Structure the Ambiguity: Lucas Longacre & Zach Grumet on Product, AI, and the Real Work of Building
- 6 days ago
- 46 min read
Lucas Longacre officially joins Signal & Noise—and in his debut episode as an Executive Voices contributor, he starts exactly where great product work begins: in the mess.
In this conversation, Lucas sits down with Zach Grumet—product leader, operator, and one of the key figures behind Lucas’s own transition into product—to unpack what it actually means to “structure the ambiguity.”
This isn’t a conversation about frameworks or buzzwords. It’s about the real work:
Why product managers don’t “ship features”—they own the mess
How unclear problems, bad communication, and organizational friction kill good products
The difference between product managers and actual product leaders
Why most teams solution too early—and miss the problem entirely
And how AI is quietly rewriting the rules of product development in real time
Along the way, they get into the uncomfortable truths: failed decisions, broken processes, internal chaos—and why those moments are where real product thinking is forged.
From reducing onboarding friction to predicting parking enforcement patterns (yes, really), Zach brings battle-tested lessons from FinTech, HealthTech, and SaaS—while Lucas connects it to a new reality where prototyping happens in hours, not quarters.
But beneath it all is a bigger question: If AI accelerates everything… what actually matters more?
This episode is about clarity in a world that’s only getting noisier. And it’s just the beginning.
Read Full Transcript Bellow:
Lucas Longacre (00:02.917)
All right, Zach, thanks for joining.
Zach (00:05.964)
Nice to see you, sir.
Lucas Longacre (00:07.483)
Yeah, this is my first podcast episode for Signal & Noise. I have lots of experience in the past, but this is the first time doing something with them. Excited to have you on as my first guest.
Zach (00:19.118)
Should I feel honored? I don't know.
Lucas Longacre (00:20.421)
You should. Well, there's a reason for this is because you're instrumental in my career switch. When I went from filmmaking to doing product management, I had a startup, so I had a lot of tech experience that was very chaotic and loose. And I also had got my full stack certificate. But when I was going for my first legitimate job, you were instrumental in kind of helping coach me and get me feel confident enough to do the full career switch.
Zach (00:22.485)
haha!
Lucas Longacre (00:48.943)
I figured you'd be the perfect person to have on on my first podcast here.
Zach (00:53.506)
Well now I'm gonna hitch up for a job.
Lucas Longacre (00:55.451)
You should. Well, no, I think this is a good way of also like, you have a ton of experience in this industry and we're at a very weird time in the industry where things are changing rapidly with technology as they do. So I just wanted to kind of get where you're at as also, you know, some of your insights that you've had over your long career, but also if you notice like when I sent you the schedule ahead of time, we're gonna dive into some stuff predicting what's to come. So.
Zach (01:23.925)
absolutely.
Lucas Longacre (01:24.071)
Why don't we dive in and you just kind of tell me how you got started? Like what was your origin story for becoming a product manager?
Zach (01:33.358)
So before I get bit by the radioactive spider, right? So I mean, I didn't set out to be a product manager. I started closer to UX and operations, but I kept finding myself in the middle of these messy problems, know, where like business and tech and users, they weren't aligned. Product was just the role that owned the mess. I've always been a problem solver. So just took me a while to figure out that job was actually called product manager.
Lucas Longacre (01:36.261)
Yeah, before you got your super suit.
Lucas Longacre (01:55.143)
Mm-hmm.
Lucas Longacre (02:02.064)
So I come from the film world and that was like what I loved about filmmaking was that it was essentially putting out fires every day. You're getting teams to talk to each other. They need a leader with vision, you know, to point people where they're going for that's the producer and director role. And so for me it was like an easy transition, way easier than I assumed because I just was not familiar with that, you know, that world. Well, so, you know, your background spans FinTech, SAS, HealthTech. Is there like a common thread between all those worlds or is it generally just all these different beasts you've managed to, you know, slay?
Zach (02:35.692)
Well, so when I was a kid, my father worked for like the big banks. He was a senior systems analyst and he used to come home and talk to me about COBOL and CICS, all this stuff. I had no interest. I was like, yeah, dad, that's great. You know, and I never had any interest in working in tech whatsoever. So I ended up owning a business when I grew up in New York. And when I lived there, this business. I sold the business and I moved out to Denver. And my background beyond this business was in sales.
Lucas Longacre (02:41.222)
Mmm.
Lucas Longacre (03:05.03)
Mm-hmm.
Zach (03:05.486)
took this job in sales and I was miserable. was like, this is not what I, I was not happy, not where I wanted to be. So what ended up happening was everyone who lived around me in that neighborhood, they were all going to the boot camps. You know, I'm becoming a web developer. I'm becoming a, you know, whatever. So I was looking at these guys and I was going, well, how difficult is this? You know, and I knew I didn't want to be in sales anymore. So I ended up finding my way to UX because I looked at my skills.
Lucas Longacre (03:32.998)
Mm-hmm.
Zach (03:35.15)
And I was like, well, I was like, this is my skill set. Where does this fit in the tech world? Because no matter what you do, you can do it in tech. If you're a chef, you can go get a job at some fang cooking. No matter what you do, you can do it in tech. So I took my skill set. I said, all right, I'm going to apply this to UX. And I started taking this UX course. all the things I learned in this UX course were fascinating to me.
Although I didn't have that, like, not the design piece, but that graphic background, the graphic design background. So when the course finished, I was, you know, I took, we all made portfolios in this course. I took my portfolio and I put it up next to any of other people I went to school with. And I was like, I'm never getting a job anyway.
Lucas Longacre (04:09.604)
Mm-hmm.
Lucas Longacre (04:25.175)
I thought that was gonna go in a different direction, but okay.
Zach (04:27.047)
Well, no, I was like, I just don't have the chops. So then what I ended up doing was I was like, all right, well, I have these sales skills and these like this personality. And I know I have these UX skills. What can I do with this? And this was before AI, because now you were just going to chat GPT and say, hey, what can I do with this? But I was like, all right. And so this is kind how I managed to find my way into Prana.
Lucas Longacre (04:50.67)
Yeah, I'll say that when I got my full-stack certificate, I was one of the oldest people in the class. It was an online class. But I could tell that I was definitely on the upper age limit of who was attending it. But what was funny is I was coming at it from years of experience of running companies and managing people. And I could just see there's a huge disconnect between just the people part of the skills.
Yeah, you can do the projects, can do the code, but it was like, can you also like communicate it properly? And like, and I was constantly reaching out to the professors and having, you know, conversation, I actually end up, they're part of my network now, because I made a point to network with them offline, right? And just like, send them questions that were not related to the stuff at hand. And I could just, and I even asked them, I was like, are any other students doing this? They're like, oh God, no, like, it's so rare to get anybody who's, you know, actively thinking bigger than just the certificate in front of them. So I get it,
Zach (05:49.025)
Well, it's interesting you bring that up because when you start working with developers, you realize why they're developers.
