Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
90 minutes of unfiltered product advice from Snap and Discord’s product chief | Peter Sellis
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I asked you what are some counterintuitive lessons that you've learned that go against common startup wisdom? I'm no longer beholden to any corporate comms team right now, so I can let it rip a little bit. You like to design teams like a terrorist organization? A good terrorist organization essentially has two things. One is it has this ideological culture that everyone understands why they are doing what they're doing, and then it has a very, very clear organizational structure of who can be trusted with which decision. You like to spend time writing your best people into the ground versus improving the average people. If you see somebody drowning, you want to save them. I did the absolute opposite. If somebody is strong and crushing it, I'm just handing them more and more rope to hang themselves with. Something that I know you believe most product managers are bad and are often negative to the company. The great product managers are exiting the system. They're becoming founders, they're becoming executives. It's kind of set up to be this profession where the median product manager is actually probably pretty bad. Snap is quite famous for not hiring PMs for a long time. The baseline, we should just be able to operate this product without any product manager. So this person has to provide value over nobody. It feels like an interesting new skill for PMs is pushing back on things AI, adding to your product. I think I saw Evan personally say no to better ideas than I've seen. Almost any other consumer startup launch. Exercising that kind of muscle of saying no, of restraint is probably one of the few muscles of taste you can exercise. If a museum has all of their collection on the walls, then the curator hasn't done any. Today my guest is Peter Sellis. Peter is a legend in the PM community. He was the first PM at Snapchat where he spent seven years building one of the most delightful and popular consumer products in history. More recently, he was had a product at Discord, which he helped grow significantly. And now he's between gigs, which means he was finally able to come on the podcast without a comps team without a PR team, which means that he's able to be especially honest and real about everything that he's seen and learned and has been excited to share. We cover so much ground from how the best teams are organized like terrorist organizations, what it's like to manage Nikita Beer, why most PMs are really bad, why Snapchat has struggled to build a truly massive business in spite of having a billion monthly active users. And it's not what you think. And so much more, this episode is full of so much gold. And that's why it went so long. I couldn't stop digging into stuff that Peter kept bringing up. A huge thank you to Jack Brody and Sri Ram Krishna for suggesting topics and questions for this conversation. Before we get into it, don't forget to check out lenniesproductpass.com for a free year of the hottest and most beautifully crafted AI and non-AI products in the world, available exclusively to Lenny's newsletter subscribers, with that and bring you Peter Sellis. Peter, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast. Thank you, Lenny. It feels like it's been a long time coming that you and I have known each other. But I'm really excited to be here. You've never done a podcast before. You've been in product. You've been out there for so long.
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