The non-technical PM’s guide to building with Cursor | Zevi Arnovitz (Meta)

26:56Yeah, interesting. Let's come back to that. Cool. Alright, so this is Claude coming back. I have a comprehensive understanding of the code base. I thoroughly analyze StudyMate live code base and understand the current system, feature requests, and key areas that it's identified. Usually I'd spend a lot of time going over this because this is super, super important. But just for the sake of development right now, we're going to brush through this. Now, Claude basically comes back after it's gone through the code base and understood the way it currently works. It's basically telling me what the current understanding is.

27:33So it's talking about how the app is set up at the moment, how the data is structured, what it understood from the feature request, and what it has identified as key areas. And then it asked me some questions. So it's asking about the scope. It's asking about the data model, the UX UI of the feature, how it should be validated, how it should be graded, what changes need to happen to the AI system prompt, and all kinds of questions about the app. I've prepared answers to all these questions beforehand because I don't think we all want to sit through this. So I'm just going to paste that in and we'll see what Claude says.

28:08Awesome. I love it. And I love just scanning those questions I was asking. It's like such smart, sophisticated, important questions instead of just cool. Here I go, I'm going to build it. Yeah, and I think this is the big difference between like just vibe coding and going along with the vibes and really building serious apps. I spend a lot, a lot of time going back and forth and understanding. Also a very cool slash command that I haven't showed yet is learning opportunity, which basically when something is really difficult for me to understand, I'll do slash learning opportunity and then talk about what I want to learn.

28:43And this basically primes Claude and says, I am a technical PM in the making. I have mid-level engineering knowledge. I understand architecture. And basically, I want you to explain what we're currently working on using the 80-20 rule. So this is a great way to learn. I would definitely take this. And every time you kind of see something that you don't fully understand, I would definitely use this to learn. Great. So Claude basically comes back and says how it understands the current data model and how it's going to implement. Yeah. So it's ready to create the plan. So basically what I'm going to do now is I'm going to go and do slash create plan.

29:26And while Claude's doing this, I'm going to show really quick what this looks like. So basically these plans are from a template that I found on Twitter. I forgot who it was, but it was just a template that really resonated with me. And it's basically saying, based on our exchange, create a markdown file that will be the plan, include clear, minimal, concise steps, track the status. So this basically has status trackers on each task that Claude updates as it's going through. And it will have a TLDR, some critical decisions that we've made, and the plan itself. So Claude's finished writing the plan.

30:02so we'll be able to look and see exactly what the plan is. So it has a TLDR. It has the critical decisions we've made and the tasks broken down. And this is a perfect plan and it's also a really good way to write this because a lot of times I'll use different models to execute certain stuff. So Cursor has an amazing model called Composer which is super fast. So a lot of things that are not that complex, I'll use Composer. Gemini 3 that just came out is unbelievable at UI. So a lot of times I'll split the plan into backend and frontend, and then I'll have Gemini just read the plan and do the frontend.

30:42So having this as a markdown file is really good. And also going forward, it's really good to have within the app so that later on, if an agent is writing code in a certain area, it can see what's already been done there. So what we're going to do now is we're going to execute the plan. So now I think we're going to do this with cursor just because Composer is so freaking fast. So what we can do is basically just say execute, and then we can tag the file. And Composer is ridiculously fast. So that's it. It's off. It basically understands what the plan is, and it's going to go ahead and start writing the code.

31:20Let me ask you a question while this is happening. Awesome. I have many questions, so this is a good time to ask a few of them. You said that Lovable and Bolt and other apps in that space are just not enough to build really serious apps and you had to move to Cursor to do that. Tell us more about that. What's the kind of limitation you ran into with those products and why you switched to Cursor? I started using cursor and clawed code a few months ago, and I haven't looked back. But at that time, these teams have been moving like crazy. So I don't want to say I wouldn't trust them. I don't know what the current state is.

31:57But for me, it was basically the issue of, I felt that Bolt was being very opinionated on how I should do things. And I felt like my knowledge has gotten to a point where I can graduate and be more in control. By the way, I think that the main difference between all these tools is basically the harness. So the models are all the same models, you know, I'll run Claude within cursor, I'll run it within Claude code. And it's also the models that Claude is also the model that is underlying Bolt and Lovable. But basically, Bolt and Lovable will add a bunch of levels in the middle that will take all kind of guesswork and hard decisions out for the user.