Lucas Longacre (05:54.919)
Yeah, definitely. For good or ill.
Zach (05:59.939)
yeah, of course. I mean, you realize that there's no way a developer could communicate with a business person or really anyone.
Lucas Longacre (06:07.6)
That's gonna tie into a question I have later, which is one of my biggest failures in this role, but we'll get into that later. I did wanna ask more about your career. So you have some really impressive numbers in your bio, because I was doing a little surfing your LinkedIn and some of your online presence. So you have 30 % increase in digital claims completion, 50 % reduction in onboarding time. So can you pick one of those and just walk through us how you managed to transform something as a product manager?
Zach (06:10.126)
yeah
Zach (06:36.75)
So it doesn't matter what job I end up building, like a customer onboarding tool, no matter where I am. And I don't know why. Maybe it's the UX thing. I don't know. But it's a recent project I was building, yet another customer onboarding tool. We were receiving a lot of complaints that the claims were being driven to the call center. was an insure tech. So the claims were being driven to the call center. And it was about identifying like,
Lucas Longacre (06:44.42)
Yeah. Well, this maybe is the sales part of your background.
Zach (07:04.93)
where the disconnect was and how and why was this happening. So through a little research, I found that the customers were getting lost. Mostly it was like confusing wording because the original onboarding tool was built by people in the industry. And in the insurance industry, there's a lot of jargon and they just assume that you know. But laypeople don't know. You don't know what things are until you learn.
Lucas Longacre (07:21.338)
Mmm.
Zach (07:33.167)
What was happening was these people were going and filing claims and then not understanding it and not wanting to mess it up because it was important. So they would stop and they would just call the, you know, call the, uh, the 800 number. It was driving all these calls to the call center. So, um, obviously, we talked twice about my UX background, but I also have experience with real people and I understood that. So it wasn't a far stretch for me to understand why this was happening. Um, so like if you take yourself, right? Say your wife or your mom is sick. And you have to file a claim to take off for work. Like, do know the difference between FMLA and PFML? Do you know you're...
Lucas Longacre (08:10.032)
God, no, this seriously is my world because I work in the health care industry as well and I didn't come from that world. So trying to explain this to people who use jargon and acronyms is like, but I get it. like it's it gets you there quicker for them. But you're right. It's completely destabilizing and confounding to people who are not of that world.
Zach (08:16.406)
Right, now...
Zach (08:24.014)
Well yeah, no absolutely.
Zach (08:29.454)
Well, absolutely. And when you first get into that world and you hear all this jargon, you're like, I made an entire glossary of like, just terms. You know, was like, let me control that thing, figure out what they're talking about. So, I mean, so you understand this, but maybe other people don't. But when you hear all this jargon and you're not sure, you don't know if you're supposed to file a FML claim or a PFML claim or if your state has PFML or whatever it is, your state does, by the way, in case you're wondering.
Lucas Longacre (08:37.638)
Clever, yeah. Yeah.
Lucas Longacre (08:54.63)
Mm-hmm.
Lucas Longacre (08:58.32)
Thank you. Now I know.
Zach (08:58.862)
But beyond that, so once you understand that, and once I understood that, it was very easy for me to parlay that into, hey, let's fix this onboarding tool. Once you do that, something like that's a major change. And once you accomplish that, 50 % reduction was not a huge deal.
Lucas Longacre (09:16.848)
I mean, it's not a huge deal when you look at it that way, but I agree. think as a product guy, like that's my first like approach is like, who is this for? Like, like, who is it? Because it's obviously not for industry people who are going be navigating this site. And it's crazy to me how few people really like in our industry, like bring that to the table.
Zach (09:38.526)
digress a lot. A few weeks ago I was working on an internal tool and and we're working I was working with one of my stakeholders and she was trying to come up with some help text and like she's saying this she was saying the same thing I was saying in a different order and the way I was saying it made so much more sense.
Lucas Longacre (09:53.239)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, I think so much of it, though, is really like this is why I encourage it. You said earlier, which I think is important, you're a chef, you can work in tech like so many times people do not pursue a career path because they think, oh, I don't have the personality for I don't have the background for it. And it's like we desperately need you in this industry. And, you know, because like those varied backgrounds, those very perspectives are invaluable when it comes to building better products.
Zach (10:12.834)
Well, I think that's it.
Zach (10:19.896)
Well, that's exactly it. know, I read all these job postings and say, it doesn't matter if you have the experience, apply anyway. Yeah.
Lucas Longacre (10:26.95)
Can you learn? that's more important nowadays than having the certificate. So one of the things I loved about a post you did recently, because I feel like this is one of my strengths of when I took over this role, but also just my personality, is this idea of structuring ambiguity. I just love that term because I do feel like that's so much of what my day-to-day job is. And so when did you realize that that was the job and not just shipping features, which is what everybody thinks a product guy is doing?
Zach (10:57.08)
Probably when I started hearing, we have this random problem, it's very hard to just solution that. So you have to ask those questions. You have to be curious. You have to say, explain the problem and how is this affecting A, B, and C. And once you understand the problem and what it's affecting, it's it's at least easier for me to structure that in a way that I can say, all right, now this is the problem, where is the solution?
Lucas Longacre (11:04.687)
Mm-hmm.
Lucas Longacre (11:26.148)
Yeah, I mean, so another thing to follow up on that, you describe problems as like signals, know, customers are frustrated or this process feels broken. You know, what's your actual process from going from like that vague signal to something you can actually execute on?
Zach (11:41.657)
So you have to know and understand your problem. And you also have to understand that you can ask a question in two different ways and get two totally different answers. There's a four-step process that I use. I lay it out. It starts with defining that problem. Your problem statement is super important. So you have to define a good problem statement and understand what the problem is. Once you do that, you can break it down. So let me tell you a story about a project I worked on. was, we were given 15 million parking tickets. Not that I had to pay, but the data for 15 million parking tickets. It was five years of historic parking ticket data. And we were challenged, like, hey, what are you going to do with this? So I joined the project, you know, a few months after it started. basically the developers had just started building a heat map.
Lucas Longacre (12:12.262)
Yeah, I'd love to hear it.
Lucas Longacre (12:18.47)
It's like, wow, somebody doesn't care about the law.
Lucas Longacre (12:35.782)
Mm-hmm.
Zach (12:36.302)
And when you put all that data into this, into the server, it was overloading the server and crashing the server. So I was working with one of the data scientists one day and I was looking at the data and I noticed a GPS coordinates on the data. And I asked him, are these GPS coordinates? He goes, yeah. I go, so we know where every one of these parking tickets was written and when it was written. And he goes, yeah. And I go, why aren't we using that? You know, and he goes, well, what do you mean? Cause again, data scientists and programmers think very differently. said,
Lucas Longacre (13:04.965)
Yes.
Zach (13:05.536)
If we know where the tickets were written and when, we can build an algorithm to say, hey, this is what's going on and this is where the guy's going to be. So basically, that's what we did. And to validate it, this funny, I took lunch, right? Everyone eats lunch usually between 11 and 2, usually, right?
