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Back to Why every company now needs to think and operate like a lab team | Josh Woodward (Google Labs, Gemini, AI Studio), with Josh Woodward.

Will Google Have 10,000 Products or Five?

Josh Woodward keeps switching his answer in a long-running debate with Logan Kilpatrick about whether Google will have 10,000 products or five in five years. Right now he does not know if Google is even going to think of products the same way.

One framing of 10,000 products from Google is 10,000 surfaces that have their own brands, and he is not sure that framing will be possible. A product factory that turns products out is one option to think about. He is thinking more about bespoke experiences the models might make, with labs teams making the agent a person meets in a common surface, and he is not sure about that path either. A couple of experiments in labs are trying to prove both sides of the debate: what the world looks like if things consolidate into a super app or a set of super apps, and what the world looks like if things super fragment.

Super apps have worked extremely well in some use cases in some parts of the world. For a lot of people using them, they can be very complex, and it is very hard to drive the behavior that adds value because of so much complexity.

Grokipedia·Josh Woodward·Logan Kilpatrick

Transcript

Why every company now needs to think and operate like a lab team | Josh Woodward (Google Labs, Gemini, AI Studio) ·

Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth

More from this episode

  1. Where Do Google's Best Ideas Come From?Josh Woodward says the best ideas to come out of labs, and out of Google more broadly, arrive from a variety of places.
  2. What Is Google Labs' Almost Possible Framework?Josh Woodward says Google Labs keeps a list of what is almost possible and watches for the moment an experience crosses into something a team can build.
  3. How Do You Spot Product-market Fit Early?Josh Woodward spots early product-market fit by watching people's eyes, because the early read is way more art than science.
  4. When Should You Kill a Product Idea?Josh Woodward kills a product idea when the team already knows it is failing, usually before the leader does.
  5. What Skills Are Rising in Value in the AI Era?Josh Woodward looks for mispriced signals in the people around him, past the usual talk of taste, judgment, and vibe coding.
  6. Should Every Employee Become a Builder?Josh Woodward says people are overhyping the idea that everybody is a builder and that the new job is all the same.
  7. Why Does Every Company Need a Frontier Team?Josh Woodward says every company needs a set of people whose job is the frontier.
  8. How Do You Set Up an Internal Labs Team?Josh Woodward gives three tips for anyone setting up an internal labs team.
  9. Why Does Google Labs Hand Out Miniature Rakes?Josh Woodward gives Google Labs teammates a little miniature rake and a cash reward when they do the grungy work of reclaiming TPUs.

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