In this podcast conversation with host Michael Bernzweig, Raj Singh of Mozilla discusses the concept of the "super individual contributor" (super IC) and how leveraging Gen. AI can transform productivity and innovation. He shares personal experiences and strategies for adopting AI tools to enhance workflows, emphasizing the importance of adaptability and collaboration. Singh highlights the potential of Gen. AI to democratize expertise and accelerate career growth, urging individuals and organizations to embrace these technologies to stay competitive.
In this podcast conversation with host Michael Bernzweig, Raj Singh of Mozilla discusses the concept of the "super individual contributor" (super IC) and how leveraging Gen. AI can transform productivity and innovation. He shares personal experiences and strategies for adopting AI tools to enhance workflows, emphasizing the importance of adaptability and collaboration. Singh highlights the potential of Gen. AI to democratize expertise and accelerate career growth, urging individuals and organizations to embrace these technologies to stay competitive.
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Michael Bernzweig (00:07.812)
Okay, I hope everyone enjoyed that last presentation. This next presentation is slated to be an exciting one. Joining us today, we actually have Raj Singh. He leverages his serial entrepreneurship expertise and AI machine learning development to power Mozilla's privacy focused SMB solutions. His background in product strategy enables organizations like educational institutions
enterprises across 33 countries and small businesses to achieve secure digital transformation and enhance productivity through privacy preserving technologies. So with that, Raj, welcome to the summit and I'm going to hand the mic right over to you because everyone's here to hear your presentation.
Raj Singh (00:59.328)
Thanks, Michael.
So I thought today it'd be good to talk about something I had actually presented earlier this year. And this stuff's evolving so fast that what's new is old by tomorrow. But I still think there's some interesting tidbits here. This was an hour presentation I'd given back in April. We're going to speed run through parts of it. I'm going to skip over other parts of it and happy to share the slide deck offline to your audience. But it's basically about this topic of what I'm calling the super IC, or also known as the
super individual contributor. And really, where this all started, you know, I've had startups through multiple, let's call them ups and downs of the economy. I had a startup through the dot com crash, through GFC and oh eight through COVID. And I've seen venture back in all cases, and I've seen various sorts of ups and downs. As you can imagine, this era is different.
We are seeing Gen.AI absolutely automate some workflows. It's making people 10 times more productive. And so it's become uber critical that individual contributors within your team are looking at how they can adopt these sort of tools to just simply move faster. So there is a little bit of anxiety. And I'm not in the camp that AI is going to replace people, not at all. Companies are aspiring larger. They want to become trillion dollar companies, not billion dollar companies.
But I'm absolutely in the camp that those that are using Gen.ai to accelerate will certainly replace those that are not. moving along, part of thinking about becoming a super individual contributor or somebody that uses Gen.ai to replace your low leverage tasks, a lot of it, when I see some of the friction from those that maybe don't move forward, they have a certain workflow and they don't want to change. And this is a time where people need to be humble.
Raj Singh (02:55.102)
and say, maybe I need to do things differently. Maybe I need to approach the way I've been doing this particular process for the last five or 10 years in a different kind of way. And so I like to start with just sort of a little bit of this humility. You know, have we been right about every single thing, right? So there's always an opportunity to do better. And so my hope is as people think about this and look into this, they come in with an open mind. So my perspective, Gen.ai has become a thought partner for everything. Now, what does that actually mean?
Well, should should Gen.ai be a jury member in a court case? Should Gen.ai listen in on every single meeting? Should Gen.ai look at your notes? Should Gen.ai give you a perspective when running UXR with your team reviewing product? My answer to all of those questions is yes. It's another perspective in the room. Arguably, maybe the most objective perspective, but it's another perspective for humans to apply our own taste and judgment and product sensibility to really determine how, you know,
to really inform our own model and determine how we want to move forward. So the way I sort of approached how I wanted to become a super IC or become sort of a super individual contributor is I did three things. First, I was actively reading Gen.ai stuff. Now there is a plethora of content out there, probably half of which is also generated by Gen.ai, so that certainly doesn't help. So that's sort of one. Two, I looked for team members internally.
that we're in same sort of functional roles as me and looking at how we could trade notes. And this is an incredible way to learn. And I encourage everyone to do this. Look at what you do and then go talk to other people and look at and ask them how are they using GEN.AI to accelerate their workflows. And the reason this is so valuable is so much of this process is about discovery. It's sort of like not knowing that you could do it and then seeing you can like, wow, I didn't even think I could do that. So these were just some of the things that I did.
