Creating Custom Roles Around Individual Strengths

Peter Dang believes that exceptional teams are built by identifying each person's unique strengths and creating environments where they can fully express those strengths rather than forcing them into predetermined roles.

When Peter noticed Joanne Jeng at OpenAI had a rare combination of technical depth and product taste, he recognized something special that didn't fit existing job descriptions. Instead of trying to make her conform to established roles, he asked her to write up a description of what excited her most. This exercise helped codify her unique perspective, leading to the creation of a new "model designer" role that she would lead. This position became crucial to ChatGPT's success and led to hiring more people with similar specialized skill sets.

Peter approaches team building like assembling the Avengers—each person having different "sliders" or superpowers that collectively create a balanced, high-performing team. He believes fit is a two-way street: "What you are passionate about, what your strengths are, you gotta really find the right company, the right role for you." He sees forcing people into archetypes as counterproductive when they could be leaning into what they naturally love and excel at.

For product managers specifically, Peter identifies five distinct archetypes (consumer, growth, business/GM, platform, and research/AI PMs), noting that everyone has a primary and secondary type. This framework helps leaders recognize when they're missing a critical perspective on their team and allows individuals to embrace their natural tendencies rather than trying to fit a single PM mold.

This strength-based approach creates healthy tension between different perspectives—like the consumer PM focused on craft and the growth PM demanding data—which ultimately leads to better products. For individual contributors, this means you'll likely be most successful when you find roles that align with your natural strengths rather than trying to conform to someone else's definition of your role.