Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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.
00:12:57 · Lenny Rachitsky, Peter Sellis
[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. [00:13:08] S1: I think it's essential to be able to create an organization that can adopt that type of talent. I view it as a failure state if you have product orgs that can't essentially handle really spiky talent. I mean, Nikita took it to extremes. You remember when he was on Intro doing that thing? At one point I was trying to get a one-on-one with him who, by the way, he reported up into me, and I couldn't get him. So I was like, "Dude, if you don't fucking answer my DMs, I'm going to go on Intro and book you so I can just have a one-on-one with you right now." Luckily, we didn't get to that, he answered. I think I hit him up on four different messaging apps before I got hold of him. But yeah, I think this ability to handle spikiness, to build teams that can essentially adopt the type of talent that isn't necessarily the perfect 9:00 to 5:00 employee from a product perspective is... I look up a lot from a management style to Phil Jackson, the coach of the Bulls. [00:14:05] S0: And Lakers.
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.