Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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?
00:21:14 · Peter Sellis
[00:21:14] S1: I'll try and be as objective as possible, Lenny, because this is a little bit of my life's work and maybe I do have some level of chip on my shoulder, or... Yeah, I'll try and be as objective as possible. So I'll say two things, maybe three things about Snap from a monetization perspective, at least an ads monetization perspective. And then we could talk about they've had a lot of success with Snapchat plus and subscription products in general are doing well, but ads are truly the magical product market fit of consumer monetization on the internet, and there's a lot of mathematical reasons why that's true. And there are three things that hold back Snap from an ads perspective that I think the company, like we still talk about, is we deserve a little bit more credit maybe than we get, but I understand why we don't. The first is yes, the user base is extremely young. Snap appealed to Gen Z at an excessive rate early on, now even I think Gen Alpha as they graduate from Roblox and stuff like that. And there is a step change, literally a suspicious discontinuity in advertising CPNs between 17 and 18 and between 18 and 21 in the United States and abroad. If you're under 17, the rules around how you can track and measure and target ads are extremely constraining and justifiably so, right? To protect teenagers. That means that it's essentially much harder to drive ROI from this group of people versus an 18-year-old versus a 21-year-old and 24-year-old. And you can say all you want about, "Oh, the teenagers influence their parents, blah, blah, blah." The key thing to think about is, those are just harder to measure and it's harder to build performance products around things that are hard to measure. And so yeah, Snap's audience is definitively less valuable from that perspective, versus like a Pinterest or an Instagram or a Twitter. The second thing is, almost every ads business, every ad product you'll see that isn't search based, every display ad product opens to the screen where you put the ads. There's a lot of studies around attention and just mathematically where you're going to get the impressions, where you need to maximize that for advertising. And Snap opens the camera and that makes it awesome as a product, in terms of its ability to be the fastest way to capture a moment and share it with your friends.