Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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.
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.