Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…To elaborate on that, I think the broader point is that truly not every team needs a product manager, but the activities, the outcome that one would drive needs to get done no matter what. And in some cases, this is why the prototypical companies that everyone references when they say, "They never had product managers, look at how successful they are," they're all building for themselves. Stripe, Twilio, Figma, designers for designers, engineers for engineers. When you are the customer, why the heck do you need someone else to help do the things that let you make decisions on what to build? But if you are not the customer, if you're working in a particularly complex space, if there's something that you, as the person that could build the product, feel you don't have, that's when you can essentially delegate that responsibility to someone else to say, "Hey, let me do the things I'm really good at and you do something that I need to get my job done." So it's that sort of relationship that I think is often missing in the discourse. I think it would alleviate a lot of the, "We don't want PMs. PM is useless" or, "PM's one of the best thing since [inaudible 00:09:52]," which they're not. It's just a manifestation of that problem. Yeah. Just to build on that, we're going on a tangent, but I think that's really interesting. I think there's another element of that, SNAP actually is another example where they waited, I think, until they had 200 people before they hired their first PM. To me, that's an example of other people were doing the PM job. As you said, there's PM activity, someone's doing them, lining people, prioritizing, making sure things are clear, making sure people aren't surprised, all these things PMs do. Someone's doing that, and my feeling is like, "Okay, your designers may love doing that, great. Let them do it." If your engineers that have a lot of product sense may want to do that, great. But there's some point they either is like, "Forget it. I just want to code. I want to build that. I want to be sitting around in meetings all day," or they just aren't as good as things are scaling. And so it's kind of like, if your engineers, designers want to do it and are good at it, great. You don't need PMs for a long time. Oftentimes they're not good at it or they don't want to be sitting in doing all these PM things. Yep, precisely.…

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