复杂的系统，也会有某一部分在增长，某一部分已经成熟，某一部分可能在下滑，或者不怎么涨了。Instagram 很明显，过去这些年里，分享方式从公开的大广播帖子和 feed，转向了 Stories 这种更轻量的形式，还有 DM 这种私密分享。你必须观察这种变化，因为每个月、每一年，世界都在变，人的需求也在变。第一步是先理解：用户到底想从这个产品里得到什么？它的真正本质是什么？
我很受 jobs to be done 这个框架影响，也很喜欢 Clayton Christensen 那本《Competing Against Luck》。它特别能帮助你成为一个“因果”的学生。为什么有人会用你的产品？他到底在做什么？他想完成什么任务？
这通常会把你带向下一阶段更大的想法，也会让你不再执着于“必须用现在这些工具去解决问题”。拿 Instagram 来说，原来的思路可能只是“得让一张方形照片发挥更多作用”，这就是渐进式改进。但像 Google 这样的例子，核心搜索体验里其实有某些很具体、很关键的地方需要变化，哪怕只是很细微的调整。你得先回到第一性原理去想：这件事真正的大方向是什么？用户是在问一个特别难的问题，那最好的回答方式是什么？
接着你会发现，这些新东西很像一个新格式。在很多方面，Google 的 AI 版本、Stories、Reels 都是一样的：它们都是世界里出现的新格式，而人们会期待它们、也想要更多。
一旦你把它加进去，它就不是替代，而是互补。Stories 没有替代 Instagram，而是把 Instagram 扩展开了。AI 也是一样。你接着就会想，怎么把这个东西带进我自己的世界？对于一个已经很成熟的大产品来说，最好的方式，是把它做成核心体验的一部分，但同时要清楚地把它定义成一个有自己属性的东西，因为人是按空间去理解产品的。你如果有个 feed，里面一个格子是照片，用户就会预期那个格子做点什么。如果你把其中一个格子做成一个小钟，第二天就消失，或者它不能点赞，或者它和 feed 的其他部分都不一样，用户会非常困惑。
所以你得很谨慎地加产品，但它必须是连贯的，同时又是不同的。Stories 有类似的美学，也能用相机胶卷，能在 DM 里分享，和系统是连着的，但它有一个不同的原语。Google AI 也是一样，它是一个全页体验，你现在可以把它弹出来，还能和它继续对话。用户对这些场景会有一套预期，你得顺着这个预期去做。然后你会一直学习，去找怎样才能把这些新产品最好地融进你的世界里。

你不能只是把一个已经跑通的东西直接塞进来，然后就指望它在你的世界里也一样好用。你必须让它适配你的用户、你的预期，以及大家在你这个产品里真正想完成的事。我觉得大家最容易犯的一个错，就是默认“这个东西在别的系统里跑得好，在我这里也一定行”。但别人的系统面对的是完全不同的人群，也对应着完全不同的产品预期。你得尊重这件事，然后问自己：我能从它身上学到什么？再把这些东西带回到自己的产品里。要是我去总结一下我这些年反复看到的方法，大概就是这样，很多产品也是这么一步步长出来的。

Lenny Rachitsky我很喜欢这个话题。它让我想到大家总是在找那个平衡点：一边是优化手头已有的东西，一边是押一个大注。你有很多例子，都是押了一个全新的大注，而且结果特别好。你有没有什么经验法则，来决定团队怎么分配？比如现在 Google 体验已经很棒了，资源应该有多少放在继续优化它，多少放在尝试完全不同的新东西上？

Robby Stein这件事上，我反而觉得更分析化、更系统性的思考很有帮助，因为你总得想办法在世界里创造价值，最好还能把它量化出来。所以如果你在看增长曲线，想理解一个产品到底是不是越来越多人在用，那就要知道：产品年轻时会增长，后来会逐渐成熟。你可以把产品套件、不同功能拆开来看，方法都一样。有些功能长得很快，有些没那么快。到了某个点，边际回报就开始递减了。你会发现就算往一个项目里再塞 50 个人，也不一定能明显推动结果。这里面一部分是团队自己要从下往上认真判断这笔投入的预期收益，知道什么时候已经快接近零，或者已经接近边际收益递减。

而一旦到了这个时候，通常就说明某种根本性的东西在变。可能是用户预期在变，可能是外部市场已经饱和，也可能是别的什么正在发生，你就得调整了。这时候就要去找下一个增长驱动，或者一组新的增长驱动。你就得更回到第一性原理，去更大胆地试新的东西。等你碰到一个新东西，形成一个新的小增长引擎，然后你再往上加人，再做优化，因为每一次改动可能就是 10% 的提升、20% 的提升、4% 的提升。
这时候它显然还有很多上升空间，还是能继续给人带来价值，你也能从数据里看出来。所以我前面说的那些仪表盘和监控信号，就会变成你判断自己决策是否正确的指南。否则，如果你不知道自己要去哪，也没有一个更量化的目标，就很难判断你现在做的事到底有没有影响到任何人。你可能会觉得“我把产品做得更好了”，但有人在用吗？有人在乎吗？还是我们只是在自我表扬？最后你还是得真正影响到人，这才是最重要的。