Lucas Longacre (13:28.486)
Can I predict you went to where you knew they were not gonna take at you? In part, illegally.
Zach (13:32.375)
No, not even because it was in a totally different city. So this is what I did. I went on Google Maps and I looked at the ticket data and I found the restaurants that were around where the tickets were written. And I said, all right. I said, I bet you this guy or woman or whatever likes this, you know, the sandwich shop. This is the only sandwich shop in three blocks, you know, or maybe it's the only, you know, and we, we, we just took a bunch of data points and we put them on a map and said, all right what, you know, are these tickets showing up at this time? You know, between 11 and two. And once we did that, I did something kind of unscrupulous. I called the health department and I called in a complaint and I got the place closed for the day. And then we went back to the data. No tickets. Well, it worked. It validated my data. Yeah. So what do we do now? Well.
Lucas Longacre (14:19.43)
That's real unscrupulous, That's hilarious. I'm sure that sandwich shop was pissed, you know, maybe, but also in your defense, maybe they needed a wake up call with their, you know, the cleanliness of the establishment. We don't know. We don't know.
Zach (14:28.814)
You're losing it, what's that?
Zach (14:35.15)
Well, damn, I- It was a corporate 7-Shop anyway. But yeah, go ahead.
Lucas Longacre (14:41.126)
All right, whatever, screw them. so it's funny though, you say that, because so many times when people come to me on my team, they're always coming to me with a solution without any explanation. And it's like my entire job is reverse engineering what they're trying to tell me to what actually the problem is. That's so much of my day to day is like, okay, you're telling me you need this fixed, why? And let's go back into what is actually broken, what's not working and I applaud people for trying to be proactive and find solutions, but so often their solution is like a temporary short-term fix from their perspective. So they're not taking into account every other, you know, stakeholder. So it's just like getting them to go back to the, what the real issue is. And then from there I can put it into like, you know, context of what I need to do. let's see. so in your, you know, from PM to product leader. So you draw a clear line between like a PM mindset. you a product leader mindset. when did you feel that, sorry, a PM mindset and a product leader mindset, like there's the two distinctive ways to approach that. And so when did you feel that shift happened for you personally?
Zach (15:47.406)
Thanks.
Zach (15:52.921)
So I was on a project where I was basically an order taker. I was completely siloed from users and really just stuck in a, basically in a corner listening to the stakeholders saying, we need this and we need that. And said, well, can we talk to some users? Can we find out like why? How do I know if I put that field on the screen that it's in the right place or even being used? Yeah, like it was impossible to function as a PM successfully. So once I,
Lucas Longacre (16:12.89)
You just described my nightmare, really. That scenario.
Zach (16:22.87)
I saw that and I said, I need to get the hell out of here. people, like it taught me that being a leader doesn't mean you're a good product leader. You know, you can have that title that doesn't mean anything. That just means some executive thought you deserved the title. Titles are bestowed upon us by management. So just because this person was my boss, and I say that in air quotes, you know, doesn't mean that they're they know any more about product than I do and that convinced me, said, there's a difference between product leadership and product management.
Lucas Longacre (16:55.268)
Yeah, I'll say the best compliment I got from my the president of my company. She was like, you know what? When I since I have you since you started here, I just I don't have have any of the anxiety or worry over the product anymore. She's like, I know you're just going to figure it out and handle it. And I was like, that is like the kindest thing anybody said to be in a really long time. But it's true. It's like because you take charge, you to be a leader in that. And like she knows that I'm going to step in if there's an issue, if something's going wrong. I'm not waiting around for permission to do things. It's like you've run forward and, you know, find a solution but that does bring up an interesting question, is, how do you balance the pressure to ship something in the short term against a long-term strategic vision? And that's the thing that I always am trying to keep my eye on the ball, where I'm like, OK, I'm making trade-offs with every decision, but how am I keeping that pointed to my North Star, which is the product roadmap six months, a year down the road, two years down the road?
Zach (17:50.383)
Well, and you hit the nail right on the head there. It's a, it's a balance between the backlog grooming and the backlog management and just cornering the stakeholders and beating the crap out of them. I mean, it's really good. It's about communication. You know, you have to communicate your, like your, what, your needs are versus what your stakeholder needs are. So your stakeholder can come to you and say, we need this fixed and we need it now. And you have to very clearly say to them, all right, well, I can do that for you, but what are we giving up? You know, and I'm big on like, um,
Lucas Longacre (17:59.995)
Yeah.
Zach (18:20.906)
asking like three times. So, you know.
Lucas Longacre (18:23.962)
funny, I just dealt with this where they we had this whole referral program we wanted to do with like users on our site. It's like we wanted to, you know, incentivize them to bring more people on. I think that was like the right call along, but they never would get back to me on clarity on like how we were going to do that. So I just shelved it and they kept coming back to me. When is that going to be available? I'm like, well, when you get me all the information I will. And then it went on long enough to the point where they're like, we're doing this huge marketing campaign in like two weeks or whatever. And I was like, wait, so you don't have the referral program figured out yet. I just essentially had to eat it because I put it off too long because they like I didn't think it was ready until they gave me those pieces. But I had to just eat it because I like strategically like this would be good for the company and also for my vision of what I need to do for this for this product. So I was like man like I don't know. I wish I would have hammered them harder on certain things or I honestly I would have saved myself some headaches if I just actually acquiesced earlier. But I have to admit I put off some priorities that I really am now like kicking myself a little bit over, but like it was the right call. Cause then we had these campaigns go out. Then all of a sudden the referral programs there, people are signing up with it. We're seeing the users increase. So I was like, it was the right call, but I still wish I could have gotten them to figure out the incentive part of it.
Zach (19:37.122)
I'll tell you that the easiest way I find to do it is just keep asking. And eventually they'll be like, why do you keep asking? Well, you know, and they won't forget the answer they give you either.
Lucas Longacre (19:40.56)
Yeah. Squeaky wheel, hell yeah. Yeah, and honestly though sometimes like in my whole thing is perfect should never be the enemy of good and like you don't know until you put stuff out there and then you can update it. Like you have a lot of assumptions you can do and lot of data you can get, but until you use real users are interacting with it. So one of the arguments the vice president gave me, which I agree, which is what allowed me to then flip the switch is she was like, you know, know, people will use it anyway. And I was like, okay, like I do think they would use it more like it was to be a better push if we flip, you know, we turned on the spigot for incentivizing it, but I'm like, you're right, let's see what it's like now when we don't incentivize it. So when we actually get our act together in the next couple of months, I can add that portion to it. Then we'll have both data points to see how much it increased. And I was like, you know what, you're right, we're gonna do it. Essentially now we're like out of duress, that's, and from my perspective, like, yeah, like you don't always have to, something does have to be perfect before you're shipping it out. Even though I do feel like we miss the opportunity by not getting our act together.
