90 minutes of unfiltered product advice from Snap and Discord’s product chief | Peter Sellis

Lenny Rachitsky (0:00)

I asked you, what are some counterintuitive lessons that you've learned that go against common startup wisdom?

Peter Sellis (0:05)

I'm no longer beholden to any corporate comms team right now, so I can let it rip a little bit.

Lenny Rachitsky (0:09)

You like to design teams like a terrorist organization?

Peter Sellis (0:13)

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.

Lenny Rachitsky (0:29)

You like to spend time writing your best people into the ground versus improving the average people.

Peter Sellis (0:34)

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.

Lenny Rachitsky (0:43)

Something that I know you believe most product managers are bad and are often negative to the company.

Peter Sellis (0:50)

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.

Lenny Rachitsky (1:00)

Snap is quite famous for not hiring PMs for a long time.

Peter Sellis (1:03)

The baseline is we should just be able to operate this product without any product manager. So this person has to provide value over nobody.

Lenny Rachitsky (1:10)

It feels like an interesting new skill for PMs is pushing back on things, AI is adding to your products.

Peter Sellis (1:14)

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.

Lenny Rachitsky (1:33)

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 head of 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 Bier, 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 Sriram Krishnan for suggesting topics and questions for this conversation. Before we get into it, don't forget to check out lennysproductpass.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, I bring you Peter Sellis.

Peter, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

Peter Sellis (2:57)

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.

Lenny Rachitsky (3:05)

You've never done a podcast before. You've been in Product. You've been out there for so long. I'm very honored you chose to do this. Why have you avoided podcasts? Why have you decided to finally do this podcast?

Peter Sellis (3:15)

You know, it's not avoiding podcasts. I've really just been avoiding you. No, I'm kidding. It's been, you know, I always, I think there are two things. To be totally frank with you, a lot of times when I saw, especially early on, because you have such wonderful distribution among so many influential people and teams.

When I saw somebody going on Lenny's Podcast, I was like, oh, that person is probably about to get fired. They're going on and they're pimping themselves out for like their next role, which was like maybe one view of it. I was like, why aren't they just grinding?

Now, I think when I kind of take a step back, you know, a lot of the people I've worked with and a lot of teams I've had, kind of the opportunity to lead, I think one of the things that I generally do is show up pretty authentically every day at work. There's, you can call it no filter, you can call it whatever you want. And a lot of the stuff that I say and do, I think it's probably better suited for behind closed doors. But as you and I have chatted about, now I'm between different roles. So I'm no longer beholden to any corporate comms team right now. So yeah, I guess I can let it rip a little bit.