YouSaid · the spoken record

Robby Stein

lines on the record: 98
first: 2025-10-10
most recent: 2025-10-10
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, I think on X at RM Stein 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”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Be scrappy, be immediate, like intense urgency usually wins over thinking about it for a long time. And that's certainly proved to be true on that one.”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Going to be in LA tomorrow. No, no Do you happen to be there? And he just wrote back some one line thing, like, meet me at this hotel, like for breakfast at something. And we're like, oh, okay. So 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 he 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 he obviously was using it to stamp his favorite stuff. And so people go, oh, Justin's into this song or he's into this stuff and would post that. And it was one of the ways that we got lots of people to try out and see what we were doing. So that's a little extra scrappy moment in time. But I think it embodies a good lesson, just like do it now.”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was going to be on there. I would totally stamp this billow, and then you could discover it. And one of the Cold Star problems was obviously like you want a group of people that are on it that are already using it, that could have some Tastemaker type folks. And so we had a bunch of people that were like chefs and we had people who were kind of literary folks. And then we wanted to get a couple people that were more musicians, artists, and these kind of influential folks. And so 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. We were like, hey, we're going to, we were 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.”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's kind of a wild story. So I was just a scene set a little bit. I was 25 right after Google being an ICPM 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 Stamp was to put your stamp on your favorite things, get recommendations from friends and from people that you trust. And so you think of like a Twitter feed, but it's all stuff that people think is cool. It's like books, restaurants, movies, food, products.”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is be curious. I think I almost named a company curious. I just think it's a really awesome. One thing in life, it's that in terms of getting things done, in terms of understanding the world, people, your kids, your family. Like 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.”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm super into this new pillow that I got called Purple Pillow. And I've been recommending it to everyone like at work. We're on a pillow chat now. It's like a thing. It's like Talk about like what pillows we're getting, but it's this really cool thing where it's got this new technology of like this honeycomb polymer that's inside. And so it like 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.”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I 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.”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I 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 Cope wrote. It's about electromagnetic pulse in the sun that like knocks out. It's like, It didn't work out. I don't know. I was sad to see that fall apart. But it's a really fun book”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This, yeah, that's exactly right. You go to Google app. 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, it's a live version of AI mode that you can just talk to. It's a full screen experience and it'll say like start talking.”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The 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 talked 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 on when you're driving. You can just talk all the knowledge I talked about, what 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, like, I talk to Google about something. Like, 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, you know, 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.”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Studying what you want to know about and knowing where the branches of knowledge live there. Like a lot of times, I'll read like old papers and PDFs that are free online on like a statistics thing if I want to learn about that. And I think people underappreciate those as like analog old school great learning. And AI can help you discover them. I'm using AI, 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. And I find that like 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.”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, AI is obviously like the ultimate curiosity engine, and that's what's so cool. You can now ask anything and just get information. And so I find that people just underappreciate just how much they can learn about whatever they want. But also, I think that a lot of this also comes down to”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Concept Be curious like I think of embodying everything as 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. Those would be my only parting thought.”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It feels a little more like when I was at Google the first time through right now, where you kind of just have so much stuff and this kind of like fun curiosity happening where people want to try things and ship things. And yeah, hopefully that continues.”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't actually 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. Yeah, they wanted to go for something fun for folks to.”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. 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.”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a little difference in Nana Banana because Nana Banana is like an image editor. This is more like helping you find images on the web. So it's a little bit more like AI inspiration.”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 code, math, homework kind of 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 for at IO. And so you can reference some of those keynotes. But that's in the process of being rolled out. And so you're going to be able to now ask 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,”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, you know, for a long time, if you were to ask it to help you, you know, 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. And 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 IO that we're going to be building more of was how AI can help with inspiration.”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think that it's mostly when you have hit the conviction moment. Like, I think there's two big milestones. There's like internal conviction, like for yourself, do you believe in it? And you believe in it because there's some external validation, like your friends, you know, 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. Like 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 like all 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 like 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's kind of like you want to build the right product eventually is the mentality.”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 and market fit, which it's not always true.”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Companies that have had huge impacts on people. And I think particularly for bigger companies internally, something I've seen is it's almost like too scrappy because it never gets enough momentum The froc never gets good enough internally, and then it kind of 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 kind of like either takes forever to get to the thing you're looking for, like 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 the like 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, you know, that leisure. And so I think you need to actually think, what is the group I need to build a version that's great?”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 kind of this. 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 too earlier underinvest 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, right? So what you're building does change. But even for software, I mean, 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”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No. Although it sometimes is. Australia and Canada get a lot of stuff just because it's easier for the teams to see feedback from them.”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that was one of the earlier ones. Yeah. But it's always every time you ship something, there's a slightly different reason why.”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We had like 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.”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was actually, I think that informed us everyone had a Finsta, and there was a Finsta. It's like this layering of people of like 20 Vincas down to like your partner insta. And then it's basically like, I made that up. I don't know if it's true, but I'm sure there's Pinsta out there somewhere. And we were like, wow, people clearly trying to hack Instagram, basically, to create these private smaller group settings. And so we should just make a product.”