Lenny Rachitsky: uncertainty

Transcript context

…The big difference or one big difference I noticed was that they were extremely careful about only making people PMs who had first proven themselves out as forward deploying engineers. You basically could not become a PM any other way. So as an example, when I mentioned earlier the thing that we built for the plane factory, the person who was managing that deployment, she later became the PM for ontology, and it was just because she'd kind of proven her method in the field. And the reason for that's pretty simple, it's going to be someone who understand how customers work and has that customer empathy, and it's going to be someone who has this drive to get things done because that's what BD selected for. I think the failure mode that they were very, very averse to in traditional PMs was this kind of Google Docs syndrome of like, okay, I'm going to write my product requirement documents, and I'm going to manage it in this very sort of sane, rational way I think, so the company was really rigorous about that. And so basically PMs were almost always internal promotions and they always came from BD. I am not aware of a single case where we took somebody who was a PM at a place like Google, which produces many excellent PMs and hired them successfully into Palantir, it's just a very different vibe. So I think that was one thing. This is maybe more of a classic PM trait, but you just had to be either an engineer yourself or extremely good at working with engineers, and the ones I saw who succeeded the most were just best friends with their engineering team. And the team would always just be like one, it was called the group pm and then it would be a lot of very, very good engineers. And basically the success or failure mode was just do the engineers and trust you? I mentioned before Palantir how is very almost disagreeable personalities, and so if you didn't gain the trust of engineering team pretty fast, you didn't last very long. I think we've cracked the question of why are Palantir PM's so successful? First of all, the hiring bar is just basically hiring for leaders in a lot of different ways, to this, I don't know, forge for founders where they're working with a company solving a real problem, building a real product that makes money, and then those are the people that become the PMs at Palantir and then they go on to leave and that's why 30% of them end up starting companies, I'm surprised it's not higher, or become first PMs at other companies or heads of product. Yeah, absolutely, it's crazy. I was part of a pretty small team within Palantir, I think it was 20 to 25 people when I joined, and I think at least six of them now are either unicorn or just pre-unicorn founders from that group of 25 people, which is actually a crazy ratio. And then a bunch more have become founders recently at an earlier stage, so yeah, there's all these little pockets of excellence and it's been really interesting to see. I think the other thing that's driving that a little bit is when you leave, it's just such an interesting company to work at that I think the retention numbers were actually very high for that company. People would often stay a lot longer than maybe the average Valley tenure. And so when you left, it was really this decision of just something very specific is pulling you and you want to kind of play the next level of the game, and so it was very unusual for someone to leave and then join maybe a more traditional tech company. It's sort of like you're either going to go become a founder or why would you leave when there's so many interesting different things to work on? And I know that sounds a little culty, but that's what everyone thinks.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.