Lenny Rachitsky所以本质上，你是在给每个产品追踪 S 曲线，判断它是不是已经进入平台期，以及是不是该把重注投到别的地方去了。

Robby Stein对。

Lenny Rachitsky这期节目由 Orkes 赞助。Orkes 是开源 Conductor 背后的公司，它提供的是一个编排平台，驱动现代企业应用和 agentic workflow。传统自动化工具已经跟不上节奏了。割裂的低代码平台、过时的流程管理、彼此 disconnected 的 API 工具，在今天这个事件驱动、AI 驱动的 agentic 世界里都不够用了。Orkes 正是在解决这个问题。用了 Orkes Conductor，你就能得到一个 agentic orchestration layer，把人、AI agents、API、微服务和数据管道实时连起来，而且能在企业级规模下运行。可视化加代码优先的开发方式，内建合规、可观测性和高可靠性，让工作流能随着需求动态演化。它不只是自动化任务，而是在编排自主 agent 和复杂工作流，让结果更聪明、更快落地。不管你是要现代化旧系统，还是扩展下一代 AI 应用，Orkes 都能加速你从想法到生产的过程。去 orkes.io/lenny 了解更多并开始构建吧。

也许我们可以聊聊 AI Mode 的演进历程，聊聊它是怎么出现的，以及你们后来是怎么一步一步把它推成 Google 搜索体验里这么重要的一部分的。它最早是什么时候开始的？你们怎么决定要押这件事？后面又是怎么一步步推广开来的？

Robby Stein我觉得最早应该是从 AI Overviews 开始的，那是我们第一次把生成式 AI 带进搜索。在那个阶段，我们注意到人们会问这些问题，而且很多人已经开始把自然语言问题直接输进搜索。所以我们就开始想：怎么才能给他们有用的上下文和链接，让他们能继续往下挖，同时做出一个真正适合 Google 的 AI？那就是我们第一版可以帮人处理这类需求的模型。后来我们在这个基础上继续往前做，又观察到用户想要更多、想要直接访问，还想继续追问。于是就需要一个新的形态。把这些东西都塞进核心搜索体验里会非常难，所以我们就组了一个很小的团队，几个技术负责人、几个设计师，先做个原型，看看如果有一个几乎空白的页面，能不能像新文档一样打开，只放一个光标，让人直接提问。

如果有一个新页面，你可以随便问它任何问题，直接接入原本给搜索顶部结果供能的 AI。但我们在把它做得更强，正如前面说的：它可以主动帮你搜索，它有 reasoning 能力，它有多轮上下文，所以如果你和它对话，它能记住前文。这些是它比较独特的部分。于是我们想快速试试看会发生什么。最开始也就是五到十个人的小团队。

Lenny Rachitsky这个团队大概是什么时候组起来的？

Robby Stein大概就是过去这一年，基本上是去年夏天到秋天这段时间。

Lenny Rachitsky哇，也就是大概一年前。

Robby Stein对，差不多一年前，可能就是从那时开始的。我们一直在死磕，然后看到一个小版本冒出来，虽然还不够好，但已经有些闪光的时刻了。那种感觉有点像打高尔夫，你打出一杆完美击球时会想：“天啊，原来一切都对了。” 我当时问过它一个问题，记不清具体是什么了，反正是在和我女儿一起做某件事、在规划一次活动，它就找到了特别有用的公园信息，还附上了网站链接，能去核对很多东西。里面还有 Google Maps 的信息，告诉你那里能不能走过去。类似这种早期例子，一下子就把我惊到了：它到底能找到多少东西、能帮上多少忙。

这给了我们足够的信心，觉得应该继续往前走。当然，这个决策背后有很多人参与，组织里也有很多领导支持。但本质上还是一个很小的工作团队，先自己做出点东西，再自己亲手感受到它的价值，这种方式很创业。等你真正看到它的效果时，你就会问：“那它的好版本应该是什么样？什么样才真的能跑起来？” 这就给了你希望。所以我们后来把它真正做出来，先做成了 Labs 版本。

Lenny Rachitsky所以第一个大里程碑就是确认它真的能跑起来。那种体验是非常定性的，就是“哇，这里面真的有魔法”。

Robby Stein对，确实能跑。然后我们又把它拿给了测试用户，严格地说是在 Labs 之前就先给了一个 trusted tester 小组，大概 500 个外部用户。我们会和他们保持联系，其中一些还是朋友和家人。我们尽量把它做得更像创业公司一点，因为我们觉得你必须让人来测试，才能听到真话，也才能知道它哪儿烂，因为它大概率就是会烂的。

然后他们会不断给你发消息。我有个朋友一边喜欢它，一边又因为很多正当理由讨厌它，就会一直给我发截图：“这个坏了，这个坏了，这完全不合理。”
这样持续了一阵子，直到我们觉得它已经开始像样了，测试用户也喜欢，反馈也不错，然后我们把它推进到 Labs 阶段，任何人都能打开它，再用真实查询数据继续把它做得更好。我们能看到大家到底拿它做什么，而且是更大规模地看，所以可以据此调优。然后我们就把它面向所有人推出了，至少先是在美国。之后就一直在把它扩展到更多国家和语言，让更多人能用上。

Lenny Rachitsky很难想象 Google 竟然在大概一年的时间里，从一个想法走到了把搜索体验改成 AI 驱动的重大变化。我觉得这不是大家对 Google 的想象，而且感觉你们做事方式真的变了。到底是什么让这件事能推进得这么快？变了什么？只是上面喊“赶紧把事干成”吗，还是还有别的东西？