Zach (20:30.83)
So you were A-B testing.
Lucas Longacre (20:45.018)
Better to put something out there than nothing at this point.
Zach (20:47.31)
Well yeah, I'm a big fan of Fail Early and Fail Often, you know.
Lucas Longacre (20:50.288)
Yeah, definitely. So I want to kind of transition to kind of the future focus, talking a little bit about AI and the definitely the challenging landscape that it's bringing for people in our positions. So, you know, from a product perspective, how has the arrival of, you know, this AI tooling changed the way you think about roadmaps and prioritization?
Zach (21:13.518)
So it's changing everything. 100 % is changing everything. I was in a meeting two weeks ago where they were talking about product managers not writing Jiras anymore and going right to building prototypes. And actually, I've been playing with cloud code a lot, just building apps. There was an app I had an idea back when I was in school for UX. I had an idea for an app that the technology just wasn't there yet. But now I can prototype it out and see if it'll work, which is awesome.
Lucas Longacre (21:26.598)
Mm-hmm.
Lucas Longacre (21:39.099)
Totally. No, this, in this past week, I wrote two side apps that are not that, you know, connected directly to the product that we're using for demos. Like I have a sales team that's going out to, they're going to a conference and they were, and they were like, this would be game changing if you had this like feasibility calculator thing, which I already designed with the engineers, but it's like limited. And he's like, we want to put all these things in. like, I can't get that to you in a week. I was like, or can I. So I essentially just use cloud code and I, you know, I have the full stack background. So I just like threw it together in, I think one hour, I did the first version, got comments back from the sales team, updated it. And now they're in Chicago demoing it on the floor with people, you know? And like, that is like game changing. Like I cannot, so, cause what I'm gonna do is if they'll get feedback from actual potential customers, and then I can go to the engineering team and say, hey,
Zach (22:21.944)
See, that's awesome.
Zach (22:29.774)
Hmm?
Lucas Longacre (22:33.31)
I'll probably do one more update on it and then hand that over to them and say, this is this pretty dodgy thing I built, but this is the study of it. This is what's working. This is what we need to do. I can give them way more. And seeing the tactile version of it, I'm sure they're going to have 1,000 more questions than they would if it was just the data in front of them, or the Figma file and the linear tickets. They'll actually get to interact with it.
Zach (22:58.53)
Well, I think that leads into like the whole conversation about AI and, you know, our jobs are going to change and it's going to be all that prototyping and like, you're going to collect, I think, think you're going to collect information and you're going to prove yourself with a prototype rather than, you know, what we're doing now is a lot more documentation based. You know, I'm not going to be sitting here writing PRDs probably, but I'm going to take that information and build a prototype and that'll be my PRD or my, know.
Lucas Longacre (23:07.515)
Mm-hmm.
Zach (23:28.61)
and you'll bring that to the developers and be like, all right, this is how I want it to work. this isn't working quite right, if we could change, and that's kind of, mean, you'll still have to do some writing, but I think that's how it's gonna go.
Lucas Longacre (23:38.815)
yeah, for sure. Like, so the funny thing is like, I love my engineers cause they like, they always bring solutions that I didn't think of, you know, that are whether it's front end, you know, how people interact with it, whether it's backend efficiencies, like that's why they are the engineer. Like they have a way how they think and process things. Like I just not my skillset, but you know, being able to give them that direction and the vision is important. So I feel like just getting it closer to that alignment.
Zach (23:44.515)
Alright.
Lucas Longacre (24:04.762)
but then also allowing that room for them to put an input and creativity. This isn't, this is the finished product, put it up on, just take this and tweak it. No, no, it's like, here's what I'm thinking, what do you guys think? And then getting their input. But I do agree, think like, show don't tell is gonna become the norm at this point.
Zach (24:18.606)
Well done.
Zach (24:23.628)
Yeah, well, I think that's important with your background of, you your full stack background. But I think it's, that's collaborative work. That's always been that way. You know, I can say, hey, I have this idea to an engineer and he'll say, well, yeah, it's a good idea. Or, hey, that won't work because of X, Y, Z. You know, and that's, I mean, that's all about collaboration.
Lucas Longacre (24:42.01)
Yeah, which is the reason I love this line of work. Honestly, it's like to me, this is no different than the creative expression I did in filmmaking, where it's like a team of people working together, you know, at a shared vision and everybody bringing their, you know, all their strengths to it. so I have a question though. Have you, have you shipped any like, like AI, you know, at its core features yet? have you had the opportunity to play around with that in your line of work or is it more just like side projects?
Zach (25:08.302)
It's really all just side projects. I've done a lot of work in machine learning back in when I worked for, I worked for a payment processor and we were using machine learning to highlight mistakes and payments before they, before they dropped out of the payment process. And that was just right, right pre before AI really hit before chat GPT came out and all that. But I haven't had the opportunity to really work in AI. I've been doing a lot of learning about it, you know.
Lucas Longacre (25:20.902)
Mm-hmm.
Lucas Longacre (25:32.571)
Yeah. Well, I'm glad you bring that up because honestly, it frustrates me that now AI is the term where I'm like, machine learning has been around for decades. You know, this idea of what an AI is, it's only because people don't understand large language models, which is really like pattern recognition with language. And, you know, it's super powerful, but I do feel like we're getting into this trap where people who don't fully understand it are just running wild with it in a way that is like my prediction is that a lot of solutions that people are implementing now.
Zach (25:48.792)
Mm-hmm.
Lucas Longacre (26:01.914)
are gonna have to be redone because they're incredibly inefficient and wasteful. Because it was like, I'll use an LLM for this. It's like, why don't you use machine learning for 90 % of this and an LLM for this part? You know what I mean? Like understanding how they all interact. again, I'm gonna keep ranting, but I do think like a lot of these solutions are based on how cheap and easy it is to have this processing in the background that they're essentially doing what Uber did, which is like, you get it for cheaper free when the actual hard costs are gonna push into the future.
Zach (26:06.146)
What?
Zach (26:30.87)
Right. Now, I mean, I think that there's a twofold response to that. First is AI is the new cloud computing. Remember when cloud computing was, we'll use the cloud, we'll use the cloud. Well, it's the same kind of thing. They're throwing AI, you we'll just use AI. And it doesn't really work that way. I can't tell you how many conversations I have where I'm explaining what a large language model is to someone. How I'm explaining that it's not actually thinking, it's just understanding that these are the words and it knows that these words go in this order.
Lucas Longacre (26:37.808)
Mm-hmm.
Lucas Longacre (26:49.99)
Mm-hmm.
Zach (26:59.342)
It's been taught that.