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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? It's like, 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 kind of like common 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.”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And also only worked in stories. So 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. The list we made, 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 kind of the design for clarity. We were being cute like, oh, if you, we thought, I think at the time it was like, oh, it's like a secret story or something. And if you open it, you see 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 like a private story for me. That system worked and did incredibly well. And that was the process we followed from like a total flop to something that was very successful.”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, the other thing Clayton Christian talks 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's story. They just see the little head because you have to click on it to see the thing. And so it just people stop using it. So we went through and we did these revs where we would like 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 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.”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Feet. And then it was just confusing because you didn't, it had like an extra little green thing on it, but it was like that got a green thing and the story is one didn't. If you open the story, it had a green thing inside the story. And people were just so confused. And they 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 because I think it was actually called originally favorites, I want to say, and that encouraged people to just do like 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? Like, are people up? And it feels very much, it's 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.”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Green circles, yes. It's one of the most popular, at least when I was there. It 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 friend's post for anything. So you could do a feed post or a stories post. And you also had a close friend's profile. So you could see like if Lenny went to Robbie'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 humble part. Wasn't great. Had a bunch of, it was just super confusing. Like 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.”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, honestly, this close friends example, I can give you more from Instram 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 that you can feel really comfortable sharing.”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We talked about it internally. It's like if you look at it in the tab, it's like everyone knows it's like you see it and you'll know what it is. Or we could call it something like random, but then what is that? And now you're working against yourself.”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a camera. Just put the camera in. Maybe you could add like 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 gives me more of the code is be humble. Like constantly and always. Question yourself, listen to others, listen to users, and be open to being wrong.”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't. And I think on this one, there's this great book, Don Norman's book, obviously Design of Everyday Things is a big one. But he has this incredible chapter in there about doors and how 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 most beautiful symmetric two handles on each side on a glass door, it like 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, you know, like a camera that's like kind of a camera but is mostly an AI looking thing and then is most but then has these dots in it that connects it to this other product and you're like keep”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then you understand it turns out that it was most we actually learned about this, and there was a story in close friends on Instagram where it just totally failed at first in a bunch of 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 of that person saw it and wrote back to you was like zero. It's a proc which is broken. So it's like you got to understand your problems. And then the third one is around really designing for clarity instead of cleverness. Like a lot of people are like, oh, we're going to differentiate the design. And we talked about this a little bit with stories. Like 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 where you.”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This interview, he calls it like an interrogation. We talk to a user, like, hey, why'd you use my product? Where were you? Were you in bed? Were you like at work? What were you doing? Oh, I was talking to my, you know, 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 like aha moment like that when they first decide to use your product, he calls 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 will be much more on your way than just building things that sound cool. And so that's the first chapter is like deeply understand people. Second is really around analytical rigor and understanding your problems. You have to understand your problems. And this got, this is a little bit of what we were talking about about root cause analysis and understanding, okay, the metrics are dropping, like why 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.”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, how do you, when you go back, like why someone not using your product, right? And so it focuses on these techniques to extract.”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The first, I mean, I 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. People don't want a quarter inch drill. They want a quarter inch hole.”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's typically three things I think about. Like if I were to write a book about how to build great products, there'd be like three chapters. I mean, there'd probably be more than that, but three chapters.”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To the authoritative sources, ultimately that people want, and we hear from people. So those are ends up becoming the distinct qualities of this product versus more of like a chat bot. Maybe you would talk to it, like you maybe even have like a bit of like a, hey, how are you doing today with that chat bot that, you know, 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've focused our product on that.”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, AI mode is 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. So think about your planning a trip. You're trying to buy something, you're working through question for a 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. Like you can ask it to rewrite something for you. It'll do that. But we are less focused on creativity, productivity, like upload a spreadsheet and like output graphs for me. Like we're not focused on that. Like 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. And then also verify to get in and go to the”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everything Google knows about the world and information to people and accessible with AI. That's driving a lot of the excitement.”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I mean, I think it's interesting how organizations change. I think when you feel like there isn't a moment in time that is clearly critical to deliver for people like 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. And so 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 kind of establish how people use the next wave of products for many years. And so at least, I mean, I can only speak for myself. Like, 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 everyone.”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, it's working. And then we did bring it before Labs actually to trusted tester group. There were maybe like 500 people externally that we added on to it and we had pings with them. Some of them were actually had friends and family. We tried to treat it a little more like a startup where we feel like you got to have people test it that tell you the truth and tell you when it sucks because it probably does. And then they message you. It's like 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. And so we kind of had that for a while. And then we got to a point where it was feeling good, you know, the trusted testers were liking it, reporting good stuff. And then we brought it to this labs moment where anyone could turn it on. And then we used that to make it better with real query data. Like 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.io to everyone, 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.”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 has like a little working team to build something and then you have to feel it yourself. And it's a 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 give you hope. And so then we basically built it out and built the first version that launched in labs, basically.”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source