Robby Stein我觉得组织变化这件事挺有意思的。只要你感觉到现在就是一个关键时点，必须把东西交到用户手上，而 Google 又有些问题暂时答不上来、帮不了人，但技术已经能解决这些问题，那就会自然产生一种紧迫感。再加上现在外面大家都在做很多东西，市场很疯狂，产品一直在飞快上线，所以这是一个既紧张又健康、很适合冲刺的阶段。我觉得很兴奋的一点，是我们真的有机会抓住这个窗口。因为我相信，不只是我，很多人也都相信，接下来这一两年的产品形态，会决定未来很多年人们到底怎么用下一波产品。所以至少对我来说，我会觉得自己有义务给用户一个最好的 Google 版本，一个由 AI 驱动、能把 Google 对世界的全部知识都带给大家、并且让人更容易获取信息的版本。这种责任感正是很多兴奋感的来源。

### 中文译文

是的，这一点非常重要。人们正在形成新的习惯，很多人现在已经完全依赖 ChatGPT 了，而且这个变化发生得太快了。谷歌当然会担心：糟了，大家是不是正在把习惯从搜 Google 换成搜 ChatGPT？而现在 Gemini 又冲到了第一名。我刚才还看了下排名，前 15 个 App 里 Google 好像占了 5 个，也就是三分之一。这个表现太夸张了，真的很猛。那当大家拿 AI Mode 去和 ChatGPT、Claude，甚至 Perplexity 比的时候，你会怎么定义 AI Mode 的位置？它是想正面竞争，还是你会说“不，它其实完全不一样，它就是干这个的”？

Robby Stein对，AI Mode 的作用，就是让你用搜索去问任何你想问的问题。它是专门为信息场景设计和打造的。所以它真正应该做的，是给那些人们来 Google 想解决的事情提供极其有用的答案。比如你在规划一次旅行、想买东西、或者在做研究项目里的一个问题，它都需要信息，这正是它的重点。它不像有些产品那样更偏创意；虽然它也能做一些创意类的事，这些功能也挺好，能帮上忙。你当然可以像用任何核心 AI 产品一样，让它帮你改写一段话，它会做。但我们不那么聚焦于创意、生产力，或者“上传个表格给我画图”这种事情，我们不是这个方向。

我们真正关注的是人们用 Google 来做什么，然后为这些场景做一个 AI。这样你来 Google 问任何问题，都能很省力地拿到信息、上下文和链接，方便你继续验证、深入、再去看最终用户真正想看的权威来源。而且我们也确实从用户那里听到了这些需求。所以这些就构成了它和普通聊天机器人的不同特征。你可能也会像和聊天机器人那样，顺手问一句“你今天怎么样”，我们也有一些这种感觉，用户也会这么用一点点；但绝大多数时候，人们来这里是为了获取信息。他们是想学点东西，而我们的产品就是围绕这个目标做的。

Lenny Rachitsky明白了。所以 AI Mode 不是你的心理治疗师。我们再往外拉一点，回看你做过的这么多产品、去过的这些地方，如果让你挑两三个最核心的产品原则或者理念，正是这些东西帮助你做出了这么多成功产品，你会选什么？你脑子里最先冒出来的是啥？

Robby Stein我通常会想到三件事。要是让我写一本关于怎么做出好产品的书，大概会有三章。其实可能不止三章，但先说这三章。

Lenny Rachitsky我很喜欢这点。我喜欢这本书会很短，这才是理想的书。

Robby Stein我已经想这三个方向很久了，而且它们一直都稳定地排在前面。第一件事是要深刻理解人。我前面其实已经讲过一点 jobs to be done，还有 Clayton Christensen 的《Competing Against Luck》，我很喜欢那本书。它特别能帮你理解：为什么一个人最终会“雇佣”一个产品。别把用户看成只是“在使用你的产品”，而是把他们看成在雇你替他们完成某件事。

