90 minutes of unfiltered product advice from Snap and Discord’s product chief | Peter Sellis

I asked you what are some counterintuitive lessons that you've learned that go against common startup wisdom? I'm no longer beholden to any corporate comms team right now, so I can let it rip a little bit. Do you like to design teams like a terrorist organization? A good terrorist organization essentially has two things. One is it has this ideological culture that everyone understands why they are doing what they're doing.

And then it has a very, very clear organizational structure of who can be trusted. with which decision. You like to spend time riding your best people into the ground versus improving the average people. If you see somebody drowning, you want to save them. I did the absolute opposite.

If somebody is strong and crushing it, I'm just handing them more and more rope to hang themselves with. Something that I know you believe most product managers are bad and are often net negative to the company. The great product managers are exiting the system. They're becoming founders, they're becoming executives.

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