90 minutes of unfiltered product advice from Snap and Discord’s product chief | Peter Sellis
AI Summary
Lenny's Newsletter features a 97-minute podcast episode with Peter Sellis, the first product manager at Snapchat and former Head of Product at Discord. The episode covers unfiltered product advice, including team design principles, managing top performers, why the median PM underperforms, why Snapchat's ads business underdelivered, why growth comes from the core product, and his three 'oxymorons' of a truly great PM.
Key Facts
Author Takes
Median PM quality
The median PM is bad
Snapchat's ads business
Snapchat's ads business never reached its potential
Growth strategy
Growth almost always comes from the core product
Contrarian Angle
Designing teams like terrorist organizations
Peter Sellis designs product teams using decentralized, autonomous structures inspired by terrorist organizations, a deliberately provocative framing for maximizing speed and ownership
Inverts conventional corporate org design by borrowing from extremist group structures to create small, high-trust, autonomous cells
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