There’s that famous quote, 其实是 Theodore Levitt 说过的，大家不是想要一个四分之一英寸的钻头，他们想要的是一个四分之一英寸的洞。重点是：到底是人想完成什么任务？你得非常深入地理解这一点，然后你才能做出真正好的产品。顺带说一句，你回头去看，为什么有人没有继续用你的产品，这同样重要。
这就会把你带到一套很讲究因果的访谈方法里。Christensen 其实讲得很多，他把那种访谈叫作“审问”，就是你会问用户：“你为什么用我的产品？你当时在哪里？在床上？在上班？你在做什么？”
“哦，我早上在和我太太说话。”
“那是怎么突然聊到这个的？”
“嗯，我想我当时在看报纸。”
“那为什么呢？”
然后你就会在用户第一次决定使用你的产品的那个瞬间得到一个顿悟。Christensen 把它叫作 big hire，也就是“大雇佣”。你拿到的这些信息往往是最关键的，因为这就是促使某人开始用你的产品的原因。如果你能研究清楚这一点，你就会比只会做“听起来很酷”的东西走得远得多。所以第一章就是：深刻理解人。
第二件事是分析上的严谨，以及理解问题本身。你必须理解你的问题。这跟我们前面说的根因分析有点像：指标掉了，为什么？如果有人没在用你的产品，为什么？你得能把问题拆得足够细，找到真正的根因。比如，他们一直用到了最后一步然后放弃了，那你就要看看到底发生了什么。我们其实在 Instagram 的 Close Friends 里就学到过一件事：这个功能在刚上线时就几乎彻底失败了。后来我们看数据发现，很多市场里因为翻译问题，大家把“close friend”理解成“best friend”，所以他们名单里只加了一个人。于是那个人看到内容并回你 DM 的概率就是零，这等于产品直接坏掉了。所以你必须真的理解你的问题。
第三件事是做清晰度，而不是花活。很多人一想到设计，就想“我要搞点不一样的”，我们刚才也提到过 Stories。大家总想做一个新版本，但如果某个东西已经是标准形态，而且人们真的理解它，那你顺着它去做，会比推翻重来有大得多的杠杆。你得特别清楚什么时候该重做，什么时候不该重做。
在这一点上，Don Norman 的那本《The Design of Everyday Things》里有一章特别棒，讲的是门。为什么这么多年过去了，人们走到一扇门前，还是会分不清该拉还是该推？因为如果你在玻璃门上做一个对称得很漂亮的双把手，它并不会把任何信息传达给你。
我经常看到的一件事是，我们明明可以用全世界都看得懂的图标，却偏要发明新图标。比如“哎，如果我们做一个看起来有点像相机、但其实主要是 AI 风格的东西，再加上一些点点，去连接另一个产品，是不是很酷？” 但你会发现，用户只会说：这不就是相机吗？那就直接放相机图标就行了。你最多加一点点变化，这样用户才会真的开始用你的产品。如果这三件事你都做到了，通常结果不会差。
然后第四点，也可以算是个结语，就是要保持谦逊。持续不断地质疑自己，听别人的意见，听用户的意见，并且随时准备承认自己可能错了。

Lenny Rachitsky我很喜欢这几点。你刚刚说的第三点里，我觉得 AI Mode 这个名字就是清晰度的绝佳例子。它是什么？它就是 AI Mode。

Robby Stein我们内部也讨论过这个问题。你看标签页里一眼就知道它是什么。你一看就懂。也可以起个很怪的名字，但那样又是什么呢？你反而是在跟自己作对。

Lenny Rachitsky如果我把你这三点反过来理解，基本上就是你会写的一本书，教人怎么做出更成功的产品：第一，深刻理解你到底在帮别人解决什么问题。用户到底雇你来干嘛？我很喜欢你说的那个小写的 jobs to be done，不是那种特别严谨、上纲上线的版本，大家都懂的那个大框架。

Robby Stein对，没错。一定是小写的。

Lenny Rachitsky所以就是：为什么人们要雇你的产品来帮他解决问题？他们到底在解决什么问题？也就是说，先搞清楚他们在经历什么问题，然后通过数据非常认真地理解这个问题，以及你到底有没有把它解决掉。最后就是尽量保持简单，清晰胜过花哨。

Robby Stein对，就是这样，而且要谦逊。

Lenny Rachitsky对，要谦逊。这个很重要。那有没有一个我们还没聊到的例子，能把这些东西完整地演示出来？就是：我们找到了什么问题、怎么确认这是解决方案、怎么判断自己在成功，以及最后是怎么用一个很简单的方式把它做出来的？

Robby Stein老实说，Close Friends 就是个很好的例子。我还能从 Instagram 那会儿举更多，但这个真的挺夸张的。它花了两三年才真正跑起来，刚开始其实完全失败了。这个功能是让你加一个私人名单，然后你发 Story 时只有名单里的人能看到。它其实是一个很私密的小空间，让你能更放心地分享一些东西。

Lenny Rachitsky哦，绿色圆圈那个。

Robby Stein对，绿色圆圈。至少我在那里的时候，它是 Stories 里最受欢迎的功能之一，表现非常好，但一开始是彻底失败的。我觉得我们后来发现，你其实会用到我们前面讲的那一整套方法。第一步我们最开始把它想成一个系统性问题：任何东西都可以加一个 Close Friends 的帖子。你可以发 feed，也可以发 Stories，还可以有一个 close friends 主页。如果 Lenny 访问 Robby 的主页，而我们是 Close Friends，你就会看到我主页上也多了些额外内容。

于是我们先把它做出来了，本来以为会很棒。这就是前面说的“保持谦逊”那一面，结果一点都不好，整个东西特别混乱。你会先看到一张很漂亮的照片，紧接着 feed 里又出现一段模糊、很脆弱的内容，人家明明是在和朋友分享，放在 feed 里就非常不对劲。更别说它还多了一个小绿点，可另一边的 Stories 又没有。你打开 Story 以后，里面又有一个绿点。大家真的非常困惑。
另外名单本身也有问题。你会发现“好吧，这个名单不行，因为翻译让人看不懂”。我记得它一开始好像真叫 favorites，这就导致大家只会往里面放两个人。但它真正应该怎么工作呢？这就回到前面的框架了。先深刻理解用户。他们到底想干嘛？
他们想做的是分享一些脆弱的东西，像在说：“嘿，我有点孤单，嘿，最近怎么样？有人在线吗？” 它其实非常像一个朋友小群的场景。
如果你名单里只有两个人，那我们真正完成的任务，其实是把你跟朋友连起来。如果你收不到 DM 回复，那就是产品坏了。我们真正做的，是帮你收到一个 DM，帮你建立连接，帮你获得那种“我和 Close Friends 是连着的”的感觉。这才是那个 job。

