Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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.
01:16:40 · Peter Sellis
[01:16:40] S1: Yeah. I can't help but think this is maybe why it's so hard to come by some of them because you see an [inaudible 01:16:48]. There's basically these three, I bet you could actually come up with this from a synthesis of so many of the amazing product leaders you've had on here, but there are these three oxymorons, I think. There are two wolves inside of the PM three times. One is, I think to be a really good PM, you kind of have to be really confident and that borders on arrogance a lot of the time, especially at certain levels. And so that has to be balanced with some form of humility, really serious humility where you, again, are so confident that what we're doing is the right thing to do and that we have conviction on this path. And also personally, that I will be recognized for my contribution. I can go out there and give credit to exactly who deserves it. The designer who made that last second change that made a huge difference, the engineer that stayed up all night to get out the thing on time for the partner event. I think that this also ties to being a great leader, but having the humility and the attention to detail to know who to give credit to actually comes from this sense of confidence that you kind of know that PMs are going to get too much credit no matter what. And so I think that's the first one. The second one, which I really like and really try and test for in interviews, and I'm not the best interviewer, is you want these people who are extremely organized and very process driven. They understand the value of good process and not too much, not too little, et cetera, and then are just super comfortable with ambiguity, almost to the point of despising authority, almost like pathological demand avoidance. And so it's just like, "I have a checklist for everything, but I'm also comfortable if I have to throw it out and redo it all the time." Or something like that. I think these two wolves are like, if you can demonstrate that through some stories or through some examples, that's so attractive to me in a candidate. It's like, yeah, I'm really comfortable with ambiguity, but that doesn't mean I just am not organized or I hate process. Another one of those things where it's really trendy to just say all process is useless, but it's like I like somebody who has both those wolves.