The Looking Glass · Julie Zhuo♥ 17
Sep 16, 2025
Subscriber post — summary onlyAn open, personal letter from a manager to a younger, overconfident college graduate she once worked with. The author reflects on how the young person's arrogance was hard to see past at the time, and frames the piece…
Product Talk · Teresa TorresSep 16, 2025
Sep 16, 2025
Teresa Torres, host of Product Talk, is interviewed by Petra Wille about how product teams can move beyond casual use of chatbots to build AI-powered products. Drawing on months of building her own AI product, the…
Lenny’s Podcast97 min
Ethan Smith · Sep 14, 2025
Key learnings- Everything that works in traditional SEO also works for AEO, so start with landing pages targeting high-volume keywords before…
- In LLM answers you win by being mentioned across many citations, not by ranking first, so pursue multiple third-party mentions…
- Early-stage companies can win in AEO quickly, since a single citation from a Reddit thread, YouTube video, or blog can get you…
SVPG · Marty CaganSep 11, 2025
Sep 11, 2025 · 6 min
Cagan argues that the main purpose of prototyping is to discover a successful solution, not to ship a product. Recent gen-AI prototyping tools have sharply cut the cost of live-data prototypes, changing the economics…
Lenny’s Podcast108 min
Ben Horowitz · Sep 11, 2025
Key learnings- Hesitation is usually the most destructive leadership mistake; when both options look bad, make an explicit decision rather than…
- Leaders add real value only when they make decisions most people disagree with; if everyone agrees, the leader added nothing.
- Success is built from a long chain of small, hard decisions, and each good choice sets up the next, so keep making the next one.
Product Talk · Teresa TorresSep 10, 2025
Sep 10, 2025 · 22 min
Teresa Torres shares answers from the Q&A of her webinar on building AI evals for the Interview Coach, a teaching tool that gives students feedback on their customer interviews. She explains her lean, hands-on tooling…
The Looking Glass · Julie Zhuo♥ 123
Sep 9, 2025
Julie Zhuo announces the launch of her book on management and offers predictions about how the manager role will change in the era of AI. The piece frames management as a path many product and design people will…
Product Talk · Teresa TorresSep 9, 2025
Sep 9, 2025
Teresa Torres and Petra Wille argue that promotions, while common career targets, can be a poor north star because they are largely outside an individual's control and often tied to salary and status rather than…
Lenny’s NewsletterSep 9, 2025
Sep 9, 2025 · 20 min
Subscriber post — summary onlyHamel Husain and Shreya Shankar outline a practical playbook for building AI evaluation systems that improve a product rather than just producing dashboards. The core argument is to start with error analysis by a domain…
Lenny’s Podcast131 min
Scott Wu · Sep 8, 2025
Key learnings- Treat an AI agent like a junior engineer: scope it with well-defined tasks rather than open-ended problems, and start with small…
- Run several agents asynchronously in parallel and only step in for the portions needing human judgment, such as scoping…
- Invest up front in setup for the agent: connect repositories, teach it how to run lint and CI, and give it a virtual machine so…
Product Talk · Teresa TorresSep 3, 2025
Sep 3, 2025 · 33 min
Teresa Torres describes building Product Talk's Interview Coach, an AI tool that gives students feedback on their customer interviews, and how she designed evals to measure its quality. She explains the core idea of…
Product Talk · Teresa TorresSep 2, 2025
Sep 2, 2025
In the season opener of this podcast, hosts Teresa Torres and Petra Wille reflect on the 2025 Product at Heart conference theme of curation. They argue that curation, choosing what to build, prioritize, and serve, is…
Lenny’s Newsletter♥ 315
Sep 2, 2025 · 9 min
Subscriber post — summary onlyDavid Placek of Lexicon Branding outlines a step-by-step naming playbook drawn from decades of work on brands like Swiffer, Pentium and Vercel. He argues that a strong name builds trust, communicates an original idea…
Lenny’s Podcast121 min
Howie Liu · Aug 31, 2025
Key learnings- Leaders should stay close to the product details, since in AI-era products the interaction design and underlying behavior are the…
- Use AI products constantly, even multiple times an hour, and build small weekend projects to understand what models can do and…
- Ask whether you would build the same mission from scratch as an AI-native company; if your existing assets don't give a real…
HEY World · Jason FriedAug 28, 2025
Aug 28, 2025
Jason Fried argues that marketing is less about slogans or campaigns and more about the transfer of whatever a team actually feels about its work. At its best, genuine enthusiasm and care spread outward and become the…
Lenny’s Podcast73 min
Asha Sharma · Aug 28, 2025