前面的那一套，其实正好呼应了 Clayton Christensen 在书里讲的：有些任务是功能性的，有些任务是情绪性的。很多人会把情绪性的那部分低估掉，但这次其实情绪性和功能性一样重要。那个产品本身是坏的，对吧？而且人们甚至不知道那是一个 close friend 的 Story，他们只会看到一个小头像，因为你得点进去才知道发生了什么。所以它就慢慢没人用了。
后来我们做了一轮又一轮调整，把它简化、更新，然后把改动清单一项项过掉：这个拿掉、那个拿掉、名字改掉。然后我们发现，对那些名单里加了 20 到 30 个人的用户，这个功能特别有效。因为当你把 30 个人加进去，里面就会有两个人回你 DM，这样你就把闭环打通了，也会感觉和这些人真的连上了。这种感觉是赢的。所以我们整个系统都围绕这一点来设计，而且它只在 Stories 里有效。我们一边看数据，一边理解它哪里有效、哪里失效，然后把名字改成了 Close Friends，让它不再像 favorites。这样一来，用户想的就不是三个人，而是 20 个。
在名单这块，我们还做了一个名单推荐器，会根据工程师写的一些很酷的算法，推荐一组人。然后我们又把设计改了，把 Story 外面的绿环放到外面，这就是为了清晰。之前我们有点太“可爱”了。当时大概是想，“这像个秘密 Story，或者别的什么，你点开才会看到。”
但对用户来说完全不清楚。所以我们把绿环放在外面，让用户在 tray 里一眼就能看到：“哦，这个小绿圈是什么？”
然后他们就会点进去，发现：“哦，这是给我的私人 Story。” 这套系统最后真的跑通了，而且效果非常好。我们就是这样，从一个彻底失败的东西，一步步做到很成功。

Lenny Rachitsky这真是个绝佳案例。而且你说这个过程花了两三年，对吧？

Robby Stein对，花了挺久。那其实是我们做过最久的项目之一。不过之所以做这么久，原因就在于我们一开始问大家：“你为什么不往 Story 里发东西？到底是什么挡住了你？”

结果大家的回答都差不多：“我前任在上面”“我老师在上面”“有个有点爱评判人的朋友也在上面。”
我们发现这是一个共通问题，就是 audience 问题。人们对“谁在看我”这件事有顾虑。正因为这样，我们才有足够的信心把这个问题死磕这么久，因为我们知道这是产品的核心问题。

Lenny Rachitsky这和 Finsta、Rinsta 这些趋势有关系吗？

Robby Stein有，确实有帮助。每个人都有一个 Finsta，还有个 Binsta。

Lenny RachitskyBinsta 是什么？

Robby SteinBest friend Insta。

Lenny Rachitsky明白了。

Robby Stein就是这样。其实这就是一层层往下分的人际圈，从 20 个 Finsta，到你的伴侣 Pinsta，基本上就是这样。我这词是现编的，不知道是不是正式说法，但肯定到处都有人这么玩。我们当时就觉得，哇，大家显然是在想办法 hack Instagram，去做更小、更私密的群组设置，那我们干脆就直接做成产品。

Lenny Rachitsky那你们具体怎么做测试的？是放给某个比例的人？还是先放到新西兰之类的地方？

Robby Stein对，我们确实先在几个别的国家上线了。

Lenny Rachitsky哦。

Robby Stein我们会选一组国家去试，然后再做研究。我记得澳大利亚是最早的一批之一。

Lenny Rachitsky好，我本来还想问你能不能说国家，那就是澳大利亚。

Robby Stein我觉得那确实是比较早的一批，不过每次发东西，背后的原因都不太一样。

Lenny Rachitsky有意思，所以不是每次都是澳大利亚最先拿到新东西。

Robby Stein不是，不过有时候确实是。澳大利亚和加拿大会拿到不少新东西，因为团队更容易收到那边的反馈。

Lenny Rachitsky因为都是英语。

Robby Stein对，没错。

Lenny Rachitsky好，换个方向，聊一个你有点热观点的话题。现在大家都在谈 lean team、小团队、少资源、甚至不怎么招人。你反而觉得，想做出真正的大突破，往往需要很多资源。聊聊你这方面的经验。

Robby Stein对，还是要看你到底想做什么。确实有一些著名的小团队也做出了很有影响力的产品。但现在有一种 lean、scrappy、快、做完就扔、一直往前冲的崇拜。我觉得在某种层面上，它对内部建立信心是有帮助的。但如果你要做的是一个能服务很多人的产品，而且它还建立在某种技术突破上，那很多时候我看到的是，团队太早放弃，或者对产品投入不足。当然，场景也很重要。如果你做的是一个单独的小产品、比如某个比较直接的数字化应用，那和做机器人公司完全不是一回事。所以你做什么，本身就会决定很多。