initially to really kick off this transformation of how to become a super IC. The other thing I did was I documented my day. This sounds so silly, but I basically wrote down what I was doing throughout the day in small blocks. And I took that and I fed it to Gen.ai and I asked, hey, how can you help me with some tasks during my day? And this was eye-opening because it really sort of opens your mind. And a lot of this is about discovery and figuring out
Raj Singh (05:22.239)
uh... other ways that you can leverage any i to sort of accelerate the reason i'm sharing all of this because the goal from an organizational perspective to really harness and develop a team full of super i c's and as an individual we should all be striving to become super i c's because this is this is the way this is where things are going uh... and we certainly don't want to be replaced by an icy not leverage here we don't want and i see not leverage it jenny i we don't want them to be be replaced by a super i c
So as a PM, and I'm sharing this little rubric here on the right, more as just sort of a joke because there's so many things, in product management, very cross-functional role. So there's a lot of these meme style representations. I'm sort of just showing one here on the right. And my job as a PM, and when I think about Gen.ai, is how do I replace my low leverage work with high leverage work? So a lot of this is about, as part of becoming a super IC,
I want to focus on taste. I'm the conductor. I'm no longer the operator. want to focus on judgment. Look at, be sort of the executioner and direct and review, be the human in the loop. And this is really a reframing of how you think because often we think about doing the work, but in this case we have somebody who could do some of low leverage work for me so I can focus on higher leverage things. And this is, you know, it's difficult if you don't sort of reframe this thinking, but once you start thinking about it as truly your assistant,
it really becomes this huge sort of unlock. This was a representation that Claire Vaux, she's running a PR, super PR, I forget what the name of product is, like, to help you write your PRDs. Anyway, she did a write up talking about the different attributes of a super IC. And I thought it was really interesting because a lot of this is looking at like different activities that you don't normally think of as product manager activities.
But in the world of a super IC, the edges are becoming more gray. There's more overlap. We're not necessarily stepping on each other's toes, but expertise has now become democratized, and we have access to that fractional expertise. And so I thought this was just an interesting framing of thinking about a super IC. And as I said, to me, I think this is one of the greatest unlocks, which is we have all this sort of human creativity or human potential, all with immense or.
Raj Singh (07:47.104)
incredible ideas of things that they want to build. But they can't build it because they didn't know how to design hardware or write software. They don't have access to somebody who really understands medicine, science or whatnot. But now we have what I like to describe as Neuralink in your pocket. This is the Neuralink, it's Gen. AI. We can use this. This is now my fractional, you know, PhD expert that's allowing all of these people to now build and they couldn't build before. And so I feel like this is just unlocking incredible human potential.
So when you think about organizations and how they're pushing the sort of super IC, I thought this email, which was a memo that Toby, the CEO of had sent was really interesting. And so he took a very top-down approach. How can I sort of really push and mandate the adoption of Gen.ai and his teams? And they're doing some of the things that we talked about, which show and tell, sharing what you learn, giving people unlimited budgets, et cetera. But one of the things I thought that was interesting here was number five.
Before you can even ask more headcount, have to justify why you can't do this with Gen.ai. And I think that's really sort of an interesting reframing or different perspective. So I want to put this in practice because I want people to really see and understand what I mean, right? And so again, this was a presentation I gave back in April. So some of this is now dated. But in that day I had given the presentation, these were activities that I had literally done the day before using Gen.ai. And part of my objective here is just to show people
the wide range of things of how you're using it to sort of accelerate your day. So here's a case where there was a series of questions legal had sent me and we used Gen.ai to sort of write the first draft of answers. It was incredible. Saving a huge amount of time. You know, I thought, you know, if you think about this sort of workflow as a PM within an organization, we had a design we were looking at for a social media management product. We weren't sure what was the best way to lay it out. Literally uploaded the design.
It got four or five different derivatives, right? Always interesting to look at AI's perspective. Sure, it's a perspective of the masses, but it's another perspective. And it's a fast way to sort of influence your own thinking so you can ask better questions. Support emails. This was something I'd vibe coded a little tool, an add-on actually, to Outlook. So I could autodraft support emails. It could sort of auto-reply, feed it into Google Sheets. So we had a categorization of everything we're getting.
