From ChatGPT to Instagram to Uber The Quiet Architect Behind the World’s Most Popular Products Peter Deng

Peter Deng
What seems obvious today is that, you know, there was a time when databases were all the rage. It’s like, oh my goodness, you can store a bunch of data and you can query it really quickly and like imagine all the possibilities. And I think that a lot of amazing entrepreneurs and builders, know, build some really great products on top of databases, right? In fact, that’s kind of the basis of all the stuff that we’re seeing today. And it seems so obvious today, but I don’t know, maybe in, you know, 10 years, 15 years, when we look back, it’s like, of course, it made sense that we have this super intelligent, you know, Thinking machine, but it requires product builders to be able to go in there and say, how do we channel this energy to make it something that we as humans love to use and want to use?
Lenny Rachitsky
I love the optimism around this. It’s just like things will not go crazy once computers are as generally intelligent as humans.
Peter Deng
I think that’s exactly what I’m trying to say. And I think that, again, every technology people have this fear, right? And I remember reading or I started watching a documentary once and they were talking about how when the bicycle came out, people were like, oh my goodness, this is going to be the end Of all things. And again, it sounds silly today, right? Because you’re like bicycles, really? But then if you put yourself in the context and the mindset of a previous generation, which the next generation will be looking back at this podcast in that previous generation, I think That, again, I think optimistically things are going to be okay. We’re going to adapt. And this was actually one of the things that I talked about with my fresh friend, Josh Constein at South by Southwest, is this idea that humans will always co-evolve with technology. And I think that that co-evolution is already happening. When you start to get familiar with it, that kind of things change. And then you are able to evolve from being fearful to familiar and to go all the way to having this mastery of this thing of like, oh my goodness, look at all the startups that are happening Now, all the things that we can build. And just over 18 months, I would say we look back and there’s been an attitude shift. And so I guess part of my optimism comes

Peter Deng
That seems okay. And when he was playing with ChatGPT and some of the latest models, and he was nine at the time, I can already see his brain rewiring. He was starting to ask questions and he never heard the word prompt before, but this is how awesome the human mind is. Because he was exposed to this technology at an early age, some things just are unlocked. And I think that you’re able to think differently. And I’ll give you a specific example of what I mean here. He goes to Python class, right? And he’s coding. Now, I don’t actually think he’s going to have to code when he grows up. I think that’s going to be a solved problem. But it’s a very valuable skill because I think learning to program is learning how to think in a structured way, right? In a very semantic way, a systematic way. And he was prompting Chachi Biti with some really crazy things that I’d never even thought of. And one of the things was, hey, Chachi Biti, can you give me a sentence that has every letter in the alphabet along the theme of oceans or along the theme of space? And the reason this kind of blew my mind is because in traditional programming, you couldn’t write that program. You can’t say to, you know, in Python, like, oh, write a function that goes and formulate. I mean, it’s a really difficult function to write, but for, you know, him to be able to think of that prompt, which is really cool because he built a custom GPT that you can type in any topic And it would give you a sentence that had every letter of the English alphabet, kind of like the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog, right? Like,-blowing? At age nine, he could think about that. Whereas being at age nine, I was playing with Legos and maybe QBasic. And so this idea of how young humans’ brains will evolve because of this new tool we have is going to change the way I think we’re going to do education. And I’ll be very honest, I’m not an expert in education, but I just thought a lot about it. And one thing I think it’s going to be really important in the future is being able to figure out how to ask the right questions. We humans are inherently inquisitive, but being inquisitive and turning that into the right questions to prompt or ask AI, which is going to be, again, something that everyone’s going To have access to, is going to be a differentiator for what kind of work can be done. And the analogy