但即便是软件，如果是非常难的技术问题，你想想建立一个基础模型花了多少时间、多少精力，多少年、多少人一起才做出来。再想想那些对人们影响巨大的大公司。尤其在大公司内部，我见过的一种情况是，团队有时候太 scrappy 了，因为它始终攒不够 momentum。产品在内部一直长不大，最后就胎死腹中。相反，如果你往上加人，当然也得小心，别一下子加太多太快。但我更常见的是另一种情况：大家把小团队留得太久，结果要么一直拖，要么根本到不了你想要的东西。
我前面说的 Close Friends 就是个例子，那本来也是个小团队。但我们之所以花了那么久，就是因为团队一直保持得太小、太 scrappy。那种循环非常短，放到创业公司里，你大概率早就死了。所以你在大公司里也许还能这么干，但如果是创业公司，我不知道你有没有那个余地。所以你还是得认真想：我到底需要多大的团队，才能做出一个足够好的版本？要从第一性原理去想，而不是盲目相信“我们就先两个人干到 velocity market fit 出来再说”，这并不总是真的。

Lenny Rachitsky这跟 Twitter 上的主流叙事完全不一样。你有没有一个判断标准，来决定这个团队要小多久？我知道不会有 1、2、3 的那种标准答案，但我听出来的感觉是：先从小团队开始，把概念验证出来，设计师、PM、工程师都先少量配置。那你觉得什么时候该开始放大？

Robby Stein我觉得主要是你到了“确信”的那个时刻。这里面有两个大的里程碑。第一个是你内心里真的信了。你之所以信，是因为有一些外部验证，像你的朋友，你把 20 个朋友拉进来试了。顺带说一句，我很快就发现，做创业项目的时候，如果你只拉 20 个朋友进来，他们不会给你太多面子。他们不会因为和你熟就天天用你的产品。过了 30 天、60 天、90 天，如果你的产品对他们没用，他们就不会用了。所以你会收到很多反馈，而且你能看到大家是真的喜欢它。你会走到那个点。

但我觉得这还不是一个能直接外部赢下来的产品，因为如果你真的把它发出去，它还是坏的，效果也不会很好。然后你就需要投入足够多，去把它做成最好的版本，或者至少做成一个足够好的版本，把它推出去。我的理解是，你最终是想做出正确的产品，而这只能靠合适的团队来完成。

Lenny Rachitsky我想把我们带进播客的一个固定环节，我叫它 AI Corner。

Robby Stein好。

Lenny Rachitsky你在工作或者生活中，有没有什么特别有意思、特别有帮助的 AI 用法，可以让别人也借鉴一下？

Robby Stein我觉得最近最酷的趋势之一，就是 AI 正在影响多模态的视觉需求和灵感需求。我们其实才刚开始，而且这也是我自己在做的一个项目。但如果看 AI 到目前为止的大部分发展，它是出生并成长在文本模态里的，也就是聊天。所以很长一段时间里，如果你让它帮你想“怎么重新布置你身后的书架”，它也只会用文字来描述，因为那是它知道的方式。但越来越多地，AI 会从文本里被解放出来，去帮你处理所有可能的模态。

这件事在 Google Lens、图片搜索和图片功能的爆发式使用里已经很明显了。基于这种更深的理解，我自己内部也已经开始用一些东西了，我们也有一些更令人兴奋的东西快要出来了，这些其实也在 I/O 上公开提过，我们会继续往这方向做。重点就是：AI 怎么帮你获得灵感，怎么帮你购物，怎么帮你把那些更偏“灵感需求”的事情真正做成，而不只是代码、数学、作业这种核心工具型需求。
我真的很期待接下来会出现的一些东西。你以后可以直接让它帮你处理灵感类任务，我看到的结果已经很有意思了，希望之后能多分享一点。不过我能先说的是，有一个视觉版的 AI Mode，我们在 I/O 上其实也提过，你可以去看那些 keynote，现在它正在逐步开放。

Lenny Rachitsky神神秘秘的。

Robby Stein你以后就可以直接问：“给我一个带深色调的中世纪现代风漂亮办公室设计。” 它会给你生成一个灵感图板，而且你可以继续多轮追问。然后你可以接着说：“不，我想要更浅一点、更奶油一点、更加 California、更加海岸风。” 它会理解这些变化，真的跟着你一起调，而且它还能看图，这种方式会像文本对话一样自然，我觉得这会很酷。所以我觉得这会是接下来 AI 领域里比较激动人心的新东西之一。

Lenny Rachitsky我听出来了，就是把 Nano Banana 接进 AI Mode。成功配方。

Robby Stein不过它跟 Nano Banana 还是有点不一样，因为 Nano Banana 是图像编辑器，而这个更像是在帮你从网上找图，所以它更偏向 AI 灵感、AI 图片搜索，然后你可以用自然语言跟这些视觉结果继续对话。所以它和“把照片改一改”还是有区别的。当然，从长远看，给你一个能力去拍下客厅照片，让 AI 帮你处理，那也会是一个很有意思的方向。

Lenny RachitskyPinterest 这下有点危险了。因为人们用 Pinterest 不就是为了灵感吗？现在 AI 直接把这一切都做了。顺便问一句，Nano Banana 这个名字是怎么来的？

Robby Stein我真不记得了。背后应该有个故事，但我现在脑子里确实想不起来了。不过我觉得团队当时就是一群很有冲劲、很好玩的家伙在做这个，他们想取一个比较有趣的名字，让大家——

