Real Alpha
Watch modeSubscribed

The Peterman Pod · 3 min · Dec 15, 2025

Cross-org projects need a shared goal

Boris Cherny says Facebook groups and Messenger optimized for different outcomes, which made their collaboration difficult. He argues that teams need a shared goal—and sometimes aligned reporting lines—to work together.

Boris Cherny

Boris Cherny is Creator of Claude Code and former Meta principal engineer.

Created Claude Code at Anthropic and leads its team; previously spent about five years at Meta.

  • Ryan Peterman, Host · Host, The Peterman Pod

    Went from new grad to staff engineer at Instagram in three years.

About this segment

Boris Cherny says Facebook groups and Messenger optimized for different outcomes, which made their collaboration difficult. He argues that teams need a shared goal—and sometimes aligned reporting lines—to work together.

From “Boris Cherny (Creator of Claude Code) On What Grew His Career And Building at Anthropic”, Dec 15, 2025. Watch the full episode

“and then the goals were totally different. You know, like they had SLA uptimes, and for us, it was just about daily active users and engagement.”
Boris Chernyat 7:58 · The Peterman Pod7:58

Takeaways

  1. Groups optimized for engagement; Messenger optimized for reliability.
  2. Different metrics and org structures deepened the conflict.
  3. Find a shared hypothesis before asking teams to collaborate.

In this episode

Full episode
  1. 1:10:24Build for the model that will exist six months from now2:28
  2. 29:37Use competing designs to make large projects easier to scope6:01
  3. 44:33Turn repeated engineering pain into leverage for the team6:08

  4. 7:01Cross-org projects need a shared goal2:41

  5. 18:55Volunteering for a platform rewrite can earn influence4:52Up next
  6. 35:31A large data-model migration can be worth reversing5:43
  7. 54:13Trust helped Boris move Instagram from Python to Hack5:48
  8. 1:13:21AI-generated code should meet the same review bar2:40

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

  1. 7:05

    I think also at this part of your story, you mentioned that you worked across orgs, you worked because you were bridging the gaps between Messenger and a lot of the group's engineering work. I'm curious, you said that there were some clear cultural differences, and that was difficult. Do you have any advice for working across very different culture orgs? Oh, my God. Difficult is such an understatement.

  2. 7:31

    It was a nightmare. Like for Facebook at the time, we wanted to ship. Like we just wanted to go fast and ship awesome product as fast as we could. And then Messenger was all about reliability and performance. That's all they cared about. It was just polar opposite values. And this isn't just cultural. It's not just like an engineer to engineer thing. It's like the engineers on that team were suspicious of us because we would affect their performance metrics.

  3. 7:55

    And organizationally, their org was set up in a way to ship slowly without regressing them. And we were set up to ship quickly. So it's like, and then the goals were totally different. You know, like they had SLA uptimes, and for us, it was just about daily active users and engagement. So I think for me, the running was these kind of cultural values go super deep. It's not just a thing people talk about, but you can actually see this in like in org design and in goal design and in every part of everything.

  4. 8:22

    And honestly, I think one of the reasons that project failed was, and eventually it evolved actually into something successful, but that version of the project failed was because of this difference in values. So I think that fundamentally, if you want to get companies with really different values to succeed and kind of work together, you have to find some kind of shared goal or kind of shared interest, shared belief, some kind of hypothesis that they want to test together that would be really interesting for both of them if it worked.

  5. 8:55

    And I think this chats and groups thing fundamentally, it was really cool for Facebook, but it's not that cool for Messenger for a lot of reasons. So knowing what you know now, how would you change things going back to that kind of project? I think I probably would have gone to Zuck and just been like, if you're really serious about this thing, we should move Messenger into the Facebook org. And I think this has since happened, and it's actually happened a few times.

  6. 9:18

    Messenger was in the org, then it moved out, it and then it moved in then moved out like it's a big company like this happens but i think fundamentally for this kind of thing to succeed the the common report can't be you know the common manager can't be like chris cox it has to be like a little bit lower down and so you can structure the orgs to be a little bit more collaborative i see to align the incentives so you don't get that