“A lot of the great PMs that I've worked with really just always have some form of long-term thinking in their mind… but yet on a day-to-day basis, their bias for action is just borderline annoying.”
A Great PM Is an Oxymoron
Peter Sellis, who spent seven years in product at Snapchat and later became head of product at Discord, said this on Lenny’s Podcast in an episode published September 20, 2026. The episode’s description calls him Snapchat’s first product manager. The host, Lenny Rachitsky, asked about Sellis’s idea that a great product manager, or PM, is an oxymoron. Sellis listed three oxymorons, each a pair of traits that seem to pull against each other, and said this may be why great PMs are so hard to find. The quote is the third: long-term thinking and a bias for action.
The long-term half, he says, means knowing how you want the world to look six months, a year, or two years from now, being patient, and knowing which building blocks have to fall into place for the plan to work. Day to day, he says, they set the pace for the entire company: “When they wake up in the morning, the company wakes up.”
His first oxymoron is confidence that can border on arrogance, balanced by serious humility. Sellis says the humility grows out of the confidence. A PM sure of the plan, and sure their own contribution will be recognized, can give credit to exactly who earned it: the designer whose last-second change made a huge difference, or the engineer who stayed up all night to ship on time for a partner event. They know PMs “are going to get too much credit no matter what.”
The second is being extremely organized and process-driven, balanced by comfort with ambiguity. Sellis looks for candidates who can show both through stories or examples. Their attitude, as he puts it: “I have a checklist for everything, but I’m also comfortable if I have to throw it out and redo it all the time.”