32:37So the user doesn't have to make these hard decisions. so it's also very easy to build but the flip side of that is that you have less control and basically Cloud Code is just taking Cloud and shoving it straight in your code system and giving it full tools and to do whatever it wants but also with that comes a lot of decisions that you need to make so I don't know if you can't build really amazing production apps using Bolt or Lovable now but I think basically if you want the most cutting edge abilities of the models and you want to be able to make all the decisions on your own, it's probably best to be on one of these tools.

33:12What I'm feeling and hearing is that planning work that you did, that's the stuff that Lovable, Bold, and would you put Replit in that bucket too? Yeah, for sure. Lovable, Bold, Replit, Base 44. V0. Yeah, V0, all same bucket. So essentially, they're doing that planning for you. And as you said, they're very pinnated. They try to make it easy. So it's just like, here's how to do it. we're not going to like, here's the way we want to, we think is best for people. And what you're saying is once you're trying to get a little more serious about it or have want to go in a different direction, you don't have the power to change the how they plan.

33:47So Cursor lets you do that. Yeah. I don't want this to come out like I'm bad mouthing them. Base 44, let's say. Yeah. Base 44 does an amazing job at basically taking all the complex guesswork out of building product and just allows you to just, you know, go with the vibes and build, but it will do sign in with Google for you and it will do a database, but then you don't have decisions on what database am I using? Do I need to sign in with Google this way or another way? It would just do it out of the box. So that's basically the trade-off there. Awesome. Shout out Mayor, the founder of Facebook.

34:20Yeah, I'm all shamal. Yeah. Yeah. He's amazing. I just love how this is like the way you're like flinging, what's the word? Slinging? Slinging models like Gemini 3 for front. And I love that you've never written any code. And you're just like, cool, he's Gemini for this and Claude for this. And I'm just working on Cursor, talking to this CTO, helping you build stuff and build significant product. Yeah. I mean, we just live in the craziest of times where basically the world changes once a week, it feels like. And there is just no boundaries. You can use all of these just on your like regular MacBook or regular laptop.

35:05And I have these moments. I call them time machine moments, which is basically this week, for instance, I was prepping for the podcast using Claude with a project. I was building, I was fully localizing study mate from Hebrew to English, which I did in two days, which would probably take a dev team weeks. and I was building a personal site, which went from no domain, no nothing to live on a domain within an hour and a half. And I was doing all three of these in parallel. And there was a point where basically all three of the agents were running. So I didn't have anything to do. I just had to let them think.

35:43And these are like the time machine moments where I feel like I was in the future and I just stick my head out of the time machine and whoever's next to me, like at the moment it was my wife, I'll just say, we live in the future And she'll be like, huh, what? And I'll be like, no, no, don't worry about it. But it's just basically so crazy that all these things are just, you know, an API away. You can use anything. So I think it's an awesome time to be curious and optimistic and hardworking. These are my favorite kinds of podcast guests. People that are living in the future, figuring out all these things, and then are just kind of come back, as you said, poke your head out of the rocket ship and just like, hey, here's this thing that I figured out.

36:19Here's where we're going. Yeah, best time to be alive. So awesome. So it looks like it's finished. So now what we're going to do is we're going to run the app locally and we'll be able to see what Composer ended up building. And we're going to see if anything else is needed on our end to maybe do some manual review. Does that sound good? Sounds great. And I love that was like, I don't know, a few minutes where if it was a human engineer, it'd be like days, maybe a week. For sure. Yeah, for sure. No, Composer, the one thing is it's just so, so blazing fast. Keeps you in flow. So yeah, full features take minutes.

37:00And that probably costs a couple bucks in AI credits. I don't even look. I mean, I used to be so stingy about paying for products. And now I'm just basically, I look at it all as tuition, as stuff that I'm paying for learning. So I don't know how much it costs, but it's definitely worth it. That explains why they're the fastest growing products in history. A hundred percent. Your marketing website sets the tone for your brand and is the one touch point that every single one of your customers sees. In today's age, if you're still having a hard time making small changes and simple updates to it, you're doing something wrong.

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38:20Learn how to turn your website into a growth engine from a Framer expert or get started building for free today at framer.com slash lenny. That's framer.com slash lenny. Rules and restrictions may apply. So now we have this feature, which basically we built. And I can ask it to make some changes because it's running locally. and once it's ready, I'll be able to ship it to users. So now the next phase after I've QA'd it and basically tested it manually, I'll have Claude review its own work. So what I'll do is I'll reopen Claude code. I love this because this is one of the things that comes up a lot in this podcast is writing code is now so easy.

