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Peter Deng

General Partner at Felicis (Former VP Product at OpenAI, Head of Product at Airtable, Uber, Instagram)

Felicis / OpenAI / Uber / Instagram

👥 Team & Culture (1)⚡ Execution (1)🎯 Product Strategy (1)📈 Growth & Metrics (1)

Key Takeaways

  • 1.From 1 to 100, you must stop moving fast and breaking things; instead, plan chess moves and build scalable systems.
  • 2.The 5 PM Archetypes framework helps identify team gaps: Consumer, Growth, Business, Platform, and Research/AI PMs.
  • 3.Hiring Standard: If a manager is still telling a report what to do after 6 months, they hired the wrong person.
  • 4.Sometimes the 'product' (pixels) doesn't matter; at Uber, price and ETA were the real product.
  • 5.In the age of AI, data flywheels and deep workflow integration are the new moats.
  • 6.Effective managing up involves a simple loop: Say you'll do the thing, do the thing, say you did the thing.

Methodologies(4)

👥 Team & Culture

A classification system developed at Uber to identify the specific 'spikes' or superpowers of different product managers. Most PMs have a primary and a secondary archetype.

Core Principles

  • 1.The Consumer PM: Obsessed with design, craft, and user delight (half designer).
  • 2.The Growth PM: Skeptical, data-driven, focuses on experimentation and metrics (half data scientist).
  • 3.The Business/GM PM: Focuses on incentives, margins, and business models (half MBA).
  • +2 more...

"It's almost like you're playing an RPG where everyone has different sliders and you have to create this super team where everyone actually spikes in different ways."

#archetypes#team#culture
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⚡ Execution

A hiring and management heuristic that forces leaders to select for independent thinkers and shift management style from task-assignment to strategic calibration.

Core Principles

  • 1.The Razor: 'In 6 months, if I'm telling you what to do, I've hired the wrong person.'
  • 2.Calibration over Direction: The goal is to align judgment so the report directs the manager, not vice versa.
  • 3.Growth Mindset Check: Verify ability to learn from mistakes (ask about their biggest failure) to ensure they can handle this autonomy.

"The Meta goal becomes, are we calibrating enough? Are we actually getting into a spot where in 6 months you're the one telling me what needs to be done?"

#6-month#autonomy#razor
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🎯 Product Strategy

A simple communication habit for managing up and ensuring operational rigor. It prevents 'shadow work' and ensures strategy stays aligned with execution.

Core Principles

  • 1.Say you'll do the thing: Announce intent to align on goals and language.
  • 2.Do the thing: Execute with focus.
  • 3.Say you did the thing: Close the loop to confirm completion and impact.

"Repetition doesn't spoil the prayer."

#'say-do-say'#strategy#product
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📈 Growth & Metrics

Transitioning from seeking PMF (0-1) to sustainable hyperscale (1-100). This requires slowing down to build infrastructure that allows future speed.

Core Principles

  • 1.Plan Chess Moves: Look several steps ahead rather than just reacting.
  • 2.Build Systems: Invest in architecture (code/design) that scales (e.g., refactoring).
  • 3.Hire Growth Team Early: Not just for numbers, but to force instrumentation and rigorous logging/analytics.
  • +1 more...

"You have to really think before you act and build systems that were going to let you go sustainably faster."

#1-to-100#systems#scaling
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