Lenny’s Podcast114 min
Jonathan Lowenhar · Dec 5, 2024
Key learnings- Being a founder is a state of being, while being a CEO is a craft; founders should deliberately develop CEO skills like planning…
- Calibrate between founder mode and manager mode depending on what the moment needs; great CEOs know when to dive into details and…
- Start planning by working backwards from your next major milestone (exit, fundraise, profitability, or wind-down) and define what…
Product Talk · Teresa TorresDec 4, 2024
Dec 4, 2024 · 5 min
Teresa Torres and the Continuous Discovery Habits community explore what a product manager should do after inheriting a large, aging product backlog of feature requests and bugs. The discussion rejects both extremes of…
Lenny’s Newsletter♥ 125
Dec 3, 2024 · 15 min
Subscriber post — summary onlyA guest post from GiveDirectly's team, shared alongside a Giving Tuesday fundraising appeal, walks through the experiments that raised roughly $3 million more in donations per year. It covers winning tests like faster…
SVPG · Marty CaganNov 21, 2024
Nov 21, 2024 · 10 min
Marty Cagan argues that successful product-model transformations deliberately confront political realities rather than avoiding them, since changing how an organization decides and builds is fundamentally a people…
Lenny’s Podcast68 min
Amjad Masad · Nov 21, 2024
Key learnings- Replit aims to remove the setup friction of building software by bundling the editor, runtime, packages, database, and deployment…
- Once AI removes the build bottleneck, the limiting factor shifts to how fast you can generate and articulate good ideas, so…
- Product managers can use an AI agent to build a v1 prototype, test it with real users, and then hand a validated concept to…
Product Talk · Teresa TorresNov 20, 2024
Nov 20, 2024 · 3 min
Teresa Torres publishes a running list of product conferences for 2025, organized by month with dates, event names, and locations. The list is intentionally non-exhaustive and invites readers to submit missing events…
Lenny’s Newsletter♥ 384
Nov 19, 2024 · 17 min
Subscriber post — summary onlyHilary Gridley, a WHOOP product director, argues that AI can help managers become "supermanagers" by scaling their coaching and feedback. She shares five practical strategies, from building custom GPTs that replicate…
Lenny’s Podcast84 min
Raaz Herzberg · Nov 17, 2024
Key learnings- Early in a startup, look for signs of real pull, such as prospects asking about pricing, timelines, or introducing you to their…
- Be willing to say 'I don't understand' in product discussions; a healthy culture makes admitting confusion a strength, and…
- Run a high volume of customer conversations (10 to 15 a day in Wiz's case) to find what actually resonates rather than relying on…
SVPG · Marty CaganNov 12, 2024
Nov 12, 2024 · 4 min
Marty Cagan argues that a successful move to the product model depends on the product organization earning the trust of the rest of the company, which is a race to win over executives before they lose confidence. Senior…
Lenny’s Newsletter♥ 496
Nov 12, 2024 · 18 min
Subscriber post — summary onlyTal Raviv, a long-time individual-contributor PM, argues that flatter tech orgs demand PMs build their own systems to stay effective and healthy. The post offers practical tactics such as finishing meeting action items…
Lenny’s Podcast94 min
Archie Abrams · Nov 7, 2024
Key learnings- Optimize for the absolute number of people reaching each funnel stage, not local conversion rates, since rate-chasing teams often…
- Judge growth by the total long-term value of a merchant cohort (cumulative GMV over several years) rather than per-merchant or…
- Keep long-term holdouts and revisit experiments at 3, 6, 12, and 24 months, because many short-term wins fade and some neutral…
Product Talk · Teresa TorresNov 6, 2024
Nov 6, 2024 · 10 min
Teeba Alkhudairi, a product manager, used continuous discovery skills during her job search by mapping each target company's revenue model into business outcomes, then breaking those into product outcomes and…
Lenny’s Newsletter♥ 140
Nov 5, 2024 · 24 min
Subscriber post — summary onlyA guest-written post by storyteller Matthew Dicks argues that humor is a learnable skill rooted in surprise, not a fixed talent. It walks through seven practical strategies (nostalgia, exaggeration, o…
Lenny’s Podcast95 min
Shreyas Doshi · Oct 31, 2024
Key learnings- Run a pre-mortem before launches by imagining the project has already failed, then surfacing tigers, paper tigers and elephants…
- Classify tasks as leverage, neutral or overhead; spend extra effort only on leverage tasks, and do less polish on neutral and…
- Beat procrastination on high-leverage work by doing a couple days of low-stakes placebo tasks first, then working from a…
Lenny’s Podcast49 min
Shreyas Doshi Live · Oct 31, 2024
Key learnings- A real, pre-aligned product strategy can collapse weeks of annual planning into a few days, since most planning rituals are…
- Many decisions treated as reversible 'two-way doors' become one-way doors in practice once commitments, QBR narratives, and…
- Judging ideas on their merits rather than on social proof, authority, catchy metaphors, or alliteration is a core skill of good…