Key learnings- Treat AI products as living systems: build the loop of collecting usage signals, defining rewards, A/B testing, and fine-tuning…
- Invest in post-training and fine-tuning on your own data, not just off-the-shelf models; once models are large, adapting them to…
- Watch for a shift from GUIs toward composable, code-native interfaces, since text streams and composability connect better with…
SVPG · Marty CaganAug 27, 2025
Aug 27, 2025 · 4 min
Marty Cagan responds to a Product Therapy interview with Shreyas Doshi, which described three product leader archetypes: craftsperson, operator, and visionary. Cagan argues that deep product craft is non-negotiable…
Lenny’s Podcast85 min
Garrett Lord · Aug 24, 2025
Key learnings- Post-training, not pre-training, now drives most model gains, so high-quality expert data targeting specific capability gaps is…
- The labeling market has shifted from cheap generalist labor to domain experts, so the right supply is credentialed specialists…
- Access to a trusted audience is the real moat in human data; owning an audience removes customer acquisition costs compared with…
HEY World · Jason FriedAug 21, 2025
Aug 21, 2025
Jason Fried argues that owning an independent company is a rare privilege, one that frees leaders to experiment in ways that public companies and businesses forced to justify every move cannot. He encourages owners not…
The Looking Glass · Julie Zhuo♥ 66
Aug 21, 2025
Subscriber post — summary onlyJulie Zhuo's paid essay reflects on the path into founding a company, framing it as a hero's journey shaped by conviction. Based on the excerpt provided, the piece looks back on the starting point and suggests founders…
Lenny’s Podcast91 min
Eoghan McCabe · Aug 21, 2025
Key learnings- When growth stalls in a late-stage SaaS business, cut costs hard and pick one clear strategic lane instead of trying to serve…
- Simplify and fairly price your product even at short-term revenue cost; McCabe gave away roughly $50M ARR to replace confusing…
- Price AI products on outcomes that align with customer value, like charging 99 cents per resolved ticket, rather than on the…
Product Talk · Teresa TorresAug 20, 2025
Aug 20, 2025 · 26 min
Teresa Torres recounts a 90-day, self-directed journey building her first AI product, an Interview Coach that gives feedback on customer interviews, which she built while recovering from a broken ankle. She argues that…
Lenny’s NewsletterAug 19, 2025
Aug 19, 2025 · 20 min
Subscriber post — summary onlyAishwarya Reganti and Kiriti Badam introduce the Continuous Calibration/Continuous Development (CC/CD) framework for building AI products. They argue AI systems are non-deterministic and require negotiating a tradeoff…
SVPG · Marty CaganAug 18, 2025
Aug 18, 2025 · 6 min
Cagan argues that the build-versus-buy question, long familiar in IT and product teams, is being reshaped by generative AI and user-programming tools like Lovable and Bolt. Despite hype that everyone will build and SaaS…
Lenny’s Podcast119 min
Matt LeMay · Aug 14, 2025
Key learnings- Ask whether you would fully fund your own team if you were the CEO; if you can't answer confidently, that signals a risk worth…
- Set team goals no more than one step away from company goals, so leadership immediately understands how your work contributes to…
- Keep impact first at every step, from OKRs and strategy to epics and daily backlog, rather than letting goals get cascaded into…
Product Talk · Teresa TorresAug 13, 2025
Aug 13, 2025 · 40 min
Teresa Torres surveys eleven real-world teams using Lovable and similar AI prototyping tools to speed up product discovery. Across stories from design sprints, navigation tests, side projects, job applications and…
Lenny’s NewsletterAug 12, 2025
Aug 12, 2025 · 10 min
Subscriber post — summary onlyLenny Rachitsky curates ten more essays for product builders, spanning problem framing, communication, distribution, market sizing, growth, scaling teams, positioning, and ambitious startup ideas. Each pick is paired…
Lenny’s Podcast128 min
Nick Turley · Aug 9, 2025
Key learnings- Ship early to learn what people actually want; with AI, the valuable behaviors are emergent, so you won't know what to polish…
- Treat the model itself as a product: iterate on it using real user use cases, personality/vibe checks, and new capabilities like…
- Set the team's pace deliberately by asking whether work is 'maximally accelerated', separating fast product iteration from…
Product Talk · Teresa TorresAug 6, 2025
Aug 6, 2025 · 47 min
Teresa Torres recounts building an AI-powered 'interview coach' that gives students feedback on practice customer interviews, grounded in her Continuous Interviewing course rubric. She describes moving from a…
Lenny’s Newsletter♥ 338
Aug 5, 2025 · 9 min
Subscriber post — summary onlyLenny Rachitsky and Peter Yang distill tactics from AI-forward companies like Shopify, Ramp, Zapier, Duolingo, Intercom, and Whoop on driving employee AI adoption. The core argument is that the main barrier is…