Lucas Longacre (27:01.968)
No, mean, I is so when you know, coming from kind of the AI background, when I had my startup, when I first got this position, there was incredible pressure from the organization in general, this huge healthcare organization to be like, how are you leveraging AI? How are you leveraging AI? And I'll give my president a lot of credit. She's like, well, Lucas comes in that background. So what he says he wants to do, that's what we're going to trust, which was very cool, because I didn't have an answer for her. I'm like, I do not have a good use case yet on how this will actually improve anything across the board. I was like, if we're going to plug it into our product today, I'm like, I don't have an answer for you yet. And then like a year went by when I was like, tinking around, learning the product better, seeing how people interact with stuff. And the big light bulb moment for me was realizing how in our internal team, they were constantly struggling to pull insights from the data. There wasn't a dashboard I could build for them that would give them what they needed. Cause it was always weird, nuanced queries about like, cause we were a bunch of healthcare, know, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of healthcare experts that we, you know, have to you know, query. And so that was my light bulb moment because I was constantly going to chat GPT and putting in these like complex seek, putting in the structure of our database. I put our taxonomy in there and I was going, okay, I need to find this expert from this region who prescribed this drug. How do I connect all the tables, write the SQL code for me? And I'd go and pull those data and I'd give it to my team. And I was like, chat like LLM could do this for me. Like they could be replaced doing this task with it.
Zach (28:27.32)
Right.
Lucas Longacre (28:29.668)
So I brought that online where essentially it translates what they want into the data that they need. so it's essentially pulling the data directly from the database. It also walls it off so that you're not sharing sensitive information from our database about our experts. It's personal information with an LLM. So all it's doing is writing the code, pulls it like a SQL query, and then gives the table that they asked for. I'm like, so I haven't, I've only been like testing it still on a small subset right now internally. But as soon as that's, should be the next week or two, I'm gonna unleash this on my entire team. And I'm just so curious to see how much more efficient it makes them. Because currently they're like dying, like being crushed by spreadsheets and then trying to like use LLMs, like load spreadsheets in and get insights. I'm like, that's the worst way to use it. Like that's not gonna work well for you. So anyway, that was like one of the main solutions I saw, like low hanging fruit to like,
Zach (29:18.646)
I mean.
Lucas Longacre (29:26.246)
how you, but also think about this, token costs. like, do, if you asked, if you loaded in like 10,000 records and were like, hey, can you make sense of this? You're gonna burn tokens doing that for these LLMs. But if you were like, just give me the SQL code, I'll return this. And then you, like that's like pennies on the dollar for that. So anyway, rant over.
Zach (29:29.102)
Right.
Zach (29:35.406)
Okay.
Zach (29:40.343)
Right.
Zach (29:44.367)
Well, I mean, that's return on investment is really what that is. But you're going back to my thought about AI and productivity and how it's going to change product because you're not going to be sitting there writing documentation and be like, hey, this is what I need to write, spit this out for me. And it's going make us all amazingly more productive. However, it still can't make decisions.
Lucas Longacre (29:58.491)
Yeah, yeah.
Lucas Longacre (30:04.058)
Yeah. And honestly, there's the whole hallucination thing, you know, great for kind of planning and thinking. And as you played with Claude code, like writing code now is getting really good with it. You know, that's a lot of these language models, but the end of the day, like you've got to have the human in the mix. You need somebody orchestrating it. Like I think we're, you know, I think always you're just going to want to have like the, person who's the making the decisions, as well as somebody who knows the, the, landscape who can like,
Zach (30:15.608)
Mm-hmm.
Lucas Longacre (30:34.022)
identify where, know, telling AI what to do, but also like being able to coordinate a bunch of priorities and understand that at the same time. Cause I think that's where oftentimes, you know, these, the, the large language models are just telling you everything you want to hear, which is like setting you up for disaster.
Zach (30:49.998)
Right. Yeah. you're talking about hallucinations. was just thinking about, was just reading an article the other day and I thinking about this, is this big push with AI and, can do everything. can write code and we don't need junior developers anymore. And I go, well, where you going to be in 10 years? You're going to screw yourself. Like we don't need APMs. You absolutely do because you have to teach someone to do the job. And if you give an APM, you know, the chance to give them a job now, they may not stay with you, but they're to go somewhere else.
Lucas Longacre (31:06.213)
Yeah.
Zach (31:19.49)
and it's just painted forward. You know, that's what it is.
Lucas Longacre (31:20.433)
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it was funny when I was had employees, I used to always ask them the first thing I'd ask, I'd be like, what is your career goals? Like, obviously, this is not the end of your career is like you're the production assistant for my company, right? It's like, do you want to direct? Do you want to produce? Do you want to act? Do want to? And same thing, like every time I'm working with people, I always ask them, even though I'm not the boss anymore, but I'm like, where are you going with your career? Because that always helps how I gauge our relationship where it's like hey, if I see an opportunity that might not be totally like within the job description now, maybe I'm gonna throw it your way and give you a shot at it or give you some more exposure to it, because it's gonna help your career out and in the end of the day, that's gonna be like better for me and better for the organization.
Zach (32:03.502)
No, it's funny. You make yourself valuable enough that they start asking you to do different things. So they asked me to do an ERD. I'd never done an ERD before. I had no idea what it was. I had to Google what it was. And then I'm talking to people about it. go, oh, that's usually done by architects. And I go, I'm not an architect.
Lucas Longacre (32:09.552)
Yeah.
Lucas Longacre (32:22.055)
You're like right on top of that boss.
Zach (32:31.182)
So now I'm asking myself, like, did they ask me to do this to see if I would or see if I could or?
Lucas Longacre (32:36.347)
Sometimes, yeah, no, sometimes they're like, we just need anybody to honestly, I've been, I'm not gonna say guilty of that, but I've definitely, you know, ask people for stuff to just to like, I need the support. Like I'll get to it if you don't do it, but could you take a, take a whack at this?
Zach (32:39.427)
Wow.
Zach (32:51.522)
Well, yeah, I think their intention was different, but that's a story for another day.
Lucas Longacre (32:55.495)
Well, I want to get some of those those stories like the honest stuff so I can share mine if you know what to share first, but what is one of like the biggest mistakes you made as a PM and what did it teach you?
Zach (33:09.01)
my biggest mistake was taking a project that I wasn't passionate about. when you're sitting in meetings going, I could care less about what they're talking about. It's miserable, you know? And I know you're, you're asking something specific about a specific project. I don't have an answer for you, but like I said, that's my best piece of advice is like find a project that you care about. If you like.
Lucas Longacre (33:24.699)
No, that's fine.
Zach (33:30.732)
I don't know, dogs, go find a job with a company around pet products or something. Don't take a job, a data heavy job where you can sit in meetings and they're gonna talk about adding columns to reports. You're gonna be missing.
Lucas Longacre (33:42.428)
Yeah, no, I could not agree more. You know, bringing passion to your work is like, makes it worth waking up in the morning for, honestly. Like, if I didn't have that for my job currently, like I really enjoyed my colleagues and the work I'm doing, but I'm not good at faking it, man. You know what I mean? Like, if I didn't have the passion for it, I would probably be looking for that next opportunity.
Zach (33:52.226)
Well.