Peter Deng
I think one thing that it’s a really hard lesson that I learned at Uber, which is sometimes your product actually doesn’t matter. And by product, I mean, sort of the pixels you put on the screen or things that you build in your mobile app. And at Uber, I learned this because it pains me to say this, but really the price and the ETA at Uber was the product. And I think a lot of times people at tech companies think of the product as just this digital manifestation, but looking at it from a holistic perspective, we humans consume the entirety Of the product. I think that was one of the things that I learned, the lessons that I learned that was like really kind of hard hitting, right? That sometimes the pixels don’t matter as much as you think, right? And you fix a certain bug. It’s not to say that you shouldn’t fix the bug, but it doesn’t have as much of an impact as something that is more important to people like a price or a TA. And this happens a lot in B2B products where it’s not just about how it’s great that your product is well-loved by its end users, but doesn’t make good business sense is one of those hard Lessons I learned as a very bright-eyed, bushy-tailed sort of design-based product manager going into Uber. I think the other insight that I had, or rather, other thought I had the other day was just the idea that so many of the tech companies today, this is kind of counterintuitive, so many of The tech companies that are most valuable today didn’t really start with any technological breakthrough. They were built on some kind of technological breakthrough and they ended up building a lot more technology. But really, a lot of these companies like Facebook, for example, just put in the hard work, right? The elbow grease, especially in the early stages, to take essentially a database of human connections and build something valuable on top of it and keep on polishing and iterating That product and coming up with new ones like News Feed and photo tagging were just kind of came out of just really paying attention to what people wanted. And some of the ideas are super simple, and it’s not something that came out of the lab, right? So Uber, for example, took the fact that everyone had these GPS devices in their pockets and they didn’t invent the GPS device, but they were able to take that. And the fact that people had cars and people wanted to kind of get around there was a human need and they just connected the dots and put everything together. And eventually built a ton of tech to predict the right marketplace and pricing, et cetera. But largely, that’s a very valuable tech company, but it’s largely an operations company. And I want to give a huge shout out to my colleagues there who run, you know, kind of Uber Eats and Uber rides from a, from a operations perspective, because truly like that was one of the Biggest kind of business model hacks that I’ve seen.

Peter Deng
Believe there is a level of product craft that will make it so that it’s just worth it to switch or try something else. And there are a few products out there that I see with this. I think Granola is one of them. There’s so many distribution advantages that Google Meet has, that Google, Facebook, sorry, Microsoft Teams has, Zoom has. But they’re just these tiny little product craft delightful things that I really appreciate of like, yeah, they got it. They have these little edges sanded down just right. And they’ve really figured out a way to really make it so delightful that it’s like, yeah, I will install this piece of software. Yes, 100%. I will talk to my friends about this because it is so life-changing. And we’re starting to see that now. Again, before, I would say 18 months ago, it’s like, oh, well, who has the best model? But think coming forward, it’s like, really, who has the best workflow and who has the best product? And we humans are just demanding. We want the best. And so when someone is going to come out and produce something

Lenny Rachitsky
Me follow that thread real quickly, because that’s really interesting. So essentially what you’re saying is once there’s like a phase of once you find product market fit, and I want to actually ask you this, before you start planning, when you’re starting To scale going from one to a hundred your advice here is basically don’t move fast and break things don’t ship mvps this is the time to really think many chess moves ahead about what you’re
Peter Deng
Going to need to get this to say a billion users yeah yeah it’s building the systems and then that systems thinking will will carry you really far. At least that’s been my experience. And hopefully, hopefully you can find the same way, but you know, your mileage may vary, but yeah, that’s exactly right.
Lenny Rachitsky
What’s your guidance on just like when to do that? Because, you know,

Lenny Rachitsky
What I like about this growth team advice is that a lot of people think of a time to hire a growth team to we need to drive growth. What you’re saying is there’s a lot of second order benefits, which is they help you figure out what the hell’s going on and inform a lot of other things that are happening. People just actually understanding how things are going. Totally.
Peter Deng
And I think that the reason why growth team is the advice I would go with rather than to build an analytics team is because if you build an analytics team or a data science team, it’s possible

Peter Deng
Guess the last thing I would say is I want to make sure that sometimes in the, in the pursuit of numbers, product folks lose sight of the importance of taste and craft. So maybe this is actually the dovetail into kind of building teams, but like you got to have the counterbalances. Right. And it’s really important to give two people on your team different charges. One is like, go grow the product. And the other one is, wait, maintain that design, that beautiful aesthetic, the craft that your product is known for. And that tension is extremely healthy. And so I’ve seen this at Facebook. I’ve seen this at Instagram. I helped create this at Instagram, this kind of healthy tension. Airtable, same thing, but just having ChatGPT, same exact thing. You have to have that push and pull on both sides to really stretch the gamut.
Lenny Rachitsky
That begs the question, how do you actually do that? You could talk about it. You could be like, okay, we need to make sure the experience is awesome, but also grow this number. Here’s your goal. How do you operationalize that? Is it like a performance review attribute thing? Is it culture or something else?
Peter Deng
As a leader, you have to set up your team the right way. You have to really think about your team as a product and what are the various pieces you need to really stretch the gamut of what you’re thinking about. And the teams that I’ve helped build are the most successful ones are a team of Avengers that are just like very different, have very different superpowers.

