Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:14:05 · Lenny Rachitsky, Peter Sellis
[00:14:05] S0: And Lakers. [00:14:06] S1: And the Lakers. I think his ability to mesh talent of very different types that literally does not get along otherwise to create these winning teams, to have done it both as a player and as a coach in two different places, to use philosophies from Eastern philosophies, Western philosophies to combine all this stuff. I think he's one of the most meaningful leaders from a leadership styles perspective, of the last half century. And I think the thing about product, especially when it comes to consumer and anything that involves more creativity and taste, is I think of a lot of product leaders more like bands putting out albums. And you can love a band, but sometimes they have a dud album. And what you do with the band as a fan during that time, do you stay a fan? Do you still listen to the album? Do you ride it through? Do you just listen to the old stuff? That's kind of how I think of a lot of the spikier product managers that I've worked with, which is just like, man, sometimes they whiff on an album, but if I still believe in them as an artist, I'll stick with them.
00:15:17 · Lenny Rachitsky, Peter Sellis
[00:15:17] S0: Something that, coming back to Nikita but going in a different direction, when he came on the podcast, this line that he's like, "I'm honored to be on a podcast about product management, as someone that doesn't believe product management is real." And it's funny that he went on to be Head of Product at X, but this connects to something that I know you believe, which is that most product managers are bad and are often net negative to the company. Talk about that, and just why you think the median PM is not actually good. [00:15:48] S1: I feel like this might have been a contrarian take during the ZIRP era, but now I think it's bleeding into the mainstream of holding a higher bar for a product management. And it is funny, you have this kind of... Because you had Tom, the CPO of Whatnot- [00:16:05] S0: Whatnot, mm-hmm. [00:16:06] S1: ... as well, to say something similar, and I think I agreed with a lot of the stuff he said. And I think by the way, I think some of his most senior PMs are actually former Snap PMs from my team at Snap. [00:16:06] S0: Oh, wow.
00:16:16 · Peter Sellis
[00:16:16] S1: Which is great because it, I think, verifies a lot of this. But yeah, now a bunch of self-hating PMs who've made a bunch of money being PMs are now like, "Oh, PMs are bad." But no, I think there's actually a mathematical explanation for this. First of all, I think any craft that is... especially when you're at the top end of any kind of skill that is normally distributed, you're at the tail end of the distribution. And so for product management, if the skill of product management is normally distributed across the population, the ones who are actually product managers are all the way on the right-hand side of the distribution. So you lop that off and it becomes a power distribution. And for any power distribution, the median is going to be far below the average. Most people are on the left side of it. And I think this actually gets excessively emphasized within product management for two reasons. One, especially during the ZIRP era, it became essentially the most lucrative career in tech for non-technical people. So, it has a very subjective definition, which is part of the reason why your podcast has been so valuable to people over the years because they're like, "What do I need to do to be one?" And so once you're in it, you're being compensated essentially as if you're on a technical ladder, so you have a very high incentive to remain part of it. If you're very good at it, the skills you develop as a product leader are almost perfect for either other executive roles, just like overall leadership roles, or starting your own company. So you're on the right-hand side of the distribution, the great product managers are exiting the system. They're becoming founders, they're becoming executives, etc. And on the other side of the distribution, anybody who's in is doing anything possible to stay in. So the distribution, it just becomes more weighted, weighted, weighted, like this. And I think during ZIRP, you saw this and there were memes about it and stuff like that, and maybe there's been some correction. But yeah, I think mathematically, it's set up to be this profession where the median product manager is actually probably pretty bad.
00:18:29 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:18:29] S0: Do you feel like it's getting better? And do you think... There's something I think about a lot that a lot of people say that, "PMs suck, they're useless," and I find that that's usually the case because they've just not worked with a great PM, and a lot of people haven't worked with great PMs. And so it makes the whole profession look bad and sound bad when a lot of people have, as you described, are working with these kind of mediocre PMs. Thoughts there?
00:18:59 · Peter Sellis
[00:18:59] S1: Yeah, I think you're exactly right. I've also noticed this. I feel like so much in the world right now is explained by some form of the midwit meme in some way or another. But yeah, I think you're exactly right. That is a second order effect of this kind of distribution that I think governs the whole profession. I do think it's getting better, because I think, again, a lot of people reference the ZIRP era, but I truly feel like when interest rates go down, that means opportunity costs are lower. And so when opportunity costs are lower, people are doing things like just hiring that extra person, doing stuff like that. But these opportunity costs I think are higher than are internalized because of some of the stuff we started talking about, that a lot of these costs are not internalized. And we can talk about this, but I've been really focused on developing a system for evaluating product managers, not just the person, but the person and the place that they are at that time, to make sure that the team is actually just net positive. And in my experience, and we can talk about what some of those methods are, but in my experience, the way this ends up is that I really don't hear great engineers complain about product managers that much, because great engineers, A, they know how to bend product managers to their will. They get the use out of them that they want. And B, they just don't put up with bad ones, so they don't get assigned or they don't get to work with bad product managers. I think ironically in a midwit meme or the horseshoe theory of things, really bad engineers also don't complain about product managers because they know they can just hide behind their decisions and stuff like that. So, it's really just the ones in the middle that are complaining.
00:20:50 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:20:50] S0: I do want to ask about Snap. I feel like it's a company that doesn't feel like it lived up to the potential of what I think Evan and everyone imagined it could be. I imagine the main reason from, and I had Evan on the podcast, is just the users that it's going after are just hard to monetize. Is that the core of what has kept Snap from becoming a bigger success, or is there more to it?