From ChatGPT to Instagram to Uber: The quiet architect behind the world’s most popular products | Peter Deng

You built and led Facebook newsfeeds, you ship the Messenger app as its own app, you launched Chad GPT Enterprise. What's an important lesson you've learned about what it takes to succeed building something from idea to one to billions? You have to plan your chess moves out in advance. You have to really think before you act and build systems that We're gonna let you go sustainably faster. What's the most counterintuitive lesson you've learned? Sometimes your product actually doesn't matter. At Uber I learned this because really the price and the ETA at Uber Was the product. Looking at it from a holistic perspective, we humans consume the entirety of the product. It's not to say that you shouldn't fix the bug, but it doesn't have as much of an impact as something that is more important to people. What's one specific thing you think will change in a big way with AI that people don't think enough about? Education is gonna change. My son, he was nine at the time, built a custom GPT that you can type in any topic and it would give you a sentence that had every letter of the English alphabet. Isn't that mind blowing? I can already see his brain rewiring. What's one thing you look for in people you hire? In six months, if I'm telling you what to do, I've hired the wrong person. It helps me and the person operate on a different level, where the goal is not, did you hit this OKR? The meta goal becomes, are we calibrating enough? Are we actually getting into a spot where in six months you're the one telling me what needs to be done?

You've learned about what it takes to be a great product person. I think there are five different types of product managers. Number one is Today my guest is Peter Dang. Peter is maybe the most under the radar impactful product leader that you have never heard of. I often say that the best product people are not the people on Twitter and LinkedIn sharing advice. But the people who don't have time to do that because they're too busy doing the work.

Peter is the epitome of this. He was VP of product at OpenAI, where he oversaw product design and engineering for ChatGPT and helped ship ChatGPT Enterprise, voice, memory, desktop, custom GPTs, and more. He also oversaw and built their first growth team. He was the first to had a product at Instagram, where he worked closely with Mike and Kevin and oversaw all product development, including on content sharing, ads, growth, even helped build out their design to user research functions. He was also head of the Ryder product team at Uber, where he oversaw everything in the Ryder app, including big improvements to pickups and drop-offs at Uber Pool and airports. He also helped the team launch new products, including Uber Reserve, which is now approaching a five billion dollar a year business. He also spent nearly 10 years at Facebook as their fourth ever product manager.

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