Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. We've increasingly hiring people that at other companies may have a PM title. I'd say we have two to three right now, that could have a PM title at another company. I don't think we will have a pm organization, or a PM role, because again, we believe depending on ... If you unpack the verbs that a PM does, I think those are verbs that anyone that we hire could do. And it really depends on what is the project? And what are we trying to do? I think the thing that will be unwavering is we like to hire mutts. And I haven't yet figured out a term that comes off as more endearing, because it's meant to be very endearing, but ... For example, there's a woman in a company named Rebecca. Rebecca was a data scientist we use at Cora. She got her PhD in MIT in I think behavioral psychology or something. I'm probably going to misquote that. But, got some crazy degree at MIT, and then was a software engineer at Stripe. And I'm talking about Rebecca through her resume. There's so much about Rebecca. She plays effectively a PM role right now. She is effectively PMing our effectively our multi-player team. But what was so awesome about meeting Rebecca is her and other people at this company have the mindset of, "I make things, and I will do what I need to do to make what I want to make. Whenever that verb is, whenever that discipline is." And that requires people that are multidisciplinary in practice and multidisciplinary in approach to their work. It's not that we don't hire PMs, but we want to hire people who have a multidisciplinary approach and view things as, "I like to make things. Tell me how I contribute to making it." And sometimes they may play the verbs of a PM and sometimes it may be something else. 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!"…

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