SVPG · Marty CaganOct 29, 2024
Oct 29, 2024 · 3 min
Marty Cagan argues that many companies undertaking a transformation to the product model make the ironic mistake of managing that transformation as a conventional big project, with program managers, Gantt-style plans…
Lenny’s Newsletter♥ 293
Oct 29, 2024 · 15 min
Subscriber post — summary onlyLenny Rachitsky shares a guest post by prompt engineer Mike Taylor covering eight prompting techniques, from role-playing and few-shot examples to chain-of-thought, retrieval, and using an LLM as a judge. Each tactic…
Lenny’s Podcast121 min
Naomi Gleit · Oct 27, 2024
Key learnings- Keep one canonical doc per project that links to all other docs, listing workstreams, single-threaded owners, processes…
- Pursue a dream company or role persistently, even by volunteering informally in the role you want until the formal job becomes a…
- Pick a clear activation or retention milestone so the whole team optimizes toward one shared goal, even if the exact threshold is…
Product Talk · Teresa TorresOct 23, 2024
Oct 23, 2024 · 5 min
Teresa Torres argues that the engineer in a product trio should be the one with the most authority over technical feasibility, but that the word "lead" causes confusion because it conflates seniority, management, and…
Lenny’s Newsletter · Free post♥ 161
Oct 22, 2024 · 12 min
Lenny Rachitsky and Louise Beryl analyze over 5,000 survey responses from newsletter subscribers to benchmark U.S. product manager salaries by level. The headline finding is the rise of the individual contributor path…
Lenny’s Podcast99 min
Jessica Hische · Oct 20, 2024
Key learnings- Startups can launch with a quick, internally made logo, then invest in a custom refresh once the company is more stable, avoiding…
- Signs it's time to upgrade a logo include a broader rollout of the brand, printing swag or hosting events, or needing assets that…
- A custom logo or typography makes your brand harder to copy than a freely available font, which matters once success attracts…
Lenny’s Podcast87 min
Anneka Gupta · Oct 17, 2024
Key learnings- Being strategic means pairing a compelling, simple 'why' behind decisions with the courage to champion hard, long-term changes…
- Reframe high-stress situations by asking what you can learn and by bringing humor into meetings, since your mood shapes how the…
- Summarize what others have said in meetings and end with a question inviting agreement or dissent; this builds trust and moves…
Product Talk · Teresa TorresOct 16, 2024
Oct 16, 2024 · 4 min
Teresa Torres argues that the biggest barrier to continuous discovery is getting consistent access to customers, and that teams must automate recruiting so interviews happen without weekly hustle. She explains that…
Lenny’s Newsletter♥ 252
Oct 15, 2024 · 22 min
Subscriber post — summary onlyCoach Natalie Rothfels argues that stuck, overwhelmed product leaders are usually facing inner conflict between competing 'parts' of themselves, which external productivity tactics can't fix. She walks through the…
Lenny’s Podcast143 min
Tristan de Montebello · Oct 13, 2024
Key learnings- Treat speaking as a meta skill: improving it tends to lift confidence and results across work, relationships and daily life.
- Use enjoyment as a barometer; if practice or speaking feels unpleasant, you are probably overthinking or doing it wrong.
- Focus on root causes like pressure and self-trust rather than surface symptoms such as filler words or rushing.
Product Talk · Teresa TorresOct 9, 2024
Oct 9, 2024 · 9 min
Teresa Torres draws on the 2022 CDH Benchmarks survey of roughly 2,000 people to examine why product trios (PM, designer, engineer) often fail to collaborate effectively. Although most respondents worked in trios, about…
Lenny’s Newsletter♥ 114
Oct 8, 2024 · 11 min
Subscriber post — summary onlyLenny Rachitsky reports first results from a compensation survey of about 5,000 newsletter readers, finding that 75% prioritize salary over equity during negotiations. The post argues this reflects a desire for…
Lenny’s Podcast101 min
John Mark Nickels · Oct 6, 2024
Key learnings- Treat leadership as any influence you have, not just formal management, and take responsibility for how you show up with others.
- When stressed in high-stakes meetings, first allow the emotion and thought rather than fighting it, since resisting it tends to…
- Stop seeking approval or self-worth from presentations and outcomes; anchoring to the mission and the product often improves both…
Lenny’s Podcast126 min
Alex Komoroske · Oct 3, 2024
Key learnings- Favor gardening over pure building: look for things that can grow on their own with ecosystem or network-effect dynamics, invest…
- Treat LLMs as squishy, imperfect 'magical duct tape' and design products that tolerate occasional failures rather than assuming…
- Build taste by finding a distinctive perspective that resonates with people, since cheap content generation makes differentiation…
Product Talk · Teresa TorresOct 2, 2024
Oct 2, 2024 · 10 min
Teresa Torres profiles Yury Oleynik, VP of Product Management at HiveMQ, and how his team automated recruiting for continuous customer interviews. Early manual outreach campaigns to thousands of free-plan users yielded…