Follow the Hoops

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, had asked when a company should bet on something outside its core product. Sellis’s first answer was to take what the product does best, like Snapchat’s camera or Discord’s voice chat, and look for other groups of people it could serve. His second was this line, and he pointed to Discord, which he describes as focused on people who play games with their friends. Users were stretching it to organize “larger and larger communities as opposed to the 20-person gaming friend group.” People who do that, he said, are “voting with their feet.” They’re telling you, “What can you do to make it a little bit easier for me?”

Boris Cherny, who created Claude Code at the AI company Anthropic, told the same podcast in February 2026 that this pattern, which he calls “latent demand,” is “the single-most important principle in product.” Claude Code began as an AI coding tool that runs in a terminal, the bare text-command window that Cherny says even a lot of engineers don’t want to use. For about six months, his team saw many people using it for things that had nothing to do with code. Someone on Twitter was using it to “grow tomato plants.” Others used it to analyze their genome or an MRI, and one recovered wedding photos from a corrupted hard drive. It was obvious, Cherny said, that “people are jumping through hoops to use a terminal to do this thing,” so Anthropic built a product for them: Cowork, launched in January 2026, which brought Claude Code’s abilities to non-coding work in Anthropic’s desktop app.