Zach (34:05.304)
Well, but Lucas, we have this meeting where we need to add a column to our report. We need you there.
Lucas Longacre (34:08.711)
Yeah, that's where that's a good use of AI I'll get right on that boss for me it was I made this the biggest bonehead mistake a few months ago where there was a This project that existed before I showed up and like a solution that was made before I even showed up and I didn't know much about it So my it was like this redirect system this basic redirect system on our WordPress site, which like is like a marketing site They just found some temporary solution that they never fix
Zach (34:27.534)
Right.
Lucas Longacre (34:37.049)
And so I just, you know, ask the engineering team to work with the, you know, the, the project managers on it. Be like, can you all just like get, figure this out? Like, I don't know what it is. It existed before me. Why don't you guys just like find a solution. should not take long. And so the engineering, the head of the engineer started interacting with the project managers. And all I needed them to do is just like come to a solution for this like basic redirecting app. And,
Zach (34:53.208)
Mm.
Lucas Longacre (35:06.533)
you know, 10 meetings later, you know, I essentially I had to do like hour and a half meeting sitting down with the project managers to learn it. So I had to like do a deep dive into what they already supposedly knew because they could not work together like the engineer was frustrated with the project managers who are angry at the engineer. Nobody's listening to each other. And I was like, huh, it's almost like you need a product manager in the middle of all this. And I was like, I it was just because it felt like such an easy thing to do. I like dismissed it.
Zach (35:19.1)
Ugh.
Zach (35:29.186)
Thank
Lucas Longacre (35:36.284)
It was a small little thing. I didn't know enough about it. I thought that's the quickest solution. And if I just treated it like any other part of the job, that it was my responsibility, it would have been done in like two days. But I cause headaches for everyone. they're all like, sort of like apologizing to me for not making it work. And I'm like, no, I fucked this up. Like I did not prioritize it like I should have because I thought it would have been a simple thing. And that was like a big lesson to me, though, is like
Zach (35:44.376)
Right.
Lucas Longacre (36:04.209)
You gotta own stuff, especially like there's a reason engineers don't talk to the project managers typically, right? They have me as a firewall to protect the engineers, but also to protect the project managers from this kind of situation. So it was a good wake up call about that where it's like some stuff you can't just like fumble. You gotta just take it seriously.
Zach (36:10.584)
Yeah, do it.
Zach (36:23.17)
Well, that's part of product is being able to speak engineer, right?
Lucas Longacre (36:27.527)
Yeah, they, God, they could just, it was very eye-opening to me though. Because it was funny thing is like the engineer was super pissed because he, because they were not being very descriptive about what they needed. But it was like, because they're saying, you know, all this intricate, weird stuff that because they don't fully understand what's happening with the, you know, the web development part of it. So they're just interpreting it the way they know it. And, and he's not used to sitting down and being like, all right, now show me what you're doing. Let's walk you through it. Like, show me what you're typing. I even was like, what are the emails you're getting from your client? I was like reading emails.
Zach (36:44.492)
Right.
Right.
Lucas Longacre (36:56.975)
seeing, show me the files that were sent. Like I had to go that in depth to figure out what was actually needed. And, but I did it and then I figured out the solution. But like by, by not doing, giving it that proper due diligence, I took what should have been an easy solution and made it super annoying for everyone.
Zach (37:14.776)
Well, that brings up something else I was talking about with someone the other day, scalability. You you're talking about an old WordPress site that was just put together as a basically as a bandaid on a bullet hole. And, you know, a lot of times that's done it and scalability isn't thought out. So one of my projects, was something that was done was when they first started, they were like, well, we'll do all this custom work for each client. And then as the company grows, it's not sustainable.
Lucas Longacre (37:25.009)
Yeah.
Zach (37:44.077)
So now you have a million workflows for every different customer. when one breaks, you're going right down the line and it's going to screw everything up. And one of the main things I go into when I look at a project is how is this scalable? It works now, but with 100 customers, it's going to work with 1,000 customers. It's going work with a million customers. How is this going to grow?
Lucas Longacre (37:44.402)
hell yeah.
Lucas Longacre (38:08.327)
Honestly, that's a challenge in my role now too. it's, think in any role where you're with people in technology who they think of solutions, you know, that will work for them in the moment, but they're not thinking about the scale. And like, that is like constantly weighing on my shoulders all the time. It's like, if I make this change here, how is this going to be done? So it's fine when we have five users is what happens when we have 50, what happened when we have a thousand, what happens when we have a million, like not being able to.
Zach (38:21.56)
That's the second time you've said that.
Lucas Longacre (38:35.323)
project and if you realize a lot of people even in our industry are just not capable of thinking in that way.
Zach (38:41.506)
Well, again, that's the second time you've said that and the second I'm going to warn you, you can't solution these things. It's all about the problem statement. It's why do we have this problem? What's causing this problem? And what's the root of this problem is so important, so important.
Lucas Longacre (38:49.489)
Mm-hmm.
Lucas Longacre (38:56.261)
Yeah. Well, so what does like a genuine product victory feel like to you? Like not the metrics or anything, but like the actual human moment where you're like, yep, it worked.
Zach (39:07.598)
Well, we talked about cloud code and making prototyping way faster So and that's a huge win for me, you know, like being able to type in a prompt into cloud code and it's spitting out an app You know half an hour later is awesome But you know you're asking like what's a true win? It's like going through those like it was Friday night releases and coming out on Monday morning and just seeing that it worked you know, and and one of big frustrations for me is like
Lucas Longacre (39:26.673)
Yeah.
Zach (39:37.519)
There's always something you didn't think about. And I'm really hard on myself about that, because you can think out every possible issue, and you're going to forget one. And I always kind of kick myself when that issue comes up. Why didn't I think of that? Because you can't. You can't possibly think everything out. And you have to kind of celebrate those wins, because again, maybe it's my pessimism. I don't really know. But I'm trying to think about
Lucas Longacre (39:47.516)
Mm-hmm.
Lucas Longacre (40:03.335)
Mm-hmm.
Zach (40:07.402)
specific project where we had a great win when nothing came up and I don't think that ever happened.
Lucas Longacre (40:12.657)
Well, I'd say from my perspective, in the moment, I always feel like I'm not doing enough. We're not moving fast enough. We're not showing enough progress, right? And then when I, so I write like my state of the products whenever we do a new release, I say what the new features added. And then I do a quarterly and a yearly one. So every quarter I do one. And I swear every time we get to the quarterly one, I'm like, damn, we got a lot done. And like whoa, and you look at where we were three months ago to where we are now. And then like the end of the year, I do the yearly wrap up of like what we were able to accomplish. And I'm always feel so proud when I look back of like, man, for where we were then to where we are now feels huge. But it's like I never can grasp that in the moment. Like, and I have to remind myself constantly, like, it's okay. Like, I know it feels like give all these roadblocks that you're not moving in the right direction, you're inching towards the goal, but you're not sprinting. It's like, it's okay. Like just be patient because a lot of these things, there are they take time to align, but then when you get those features that finally align in the right way and all that work you did for three months building up to it, you flip the switch and then all of sudden, like, for us, was seeing our user count just like skyrocket because they had all these roadblocks they put in there. Like you were saying earlier about like signing up and getting people into the product. Like for me, I, it was like a nightmare when I showed up realizing they just, it was not efficient and nothing was efficient. like,
Zach (41:22.348)
Okay.