Raj Singh (10:09.183)
Really amazing that you could create this within a couple hours previously this would have required Probably adopting a tool like Zendesk custom development to sort of pull this off This is all you know can be done on your own I think you know this all again my point here is really just to show the wide range of things that you can do with Gen.ai Analyzing a financial model there's a number of terms here when I was looking at the breakdown of costs For something that we were looking to potentially launch within Mozilla, and I didn't necessarily understand all of these terms right because this is not necessarily my expertise ops and
Cloud infra, right? But Jenny, I could break it down, explain why, whether things were sized correctly, where there might be pressure points. This is another example. We have a support section for one of our products at Mozilla called Solo. We weren't sure how to describe some of these different areas within the UI, so we uploaded it said, how would you describe each of these sections? And so it gave us a way to visualize naming. I thought, again, very all sort of interesting. I'm going to sort of fast forward here just because I've limited time, but.
My point is there's just a huge sampling of things and ways that you can use GEN.AI to accelerate. And the reason I think this is also critical is if you think about the normal career trajectory, you start as a junior IC and then over time you develop more taste, intuition, you make better decisions, right? You kind of follow this blue line, right? And you become a more senior and senior sort of individual contributor. But GEN.AI is giving you this rapid step function. Now, of course, this graph is a little bit hyperbolic by definition.
But what I'm really trying to show is there is a step function and there is another curve. so years of experience may not matter as much as it once did. You still need sensibility. You still need taste and whatnot. Don't get me wrong. But the fact that you can have this sort of step forward, this jump is incredible. So beyond, I'm going to skip over some of this, but beyond just sort of using ChatGPT or Gemini or whatnot in day-to-day workflows, vibe coding, obviously this has just become a hot topic.
We have built tools within Mozilla to sort of accelerate different internal workflows and whatnot through vibe coding, whether using Replit Agent, whether using Versel, whether using Cursor or Windsurf, whatnot, doesn't matter. We've even brought Gen AI into our interview process. So we think a lot about this, like what is the next sort of archetype? We look at high agency and high taste. think that's something I, I think I had it, it's something I think Gary Tan talked about from YC. but really,
Raj Singh (12:37.725)
Are they somebody who can figure it out? Can they hustle? Can they figure out like, how to use gen AI as a resource to go and figure it out? Can they, can they judge if this makes sense or not? Does it look realistic and so forth? Right. Really sort of incredible. and interviewing, you know, instead of sort of going through your background, I'm now collaborating and building something together. I mean, this is amazing. We're literally, we literally be in a PM interview and like, let's go build an app together. Right. And we kind of design from scratch. We build.
Really just to see, you know, it's about archetypes, this sort of change in how you interview and how you approach. And again, I am speed running through some of this. In fact, I even have this new term, I call it AI native talent where these folks you call Gen Beta have basically been born with Gen AIs. They're using Gen A everywhere. And so on one hand, you get a lower sort of signal noise ratio, but on the other hand, they're just moving so fast, right? And so it's really kind of incredible to think about.
this sort of impact this was talking earlier high agency high taste of gary tan you know and you know i think what you're seeing now from a macro perspective is companies are looking at how to upscale their teams to become super i c's the orcs are getting flatter everyone is sort of becoming hands-on you know the next billion dollar company or ten person startups because we can do more right and so you it's really important to get on this train if you haven't started yet
This is one of the most common blocks I hear. It's like, I don't know how to start. The reality is we're kind of at a point where for most people, the majority of tools are frankly good enough. They can get 98 % of the way there. So my recommendation is just choose something and start. Ask your peers how they're using it. A lot of this is tribal learning. You have to go through discovery and pain. You can watch somebody drive a car, but you have to drive a car to learn how to drive a car. And that's the nature of this kind of product. So my recommendation to those listening.
and thinking about your teams and thinking about yourself. If you have not looked at how you can use GNI to accelerate your workflows, this is the time. A little bit of a checklist here you can kind of read on what you should do next. We talked about some of these things earlier. And that's basically it. Thank you for listening. And if you want to reach me, my details are there.
Michael Bernzweig (14:55.167)
I really appreciate that fantastic presentation and we're looking forward to hearing your session in the following few minutes coming up on the Q &A. So anyone that has questions, definitely pop those into the Q &A and we'll be sure to get to all of your questions.
Raj Singh (14:58.271)
WAH!