90 minutes of unfiltered product advice from Snap and Discord’s product chief | Peter Sellis
Sep 20, 2026 · 1h 37m · YouTube
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0:00I asked you, what are some counterintuitive lessons that you've learned that go against common startup wisdom?
0:05I'm no longer beholden to any corporate comms team right now, so I can let it rip a little bit.
0:10You like to design teams like a terrorist organization?
0:13A good terrorist organization essentially has two things.
0:16One is it has this ideological culture that everyone understands why they are doing what they're doing.
0:22And then it has a very, very clear organizational structure of who can be trusted with which decision.
0:29You like to spend time writing your best people into the ground versus improving the average people.
0:34If you see somebody drowning, you want to save them.
0:37I did the absolute opposite.
0:38If somebody is strong and crushing it, I'm just handing them more and more rope to hang themselves with.
0:43Something that I know you believe most product managers are bad and are often net negative to the company.
0:50The great product managers are exiting the system.
0:52They're becoming founders.
0:53They're becoming executives.
0:54It's kind of set up to be this profession where the median product manager is actually probably pretty bad.
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