Zach (41:26.968)
Mm-hmm.
Zach (41:33.058)
Mm-hmm.
Lucas Longacre (41:35.56)
I felt like we were making no progress. And I look back to earlier in the year, I'm like, my God, we 150 % change and who's like being people added to the product now. Like that was because of all these small efficiencies over time. It wasn't one magic bullet. was like we remove roadblock after roadblock, more efficient processes. Then before you know it, a year goes by and you're like, wow, we were able to accomplish so much. But for me, it's hard to keep that perspective because I feel like I'm never doing enough or I need to be better or something.
Zach (42:06.35)
I think you hit a lot of points that I like. I think at least we think alike, and I don't know if most product managers do, but lack of efficiency drives me crazy. Like, I mean, it doesn't matter what it is. I come from working in restaurants. mean, even like cooking on a line, like why are your onions over there? They should be over here. Like just all those little things. Like it just drove me nuts. And where I was just working was a giant, giant insurance company.
Lucas Longacre (42:14.023)
have no idea.
Lucas Longacre (42:22.374)
Mm-hmm.
Lucas Longacre (42:36.071)
Mm-hmm.
Zach (42:36.726)
And it drove me crazy. I was like, I need how many approvals before I can make a change?
Lucas Longacre (42:42.279)
Oh, that's the thing that is no, I'm not a good personality for that. It's funny because we're working with like our parent company on a lot of integrations because we need it. I'm like, you have so many resources we could benefit. It's like I'm like, and this is a win win. I'm like, but I went on a call like there's two of us on my team that were like working all this stuff. Meanwhile, we're ready to go. Like we built all this. Like we have the back end ready. We have the front end design, but not like we I'm like, we need the data first before we can really fill it. And I get in a call. There's 11 people on the call.
Zach (43:11.534)
You
Lucas Longacre (43:11.995)
And they're all individually great people. Like I've had fine relationships with all of them, but I'm like, how do we get anything done when you have 11 people on this call who all have to have to like have an opinion and chime in and get approval? And I just, that's, it's crazy to me how any work gets done when you start getting to those big teams, which actually brings me to my next point, which is, you know, my prediction is teams are going to not only in engineering, but across the board. feel like
Zach (43:35.628)
Mm-hmm.
Lucas Longacre (43:39.022)
smaller teams who can move quicker and get stuff out there quicker and get feedback and it adapt is like gonna be the new norm. But you know, for but so for yourself like five years from now, what do you see like your PM role? What does it look like? Do you feel like you're gonna have to scale up get bigger get more skills? Or do feel like you're gonna have to move lateral like change what your kind of position or role is? Like what are you thinking?
Zach (43:45.635)
Right.
Zach (44:00.803)
So it's interesting, every job I seem to have, ended up working with multiple teams. So there's usually an onshore team, an offshore team, a near shore team, and they're all working on different projects. So when I go to an interview and they go, well, tell me what the last team you worked on. It's like, which one? People around the team, well, there was five on this one and seven on this one. So I like the idea of a smaller team. And I love the idea of move fast and break stuff.
Lucas Longacre (44:09.66)
Mm-hmm.
Lucas Longacre (44:16.273)
Yeah.
Zach (44:29.09)
I mean, again, I don't know if I have an answer to that. think we're all just kind of speculating at this point. I think that working on small teams is great, but at this point where we are, I think it still necessitates. And you're at a different point. You're more in that C-suite area where they're going to get the whole C-suite together to make decisions. And I don't think you're ever going to get away from that. But in terms of moving fast and breaking stuff, I think that
Lucas Longacre (44:47.399)
True, yeah.
Zach (44:58.35)
where you may have a team now which is three or four engineers and say two QA guys and then a product manager, that's definitely going to shrink. Or we go back to productivity, your output is just going to be 10 times what it is.
Lucas Longacre (45:05.543)
Mm-hmm.
Lucas Longacre (45:13.563)
Yeah, move faster and create more, right? So it's like, we want that ship to, and something that would have taken three months, now we got to do in a week. And also now you have to do three versions of it, which is not necessarily a bad thing. mean, that's.
Zach (45:23.15)
Right. again, no, going back to what you were talking about before, though, with that is the idea that, like, yes, you can make that prototype or make that thing way faster. But the question then becomes, you know, who's got it? Because you still can't trust AI. You can't trust it for everything. Someone has to look over that code. So that's where the bottom line is going to become. Right now, say it's in QA and like, hey, when is this going to be tested? When is it going to be ready?
But I think that's going to shift into, well, we only have so many people to identify issues in this code because it's all knowledge-based.
Lucas Longacre (46:02.696)
This what I predict though. They'll say, we have this AI that will then check the code better. And we have these fake users that can spin up that are not real users and we can do so now again, like I said, now you have to ship things faster. And then like now we have to get in front of real human users, get that feedback. So it's not like your workload's going to get any easier with any of this. They're just people are going to expect more and more. like trying to explain that to people like all it's like, don't expect you're going to be golfing or like, you know, going to the beach like they're just going to
Zach (46:25.167)
Yeah,
Lucas Longacre (46:32.9)
Industries are going to still be competing at that level, especially at the, you know, the professional level where you're just going to have to do more all the time and faster. Yeah.
Zach (46:41.006)
Well, yeah, again, it back to productivity. It's all going to be multiplied tenfold. You know, rather than pushing, you say one thing every quarter, you're to be pushing 10 or 100 or whatever it is.
Lucas Longacre (46:50.888)
All right, so that is a little depressing, I must say. so I would say though, if you had to tell like a mid level PM now, or somebody who's just kind of cutting their teeth in the industry, who are younger who got into it, what would you tell them to like invest in now? What are the skills or the tools you'd say like really hone these things, you know, in the next few years?
Zach (46:53.085)
Hahaha
Zach (47:12.306)
I wish I had an answer for that. as a PM, we're always learning, right? So we were doing five years ago, you're not doing today. And right now, and right now the big thing is AI. And we talked about cloud computing before that was the big keyword before. I think it's deeply personal what you learn. I think going back to the basics is the most important thing. he's doing, talked in the last hour about clarity and about, you know, problem statements and having all those basic skills laid out and solid are always going to be important. And I don't think.
Lucas Longacre (47:16.39)
Mm-hmm.
Zach (47:41.742)
you know, learning the new AI tool is the most important thing because next week there's going be something new. You know, and if you just concentrate on what's coming out now, you're never, you're always going to be behind.
