Josh Miller: belief

Transcript context

…This can be a really interesting story to follow. I've seen this journey a few times at different companies. What I find is a lot of times people that are good at other things like engineering or design, for a while, they're like, "Yep. We don't need PMs. I'll do the PM job." And then eventually they're like, "This sucks. I hate doing this stuff. I want to design. Leave me alone. I don't want to sit on a [inaudible 00:54:29] all day. I don't want to be in meetings." So eventually, it turns out, they're like, "Okay. Let's find someone to do this thing that loves it." And so that's one thing that happens. The other thing I find is, I'm sure you've seen this, a lot of people are wary of PMs. They come in and they're like, "Here's what we're doing," and they're just adults process complexity. What I find is those are just bad PMs. If you have an awesome PM, everything just gets better. Everyone's happier, things move faster. So I think companies often get to that stage. And then also there's just career development stuff, eventually as you scale. It's like "What happened to my career path," and they're like, "All right. Well, we got to go on one road or another." It's hard to stay in this hybrid role. But I super respect the first principal's approach of let's just- And, for what's worth, Lenny. I think you're almost, definitely right. And I think it will almost definitely happen with us. And again, this goes back to the "assume you don't know." The "assume you don't know," is try a prototype and then assume it's not going to work. So, even in my own experience, I remember getting to know Evan from Snapchat just enough to know how he talked about PMs at Snap. And it was, "We're never going to hire PMs at Snap. Everyone's a designer." And, I have no relationship with him anymore, but you can look, there are a lot of PMs at Snapchat. So I know from my own experience with people that I respect from a product perspective that were indignant, they would never hire PMs, their organizations now have PMs. And that's probably for a really good reason. I would tell say also on our team, if any of our designers are listening, they'll tell you these, whatever you want to call it, "These verbs are taking up a lot of my time, and I do not have as much time to think and dream and design and do user research." And so, we're already feeling it breaking into our company. I think the intentionality, whatever comes next, whatever it is, is leaders of the project should be picked for the projects, not because they're in a certain org at our company. And, if we ever hire people to do the PM role, we want them to think of themselves as people who make things and have lots of different disciplines and tools in their toolkit, not just the PM discipline. And, of course, even that could be wrong, and maybe in a year we cave. I got it totally wrong. We got it totally wrong. So, we'll see. But I would also, that that of all the things I shared on this podcast so far, this is probably the one I'll come crawling back to your podcast in a couple years, being, "Lenny, you were right. It all blew up!" But it's a fun experiment and Snap is a good example. Stripes another, where they waited a long time to hire their first PMs. And I think it's because their designers or engineers were just incredibly good at that element. And it was also very design-forward or very edge-forward, so they didn't need as much PM skill initially.…

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