Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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.
00:08:12 · Peter Sellis, Lenny Rachitsky
And so, I think the components of what is this great ideological setup, a lot of things I focus on, for example, because I think oftentimes the head of product at high growth companies where the founders are still in charge, the head of product is really like a vessel for their vision. And both with Snap and at Discord where I had the privilege of working with the founders in both cases, I tried to take and absorb and internalize their vision and then create small phrases and language that could be used and repeated that were essentially shortcuts or almost like synecdoches of the whole strategy. And so yeah, I could go more into that, but that's how I think of it. And obviously, giving it branding that I'm designing it like a terrorist organization at least gets people's attention, but maybe I need to workshop that a little bit. [00:09:31] S0: No, you don't, this is perfect. This is exactly what I was hoping this conversation would be. So just to be very clear about the elements of the terrorist organization that we want to keep, one is this idea of autonomy, essentially trusting people further down in case the leaders get caught or are incommunicative. So basically, giving more autonomy to folks further down the chain. And then two is having a very clear mission, ideology, you might say, so that everyone's very aligned and decisions are quick and that kind of thing. [00:10:02] S1: Yeah, yeah. And to be clear, I didn't start with, I'm going to build a terrorist organization. That, [inaudible 00:10:10]- [00:10:09] S0: I bet you built a great one, by the way. Yeah.
00:10:09 · Lenny Rachitsky, Peter Sellis
[00:10:09] S0: I bet you built a great one, by the way. Yeah. [00:10:12] S1: That would be a great one. But when I thought about the elements of what I wanted from the organizations I was building, I couldn't help but notice that there were organizations out there operating like this and they just so happened to be terrorist organizations. So yeah, that led to a lot of interesting reading lists. I think the Peter Sellis product reading list is almost like a banned booked list at this point. [00:10:34] S0: It's interesting because I've heard many people describe, you want to build a cult, and this is not that different because cults are very effective at getting stuff done- [00:10:43] S1: It is- [00:10:43] S0: ... for people. [00:10:43] S1: It is not. Yeah. You can't spell culture without cult. And so I think, yeah, it is not very different from that. I think there are elements of a cult that are more about the person leading the cult, whereas terrorist organizations are more about a higher power or a religion or ideology. So that's why I tended more towards that. But yeah, I think you could read up on a couple of cults and then just take it all the way to the penultimate moment before they do the thing that makes them well known as a cult and you probably could learn a lot, honestly. There's a lot of alpha in that.
00:10:43 · Peter Sellis, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:10:43] S1: It is not. Yeah. You can't spell culture without cult. And so I think, yeah, it is not very different from that. I think there are elements of a cult that are more about the person leading the cult, whereas terrorist organizations are more about a higher power or a religion or ideology. So that's why I tended more towards that. But yeah, I think you could read up on a couple of cults and then just take it all the way to the penultimate moment before they do the thing that makes them well known as a cult and you probably could learn a lot, honestly. There's a lot of alpha in that. [00:11:20] S0: Speaking of a higher power, a fun fact about you is you managed Nikita Bier, who came on the podcast, one of the most popular episodes of the podcast, quite a character, was head of product for X recently for I think a year. Very few people have worked with Nikita, I'm curious what it was like to actually manage Nikita, work with Nikita.
00:11:20 · Lenny Rachitsky, Peter Sellis
[00:11:20] S0: Speaking of a higher power, a fun fact about you is you managed Nikita Bier, who came on the podcast, one of the most popular episodes of the podcast, quite a character, was head of product for X recently for I think a year. Very few people have worked with Nikita, I'm curious what it was like to actually manage Nikita, work with Nikita. [00:11:41] S1: Yeah, Nikita was on my team at Discord. We acquired his startup and he was on the team at Discord for almost, or over a year, with some phenomenal engineers that came along with him. I think managing Nikita, that's a very loose term of use of the word manage. I think much like, yeah, you don't manage Nikita, you only seek to control him or direct him. I liken it a lot to... Nikita's an awesome personality and just actual operator in the product space, pretty much one of one, and I have a ton of respect for a lot of the stuff that he does. I think of him a lot like Liam Neeson in the Taken movie series. Yeah, if your daughter gets kidnapped, he has a very special set of skills and he's going to employ those skills, and those skills are very hard to come by and very useful in certain situations. But then when you need him to raise the daughter or buy some groceries or stuff like that, all he knows how to do is just kill everybody in the grocery store or something like that. And so no, he's yeah, an incredible person to work with when you have him on the areas that he's an expert in and truly one of one, from that perspective.
00:11:41 · Peter Sellis, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:11:41] S1: Yeah, Nikita was on my team at Discord. We acquired his startup and he was on the team at Discord for almost, or over a year, with some phenomenal engineers that came along with him. I think managing Nikita, that's a very loose term of use of the word manage. I think much like, yeah, you don't manage Nikita, you only seek to control him or direct him. I liken it a lot to... Nikita's an awesome personality and just actual operator in the product space, pretty much one of one, and I have a ton of respect for a lot of the stuff that he does. I think of him a lot like Liam Neeson in the Taken movie series. Yeah, if your daughter gets kidnapped, he has a very special set of skills and he's going to employ those skills, and those skills are very hard to come by and very useful in certain situations. But then when you need him to raise the daughter or buy some groceries or stuff like that, all he knows how to do is just kill everybody in the grocery store or something like that. And so no, he's yeah, an incredible person to work with when you have him on the areas that he's an expert in and truly one of one, from that perspective. [00:12:57] S0: How do you feel about having folks like that on your team? I mean, a lot of people talk about having very distinct, I don't know, different people for different roles, and sometimes you need someone like that just, who drives home.