Lucas Longacre (47:52.211)
Yeah, I think the learning aspect is essentially any career is that, from our perspective, like because you have to be talking to engineers and talking to, you know, users and talking to stakeholders, like you have to have a curious mind and you have to be able to see from all those perspectives. And like, so that I think that is the most valuable skill really is teach, be able to teach yourself. But also I think the, human element of it is like, put yourself out there, you know, know what's happening in the industry, talk to people, know, get yourself, don't just be like, especially like both of us work remote. Like I go out of my way to go to events and go to go to interact with people because it's like, unless you have those that network and that connections, it's hard to know what is coming, what the trends are. And, you know, staying relevant is hard, man. Like you got to constantly be learning new skills as well as, you know, adapting your role. Is there anything you're like excited about building? Can you tell me about that app you've been putting together?
Zach (48:49.006)
I don't know if I want to tell people about that. No, it was an idea I had when I was in school for UX. I was working on some project and it was, know, one of the guys that was teaching my class had a brother who was partially blind or, you know, had vision difficulties. And he talks a lot about screen readers and how they function and things like that.
Lucas Longacre (48:50.472)
It's all right. Honestly, if you're like, no, this is the next big thing, man, you to keep it secret.
Zach (49:16.822)
One of my friends from high school's sister is a, sign language. So I was like, well, I was like, was putting myself in the shoes of a deaf person. was like, if they're out, I remember in high school I was working at Taco Bell and this guy used to come in with a paper and pen and write down what he wanted, hand it to you. You know, we all knew him because he'd come in like every week and he's a deaf guy, but there's only way can communicate. And I was like, well, I was like with cell phones now, what if, a person could sign to the camera on the cell phone and it could translate it. I was like, yeah, I mean, it's a no brainer. at the time, was, again, this was what, seven or eight years ago, there was no AI, was no easy way to do this. So I had this idea, I don't know if it's a million dollar idea, maybe it's a half million dollar idea. How many deaf people are out there who would need this?
Lucas Longacre (49:52.104)
That makes so much sense, yeah.
Lucas Longacre (50:08.883)
I saying, or maybe it's just like a thing that benefits humanity and you, know, like that's awesome. Yeah.
Zach (50:12.11)
Well, exactly, but like, right, but try to find funding for that.
Lucas Longacre (50:16.549)
No, exactly. No, for sure. No, and I'll say that it's so funny you say, I do think one of the trends that are happening is you're seeing everybody now as a developer, right? Which, you know, and there's a lot of fear from people, especially in the industry that like all of a sudden is democratized that. So what is, you know, what am I here for, right? What is my career gonna do? But at the same time, like, I think you're gonna see an explosion of these niche apps, similar to like, you know, anybody can create an app.
And I already experienced this from the film and television world, which is one of reasons why I left it is like, everybody's a creator, but, know, the good side being you have these little disposable apps that aren't made to be a billion dollar idea. They're made to solve a problem in your life or in your community's life. Right. And so I'm going to use an example of something I'm building just for the heck of it for fun is I had like 30 gigabytes of footage that my family shot when we were, you know, growing up on VHS, DVDs, mini DVDs, all this weird stuff that was my mom gave to me as like the family archivist. And so I used to host it all on Vimeo and they charged me like 300 bucks a year. And I just got so sick of it where I'm like, I put them up there, nobody watches them. My parents would have to write me to like, what was the password again? And I was like, I'm going to just start a family archive of that all of our video stuff. But not just limited to that, it's going to be like you want to share a video of like your kids or whatever your photos, whatever you can back it up to the family archive.
Zach (51:40.387)
All right.
Lucas Longacre (51:40.583)
So I'm essentially coding and I already have the first version of it done over a weekend where I was like drinking a beer and using Claude code and being like, here's my Firestore credentials. Here's the, you know, here's, went front end react like, and I went through the whole thing and I have the first version pretty much done and then I'm gonna just build on it. But it's an archive so all my family can share, can save all of their video and photo stuff in one location. Cause that's always a pain in the butt. All these, all your stuff saved to all these different services.
Zach (51:47.758)
you
that.
Lucas Longacre (52:08.08)
nobody keeps it, then what happens when people are passing away and dying and footage is getting lost? There needs to be a repository of that stuff. So that's what I started taking on. It's not meant to be an app for everyone, right? It's just a use for my family and I might get my friends to contribute some stuff to it so there'll be different permissions and things, but that's it. That's the height of my ambition with it.
Zach (52:20.013)
Right.
Zach (52:29.164)
Well, see that tells me though that your family had a video camera.
Lucas Longacre (52:34.842)
I was a video guy, Like, I would grab it from my parents and like I've videotaped a lot of that stuff as a kid.
Zach (52:36.354)
What?
Zach (52:41.71)
So when I was a kid, my parents were like, we don't want to watch your sixth grade graduation ever again.
Lucas Longacre (52:47.08)
That's what my wife said. She's like, I'm like, does your family have anything? She's like, God no, why would anybody want to watch that? I was like, okay.
Zach (52:52.91)
It's very funny remember to wear that find a video camera screw that
Lucas Longacre (52:59.652)
Yeah, I listen, that's definitely a family by family basis. Well, Zach, it's been great talking to you and you know, I'm hoping our career paths intersect in the near future at some point. But I have to say you are really one of the people that encouraged me to, you know, get to do this career switch. And it's honestly, I couldn't have been happier with the decision. So thanks again for, you know, being supportive.
Zach (53:22.254)
I'm glad I was part of the catalyst for your, I guess, wonderful new career. I'm gonna test you later. I gave you a list of about 20 books. I did, it was a couple years ago.
Lucas Longacre (53:34.024)
Oh, awesome. Yeah. Oh, you did. Yeah. No. And I, and I, definitely read a couple of them. It's funny. I was, I have to admit, I was so poor back then. I had to see what I could get off the library and what I could pirate and steal as well. So, but I did, I listened to like a few of them on the lie on my Libby app and, or read them on the Libby app. And then I, um, I think I ordered like one or two off of Amazon, but, no, I use, I studied up before my interviews to make sure we were talking about jargon so much of like, I was like, I need to know the jargon.
Zach (53:51.278)
Alright.
Zach (53:56.59)
It's funny.
Zach (54:01.08)
Right.
Lucas Longacre (54:04.104)
Because you can't go into these interviews and if you're not answering the, know, speaking the language of the industry, they'll smell that on you in a second.
Zach (54:04.11)
Mm-hmm.
Zach (54:10.894)
No, But yeah, as I was going to say, because I constantly get hounded by audiobooks. You have 12 credits, so I haven't bought a book in here.
Lucas Longacre (54:18.716)
I cut all that stuff out. had to. Like it's overwhelming all those subscriptions. But anyway, thanks again, Zach. And yeah, I'll let you know like when this gets published, I'll definitely release it and tag you in it so you can comment and follow.
Zach (54:23.916)
Well, yeah, no, absolutely.
Lucas Longacre (54:36.689)
Yeah man, it's such a pleasure.
Comments