Peter Deng: preference

Transcript context

…Absolutely. I'm so excited to hear what these are. These are the five that I've found to be most enduring and actually the most different. When you talk about... I love the way you put this, Lenny, which is when you hire the right people and they're naturally motivated by different things. These are the five that we came up. Number one is the consumer PM. This is the person that's half designer, half product person, really obsessed over the details. "Is it delightful? Is it crafted enough? Oh my goodness, this is three pixels off. I can't stand it. This is driving me nuts. Why is this so complex?" These are the people that you think of as sometimes the criticism PM is the consumer PM, but that's just one type. Another type, just on the other side we've talked about before, is the growth PM. These people are half data scientist, half product person, they are wired to think numbers first and they have this air about them that's like the best ones do, which is like, "I'm really skeptical. Show me the data. Let's run a test and prove it. I don't believe you." I start with these two in the framework because they're actually really different. One, it's like, "I have vibe, I feel the vibe, this is better," and the other one's like, "No. I don't believe you. We should test this and prove it." That's a really healthy tension. I love having two people in a room debating that. I'm like, "Great. We are going to get some good things done and we're going to move the product forward." The third type is what I call the GM PM or the business PM. These are half MBA, half product person. These are folks that are naturally wired to start with the business model and think about, "What are the margins? What are the opportunities? Where's the value being created?" We had a lot of these at Uber and they were the marketplace PMs and they're just like... I loved working with them because their minds just worked differently. They just thought about problems from like, "Well, what is the incentive here?" This is a fascinating type of mind to work with. Another one I found, it's actually more nuanced than you think, is there's a certain archetype that I call the platform PM, which is someone who's really deeply wired to build tools for other people. At Uber, we had internal platforms for messaging or for building internal tools. Oftentimes, these folks are overlooked but it's actually a really deep wiring, because these are the people that are going to build the systems that are going to make you go faster. And that's what they love doing. The last one, I would say, I used to call it an algorithms PM, but now in the world of AI, I'm going to rename this to research PM. These are half researcher, half engineer, half product person. These minds are amazing. Basically, they think traditional Google search algorithm PM but nowadays, it's like who are the people who really have that product taste but deeply understand the tech and the way the models are trained to go and affect that and build the most amazing product. ut nowadays, it's like who are the people who really have that product taste but deeply understand the tech and the way the models are trained to go and affect that and build the most amazing product. Those are the five. I still think to this day these hold true, and we might have been onto something the day that we brainstormed this at Uber but, yeah, I'm curious to hear your feedback.…

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