Idea · carried by 1 source
Agents as Colleagues
A framework for thinking about AI agents in the workplace: treat them as new junior team members who need onboarding into your product philosophy, values, and decision-making frameworks — not as tools. “We are basically all directors of work now.”
Where it comes from
Jessica Fain on Lenny's Podcast (~1:18:18): > “We are basically all directors of work now, right? If we have an army of agents or this hundred new colleagues that joined our team, how would we onboard new junior team members who don't already understand our product philosophy? What's important to us?” highlights/jessica-fain-influence — Full podcast context.
How it works
- Onboard agents like juniors: What's important to you as a product leader? What do you believe about product-market fit? What does success look like? How do you set metrics?
- Codify yourself: “How do we take the time to say what's important to me as a product leader that I want to inculcate into anything that's developed for my team?” (~1:19:05)
- Train on your history: Feed agents your past decisions, successes, downfalls — “that data, that history, that context”
- Set guardrails: “Where do you need to be involved? Where do you need to catch hallucinations or missteps? Where do you uniquely have taste, judgment, frame of reference?”
- Use them as a thought partner: “A really smart colleague that never gets irritated by our questions. Poke holes in my ideas. Tell me what you would do differently”
The skills of influence aren't just for executives anymore — they're for your agent colleagues too. Giving an agent clear context, goals, and constraints is an act of influence, and the quality of that influence determines the quality of the agent's output.