Peter Deng
PM, but now in the world of AI, I’m going to rename this to Research PM. And these are like half researcher, half engineer, half product person. And these minds are amazing. So basically, they think traditional Google search algorithm PM, right? But nowadays, it’s like, who are the people who really have that product taste, but deeply understand the tech and the, you know, the way the models are trained to go and affect that and Build the most amazing product. So those are the five. I still think to this day, these hold true. And we might have been onto something the day that we brainstormed this at Uber. But yeah, I’m curious to hear your feedback.
Lenny Rachitsky
This is great. As you’re talking, I’m just like, here’s that person, here’s that person. Okay, they fit here. This super resonates.

Peter Deng
The question I asked is, it’s been the same one I’ve asked for years and you can really kind of suss it out from this, which is I asked them, think about one of the biggest mistakes you’ve Made. Truly, the more painful, the better. And tell me what the mistake was described to me the situation and tell me actually how you actually think differently. Now work differently as a result. Like what, how has that turned into a core principle of yours, et cetera. And I give them a moment to think about it. Sometimes I even share some of my mistakes if need be. And it’s interesting because I’ve asked this question so many times, I can smell the BS if they’re not being authentic, right? It’s kind of like, oh, I’ve worked too hard or I did this thing, and they’re really not being that. You can tell the vulnerability that people are willing to express. And I reciprocate with that because if they ask me what mine is, I will tell them what it is. And then that’s the vibe. But what ends up happening is there’s multiple reasons why this is really interesting. One, you get to get a sense of how reflective they are. And there’s one woman I was chatting with and we actually went on for like an hour because she was just like educating me on this like amazing problem that she had made this mistake on and Like how it changed the way that she worked and the company worked. It was just incredible. Right. And you can sense the passion. You can sense what’s genuine. Right. And then there are always once in a while those things that people are like just very a little bit more defensive and not willing to open up um and i think that’s uh and it’s safe it’s a it’s A one-on setting so it’s a safe space and i’m you know it’s also it’s i don’t think it actually selects for or against introverts or extroverts i think at that point it’s really genuine And the second sort of order effect there is if they end up coming on the team, you’ve already had that moment. You’ve already had that moment where you’ve just already said like, Hey, like this is where I really messed up. And guess what? It’s all okay. It’s not a loss. It’s a lesson. Right. And so it just sets a different tone for your working relationship. So again, I’ve never A-B tested this, so I can’t tell you if this is actually works or not, but I found it to be very helpful in the style that I work in to be able to have that level of connection, Whether it’s with a direct report or somebody in the org.
Lenny Rachitsky
What I love about this answer is it’s very much like Fail Corner, which is a recurring segment on this podcast. And I might tweak Fail Corner to be even closer to this question. Okay. So let me summarize these two, essentially two questions that you’ve found to be really helpful in finding these superstars that you’ve hired over the years. One is you ask people in six months, if I’m telling you what to do, I’ve hired the wrong person.

Peter Deng
But in my mind, it’s almost like this is how we operate. And this is how we’re successful to stay on task, stay on goal, and be able to revisit the goals that we’ve set when they no longer are relevant.
Lenny Rachitsky
Okay. So the phrase again is, say you’ll do the thing, do the thing, and then say that you did the thing.
Peter Deng
It’s actually, sorry, one more time. It’s, it’s, it’s say it’s the way I would say it is, say you’re going to do the thing, say that you’re doing the thing and then say that you did it.
Lenny Rachitsky
This reminds me of, this also works for presentation advice. So this came up, I don’t know if it was Guy Kawasaki or someone had a very similar phrase that was for how to present well, which is tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, and Then tell them what you just told them.
Peter Deng
That, you know, it’s possible that I might have, you know, incepted it from there. So I take no ownership over this phrase. I will just say that, yes, I did. I did repeat it. This is great.
Lenny Rachitsky
And I love that this isn’t just managing up advice. It’s just like operating advice for everyone. And there’s an implication of the last part is just like, take, like, make sure people know what you did. Like almost like make sure you get some credit and people understand the impact you’ve had.
Peter Deng
Which is, which is important. I think there’s a lot of people who are kind of introverted and don’t want to draw attention and don’t have the hero complex. And I think that those people tend to get lost in organizations. So if that describes you, just remember to say what you did.
Lenny Rachitsky
There’s another management trait that Joanne shared that I want to spend a little time on, which is you’re very good at helping people understand that