Lenny Rachitsky对，感觉这也是为什么事情开始真正跑起来了。整个氛围更好玩了，也更有惊喜感，冒出来的奇奇怪怪的东西也更多了。

Robby Stein确实有那种感觉。现在多少有点像我第一次在 Google 上班时的状态，东西特别多，而且那种好奇心和玩心又回来了，大家都想试、想发。我希望这种状态还能继续下去。

Lenny Rachitsky对，我甚至觉得 Veo 3 要是名字再怪一点，可能会更成功。某种程度上这跟你前面讲的“清晰度”建议是反着来的。我都不知道 Nano Banana 是什么，但它确实成了。

Robby Stein是啊，这就是另一件事。没有哪条建议在所有情况下都一定正确，对吧？不过，Nano Banana 还是挺好玩的。

Lenny RachitskyRobby，在我们进入一个很激动人心的 lightning round 之前，你还有什么别的想分享的吗？有什么你想留给听众的最后一条智慧吗？

Robby Stein有一个概念：保持好奇。我觉得把很多事情真正具象化起来，核心其实就是 curiosity，也就是好奇心。你想知道一切为什么会是现在这样。为什么别人会这么做？为什么别人和我意见不一样？为什么这个东西没跑起来？那些真的具有强烈好奇心的人，会一路追下去，直到他们搞清楚，我觉得这样的人会受益很多。这就是我最后想留给大家的一个想法。

Lenny Rachitsky我想顺着这个问题问一下，其实这几个月 podcast 里最常出现的词，可能就是 curiosity。每次我问嘉宾，你会想把什么教给孩子、你在 AI 兴起之后希望孩子具备什么时，这个词总会冒出来。有没有什么东西能帮到你？还是说你本来就天生比较好奇，只是觉得“这很有用”？你能不能分享一些你自己，或者你身边的人，是怎么把这种好奇心真正活出来的？

Robby Stein我觉得 AI 本身就是终极好奇心引擎，这就是它最酷的地方。你现在可以问任何问题，然后直接拿到信息。所以我发现大家会突然意识到，原来自己能学到这么多自己想知道的东西。但另一方面，这也和你愿意研究什么、知道知识的分支都在哪里有关系。我很多时候会去读一些老论文，或者网上免费的 PDF，像统计学之类的，如果我想学那个东西的话，我就会去找。我觉得很多人低估了这些东西。传统、老派的学习方式依然很棒，而 AI 可以帮你把它们找出来。我现在，尤其是在 Google，会用 AI 帮我发现很多很酷的链接和可读内容，但我觉得这是一种很有意思的混合：它不只是 AI，而是更多地回到原始来源。我前面提到的那些书，我也是这么看。要真正把问题搞到底，你最终还是需要把这些东西混合起来。

Lenny Rachitsky也就是说，真的去读原文，而不只是读摘要。

Robby Stein对。

Lenny Rachitsky那我想问你一个我一直在问这些 AI 前沿人士的问题。你有孩子，对吧？你有没有在想，随着 AI 变成世界很大的一部分，你要怎么帮助他们学习、成长？

Robby Stein我现在做得最多的一件事，是我家孩子已经在用实时版本的 AI 了，他们现在更喜欢直接跟它聊天。挺有意思的是，我们其实这周刚把 Search Live 从 Labs 里放出来。也就是说，你可以在 live AI 场景里直接跟搜索对话，它是语音式的。开车的时候也能用，你可以直接用声音跟 Google 说话，像正常对话一样把前面提到的知识都调出来。我觉得这对孩子来说特别容易上手。

我经常听到我家孩子回来说：“我能不能跟 Google 问个问题？”
“你要问什么？”
然后他们就去打开我的 app，点 live 按钮，直接开始说。他们想知道动物，想知道历史，学校里学到了什么，都会去问。用这种方式学习真的太自然了，所以我觉得它正在让他们比我做的任何别的事都更 AI native。

Lenny Rachitsky当爸爸现在也太轻松了吧，孩子一有问题就说“去问 AI”。不过我觉得这也不坏。所以这个功能是在 Google 搜索 app 里对吧？怎么访问？

Robby Stein对，就是这样。你打开 Google app，也就是你刚才提到的 App Store 里那些应用之一。打开 Google，首页上现在有个 live 按钮。你点进去，就会进入一个 live 版的 AI Mode，直接跟它说话。它是全屏体验，系统会提示你开始说话。

Lenny Rachitsky我会在 show notes 里放一个项目链接，是 Eric Antonow 做的，我特别喜欢。它基本上就是教你怎么把一个小扬声器塞进一个毛绒玩具里，然后把这个扬声器连到 Google Live 或 ChatGPT 之类的语音模式上。你把它挂在肩膀上，再用一个小磁铁固定住，孩子就能跟这个鹦鹉说话。比如你可以让它用海盗腔说话，这样他们就会跟“海盗”聊天。

