Product Talk · Teresa TorresJan 31, 2024
Jan 31, 2024 · 12 min
Teresa Torres asked members of the Continuous Discovery Habits community to share early mistakes they made when adopting continuous discovery. Three practitioners describe their missteps: a PM who ran discovery without…
SVPG · Marty CaganJan 30, 2024
Jan 30, 2024 · 4 min
Marty Cagan argues that many feature-team product managers and delivery-team product owners are actually doing project management or backlog administration, and that companies are beginning to recognize this. He calls…
Lenny’s Newsletter♥ 121
Jan 30, 2024 · 32 min
Subscriber post — summary onlyLenny Rachitsky compiles practices from six companies known for work trials (Linear, Automattic, 37signals, Gumroad, Auth0, PostHog) into a guide covering what work trials are, why they help, example projects, time and…
Lenny’s Podcast88 min
Jonny Miller · Jan 28, 2024
Key learnings- Calm the body first: changing breath and physiological state tends to shift thoughts and feelings faster than trying to reason…
- Use a longer exhale than inhale (e.g., 4-4-8 breathing) to downshift; a longer inhale or energizing breath can raise activation…
- Build a daily practice of two to five minutes in the morning so calming techniques come naturally in stressful moments, since…
Lenny’s Podcast103 min
Geoffrey Moore · Jan 25, 2024
Key learnings- Don't take any customer you can find to generate revenue; instead concentrate on one narrow beachhead segment defined by…
- Pick a beachhead big enough to matter but small enough to lead, where you could plausibly reach 30 to 50 percent share within a…
- Win a marquee customer whose name people recognize, but make sure the reference that pragmatists trust is a pragmatist peer, not…
Product Talk · Teresa TorresJan 24, 2024
Jan 24, 2024 · 16 min
Teresa Torres surveys how early-stage teams recruit interviewees when they have no customers or even no product yet, a common blocker to continuous discovery. She draws on members of her Continuous Discovery Habits…
Lenny’s Newsletter♥ 131
Jan 23, 2024 · 20 min
Subscriber post — summary onlyAn interview with Gong's chief product officer on how the company builds product. It covers two-tier annual and quarterly planning, autonomous multi-skill pods organized around problem areas, the decision to skip OKRs…
Lenny’s Podcast100 min
Richard Rumelt · Jan 21, 2024
Key learnings- Treat strategy as a response to one or two real challenges, not a list of ambitions, priorities, or aspirations; Rumelt suggests…
- A solid strategy has three parts: a diagnosis of the situation, a guiding policy for dealing with it, and coherent actions that…
- Test your strategy for bad signs: goals dressed up as strategy, fluffy jargon, missing diagnosis, and actions that contradict one…
Lenny’s Podcast76 min
Heidi Helfand · Jan 18, 2024
Key learnings- Treat reteaming as a people-layer problem to be designed for deliberately, not just a product or delivery concern, since teams…
- Use transparency tools like whiteboards showing proposed team structures, names, missions, and open roles to gather input and…
- Clarify who requests, who gives input, who decides, and who executes each change (the RIDE framework, credited to Pat Wadors) to…
SVPG · Marty CaganJan 17, 2024
Jan 17, 2024 · 5 min
Marty Cagan argues that organizations must shift from measuring success by shipping output on fixed dates to achieving customer and business outcomes. He frames this as moving from time-to-market to time-to-money and…
Product Talk · Teresa TorresJan 17, 2024
Jan 17, 2024 · 8 min
This Product in Practice case study follows Kranthi Kiran, founder of ThoughtFlow, a collaboration tool combining visual mind mapping with data modeling. It opens by framing the risk founders face when they start from…
Lenny’s Newsletter · Free post♥ 512
Jan 16, 2024 · 13 min
Lenny Rachitsky and Dan Hockenmaier argue that every business can be reduced to a simple equation, and that you don't fully understand your business until you can write one. Building the equation forces teams to name…
Lenny’s Podcast99 min
Ethan Evans 2.0 · Jan 14, 2024
Key learnings- Do your current job well first; you can't grow your career while your manager wishes you were different about your performance.
- Ask your manager directly how you can help them, then do what they ask even when the work is unglamorous.