39:01The main challenge people have is reviewing the code that AI has written. And what you're doing here is you're having Claude review its own code. Yeah, so this is another thing where it's very difficult for me to catch mistakes. So my review process has gone through a bunch of iterations to really be as good as possible and to catch as many things as possible. So I'll always manually QA at first to make sure if I can see any mistakes that Claude made. And then what I'll do is basically slash review. And this tells Claude to start reviewing its own code. But what's even cooler and something that I'm really proud of is I will usually do multiple reviews and I'll have Codex, which is ChatGPT's competitor to Cloud Code, as well as Cursor, Open, and I will have each of them review the code.

39:55And then what I do is I have a slash command called peer review, which is really interesting. And basically what it does is it's going to take Cloud, which is usually the agent who I'm working with And just to put this in a mental model, this is basically my dev lead that I'm working with. I will take the slash command is basically saying, you're the dev lead on this project. Other team leads within the company have looked at your code and reviewed it and found these issues. Don't take what they said at face value. The reason is you have more context than them and you led this project. you need to either um explain why the stuff they found are not real issues and wrong or fix them yourself and it's really cool because the way i look at these things is i look at the models i try to imagine them as people and i can i can really tell you how each one of these uh would be as as a real human um because they have yeah each model has such distinct uh characteristics so let's say Claude she would be the perfect CTO she's very communicative, she's very smart she doesn't just go with the flow and do whatever you tell her she's very opinionated but also super collaborative which is I think why I'm always drawn to Claude because I need to do so much learning and like it's your dream a very communicative but very opinionated dev lead but then there's also codex so i use codex um 5.1 max whatever i don't know they're not the best at naming uh models but gpt's model i always imagine it as like a the best coder within the company who comes to the office like with a hoodie and sandals and sits in a dark room and you basically only bother him when you have the worst bugs and you say listen we have this bug and it will just close the door for two hours and come out and say, I fixed it.

41:53And you're like, wait, what are you going to tell us what happened or what? And he's like, don't worry about it. I fixed it. It's like really not communicative, but it solves all the worst problems. And let's say Gemini is like a crazy scientist who's super artsy, super talented at designing. But if you sit next to it and watch it work, it's terrifying. Like you would fire that person instantly. This might be just my experience, but when I'm using Gemini within anti-gravity, which is Google's new competitor to cursor. When it's writing code, you can see the steps it's taking and it's terrifying.

42:28Like you'll say, I want you to redesign the top of the dashboard. And you're looking at its thought process and it will say, oh, first things first, I'll delete the dashboard. And then it'll be like, nope, that was a mistake. I'll bring it back. And then it will say, oh, can I edit the database? And you're like, no, do not edit the database. You're just doing a redesign. And then it will end up designing something beautiful. So the way there is like a roller coaster and very scary. But at the end of the day, Gemini is very good at design. So I think that using all these models and basically playing to their strengths and mitigating their weaknesses by using other models is a game changer for me.

43:06So I'll do peer review a bunch of times and I'll have other models review other models code and kind of have them fight it out, basically. like sometimes a clock code will get really sassy and be like this has been raised for the third time and for the third time i'm telling you this is not an issue this is by design so it's just a really cool cool uh thing that i've added and i haven't seen many people doing it that is such an incredible rant slash uh way to understand what's going on okay awesome so we just ran the review so show us what we saw there and let's actually try this peer review i'm really excited to see what you learned there.

43:45Yeah. So basically, Claude has reviewed its code, and it's found a bunch of bugs, a critical bug it found in the prompt, some high bugs, some medium bugs. And now what I'll do is I'll do the same thing with the other models. So Codex has a built-in code review that you can do, or I just like to say review all the code in this branch. Of course, branch is referring to the GitHub branch that we're working on, we're not working on the live code base. And then I'll do this with Composer, say with, we can do, let's do it with Composer 1. So I'll do slash review here as well. And basically, these are both going to run and do a in-depth review, similar to what Claude does.

44:31But again, because of the differences between the models, they're all going to catch different things, and they're all going to look differently. And this is a really cool way to work. It's basically if you had other team leads within the company review the code. Here, you can see how fast Composer is. I think GPT probably will take a bunch of time. Like I said, it's in its own dark room right now reviewing code, and we'll come back in a few minutes. Okay, cool. We can let these run, and we don't actually have to go through the whole process, but is the idea, once you get these results, you run peer review, and you copy and paste kind of these results?

45:03Is that the idea? Exactly. I'll copy and paste the results. I'll do peer review, and then I'll say dev lead one, and then paste from one of the models, and And then I'll say dev lead to and paste from the other model and basically have them fight it out until I feel like we have no more issues. For me, this is super important because I'm not a not technical and I'm not a developer. And I'll also use slash learning opportunity a bunch during this to learn about stuff that I don't understand or don't fully grasp. Incredible. What a what a clever solution to solving this code review problem where it's like, I don't know what you I don't I don't know how to recode.

