Peter Sellis
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Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth · 90 minutes of unfiltered product advice from Snap and Discord’s…
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What Are the Three Oxymorons of a Great Product Manager?
Peter Sellis says a great product manager is three oxymorons, two opposing traits at once, and that is why the people are rare.
The first pair is confidence that borders on arrogance, held with serious humility. You are sure the path is right, and sure your own contribution will be recognized, which is what lets you hand the credit to the designer who made the last-second change and the engineer who stayed up for the partner event. Product managers get too much credit no matter what. Knowing who actually did the work comes from that confidence.
The second pair is the one he tests for in interviews, and he says he is not the best interviewer. He wants someone extremely organized, who unders
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What Is Core Product Value?
Peter Sellis says core product value is a phrase and a metric for why someone comes back every day. A phrase by itself does not get used. Metrics by themselves feel meaningless. Together, told as a story, they are something data scientists, product managers, and engineers can act on.
At Snap the phrase was the fastest way to share a moment with the people you care about. The team split it into fast, sharing a moment, and those people, which meant best friends. A consumer roadmap idea had to help that phrase, or it was probably the wrong priority. Fast meant time to load. Share meant the app opening on the camera. At Discord the phrase was the best way to talk and hang out with friends befor
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How Do You Build the Muscle of Product Ambition?
Lenny Rachitsky says AI is making products so much easier to build that ambition has to keep rising, and that builders have to learn the skill because people are not naturally that ambitious. Peter Sellis agrees. The status quo is the status quo for a reason. The work is a muscle for the courage to make tomorrow unlike today, against systems built to keep things still. He wants the acceleration, not a better position and not just more speed. That push is not natural.
People who can do it again and again inside a large company, without only demanding more, are rare. The trendy version showed up as the Steve Jobs ethos spread: always ask for more. When Lenny describes a ChatGPT product leader
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Why Is SpaceX Sunsetting the Falcon 9?
Peter Sellis says SpaceX is sunsetting the Falcon 9, the rocket he calls its primary launcher and the greatest reusable system ever built, so the company can build Starship. He is explicit that this is not inside information. He is close to a SpaceX engineer, and he is describing what the company has said in public.
No other company, in his view, guards against a future shock this way. In the week of this conversation, SpaceX telegraphed that the Falcon 9 is the past. Customers will gradually lose the chance to buy rides on it, starting in a few years, because the future needs a heavier rocket. He hedges that this is not every flight. The Falcon 9 would still be the future for any other cou
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Why Does Product Growth Come From the Core?
Peter Sellis says the growth he trusts, at Snap and at Discord, comes from the core. New markets can work. A network-effect product already wants to grow, so the stronger move is to make the product easier, faster, and more relevant for people who already use it for what it is for, or for something right next to that.
Almost every consumer product should aim at daily use, because days are real in a way a monthly habit is not. One daily user matches about 30 people who show up once a month. Moving that ratio a little is retention: if they used it today, will they use it tomorrow?
At Snap, the 2018 redesign was the only time daily use flattened from one quarter to the next. The team then foc
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Why Is Snapchat a Hard Place for Ads?
Peter Sellis says three product facts held Snap's ads business back. He still calls ads the product-market fit of consumer monetization on the internet, and Snapchat Plus and other subscriptions have done well. The ads gap is a different problem.
The audience is extremely young. Snap appealed to Gen Z early, and Gen Alpha is arriving from Roblox. Advertising value breaks between 17 and 18, and again between 18 and 21. Under 17, tracking and targeting are tightly constrained, which he calls justified. Performance ads need measurement, so that audience is harder than Pinterest, Instagram, or Twitter.
The app opens on the camera. Taking a snap and sending it to friends is the fastest way to c
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Why Is the Median Product Manager Bad?
Peter Sellis says the median product manager is probably pretty bad, and often a net negative, because the skill is a power distribution. If the skill starts out spread like a normal curve, the people who become product managers are the right-hand tail. Cut that tail off and the median sits far below the average. Most of the people who remain are on the left side.
Two forces make it worse. In the low-rate years he calls the Zerp era, product became the most lucrative tech career for people who are not technical. The job stayed subjective, which is why he says Lenny Rachitsky's podcast has been so useful, and the pay matched a technical ladder, so anyone inside had a strong reason to stay. T
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What Was It Like to Manage Nikita Bier?
Peter Sellis says managing Nikita Bier is the wrong word. Nikita was on his team at Discord for over a year after Discord acquired his startup, and he came with phenomenal engineers. You do not manage him. You try to direct him.
Nikita is one of one as an operator. The comparison is Liam Neeson in Taken: a special set of skills that is hard to come by and useful in the right situation, and a poor fit when the work is ordinary.
