Josh Woodward
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Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth · Why every company now needs to think and operate like a lab team |…
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Why Does Every Company Need a Frontier Team?
Josh Woodward says every company needs a set of people whose job is the frontier. If they have not heard the latest thing going viral in the last 24 hours, they are missing the job. They stay plugged into how other people are building, the model releases, and the tools everyone else is trying, including the ones that cost about $200 a month. The organization has to give that group a place to exist.
A place to watch is not enough. Those people also need an environment where they can build, and then a bridge into the rest of the company so the work is not written off as a weird research group of gimmicks and toys. Someone has to look at a thing that looks like a toy and say it will be essenti
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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. Product managers have been the function able to adapt to other functions faster, because the role is more horizontal. In builder pilots across Google, product managers are more accustomed to sitting in a meeting and simulating a lawyer, a business-development person, or sales. The best people can still come from any function. Strategy and ops, business development, and marketing people are showing up as builders in Labs and doing well.
People still have a specialty, like a major or a minor in college. If everybody becomes a builder, teams lose respect, appreciation, and the ex
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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. One is an unlearning rate: how fast someone can learn a thing and then walk away from it when a product test shows the old approach is done. Another is explosive endurance, a phrase he took from a book about Roger Federer. It means people who can go very hard and still pace themselves, and the people around them, over a long stretch. Labs talks about that pace as seasons.
Collaboration is rising at the same time, even as more of the work becomes directing agents. Someone still has to work with people. The signal he watches is how fast a person can build trust, with an
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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. Teams already know how to run experiments, make data-driven decisions, and set OKRs, and that process helps. Sometimes a couple of people simply have conviction that the future will look a certain way, and they cannot explain it. That kind of advice is not very useful, and it is still part of the early read.
A more useful check is to get outside the building and show people early prototypes. In the room, the metric is people's eyes, not a usage dashboard. Ask what they think. If their eyes light up and they lean in, the early signal is there. If they look bored, the p
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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. Getting to the frontier means playing with the models and tracking which kinds of experiences have just opened up. That crossing is like a phase shift, a solid turning to gas. Two days before this conversation he had seen one of those shifts and had not stopped thinking about it.
When an item on the list flips, whether the signal shows up on X or somewhere else, the lab gathers a team and goes. Technology alone is not enough. The new capability has to match an interesting user problem, ideally one people will pay for. The same approach is h
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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.
Google Labs products are growing and need more and more TPUs. A few people wanted a way to reward efficiency: reclaiming TPUs and harvesting TPUs so the team can build the next features and fuel growth. The rake is a miniature one made on Etsy. The award has turned into a big celebration for people who save TPUs and optimize. It is not for people who use the most tokens. People who use the most tokens are talked to separately.
A second award covers people who go in and fix paper cuts. Paper cuts are the little things that add up in a product and annoy people.
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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
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How Do You Set Up an Internal Labs Team?
Josh Woodward gives three tips for anyone setting up an internal labs team. Give it a space where weird things can grow, decide what winning looks like, and use the lab to challenge how the company works.
The team cannot nestle under an existing business unit. It needs its own independence, and in some companies that means reporting to the CEO or sitting far enough away from the core. The people running it need a users-first mindset. At Google the order is users first, Google second, Labs third: the job is to make users successful and make Google successful. Be clear whether the goal is to graduate things into existing products or to invent new product lines and categories. Google Labs star
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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. Passion starts to run out, the group has tried everything they can think of, and the work still is not going. People can see a project that is not working the same way they can see a relationship that is not working.
In Labs, and on features inside Gemini, the aim is a culture where someone can say the idea is not working. Yesterday the team had a Gemini feature they were excited to launch. Early data came back. People went out, looked in the eyes, and it just was not there. The product manager on the team refused the launch because it was not good. He replied to everyone and thanke
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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. In his experience they very rarely come from design sprints or from time set aside on a calendar specifically to come up with the next idea.
They usually arrive when people are swimming, in the hallway, maybe on a weekend, or often over a break. Labs teams hack and build because they cannot help themselves, then come back and share a video. The habit is to stay always on alert for something that catches the eye. Good ideas do not come from conventional places, and you cannot microwave them. Sometimes it is less about the idea and more about who the interesting people are.