Robby Stein哦，太好笑了，真的很可爱。

Lenny Rachitsky这事就花 15 分钟。你只要拿个美工刀，缝一缝之类的就行，挺好玩的。我给我侄子做了一个，他就在跟这只鹦鹉找宝藏。

Robby Stein这也太可爱了，我一定要去看看。

Lenny RachitskyRobby，接下来我们进入一个很激动人心的 lightning round。我有 5 个问题。准备好了吗？

Robby Stein好，我准备好了。

Lenny Rachitsky你最常推荐给别人的两三本书是什么？

Robby Stein我肯定会提前面说过的两本。Clayton Christensen 的《Competing Against Luck》，还有 Don Norman 的《Design of Everyday Things》。另外我也很喜欢一本小说，叫 Aurora，是 David Koepp 写的，讲的是太阳里的电磁脉冲把一切都打瘫了。这本书就是纯娱乐小说，读起来特别适合海边。我听说它原本要拍成 Netflix 剧集，但最后没成。挺可惜的，不过书本身真的很有趣。

Lenny Rachitsky我也很喜欢一部同类题材的书，现在正在拍电影，叫 Hail Mary。

Robby Stein哦，我现在就在读那个。

Lenny Rachitsky好，太好了。

Robby Stein对。

Lenny Rachitsky咱们是同道中人。

Robby Stein对。

Lenny Rachitsky对，他们正在拍电影。怎么样？

Robby Stein我读到一半了，现在已经开始有点疯了，但我很期待后面怎么发展。

Lenny Rachitsky后面会更疯，尤其结尾特别疯。

Robby Stein真的？好，我先有个心理准备。

Lenny Rachitsky先准备一下。

Robby Stein好。

Robby Stein这是个挺疯狂的故事。先简单铺一下背景。我 25 岁，那会儿刚离开 Google，做的是纽约那边的 IC PM，和几个 Google 朋友一起在做这家公司。算是很早很早期的阶段，也可以说是因为没什么经验所以更敢冲，基本上就是啥也不懂。我们当时决定，Stamped 这个产品的概念，就是给你喜欢的东西盖章，帮你从朋友和信任的人那里拿推荐。你可以把它想成一个 Twitter feed，但上面全是大家觉得酷的东西。

Lenny Rachitsky具体是什么东西？

Robby Stein比如书、餐馆、食物，产品，没错。

Lenny Rachitsky也许还有枕头。

Robby Stein枕头当然也可以放上去。我绝对会给这个枕头盖章，然后别人就能发现它。我们一开始最难的问题之一，当然就是得先有一群已经在用的人，这样才会有一批真正懂审美、懂品味的人。我们找了一些厨师，也找了一些写作圈的人。然后我们还想请一些更偏音乐人、艺术家、影响力比较强的人进来。

我和我合伙人就找到了 Scooter Braun 的联系方式，他是 Justin 的经纪人。我们直接发了封邮件，大概就是：“嘿，我们在纽约，明天会在洛杉矶。” 我记得我们说了类似的话，细节记不太清了，但意思大概就是明天会过去。

Lenny Rachitsky但你们明天根本不在洛杉矶。

Robby Stein对，没错。

Lenny Rachitsky好。

Robby Stein邮件里还顺手问了一句：“你们刚好在那边吗？”

结果他回了一句很短的话，大概就是：“早上在这个酒店见我。”
我们当场就想：“哦，好。”
我们俩真的立刻就冲去了机场。我到现在还记得，我们几乎是直接去机场飞洛杉矶，跟他见面。我们把整个项目给他讲了一遍，演示了产品，然后他说：“好啊，我觉得这会很酷。我们可以参与，也许你们还可以做个顾问之类的事。”
后来我们又回去见了 Justin，给他演示产品，甚至还跟他拍了几段小视频。那次真的特别好笑，也特别开心。显然他也会把自己最喜欢的东西盖章。于是大家就会说：“哦，Justin 喜欢这首歌，或者他喜欢这些东西”，然后把这些内容发出去。
这也是我们让很多人来试用、来看看我们在做什么的方式之一。那算是个特别 scrappy 的时刻，但我觉得它说明了一个很好的道理：先做，马上做，别拖。强烈的紧迫感通常会赢过长时间的思考，这在那个例子里确实被证明是对的。

Lenny Rachitsky太厉害了，谢谢你分享这个。里面有太多可以带走的教训了。最后两个问题：如果大家想在线上找到你，或者想更多了解你在做什么，去哪里找你？还有，听众怎么才能对你有帮助？

Robby Stein我觉得 X 上的 @rmstein 应该是最好的单一入口。至于怎么帮到我，直接给我发反馈就行。给我发 DM，提到我，或者直接 ping 我，告诉我 Google 产品的问题、AI 的问题，或者任何事情都行。就像我前面说的，你必须不断听别人说，去理解他们的体验，所以尽管把想法和反馈扔过来。这是最有帮助的方式。

Lenny Rachitsky哇，那你接下来要收到的搜索体验反馈简直要淹没你了。

Robby Stein没问题，尽管来吧。

Lenny Rachitsky“Robby，为什么这个链接排第二？为什么我的站不在最上面？” 我都能想象大家会怎么吐槽。Robby，太感谢你今天来了。

Robby Stein谢谢你，聊得很开心。

Lenny Rachitsky真的很棒。大家再见。

Robby Stein保重。

Lenny Rachitsky非常感谢收听。如果你觉得这期有帮助，欢迎订阅 Apple Podcasts、Spotify 或你常用的播客 App。也欢迎给我们打个分、留个评论，这真的能帮助更多听众找到这档播客。你也可以在 lennyspodcasts.com 找到往期全部节目，或者了解这档节目的更多信息。我们下期再见。