A product organization that cannot take that kind of talent is a failure state. Nikita took it to the extreme. He reported to Sellis, and Sellis still could not get a one-on-one. Sellis told him that if the messages stayed unanswered, he would book him on Intro just
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Should I Play Clair Obscur Expedition 33?
Peter Sellis thinks anyone who does not play video games should give last year's Game of the Year, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, a shot.
He does not consume TV, and he has not watched as many movies as he used to. He used to be a big movie buff, so the pick turns toward gaming, which sits closer to his heart. A wonderful indie studio out of France constructed a story with music and sound at Louvre-level beauty. Games are a form of art, and he leaves open that society maybe still has not realized how to appreciate them. The people behind the game are phenomenal, and what they produce is amazing.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is available on console as well. The best experience is probably on d
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Why Can Identity Matter for Product Managers?
Peter Sellis holds that gender, race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic background can be essential traits for the product managers and designers who build truly great consumer products for certain groups of users. The traits cannot be learned and cannot be acquired.
A product for young black men does not have to be built by young black men. How people are brought up, and who they are biologically, can suit them better to some consumer products. Society is not comfortable admitting it.
Most consumer products hit parts of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Backgrounds and upbringings that match the needs make some people better at understanding them.
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What Does Long-term Greedy Mean?
Peter Sellis says long-term greedy means the company is not a charity giving value away to make people happy. The company makes the offer happen today because customers come back tomorrow even bigger.
The phrase rests on a plain link: advertising revenue tomorrow is causally related to the return on investment driven for advertisers today, so the focus should stay on advertiser return on investment. The easiest way to drive that return is to decrease the investment in the denominator by lowering prices. In modern auctions, price is an output, not an input. Hitting long-term goals and seeing compounding growth from retention and increasing budgets, including net revenue retention for some Sa
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Why Publish a Product Roadmap Rivals Can Copy?
Peter Sellis wants the SpaceX and Tesla habit of publishing a plan so aggressive that rivals are welcome to try. Nothing SpaceX is doing now is work the company left unsaid 10 years earlier. Tesla spelled out how the first Roadster would fund the S, and how the S would fund the 3.
That public plan is a mission you publish and then turn into the product roadmap. Say what you are going to do, do it, and then tell people to copy you. Tesla went further and released the patents on the electric-car work. Publishing the plan is the bar he wants as a product leader. Giving away the patents is the next level.
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How Should Discord Bet Outside Its Core?
Peter Sellis says a consumer product has two really incremental ways to bet outside the core, and a more innovative Snapchat way that leaves the present behind.
The first is to boil down the core things people already come for. For Snap, the camera is only a maybe. For Discord, the core is voice. Then look to other niches and other cohorts. The frame is an MBA-style two-by-two, and a team should always be assessing it because it is an easy one.
The second is one of the greatest gifts: people use the product in a way nobody expected or ordained, and they go through extra hoops because the offering is already so good. At Discord, a lot of the signal centered on communities, with people organ
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How Do You Judge a Founder's Product Taste?
Peter Sellis reads a founder's product taste in the ideas they built and never shipped. At Snap he watched better ideas get a personal no than he has seen almost any other consumer startup launch.
His goal as a product leader for founders at high growth companies was to turn them into the richest museum curators in the world. Whatever is in the product at any one time is a small slice of the overall collection, the slice a curator thinks is right for the moment and place in society.
In an interview, he asks about things they built that they never shipped. He means a prototype they held in their hands and then kept back because the world was not ready, or because the work itself was not rea
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How Are Spiky Product Managers Like Bands?
Peter Sellis treats spiky product managers like bands putting out albums. Handling spikiness means building teams that can adopt talent that is not the perfect nine-to-five employee. For consumer work, and for anything that involves more creativity and taste, product leaders work the way bands do.
The management model is Phil Jackson, coach of the Bulls and the Lakers. Phil Jackson could mesh talent of very different types that literally does not get along otherwise, create winning teams, and do it both as a player and as a coach in two different places, mixing Eastern philosophies and Western philosophies. From a leadership-styles perspective, Phil Jackson is one of the most meaningful lea
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Why Does Collaboration Slow Product Teams?
Peter Sellis treats an executive who never says stop collaborating as a warning sign, because collaboration brings coordination costs that make a team move as slow as the slowest node in the system. He tries to internalize that cost aggressively.
At high-growth companies, product managers should make decisions the founders would have made six months ago, or a year or two ago. The setup has two parts: an ideological culture so everyone understands why they are doing the work, with the strategy treated almost like a religion, and a clear map of who can be trusted with which decision, the directly responsible individual single-threaded on the work. Where founders are still in charge, the head