“The great product managers are exiting the system — they're becoming founders, they're becoming executives. It's kind of set up to be a profession where the median product manager is actually probably pretty bad.”
Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth · Product & Design · September 2026
Sellis ran product at Snap and then at Discord, and Lenny Rachitsky put it to him that he thinks most PMs are net negative for their company. His reasoning is structural rather than personal: the job pays on a technical ladder but has no objective definition, so anyone who is good at it leaves for something better, and anyone who is bad at it does everything possible to stay. The result, he says, is a distribution weighted at both ends and thin in the middle.
Transcript
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. It's kind of set up to be this profession where the median product manager is actually probably pretty bad.
Snap is quite famous for not hiring PMs for a long time.
The baseline because we should just be able to operate this product without any product manager. So this person has to provide value over nobody.
Feels like an interesting new skill for PMs is pushing back on things AI is adding to your products.
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