Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:29:19 · Evan Spiegel
[00:29:19] S1: One of my favorite stories was around screenshot detection actually in the early days because when we first built Snapchat and we shared with people, "Oh, you could send photos that disappear." Everyone said, "No, you can't. You can always take a screenshot. What do you mean you can send things that disappear? That makes no sense." And so we thought a lot, I remember that summer after school, we went home, we were working out at my dad's house and Bobby and I were just going back and forth and we were like ... We were having fun using the product. We were sending photos back and forth, but people would just keep saying, "Well, it's not about disappearing photos because you can just save them. I don't get it." And one of the things we invented that at the time, we figured out a way, we realized that if you were pressing and holding to open a snap and left your finger on the screen and you took a screenshot, it would basically trigger an event on the phone essentially that made ... The phone would essentially report that your finger had lost contact with the screen.That's what the screenshot mechanism did. So even though Apple didn't provide an API at the time to let you know that a screenshot had been taken, there was a way for us to essentially detect this touch event to learn that a screenshot had happened. And then we would just send a notification back to the sender that, oh, the recipient had taken a screenshot. And that for us in the early days really resonated with our community because they didn't mind if somebody saved one of their Snaps, they just wanted to know. And I think that that early invention was one of the first things that really got a lot of traction in the early days and I think helped Snapchat spread as a new way of communicating.
00:30:56 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:30:56] S0: And that is really cool. I can't imagine Snapchat existing without you figuring that out. That feels like such a core mechanic. Something that is also really, I'd say famous in the PM community about Snap is you guys waited a long time to hire product managers. I've done all these research reports on just like how long it took the top companies to hire their PMs. And the number I saw is you had 200 employees before you hired your first PM. I'm curious if you think that was a mistake waiting that long and just your current thoughts on product managers, just like how they fit into Snap. A lot of people listening to this are PMs and so I'm just curious how you feel.
00:31:34 · Evan Spiegel
[00:31:34] S1: A lot of my view of product management was actually driven by my view of designers and the role that designers should play. And one of the things that I was concerned about in the tech community, if you look at the traditional tech org structure, designers really are producing visuals. They're not really producing the product direction or the strategy or the vision or net new innovation. They're really responsive actually, I think in many cases to the PM saying, "This is what we're building. Now go make me some visuals." And I absolutely did not want that type of culture to take root because again, as I mentioned, we modeled a lot of the way that we develop products here at Snap on that early relationship between myself and Bobby, really this harmonious relationship between design and engineering and how important that is, that dialogue is to building great things and great products. And so I think in the early days, my view was not that we don't need PMs, my view is that designers should do that work. So that's essentially what we would say to our designers, which was like, "Hey, if you need PM support, why don't you just do it yourself? What's the big deal?" And I think that that really helped, frankly, designers play a more active role in the product development process. Now, today at a company operating at our scale, if you look at the legal requirements, our approach to trust and safety, it really does take a village to get a new product off the ground and product managers play a really important coordination role in all that in addition to synthesizing, for example, data science analysis and bringing together the working group to try to solve problems or innovate or make the product better. So I think as the organization grows and there becomes all of these different capabilities that the company didn't have in the early days, whether it's data science, you name it, product managers play a really important role in bringing all those folks to the table and making sure we deliver the right thing at the right time.
00:33:33 · Lenny Rachitsky
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00:35:10 · Evan Spiegel, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:35:10] S1: Well, it sounds highly dysfunctional if folks are having that standoff. That is not a good thing. But I do like that people are thinking about doing work really differently. I think that's imperative at this moment of time. The rate of change is extraordinary. Look, I do think designers feel vindicated in a lot of ways. A lot of designers had parents who were saying, "Why aren't you studying computer science? What are you going to do with this skillset drawing things? This doesn't make any sense." And I think today, a lot of our designers are now shipping code, which is extraordinary. And that's a really big and really meaningful change in terms of the way that the design works here at Snap and the way the creative process works. And so I think removing friction from the creative process and being able to go from idea to impact at the scale of almost a billion people using Snapchat is really empowering and exciting for designers who feel like these tools maybe level the playing field to some extent for creative people. [00:36:10] S0: Yeah. What I feel like, I don't see this happening yet, but I feel like because now it's so much easier to build, people are shipping all these okay things and it feels like design should have its moment of glory right now as a differentiator of like, "Okay, this is actually awesome." I haven't felt that yet, and I'm curious if that's what will begin to happen.
00:36:10 · Lenny Rachitsky, Evan Spiegel
[00:36:10] S0: Yeah. What I feel like, I don't see this happening yet, but I feel like because now it's so much easier to build, people are shipping all these okay things and it feels like design should have its moment of glory right now as a differentiator of like, "Okay, this is actually awesome." I haven't felt that yet, and I'm curious if that's what will begin to happen. [00:36:29] S1: Well, I think for us, design actually has always operated as a bottleneck at the company, which is incredibly important. It's intentional that things need to be approved by design to ship. And sometimes that really annoys people and it does slow down the shipping process. Sometimes it means that if you don't know how to work well with design or get your ideas in front of design, that some really innovative or cool new thing developed by a PM or developed by an engineer maybe doesn't get shipped as fast as it should. But that bottleneck is really, really important because that's what results in a cohesive customer experience. And I think you can see when an app has been built by teams who are responsible for different pages of the app or different parts of the experience, but there isn't really a cohesive through line. And I think for us at Snap, having design really actually be that bottleneck in terms of helping to manage what we're shipping and what it looks like and how it all works together, I think is really important.