45:37So what am I going to even? Yeah. Yeah. Okay, incredible. Let's wrap up this kind of this workflow. Is there anything else that's important in this workflow? And again, all this stuff is going to be available. People can just plug this stuff into their cursor account and use it themselves. A hundred percent. The one thing I'll say is that I think just like working in general with AI, and even just like working on any product, doing constant postmortems is critical. So a lot of times we'll find all these kind of bugs or maybe Claude will fail to execute something correctly. And at the beginning, when I started Vibe Coding, I would basically just keep running at it, like running at the wall and until it worked.

46:20And once it worked, I was like, all right, awesome. This works. Let's keep going. But I've learned over time that updating documentation and tooling is one of the biggest hacks for productivity. So when Claude will fail to do something or I'll see this really bad bug that that shows that Claude really didn't understand something I'll ask it what in your system prompt or tooling made you make this mistake and Claude will kind of like go introspective and think of what made it do create that mistake and then I'll say okay great let's update your tooling and documentation so that this mistake never occurs again and I do this every time I'm either building uh an internal tool or anything and I think this is just like working, you know, if you've, you end up doing a bunch of mistakes and then end up releasing the feature to users.

47:08So you're like, all right, it's a big success, but going back. And even when you've succeeded, um, looking and understanding what you did and what you could have done better is critical. And also using AI, this is probably one of the biggest unlocks, going back to your prompts, understanding what was not good enough, iterating on them, and then seeing how AI's responses get better. I think that's probably one of the most important things. And one of the things that divides between people who are like, okay, with using AI and the people who actually know how to use it. That is such good advice.

47:39So what I'm hearing is when you run in when the models do something dumb, make a mistake, you ask it to reflect on what the mistake it made was. And then you update the slash command prompts with that knowledge so that in the future, it's not making that same mistake. And it just keeps getting better. These things just keep getting smart and smarter. So you're building up this really incredible prompt that just gets better and better. Exactly. Not always the slash commands. It will sometimes update different documentation or its tooling. But basically, it's understanding what the root cause of the mistake that the AI made and fixing it.

48:15Awesome. So it's not, so like the models are getting smarter and then there's also the other parts of your workflow can get smarter as you find flaws in the way it does stuff. A hundred percent. Yeah. Amazing. Okay. Is there anything else there before I move in a couple other directions? I think that's it. I think we covered pretty much everything. Basically, just to wrap this up, what I do is I do a bunch of code review and then update the documentation so that everything is documented. So the next time I try to build a feature in this area, there won't be any mistakes. And then I'll do a bunch of testing.

48:47I'll do some user testing as well before I release this to general availability. Obviously, we're not going to release this. This was just a show. But hopefully, maybe by the time the podcast comes out, I'll have done this correctly and release the feature. It's incredible that this was not possible, like, I don't know, two years ago, maybe a year ago, like you are a product manager shipping a product without knowing how to write code, barely knowing how to review code. You said you're afraid of looking at code. As a product manager, you're building a product in cursor, using all of these different AI models.

49:21You're making money with this product. This is like, we're so used to this now, but it's insane what is now possible. It's the best time to be alive, 100%. I think that I understand the fear, but AI just makes so much possible. Just a quick side note here. My brother, who I'm building one of the apps with, is an entrepreneur. He has a beautiful business that helps old people and seniors understand to use technology and AI better. and he's basically doing the same kind of learning as me and he's replaced all of the tools he was paying for. I think he was paying for Zapier and Airtable and he's basically built like a full-fledged CRM system and automation system for his business completely alone.

50:06So, I mean, for the people who are curious, optimistic, hardworking, this is the best time to be a builder. And what I love about this conversation we're having here is it feels like the biggest barrier for a lot of people is like how do i get started what exactly do i do i open up cursor it looks very intimidating i don't know how to write code i don't know how to build stuff i don't know about databases and so you're going to be sharing all these slash commands and basically this whole workflow with the audience yeah okay and like i said just start at gpt start in gpt um tell it what your idea is uh tell it to explain to you what are even the first steps of thinking what are the decisions you need to make and just be like be inquisitive, learn, don't rush things.

50:50It's very important to just dive in and really spend the time to learn. And you share this, one of your slash commands is learning opportunity. And it's how you learn a lot of these things. Just like teach me this thing of how this database issue works. Exactly. Okay. There's a couple of directions I want to make sure we touch on. One is coming back to a question I asked earlier about how this might work at a larger company. say it's not like meta, but just like, I don't know, a thousand person company, 500 people. How much of this can you plug and play into a workflow as a PM at a larger company?

