Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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
[00:33:33] S0: I am so excited to tell you about this season's supporting sponsor Vanta. Vanta helps over 15,000 companies like Cursor, Ramp, Duolingo, Snowflake, and Atlassian earn and prove trust with their customers. Teams are building and shipping products faster than ever thanks to AI. But as a result, the amount of risk being introduced into your product and your business is higher than it's ever been. Every security leader that I talk to is feeling the increasing weight of protecting their organization, their business, and not to mention their customer data. Because things are moving so fast, they are constantly reacting, having to guess at priorities, and having to make do with outdated solutions. Vanta automates compliance and risk management with over 35 security and privacy frameworks, including SOC two, ISO 27001, and HIPAA. This helps companies get compliant, fast, and stay compliant. More than ever before, trust has the power to make or break your business. Learn more at vanta.com/lenny. And as a listener of this podcast, you get $1,000 off Vanta. That's vanta.com/lenny. There's this interesting question that everyone's asking right now. Marc Andreessen put it really well when he was on the pod. There's this kind of three-way standoff right now between PM's designers, engineers, where they each think they are the future and you don't need the other with AI. And everyone's wondering, what's the more important core skill? I imagine your sense is now AI makes designers even more powerful. And so this is even more the way to approach talk about just how you think this shifts this triad with AI enabling people.
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.
00:36:29 · Evan Spiegel, Lenny Rachitsky
[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. [00:37:25] S0: That's a good segue to something I wanted to ask you about, which is you're famously very in the weeds on everything that is going on, all the things that are shipping, you're very close to the pixels. I'm curious how that's evolved for you over time. Are you still in there looking at everything that's about to ship? And what's your just philosophy on founders having to be involved in, let's say, the pixels and the details of the product?
00:37:48 · Evan Spiegel
[00:37:48] S1: First and foremost, yeah, this is what I love to do. I love building things. I love making new products, services for our community. That is what drives me. I really, really enjoy that part of the process. So it's not work to me. It's something that I really just love doing and love doing together with our team. And so I think for me, in addition to all the great people I get to work with here at Snap, the thing that wakes me up with a smile on my face every morning, the reason why I'm skipping to work is because I am in the weeds on what we're building and shipping to our community. That being said, there are always smarter, better, more talented experts working on all the different things that we have going on, but I really do like staying close to what we're creating. I don't think it's relevant just to founders. I think no matter what type of company you're running or your role in the company, staying close to your customer, staying close to the product and the way that it's serving your customer is the fundamentally most important thing you could possibly do. I think I absolutely subscribe to the old school, walk the floors, talk to your customers, get out there and stay in touch with what's actually happening with your service, with your community, with your team. And I think that's probably the most important job that any leader can do in any company is stay close to their customers, stay close to their team.