- Once trust exists, tell your manager your specific career goal and ask what they need that would also advance you; managers help…
Lenny’s Podcast121 min
Sam Schillace · Jan 11, 2024
Key learnings- Treat 'why not' objections as signals to examine, and answer them with 'what if' questions about how far an idea could go if it…
- Judge disruption by polarization: if people either love or hate something, it is more likely disruptive than something met with…
- Make experiments cheap and fast so you can test ideas quickly, since you will almost always be wrong about the product until you…
Product Talk · Teresa TorresJan 10, 2024
Jan 10, 2024 · 7 min
Teresa Torres opens 2024 by departing from her usual annual plan, explaining that a sabbatical-style 2023 was derailed by her husband's surgery and a difficult platform migration, leaving her facing burnout. Rather than…
Lenny’s Newsletter♥ 275
Jan 9, 2024 · 20 min
Subscriber post — summary onlyA founder whose product isn't gaining traction gets seven concrete options: talk to more users, narrow the target audience, rework positioning, try growth 'kickstarts', pivot to whatever shows pull, allow more time, or…
Lenny’s Podcast99 min
Will Larson · Jan 7, 2024
Key learnings- Treat engineers as capable adults by giving them hard problems and accountability, which lets them grow into senior leadership…
- Build simple stock-and-flow models of processes like hiring pipelines, then compare them against historical data to find where…
- Write your engineering strategy down, even imperfectly; an unwritten strategy cannot be debugged or improved, and every function…
Lenny’s Podcast91 min
Judd Antin · Jan 4, 2024
Key learnings- Much research sits in a 'middle range' of questions that are interesting but rarely drive business decisions; push for macro…
- Integrate researchers from the beginning of product processes rather than calling them in at the end as a service function; their…
- Watch for 'user-centered performance': late-stage requests to validate assumptions or check boxes that signal customer obsession…
Product Talk · Teresa TorresJan 3, 2024
Jan 3, 2024 · 12 min
This case study follows Mike Donovan, SVP of Product at Sauce Labs, who credits a Product Discovery Fundamentals course with reshaping how his team works. Moving away from a feature factory where sales passed requests…
SVPG · Marty CaganJan 2, 2024
Jan 2, 2024 · 3 min
Marty Cagan uses an anecdote about Apple, Xerox PARC, and the graphical desktop computer to explain what a product vision and a 'visiontype' (a vision prototype) are for. He argues that a compelling visiontype helps…
Lenny’s Newsletter♥ 300
Jan 2, 2024 · 21 min
Subscriber post — summary onlyLenny Rachitsky compiles favorite life mottos shared by podcast guests, asking them for a motto they return to often. The post is a collection of short inspirational sayings and the reflections behind them, intended as…
Lenny’s Podcast122 min
Nir Eyal · Dec 29, 2023
Key learnings- Distraction is mostly driven by internal discomfort such as boredom, anxiety, or fatigue rather than external pings, so identify…
- Use the 10-minute rule: when tempted to drift, set a 10-minute timer, return to the task or ride out the urge, and treat it as…
- Replace to-do lists with a calendar: time-box traction activities (work, family, health, rest) in advance so anything outside…
Product Talk · Teresa TorresDec 27, 2023
Dec 27, 2023 · 8 min
Lily Smith, Chief Product Officer at BBC Maestro, describes how she set out to add deliberate practice to product learning after realizing that reading and talks were not enough to change how she and her peers work…
Lenny’s Podcast128 min
Sarah Tavel · Dec 27, 2023
Key learnings- Pick one core action that defines an engaged user and track it as your North Star, rather than vanity metrics like MAUs or…
- Build the product so it gets better the more it is used and users have more to lose by leaving, which drives retention.
- Design network effects and re-engagement loops so that each user's activity pulls in and re-activates others without extra effort.
Lenny’s Podcast120 min
Christian Idiodi · Dec 21, 2023
Key learnings- Earn trust as a PM by becoming the most knowledgeable person on customers, data and the business, and by asking experts to teach…
- Frame PM success as earning a 'certificate of appreciation' from customers: revenue, engagement, loyalty, or referrals.
- Recognize that value is the hardest and most overlooked risk; test whether customers will actually buy, choose, and use the…
Product Talk · Teresa TorresDec 20, 2023
Dec 20, 2023 · 5 min
Teresa Torres and community members address a common problem: a stakeholder, such as a CEO, brings a solution idea that is unconnected to the team's current outcome and discovery work. The article argues against simply…
SVPG · Marty CaganDec 19, 2023
Dec 19, 2023 · 6 min
Marty Cagan shares his 2024 product predictions in narrative form, framing each as a hope and a worry rather than a forecast, given his track record of overestimating how quickly change arrives. He covers ten recurring…
Lenny’s Newsletter♥ 560
Dec 19, 2023 · 21 min
Subscriber post — summary onlyLenny explains first-principles thinking as a beginner's-mind method: question assumptions, dig to the source, and rebuild problems from fundamental truths instead of copying analogies. He illustrates it with examples…
Lenny’s Podcast150 min
Jason Fried · Dec 17, 2023
Key learnings- Software businesses have very low physical costs, so bootstrapping can be practical; treat cash flow and profit as the core skill…
- Venture-scale is an outlier path; most viable businesses sit in the large space between small and unicorn, so consider whether…
- Keep teams small and products simple; Fried argues constraints and a single product offering prevent the complexity that comes…
Lenny’s Podcast142 min
Matthew Dicks · Dec 15, 2023
Key learnings- Build every story around one five-second moment of transformation or realization, and make the rest of the story context that…
- Start stories as close to the end as possible, because the ending moment determines what you need to say and where to begin.
- Apply the dinner test: tell stories the way you would at a dinner table, only slightly elevated, without performance tricks like…