LinkedIn’s product evolution and the art of building complex systems | Hari Srinivasan (LinkedIn)

It was March 2020, and we were just watching COVID hit, and it was just this heartbreaking kind of moment, where in the feed you were seeing all these people, by no fault of their own, starting to post that they've lost their job. We started seeing in our data as you had some areas, like, I mean, hospitality was really getting hit, but some areas like customer service, they just couldn't hire enough. And you'd think the marketplace would balance pretty quickly. You'd think, okay, like, you know, maybe it's people will start moving to other jobs, but it wasn't happening. And a large reason behind this, people are used to looking for certain particular titles, and they didn't start realizing other people could do this job. So we made a pretty big push in something we call skills-first hiring. This was the idea that we could translate people's experiences into a set of skills, and by that we could help them really start balancing the marketplace with a much different system, right? And so I think that the job market is rebalancing but it's, it's being done, the pathways are being done in a very different way that seems to be, you know, maybe a change that holds through these ups and downs, and that'll be very interesting to see.

(Instrumental music) Welcome to Lenny's Podcast, where I interview world class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard won experiences building and growing today's most successful products. Today my guest is Hari Sreenivasan. This episode has a hilarious story. On Twitter, an account called TheCuriousPM tagged me with a request to have someone from LinkedIn come on the podcast and talk about how they operate, and what they've learned about building products that serve so many different types of customers. I replied asking for any suggestions for who he thought I should specifically talk to, and he suggested Hari Sreenivasan by doing some research on LinkedIn. So I reached out to Hari, told him about this tweet, and he agreed. And so here's the episode. Hari's been at LinkedIn for eight and a half years, and he leads the Talent Solutions Product Team as VP of Product, which is also LinkedIn's biggest business, and includes all of the hiring and learning products which you'll hear about in this episode. In our chat, Hari shares what he's seeing change in the hiring market, what you can do to improve your odds of finding a job through LinkedIn, what he's learned about building and maintaining really complex systems like LinkedIn, tips for getting into product management, and some lessons from his own course on product management. Plus, we also talk about how LinkedIn has been able to become a real source of valuable content, and a lot less cringe over the past couple of years, which I've definitely noticed and I share in our chat. What a fun series of events that led to this episode. A big thank you to Jatin, hopefully I'm pronouncing your name correctly, the guy behind TheCuriousPM account, for making this all happen. With that, I bring you Hari Sreenivasan after a short word from our sponsors. Today's episode is brought to you by Miro, an online collaborative whiteboard that's designed specifically for teams like yours. The best way to see what Miro is all about, and how it can help your team collaborate better, is not to listen to me talk about it but to go check it out for yourself. Go to miro.com/lenny. With the help of the Miro team, I created a super cool Miro board with two of my own favorite templates, my one-pager template and my managing up template, that you can plug and play and start using immediately with your team. I've also embedded a handful of my favorite templates that other people have published in the Miroverse. When you get to the board, you can also leave suggestions for the podcast, answer a question that I have for you, and generally just play around to get a sense of how it all works. Miro is a killer tool for brainstorming with your team, laying out your strategy, sharing user research findings, capturing ideas, giving feedback on wireframes, and generally just collaborating with your colleagues. I actually used Miro to collaborate with the Miro team on creating my own board, and it was super fun and super easy. Go check it out at miro.com/lenny. That's m-i-r-o dot com slash Lenny. Today's episode is brought to you by Brave Search and their newest product, the Brave Search API, an independent global search index you can use to power your search or AI apps. If your work involves AI, then you know how important new data is to train your LLMs and to power your AI applications. You might be building an incredible AI product, but if you're using the same datasets as your competitors to train your models, you don't have much of an advantage. Brave Search is the fastest growing search engine since Bing, and it's 100% independent from the big tech companies. Its index features billions of pages of high quality data from real humans, and it's constantly updated thanks to being the default search engine in the Brave browser. If you're building products with search capabilities, you're probably experiencing soaring API costs or lack of viable global alternatives to Bing or Google. It's only going to become harder to afford these challenges. The Brave Search API gives you access to its novel web scale data with competitive features, intuitive structuring, and affordable costs. AI devs will particularly benefit from data containing thorough coverage of recent events. Lenny's Podcast listeners can get started testing the API for free at brave.com/lenny. That's brave.com/lenny. Hari, welcome to the podcast.