Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:00:00 · Lenny Rachitsky, Peter Sellis
[00:00:00] S0: I asked you what are some counterintuitive lessons that you've learned that go against common startup wisdom? [00:00:06] S1: I'm no longer beholden to any corporate comms team right now, so I can let it rip a little bit. [00:00:10] S0: You like to design teams like a terrorist organization. [00:00:13] S1: A good terrorist organization essentially has two things. One is, it has this ideological culture that everyone understands why they are doing what they're doing. And then it has a very, very clear organizational structure of who can be trusted with which decision. [00:00:29] S0: You like to spend time riding your best people into the ground, versus improving the average people. [00:00:35] S1: If you see somebody drowning, you want to save them. I did the absolute opposite. If somebody is strong and crushing it, I'm just handing them more and more rope to hang themselves with. [00:00:43] S0: Something that I know you believe, most product managers are bad and are often net negative to the company. [00:00:50] S1: The great product managers are exiting the system. They're becoming founders, they're becoming executives. It's set up to be this profession where the median product manager is actually probably pretty bad. [00:01:01] S0: Snap is quite famous for not hiring PMs for a long time. [00:01:04] S1: The baseline. We should just be able to operate this product without any product manager. So, this person has to provide value over nobody. [00:01:11] S0: It feels like an interesting new skill for PMs, is pushing back on things AI is adding to your products.
00:01:11 · Lenny Rachitsky, Peter Sellis
[00:01:11] S0: It feels like an interesting new skill for PMs, is pushing back on things AI is adding to your products. [00:01:15] S1: I think I saw Evan personally say no to better ideas than I've seen almost any other consumer startup launch. Exercising that kind of muscle of saying no of restraint is probably one of the few muscles of taste you can exercise. If a museum has all of their collection on the walls, then the curator hasn't done anything. [00:01:33] S0: Today my guest is Peter Sellis. Peter is a legend in the PM community. He was the first PM at Snapchat, where he spent seven years building one of the most delightful and popular consumer products in history. More recently, he was Head of Product at Discord, which he helped grow significantly. And now he's between gigs, which means he was finally able to come on the podcast without a comms team, without a PR team, which means that he's able to be especially honest and real about everything that he's seen and learned and has been excited to share. We cover so much ground, from how the best teams are organized like terrorist organizations. What it's like to manage Nikita Bier, why most PMs are really bad. Why Snapchat has struggled to build a truly massive business in spite of having a billion monthly active users, and it's not what you think, and so much more. This episode is full of so much gold and that's why it went so long. I couldn't stop digging into stuff that Peter kept bringing up. A huge thank you to Jack Brody and Sriram Krishnan for suggesting topics and questions for this conversation.
00:01:33 · Lenny Rachitsky, Peter Sellis
[00:01:33] S0: Today my guest is Peter Sellis. Peter is a legend in the PM community. He was the first PM at Snapchat, where he spent seven years building one of the most delightful and popular consumer products in history. More recently, he was Head of Product at Discord, which he helped grow significantly. And now he's between gigs, which means he was finally able to come on the podcast without a comms team, without a PR team, which means that he's able to be especially honest and real about everything that he's seen and learned and has been excited to share. We cover so much ground, from how the best teams are organized like terrorist organizations. What it's like to manage Nikita Bier, why most PMs are really bad. Why Snapchat has struggled to build a truly massive business in spite of having a billion monthly active users, and it's not what you think, and so much more. This episode is full of so much gold and that's why it went so long. I couldn't stop digging into stuff that Peter kept bringing up. A huge thank you to Jack Brody and Sriram Krishnan for suggesting topics and questions for this conversation. [00:02:57] S1: Thank you, Lenny. It feels like it's been a long time coming, that you and I have known each other, but yeah, I'm really excited to be here. [00:03:05] S0: You've never done a podcast before. You've been in product, you've been out there for so long, and I'm very honored you chose to do this. Why have you avoided podcasts? Why have you decided to finally do this podcast?
00:03:05 · Lenny Rachitsky, Peter Sellis
[00:03:05] S0: You've never done a podcast before. You've been in product, you've been out there for so long, and I'm very honored you chose to do this. Why have you avoided podcasts? Why have you decided to finally do this podcast? [00:03:16] S1: It's not avoiding podcasts. I've really just been avoiding you, but, no, I'm kidding. I think there are two things. To be totally frank with you, a lot of times when I saw, especially early on, because you have such wonderful distribution among so many influential people and teams, when I saw somebody going on Lenny's Podcast, I was like, "Oh, that person's probably about to get fired and they're going on and they're pimping themselves out for their next role," which was maybe one view of it. I was like, why aren't they just grinding? Now I think when I take a step back, a lot of the people I've worked with, a lot of teams I've had the opportunity to lead, I think one of the things that I generally do is show up pretty authentically every day at work. You can call it no filter, you can call it whatever you want. And a lot of the stuff that I say and do, I think is probably better suited for behind closed doors. But as you and I have chatted about now, I'm between different roles, so I'm no longer beholden to any corporate comms team right now. So yeah, I guess I can let it rip a little bit. [00:04:20] S0: Okay, amazing. These are the best conversations. No PR people involved, no comms people. [00:04:25] S1: Yeah, nothing to promote either. I have no book coming, no other podcasts, no collaboration. Yeah.
00:04:25 · Peter Sellis, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:04:25] S1: Yeah, nothing to promote either. I have no book coming, no other podcasts, no collaboration. Yeah. [00:04:30] S0: Wow. Just pure alpha.
00:04:32 · Peter Sellis
[00:04:32] S1: Just pure... Yes, about to drop some pure alpha, baby. Yeah, yeah. I should probably workshop this one a little bit. This is probably an example of the one that's better for behind closed doors. But yeah, I actually talked to the Chief People Officer at Discord about this, and I think she was simultaneously horrified and intrigued in a way, which credit to her for not judging me right off the bat. But yeah, I think it comes from essentially two primary beliefs from me. One is that there's actually a hidden cost to collaborating that no one really internalizes extremely well, meaning you'll never hear really any executive at any company be like, "Stop collaborating." And to me, that's like a warning sign. Collaboration comes with incredible coordination costs, and coordination costs essentially assure that you're moving as slow as the slowest node in the system. And so, I try and aggressively internalize the cost of collaboration sometimes. And then I think the second thing separately from this is that at high growth companies especially, and so many of the people that listen to your podcast I think aspire to be at these types of companies, product managers should be in a position where they're making decisions that the founders would've made sometimes six months ago. Definitely like a year or two ago, these are decisions that the founders themselves would've made. And so, set aside violence for a moment. I'm not saying that I design my teams for violence, but a good terrorist organization essentially has two things. One is, it has this ideological culture that everyone understands why they are doing what they're doing. And then it has a very, very clear organizational structure of who can be trusted with which decision. And I think creating a culture where there's a very clear ideological, almost religious level goal, essentially that the strategy is almost like a religion to the entire team. And an organizational structure where people understand who are the directly responsible individuals, who's single-threaded on something, who's the throat to choke, use whatever MBA, blah, blah, blah-ism you want. I think the combination of those two things can be leveraged in a way such that you don't need to over-collaborate, and you can be assured of achieving the results that you wanted as if you had collaborated.