Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
01:09:03 · Lenny Rachitsky, Peter Sellis
[01:09:03] S0: I just had Tara Seshan on the podcast. She's head of product for ChatGPT Work, although they're always shifting people around, I don't know what her role is these days, and she pointed out the job of PMs now actually more and more is to elevate the ambition of the team, to remind them we could go bigger, what would it take to think bigger, what would a 1000X of this idea be. [01:09:24] S1: Yeah. I mean, again, if you can do that credibly, repeatedly, not just by showing up to meetings and be like, "What if we did more?" [01:09:33] S0: What if you did it faster? [01:09:35] S1: Yeah, exactly. No, I have got white male, gray hair, fancy degrees, I can just come into any meeting and be like, "Have you thought about doing this quicker?" Okay, have you thought about punching yourself in the face? Yeah, maybe. [01:09:55] S0: Oh, man. So that's the skill of saying that, but in a way that doesn't get you punched in the face. [01:09:59] S1: Yeah. Yeah. To be fair, I've been punched in the face a couple of times. You don't get a nose like this naturally. You're punched in the face a couple of times. [01:10:06] S0: Is this for real? Was that a real thing that you get punched in the face? [01:10:08] S1: I have gotten the shit kicked out of me a couple of times because I run my mouth nonstop, but... [01:10:12] S0: Is there a story there you can share or is that off? [01:10:19] S1: That's more ancient history. We like to move past these things, Lenny, come on.
01:10:19 · Peter Sellis, Lenny Rachitsky
[01:10:19] S1: That's more ancient history. We like to move past these things, Lenny, come on. [01:10:22] S0: I feel like there's trauma there we need to get in, we need to uncover. Okay. Final topic. When we were starting this podcast, you told me there's some cellicisms out there, things that you, how do you, what's the word you use? What's the phrase cellicisms? Cellicisms. [01:10:38] S1: I use cellicisms. [01:10:42] S0: Cellicisms, things that you often share with folks that kind of become a thing that people that work with you know. Are there any that we haven't covered, things that you think are kind of recurring pieces of advice or frameworks or even lessons you've learned that you think are important for people to hear that might be helpful?
01:10:57 · Peter Sellis
[01:10:57] S1: I don't think there's too many. I mean, I think a few of them came up. I think when we were talking about ads, and I think I might have, I don't know if I deserve original credit for this, but I've used it quite a bit, is this idea that ads is such a cutthroat hand-to-hand combat, very revenue goal driven product area that it's very easy to become very short-term oriented. And one of the things, and this hearkens back to the ideological stuff from building the type of organization you want, that we really focused on over the years both at Snap, Discord, and even some of the companies I've advised on the ad stuff, is like with ads, you really want to be long-term greedy. And that was a phrase we used. And long-term greedy is a funny phrase, but it was actually backed by essentially the mathematical realization that, which again it's not rocket science, but revenue tomorrow for advertising is essentially causally related to the ROI you drive for advertisers today. So you need to focus, your focus should be on driving advertiser ROI. The issue is that the easiest way to drive ROI is actually to decrease the denominator, the I, so you could lower prices, right? Now, in modern auctions, price is an output, not an input. But the powerful learning there is that the way I will grow this business long-term, the way I will hit my goals long-term, the way I'll see compounding growth because of retention and increasing budgets, net revenue retention for some of these SaaS products is essentially by delivering ROI for people today, even at the cost of potentially short-term revenue. And so this type of phrase allowed for, gave space for a type of thinking that was otherwise, like it can get pretty tough. And people say like, "Oh yeah, it's thinking long-term." Again, I'll take it back to you are going to encounter times in your career where thinking long-term is actually really, really fucking tough. And a lot of this time will be when you are a public company, when you are missing numbers, when like you may have to do a layoff if certain things don't happen, and to be able to have an ideological setup for which you can use it as cover to think long-term. And that was what long-term greedy was, it's like, "We're not a charity. We're not giving this stuff away because we want to make people happy.
01:13:11 · Peter Sellis
We're giving this away, we're making this happen today because we know they'll come back tomorrow even bigger." And yeah, that one was really, really, really effective. I think the other thing was at both Snap and Discord, we created this concept of core product value, and this was related to my DAU comment, was like you need to define both from a theoretical or like a conceptual level as well as a metrics level, like what it means for somebody to come back to your product every single day. And so Snap, I think at the time was like Snap is the fastest way to share a moment with the people you care about. So it's like fast, share a moment, people you care about. And you could actually break down what does fast mean? Time to load. What does share mean? It's like, okay, you're opening to the camera with sharing quickly. What does people you care about mean? Focus on best friends. You could actually break this thing down, and so you had fastest way to share a moment with your best friends. So if you're building a product roadmap on the consumer side and you're like, "Oh, should we work on this?" It's like, "Well, does it help us be the fastest way to share a moment with your best friends?" Kind of tenuous link to that, maybe that's not what we should prioritize. I think Discord was like the best way to talk and hang out with your friends before, during and after playing games. So it's like talk, hang out, games, before, during, after. You can break this thing down and we actually had metrics definitions, which I think are kind of proprietary internal, but we had metrics definitions that we were looking for. Those metrics definitions made their way into the growth books, into the hacks like, "Okay, did this impact CPV?" And this whole ideological language that everybody shared, you could onboard new data sciences to, I think just got people on the program... ... science too, I think just got people on the program really, really fast.
01:15:05 · Lenny Rachitsky, Peter Sellis
[01:15:05] S0: These are awesome. This idea of core product value is such a nice way to frame. It combines mission with the levers essentially of the business. And basically the idea here is come up with just a phrase that describes the mission that happens to also connect with how we grow this business. And it feels like three components is a consistent pattern here. [01:15:31] S1: Yeah. Three made it... Yeah, maybe it's just like a rule of threes. Yeah. But the way you characterize it is exactly right. And you can't over rely on one or the other. If it's just metrics, it's kind of meaningless to people. If it's just a phrase, it doesn't get actioned day to day by data scientists, product managers and engineers. So having both and building a story around that and telling that story repeatedly. For core product value at Snap, we actually had an onboarding presentation which I delivered to every single new hire for seven years straight every week or every other week later that was about this because that was part of the cult. This is how we deliver core product value. This is why people choose Snapchat every single day in the face of tons of alternatives and a bunch of savage competitors. And I think the same goes for Discord. [01:16:16] S0: And the work is coming up with that phrase that actually is clear, simple, connects to all these things. Not easy I imagine. [01:16:22] S1: And the metrics that are causally demonstrated with retention. That's tough too. I think no data scientist likes working with me because I'm like, "Hey, guys, we got to figure this out."
01:16:22 · Peter Sellis, Lenny Rachitsky
[01:16:22] S1: And the metrics that are causally demonstrated with retention. That's tough too. I think no data scientist likes working with me because I'm like, "Hey, guys, we got to figure this out." [01:16:32] S0: Interesting. Okay. One other take that you mentioned when we were chatting, this is this idea of how a great PM is an oxymoron.