Why Peter Sellis Thinks the Typical Product Manager Is Probably Pretty Bad
The strongest product managers become founders and executives, leaving behind a middle that is paid well to stay.
Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth · 90 minutes of unfiltered product advice from Snap and Discord’s product chief | Peter SellisPeter Sellis, Snapchat's first product manager and later head of product at Discord, was asked why the typical product manager seems to slow a company down instead of speeding it up. His answer was blunt. The median product manager, he argues, is actually probably pretty bad.
Sellis says the problem is almost mathematical. If talent for product work is spread normally across the population, he argues, working product managers are already sliced from the far right tail. Lop off that tail, and what is left looks like a different kind of distribution, one where the median sits far below the average and most people cluster on the weaker side.
What makes it worse, in his telling, is who leaves and who stays. During the era of near zero interest rates, he says, product management became the best paid path in tech for people without engineering backgrounds, with fuzzy job requirements and pay on par with engineers. Once inside, people had every incentive to remain. He argues that the skills of the best product managers are almost perfect preparation for starting a company or taking a broader executive role. So the strongest people exit to found or lead, he argues, while everyone else fights to stay, and the group left behind tilts weaker and weaker.
That helps explain, Sellis says, why so many engineers say product managers are useless. He agreed that many critics have never worked with a great product manager. He thinks the profession is getting better because opportunity costs are higher now than when rates were low and companies added roles without feeling the full price, a price he says is rarely internalized. He says he is building a system to judge a manager and their situation together, to check whether the team is actually net positive.
His test is who complains. Great engineers, he says, know how to bend product managers to their will and simply refuse to work with bad ones. Really weak engineers do not complain either, because they can hide behind a product manager's decisions. It is only the ones in the middle who grumble.
Questions people ask
What does a product manager actually do?
Product managers decide what to build, in what order, and why, then coordinate engineers, designers, marketers, and executives to ship it. Sellis focuses on whether that setup leaves the team as a whole net positive.
What is the ZIRP era he is talking about?
ZIRP stands for zero interest rate policy, shorthand for the years when borrowing was cheap and tech companies hired aggressively. With money plentiful, Sellis argues, companies added product roles without feeling the full cost in slower decisions and extra coordination.
Does being a good product manager really prepare someone to be a founder?
Sellis argues that it does, because the strengths he prizes in product managers map closely onto leading a company or starting one. In his account, that is why the strongest product managers tend to exit into founding or executive roles.