Evan Spiegel

A lot of my view of product management was actually driven by my view of designers and the role that designers should play.

And one of the things that I was concerned about in the tech community, you know, if you look at the traditional tech 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 products.

that new innovation, right?

They're really responsive, actually, I think in many cases to the PM saying, this is what we're building.

Now go make me some visuals.

And I absolutely did not want that type of culture to take root because again, as I mentioned, we modeled a lot of the way that we develop products here at Snap on that early relationship between myself and Bobby, really this, you know, this harmonious relationship between design and engineering and how important that is, that dialogue is to building great things and great, great products.

And so, you know, I think 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 yourself?

What's the big deal?

And I think that that really helped, frankly, designers play a more active role in the product development process.

Now, today, you know, at a company operating at our scale, you know, if you look at the legal requirements, our approach to trust and safety, you know,

it really does take a village to get a new product off the ground.

And product managers play a really important coordination role in all that.

In addition to synthesizing, for example, data science analysis and bringing together the working group to try to solve problems or innovate or make the product better.

So I think, you know, as the organization grows and there becomes, you know,

all of these different capabilities that the company didn't have in the early days, you know, whether it's data science, you know, you name it, product managers play a really important role in bringing all those folks to the table and making sure we deliver, you know, the right thing at the right time.

Well, it sounds highly dysfunctional if folks are having that standoff.

That is not a good thing.