Ruthless Prioritization

Peter Sellis spent seven years at Snapchat and later ran product at Discord. He said this on Lenny’s Podcast in an episode published September 20, 2026, describing what he learned from watching Snap CEO Evan Spiegel. The episode’s description calls him Snapchat’s first product manager.

Sellis said he saw Spiegel “say no to better ideas than I’ve seen almost any other consumer startup launch.” That is prioritization at its most ruthless: being good was not enough to get into the product. As a product leader, Sellis tried to turn the founders he worked with into curators, so that whatever is in the product at any moment is “a small slice of the overall collection.” He calls that restraint “one of the few muscles of taste you can exercise.”

When Sellis interviews for taste, he asks candidates about “some of the things they built that they never shipped,” leaving out anything that failed a test. He is looking for a shelf of good ideas the candidate chose to hold back.