51:21What would be your advice for someone that may want to start trying to ship code, at least showing people what's possible? I think that first making your code base AI native is a really important step. And I think this needs to be done by technical people. So basically, my code base has a ton of just plain text in it. So it will have a bunch of markdown files that explain to agents how to work in certain areas of the code base, and high level structure so that the agents navigate through the code base easier. And I think that if this is set up in a really good way, I still don't think PMs should be shipping heavy database migrations or any big project, but contained UI projects, especially if you just build it, create the PR, and send it to a dev to do the final finishes, I think that's definitely something that's possible, and I think we're going to see that a lot in the next coming years.

52:20I think basically everyone's going to become a builder, so it should be really interesting. Okay, so your advice here is as a PM, don't maybe don't go right to cursor, start building, shipping, trying to ship features to production, especially complicated features. Do you think we'll get there? Do you think like in a couple of years, PMs will be doing this and it'll feel less scary and crazy? If there are PMs. Yeah, I think titles are going to collapse and responsibilities are going to collapse and everyone's just going to be building. I definitely think that the models, the context window is getting bigger.

52:56The models are getting smarter. Um, and I definitely see how PMs or any other background can be writing at the moment. I wouldn't wait for that. I would use this as a collaborative learning opportunity to work with your dev team. It's going to be difficult. A lot of developers are very, very skeptic about the current state. And I think that it's going to be a lot of sales work on your end to convince, but if you're able to convince, and I think teams that are really sold on this and want to take the time to work on their workflow about how can our team become more AI native. I think that these teams are going to probably be a few years in the future and they're going to look back at the few weeks they spent setting this up as the best time they spent.

53:43Let me ask you another question around just the job of a PM. One of the biggest fears people have with these AI tools for PMs, for every function I imagine, is just you start to rely on these things, your skills start to atrophy, you're producing all this slop that looks great, cool, amazing strategy document. Now it's actually not at all good. Are these linear tickets or just products that are like half baked? What's your take on kind of these two parts of just like, how has this impacted your craft as a PM? Do you feel like this is weakening your skills because you're so reliant on these tools?

54:18And just how do you keep the quality of this stuff up and not just like, man, it's just a bunch of AI generated sloth. I have a very strong disagree to this. And I've heard it a bunch. I remember when I started using Tal Raviv has like this whole course on, on building a PM co-pilot using projects, which is probably one of the best courses that you can take. And when I started working with my own co-pilot, I remember people at work looking and saying like, oh, so you're basically outsourcing your thinking. and to me that's just the worst way to look at it and I think for some reason these people usually have a high correlation with the kind of person who doesn't like to show their presentation when it's only 10 % done or doesn't want to ask for help a lot I think that there is a misconception with a lot of PMs that the job is always having the right answers and being the smartest person in the room.

55:16And at least how I was trained and how I believe the role of the PM is, it's the exact opposite. It's basically harnessing anything that can get us as quick as possible to delivering the right solution to users. And I just think this is like that really smart person that has context or your mentor or whatever, but is just always available and doesn't judge you and can really help you. So if you're using it to just create your outputs and then putting them out there. I mean, yeah, that's AI slot, but it's also human error. I think it's really important that you own your own outputs. If you put anything out there or show something in a product review, and you say, oh, sorry, that was built by AI, that's your mistake.

56:01I think if you use these intentionally, and really take the time to understand how to use AI in the correct way, it's one of the biggest game changers that will make you much better as a PM. and another thing here is that especially for more junior PMs it allows you to play at such a higher level than you would normally like I think that at Wix I wasn't thinking of what's the marketing strategy of the company and how will the onboarding be completely revamped within the all of the whole product but I mean on my side product I can just do whatever decisions I want and think of the strategy and marketing and the messaging and this is basically just getting me reps, which is one of the most important things at the beginning of your career.

56:45So I understand the fear that, you know, how do you outsource certain stuff and you're not owning 100 % of everything. But I think the upside is so much more valuable. And I think the only way that AI makes you worse at your job is if you're using it wrong. Is there anything that you've learned about reducing the sloppiness, the sloppiness of the output? Just like a tip for keeping the quality high of the stuff that it produces. Similar to people setting up AI for success for the task at hand. So like if I just brought in, you know, a junior to write a deck or something and I didn't give it any guideline, I just said, give a strategy deck.

