By Lenny Rachitsky · lennysnewsletter.com · @lennysan on X · YouTube · LinkedIn
Lenny Rachitsky's annual year-end roundup revisits his past newsletter posts and podcast episodes and reorganizes the best of them by reader job-to-be-done, such as sharpening product skills, growing a product, scaling a startup, advancing a PM career, and learning how top companies operate. He also flags the most popular pieces of all time and reflects on the newsletter's growth to nearly 600,000 subscribers and a top-10 U.S. technology podcast. The post functions as a navigational index rather than a single argument, but it is useful for finding foundational reading across strategy, growth, pricing, hiring, and leadership. It also contains housekeeping and promotional content, such as a recruiting pilot and subscription offers.
01Key takeaways
- Start with fundamentals like the Mission-to-Task chain and product strategy before tackling tactics.
- Pick a single north-star metric and a clear growth wedge rather than pursuing many growth ideas at once.
- Use established benchmarks for retention, churn, activation, and payback period to judge your performance.
- Build a deliberate career loop and seek feedback, since managing up and getting promoted are learnable skills.
- Study how strong companies build product to borrow practices around planning, velocity, and customer obsession.
02Key sections
- Hone product skills
- Lists foundational reading on product strategy, sense, influence, communication, and prioritization, plus frameworks and templates like JTBD and OKRs.
- Grow your product
- Collects resources on growth strategy, funnel optimization, marketing, and B2B, B2C, and marketplace growth models.
- Kickstart and scale a startup
- Points to step-by-step guides for B2B, B2C, and marketplace businesses, finding product-market fit, execution, and fundraising.
- Career, leadership, and hiring
- Gathers guidance on PM career growth and promotion, managing and firing with care, benchmarks, and interviewing and hiring.
- Learning from top companies
- Surveys inside looks at how companies like Linear, Shopify, Figma, Stripe, and Duolingo build product, along with lessons from failure.
03From the post
“The end of the year is nigh, and as I do every year (here’s 2021 and 2022), I’ve revisited every single past post and podcast episode (over 400 of them!) and picked out the cream of the crop, organized by their job-to-be-done. This post is now the single best way to find my best stuff across both the newsletter and podcast. What this collection can help you with: 1. I want to hone my product skills 2. I want to grow my product 3. Help me kickstart and scale my startup 4. I’m feeling stressed and overwhelmed 5. I want to accelerate my PM career 6. I want to learn from how the best companies operate 7. I want to become a better leader 8. I need some benchmarks 9. I need help hiring or interviewing 10. I want to get better at pricing 11. I want to get better at sales To help make this more skimmable, I’ve added a 🎖️ emoji to posts and podcast episodes that are in the top 15 most popular of all time. To…”
04Frameworks mentioned
Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.