Snap Inc.

“Evan's truly brilliant. I mean, and he's also actually a really nice guy. I think in some ways he gets a bad rap for he has very high standards, but he's a very kind person in my experiences with him.”

“Snap actually is another example where they waited, I think, till they had 200 people before they hired their first PM.”

“Initially, there were no PMs at all. PMs were introduced with monetization. Once monetization was a big sort of element, that's kind of where PMs came in.”

“What was expected from the designer at Snap was not just the ability to design, like, you know, the skill set of designing, which all of them were IC designers, by the way, right, and there were no reports, right, so they weren't allowed to have reports, actua…”

“I do think PM is a very valuable function, right? I think it may be actually, and you know, maybe I'll get roasted for this, but I think at the end of the day, not hiring PMs at Snap might've been one of those decisions where it actually succeeded despite that…”

“Snap didn't like user research as a function for the longest time. Like, I think there was one user researcher in the company until again, 5000 employees, like post IPO basically.”

“I think one of the most unique things about Snap and The CEO, Evan Spiegel was that he had an unmatched understanding of the user. I think years and years and years of the company's existence passed, right? Like almost a decade and nobody understood the user l…”

“One of the insights that we had, which was unique, was as the company gets bigger, you can actually create alignment by causing internal virality. If there's enough people in the company, it actually starts acting like a consumer base might. If you share somet…”

“Snap almost had essentially what is TikTok earlier than TikTok existed and it kind of died out because it didn't align, align with the mission essentially.”

“And the design team was like, 10, 12 people, basically pretty small, even at, you know, five, 6000 employees it was that small still.”

“And so I think as we look forward to, you know, sort of these next generation form factors and Things like glasses. There's gonna be a whole new set of opportunities and a whole new surface for people to build generational consumer companies.”

“It's about to launch specs after, you know, 12 years of investment in this future computing platform, you know, but at the same time, it's still not net income profitable, for example.”

“I mean, I don't think people realize like Bobby created our gen AI lab like 10 years ago, a decade ago or something like that.”

“If you look at the traditional tech org, org structure, you know, designers really are producing visuals. They're not really producing the product direction or the strategy or the vision or, you know, net new That new innovation, right? They're really responsi…”

“Agents now you know, debug exactly what happened, what went wrong and, you know, can actually like suggest a fix. And I think, you know, in pretty short order, it'll be implementing the fix as well, which is pretty crazy.”

“We've got automated code review. Now we've, I think automatically detected like close to 10,000 bugs at this point, probably”

“Well, I think for us, design actually has always operated as like a bottleneck at the company, which is incredibly important, right? It's intentional that things need to be approved by design to ship, and sometimes that really annoys people you know, and it do…”

“In fact, most people join our design team right out of school. you know, not from a big tech company or something like that.”

“And at the same time, we have a very, very small, you know, it sort of oscillates between like nine and 12 people. Design team that is constantly innovating and creating new things”

“So I typically meet with our designers for a couple hours every week, and we just look at work. I mean, new work every week, you know, hundreds of ideas, I would guess, you know, on a weekly basis.”

“So it's very easy to copy hardware, you know, software features. It's very hard to copy or to replicate a full ecosystem or a platform.”

“One of the things that we try to do is there is no gate to showing me work every week. So there is no, you don't like any idea. It doesn't matter, you know, how good people think it is, how bad it is. You can bring it to that design meeting, get it on the list…”

“We don't allow designers to get stuck on specific products or verticals. For very long. We like to make sure people are rotating through different parts of the product to bring new ideas and fresh perspectives and also to avoid getting bored.”

“In the early days, my view was not that we don't need PMs. My view is that designers should do that work. So that's essentially you know, what we would say to our designers, which was like, you know Hey, if you need PM support, why don't you just do it yoursel…”

“Taking a product idea and with our go to market agent, taking that product idea, writing the spec, making, identifying the relevant folks who need to be involved in sign offs and understanding it, right? Actually helping to do the risk analysis on the product,…”

“And I think today, you know, a lot of our designers are now shipping code, which is extraordinary, right? And that's a really big and really meaningful change in terms of the way that the design works here at Snap and the way the creative process works.”

“And what Snapchat figured out that was, I think, different was that, you know, despite the fact that there were much bigger networks that connected more people, what really mattered was connecting you to the right people. And so if you could just connect someo…”