57:31He would probably just go online and find, you know, top strategy deck and just reproduce that, which is basically what AI is doing. It's basically just fed all of the internet. it. So instead of that, guiding it and giving it context on what your style of writing is and what you're trying to solve, and all these different things, I think that's probably one of the biggest unlocks. So that's just a quick tip. And also, cursor has a slash command called the slop, which is basically going back over the code. I don't know if this is integrated into the product yet, but it's on Twitter, their founders have been talking about this.

58:07So that's definitely something I would run after just to make sure that no no slop is is left behind that's so funny the slop okay one more question uh which may lead to something else but um kind of going in a whole different direction you used ai to help you actually interview for the job that you got at meta talk about how you did that because a lot of people right now are struggling to find a job uh reading about all these people using ai to help them interview you actually did it uh what did you what worked? I feel like the analogy here is I have 12 nieces and nephews, and you can see how people who have grown up in a different world, how their mind is formed differently.

58:48So if you ask me, how do you answer a phone? I'll do this. But a child now, when you say, how do you answer the phone? They'll do this. They'll do the iPhone answer. And I feel like people who are growing up now in their professional lives, we're the same just with AI. So every time I'm faced with a new challenge or problem, I think AI first how to solve it. So Meta reached out and said they'd like me to interview. Straight away, I opened up a project within Claude. I started looking online for all the best information out there, things that I resonated with. I took a ton of frameworks and stuff from Ben Erez, who's written a guest post for you, who I think is one of the best minds out there right now.

59:32And basically I created a project, which was my coach, which I would come and consult what to do at each phase. I would mock interview with, and this was amazing. Also, I created a game in Base44, which helped me. I was really struggling with segmentation within the product questions. So thinking of the correct segments. So I basically just created a quiz game, which creates questions and different segmentations and I have to choose. So this was like, I spun this up. It's a web app that I would play sometimes when I was on the bus to work. So basically, I think Ben talks about this a bunch. So I don't like just go read Ben's stuff.

1:00:11But just creating a project and feeding it with all the best information on the internet and then mocking a bunch. I will say that the biggest game changer for me was doing human mocks. So cold outreaching to people on LinkedIn and having them do actual mocks for me. I think that at the end of the day, especially for the meta PM prep, which is super competitive and difficult, I think there's no way to get around that. That is so cool to use that post. I wasn't aware. We're going to link to it. And in that post, Ben shares all these prompts you can feed ChatGPT to help you prepare for interviews, do mocks online.

1:00:50It's a really important point to say that those take you to a point, but it's actually better to use humans. I actually have a post coming out soon in collaboration with Noam Segal about how everyone's using AI to interview. And one of the most interesting ways I've heard people and that we found in this research was that people use it to get feedback. They record the interview and then it gives them feedback. Here's where you could have done better. Here's what you missed because the feedback loop is so missing. No one ever tells you, here's what you did badly in this interview. No one tells you that.

1:01:19And AI can do that. So I'll add two things to that. one which is exactly this. So I'll mock with AI. Also, I did something really cool where there's a question bank online free by Lewis Lin, which basically is an always updating bank of questions that people are asked in real interviews. And I basically used Comet, which is the Perplexities browser. And I had the agent run all kinds of analyses on what the most asked questions are. And that's how I knew how to prioritize what questions I would mock. And then at the end of these mocks, I would tell Claude within the project, you're my coach and I don't want you to make me feel good.

1:02:01I want you to make me as ready as possible for these interviews. So give me feedback, like you said. And the other thing that I did was really cool was some questions where I didn't have time to mock. I would ask Claude to play the candidate and then it would just give me a really good answer. And I could also learn from that, like learning from someone who does a perfect answer. Oh, man. I really love the way you phrased it, that people kind of in your generation, the default is I have something I need to do. Let's go to AI immediately and help me prepare for this thing, help me figure it out.

1:02:32Yeah. And this comes back to this quote that I always think about, which I think everyone's always hearing, but it's such an important quote that it's not that you will be replaced by AI for a long time. It's you'll be replaced by someone who's better at using AI than you. I agree. and that's what these conversations are for to help people keep up with all that and to learn some of these skills and again see where the future is going and and start to learn how to get there yourself okay zebby uh before we get to our very exciting lightning round i'm going to take us to a recurring segment on this podcast i call failure corner and why i love this segment is people come on this you know just even this conversation it's like all these amazing things you figured out everything's going so well people rarely hear the things that don't go well and those are often the most interesting and impactful stories.

1:03:19So the question is just what's a story of a time you failed in your career? And what did you learn from that experience? Yeah, I love this. I love this. I love Failure Corner. Big, big fan. So I'll tell a story about when I started at Wix. So basically, I started within Wix's student program. And straight out of the student program, you get put into a certain team. So I was in the editor, which is the core product of Wix and the other PMs were just the best PMs almost at Wix. Like there's four other people, uh, had much more experience than me and they were ridiculously good. And I remember coming in and thinking like my first product review, I'm going to blow these people's socks off.

1:04:01They're not going to believe how good of a PM I am. And I basically didn't really share what I was thinking. Uh, I would work tons of hours alone. And I was like, I'm going to kill this product review. They're going to be so impressed. and I ended up failing miserably. My product review was not good. It wasn't the format they expected. They had a ton of questions that I missed and I felt awful when it was over. I was like, ah, you're such an idiot. And I saw that everyone was like, all right, cool. Yeah, just come back in two weeks and we'll keep getting at this. And I understood in that moment that they had zero expectation of me being a 10X PM, but the expectation of me was being a 10X learner.

1:04:41and the second I understood that my whole mindset switch shifted and I think this is probably the best tip that I give now to junior PMs is basically be the best learner you can be at the beginning no one expects you to know all the answers and no one expects you to be good so basically what I did was I took each person on the PM team there was four other PMs and I assessed what their strength is and use them as a mentor for that so Neri was still my mentor till today he has the best product sense of anyone I've met. Oya is super, she's like a methodology expert. She just thinks in frameworks.

1:05:18Yara, who is head of product, basically can look at a product and then instantly understand the third and fourth order effects of them, the system thinking. So every time I had an issue with one of these areas, I would come to one of them and consult them. And this does two things. First of all, I learned a ton. And the second thing is that when the next time, the next product review, my success felt to them like their success. Because it wasn't this kid who's trying to show us up how cool he is. It was like our mentee kind of making us all proud. And it was such a great shift for me. And basically, at the end of the day, I really excelled through this.

1:05:57That is an awesome story. And this idea of learning is such a good thread throughout this whole conversation that AI is good at getting stuff done, but it's also really good at helping you learn how to do the thing and to be this partner, this thought partner, the way you talked about the interview process you went through and this learning opportunity slash command. So awesome. Great story. Zevi, okay, before we get to a very exciting lightning round, is there anything else that you wanted to share, anything you want to leave listeners with? Yeah. So kind of to tie back into the first thing I said, where if people walk away thinking, um zevi's so cool then then then i've failed here i think that it's just the best time to be alive i think it's the best time to be a junior uh contrary contrary to what a lot of people are saying how you know there's no more junior roles out there and people get out of school and you you can't find a role yeah that's true but also when else in history could you get out of school and just build a startup you know on your own with a couple of friends uh completely bootstrapped.

1:07:01And I see more and more people towards my end, towards the end of the time, my time at Wix, I was interviewing. And I saw more and more people building their own stuff with AI. And I think, contrary to what a lot of people think, it's the best time to be a junior, it's the best time to be a learner. And I think if any listener is listening to this, and you're a curious person, you're a hardworking person, I want to say kind, I'm not sure. But if you're a kind person and a good communicator, you have such an unfair advantage and you can give more value to companies than most people who have 20 years of experience.

1:07:37So I really hope people get inspired by this and start killing it with their projects. Amazing. So many ways to be inspired from this conversation. Zevi, with that, we've reached our very exciting lightning round. I've got five questions for you. Are you ready? Yep, let's do it. What are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people? So I'll take one from each kind of genre. So in like fiction, I love The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand, one of my favorite books. Really makes you think, really makes you feel. Business books, I'm a big fan of Shoe Dog, The Nike Story. I just finished reading that.

1:08:16So fine. Amazing. It was great. It was great. Yeah. I love Shoe Dog. And then more on like the psychology side, Mindset by Carol Dweck, who coined the term growth mindset. It's just such an amazing book. It kind of sounds like a self-help book, but then you understand that it's completely psychological and is based on research. And that book completely changed my life. Really, I was always with a fixed mindset. And then after reading that, I kind of understood that it was something holding me back. And since then, I've been really, really trying to cultivate a growth mindset. So I really recommend everyone reading that.

1:08:51Again, connects to that thread of the way you described it, being a 10x learner versus a 10x doer. Okay, next question. Favorite recent movie or TV show you have really enjoyed? Yeah, actually, my wife is really into film, so we watch a lot of TV. It's probably our favorite together time. I just finished watching The Pit, which was amazing. It was really good. And my first recommendation to everyone is if you haven't seen Severance, run to see Severance, one of my favorite shows. Is there a favorite product that you have recently discovered that you really love? This is a good question. I'm always trying new products.

1:09:26I'll always have three or four browsers installed on my computer and all this different kind of stuff. And I recently discovered a Loom alternative. I was kind of disappointed with Loom. They were taking so much money and the product, I don't know, I just didn't love it. And there's an open source alternative called Cap, which is just really well crafted. You can see that the person was like really sweating the details. And it's just a really, really great alternative. So I've been using that recently. There's also a product called Supercut that I love. That's also a Luma alternative. A shout out.

1:10:03Okay, two more questions. Do you have a favorite life motto that you find yourself coming back to in Worker in Life? Yeah, I'm kind of between two right now. One, which is like become a Twitter meme, basically, which is you can just do things. I feel like that is basically going all ways in my head. Every time I do something that I'm just shocked at the speed and ability to do things now. So you can just do things. And the second one I stole from my brother. His motto is nobody knows what the fuck they're doing. And I just love that. And I think it kind of makes you take life more lightly. So yeah, nobody knows what the fuck they're doing.

1:10:39I think people see these companies on the outside and it feels like everything they've got all figured out. And if you're ever on the inside of a company that's doing really well, you're like, how is this staying on the rails? How is this still a thing that is working? It doesn't make any sense. It's all about to fall apart. But yeah. Okay, last question. You've had a long entrepreneurial thread throughout your career. There's a couple other real world businesses you've started in the past. You did a thermal clothing business and then like a hummus delivery thing. So maybe pick one of those and just tell the story of what that's about.

1:11:13Yeah, I'd love to. Really fun that you asked about this. So I'll tell the thermal clothing because I think it's really cool. So in high school, I was selling thermal clothes in 10th grade for one of my sister's friends or something. And basically, it was just packs of thermal clothing, shirt and pants. I grew up in Jerusalem, so it's a bit chillier there. So it was perfect for the weather. And in 10th grade, when I was selling them, they were like$20,$25 a piece. And I was making like$4 a sale. And if you look in the food chain, I was like sixth or seventh down the line. so this was like crazy margins so during the summer i thought about it like i should just go straight to the importer so throughout the summer i called the importer and at first he was really really mad he was like no you have to work for me for years to get to this state and i said listen man i'm finishing school soon this is not going to be my career either do it or not and we basically negotiated uh throughout the whole summer and this was also like how i did things before chat gpt so he would like throw out something he'd say oh the import tax has gone up and i'll just search google like import tax israel and like start reading and i'll be on the phone with him and i'll be like hey uh i would just basically stall and then i'd somehow come back with a uh with a challenge um and i ended up uh getting a really great price like 12 and a half dollars a piece so i was making like 100 profit and i spread throughout a bunch of different schools each school I had the coolest people in school selling for me.

1:12:47And then the cool, a really fun thing that I did was we had a really awesome basketball team. And like our basketball team would basically be 30 points up within the first half. And it kind of got boring for the crowd. So I wrote a song like a basketball chant about thermal clothes that basically has my number within it. And like, the end of it was if you join in now, we'll give you a discount. And it was with drums and everything. And still when I go to Jerusalem, I know some people who I don't even know know my number by heart because they know it by the tune. And sometimes when I walk in Jerusalem, people stop me and say like, hey, it's Thermal Zevi.

1:13:25So that was just a really cool experience as a kid. This explains so much. Such a, just the marketing genius of that move. Oh man. Okay, Zevi, this was incredible. Well, two final questions. Where can folks find you if they want to reach out and maybe follow up on some of the stuff? We'll link to the scripts and prompts and all that in the show notes. So you don't have to read that. And then how can listeners be useful to you? Awesome. So I've been helped throughout my whole career a ton. So I love helping any way I can. So reach out on LinkedIn or on X. I really love to help whoever I can. How can listeners be useful to me?

1:14:05So if you're a student, try study mate, tell me what you think. If you're in Israel and you're not using dictation yet, try the Bortatex, tell me what you think. Amazing. I just love how much you're giving away and how useful this can be to so many people. So again, we'll link to that in the show notes. Zevi, you're awesome. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for sharing so much. This is going to help, I think, a lot of people. And I think it's going to help people get over the hump on, okay, I see all these people doing cool stuff. Here's how I can actually do this stuff. So thank you so much for being here and for sharing so much.

1:14:35Thank you for having me. And if you build something cool with some stuff that I learned here, hit me up, send me. I'd love to see. Amazing. Zevi, thank you so much for being here. Thank you. Bye, everyone. Thank 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 Lenny's podcast.com. See you in the next episode.