Lenny’s Newsletter♥ 71
Jun 20, 2023 · 12 min
Subscriber post — summary onlyA guest post by product leader Tamara Hinckley offering a step-by-step playbook for building a parental leave coverage plan. It walks through timing the rollout with stakeholders, choosing a leave timeline, assigning…
Lenny’s Podcast98 min
Melissa Tan · Jun 18, 2023
Key learnings- Hire first-principles thinkers who are humble and collaborative, since that combination drove much of Dropbox's innovation…
- Start go-to-market and monetization planning early rather than treating growth as a layer added on top of the product later.
- Introduce a PLG motion when the product is intuitive to onboard onto and has a viral component; move toward enterprise sales once…
Lenny’s Podcast107 min
Luc Levesque · Jun 15, 2023
Key learnings- Focus relentlessly on impact over activity: measure outcomes against the north-star metric rather than hours worked or work…
- Hire the top 1% by looking for repeated 'signs of excellence' in a candidate's history, such as multiple standout achievements…
- Recruit with the whole executive team and involve the candidate's spouse or family, since changing companies is a family…
Lenny’s Newsletter♥ 145
Jun 13, 2023 · 22 min
Subscriber post — summary onlyFormer Palantir product leader Adam Judelson shares unconventional product lessons from his seven years at the company, including embedding engineers with customers, hiring top talent, skipping a formal sales team…
Lenny’s Podcast98 min
Nikhyl Singhal · Jun 11, 2023
Key learnings- Think about your career as a product: work backward from the end state you want, and plan several steps ahead rather than…
- Pursue a diverse set of experiences across pre-product-market-fit, scaling, inside-the-building and outside-the-building…
- Early in your career, pick a lane of expertise (domain, crafting, market, organizational, growth) and build a story of what you…
SVPG · Marty CaganJun 9, 2023
Jun 9, 2023 · 17 min
Marty Cagan argues that generative AI will reshape how product teams are built and how they work, drawing on his decades of experience through successive tech disruptions like the PC, the internet, and mobile. He is…
Product Talk · Teresa TorresJun 7, 2023
Jun 7, 2023 · 8 min
Teresa Torres profiles Bianca Starling, a senior product manager at Voxy, who adopted continuous discovery habits by starting with a small, time-boxed MVP rather than overhauling the whole product organization. She…
Lenny’s Newsletter · Free post♥ 145
Jun 6, 2023 · 27 min
Amol Avasare, who runs B2B growth at MasterClass, recounts a traumatic brain injury from a sparring session and the year-long recovery that followed. He argues the experience sharpened his approach to energy, emotions…
Lenny’s Podcast92 min
Jeremy Henrickson · Jun 4, 2023
Key learnings- Keep small teams with clear, narrow missions, and break large problems into pieces that small groups can own end to end to…
- Build a shared platform with a single system of record so product teams spend less energy on decisions and integrations, letting…
- Dive into the trenches yourself: leaders learn where the real challenges are only by working through the hardest details with the…
SVPG · Marty CaganJun 2, 2023
Jun 2, 2023 · 8 min
This tribute essay by Christian Idiodi remembers Jeremiah Ivan, a former VP of Engineering he worked alongside at Merrill and Snagajob, using anecdotes to show what makes an agent of change. Ivan's unconventional…
Lenny’s Newsletter · Free post♥ 244
Jun 2, 2023 · 15 min
Sho Kuwamoto, Figma's VP of Product, argues that Figma's success comes from putting customer needs first, a philosophy built into its culture from the early private beta. He describes how customer support became…
Lenny’s Podcast99 min
Nancy Duarte · Jun 1, 2023
Key learnings- Make your audience the hero of the story and approach every presentation with empathy, since the audience ultimately holds the…
- Position yourself as the mentor who helps the audience get unstuck, offering them a practical tool and an inner resolve for the…
- Use the 'what is / what could be / new bliss' contrast structure to build tension and longing for a future state, even in short…
Lenny’s Newsletter♥ 277
May 30, 2023 · 19 min
Subscriber post — summary onlyAn in-depth look at how Notion builds product, drawn from an interview with its Chief Product and Technology Officer. It covers planning cadences, a four-stage product review process, the small size of the PM team, a…
Lenny’s Podcast71 min
Andy Raskin · May 28, 2023
Key learnings- Replace the 'arrogant doctor' pitch (problem, solution, why we're better) with a story that opens by naming a shift from an old…
- Name the old game in a few concise words, such as 'transactions' or 'opinions', since compact labels make the shift easy to…
- Show that winners are already playing the new game, and frame the stakes as a clear choice between a very negative and a very…
Lenny’s Newsletter♥ 285
May 23, 2023 · 23 min
Subscriber post — summary onlyAn interview-based deep dive into how Ramp's product org works, centered on a culture of velocity: planning only as far out as needed, anchoring strategy to the financial model, organizing teams around business…
Lenny’s Podcast103 min
Gustav Söderström · May 21, 2023
Key learnings- Expect the internet's next shift from recommendation to generation to require rethinking products and business models, much as…
- Design UIs to match your model's real accuracy: if predictions are right only one in four or five times, show several options at…
- Treat generative AI as a distinct paradigm rather than more of the same machine learning, and ask what experience couldn't exist…
Lenny’s Podcast76 min
Scott Belsky · May 18, 2023
Key learnings- Build product sense by developing genuine empathy for the customer's problem before getting attached to a particular solution…
- Optimize the first mile of the experience: users arrive lazy, selfish, and impatient, so onboarding, orientation, and defaults…
- Re-examine onboarding for each new customer cohort, since later pragmatist users are less forgiving and need a reimagined…
Product Talk · Teresa TorresMay 17, 2023
May 17, 2023
Teresa Torres observes that many individual contributors who love continuous discovery struggle to get their teammates, stakeholders, and leaders on board, because few people have time to read a book or blog post. To…
Lenny’s Newsletter♥ 239
May 16, 2023 · 11 min
Subscriber post — summary onlyLenny explains what investors mean by a "venture-scale" startup: a credible path to roughly $100M in annual revenue and a $1B+ valuation within about a decade. He argues most ideas, including many successful products…
Lenny’s Podcast69 min
Ayo Omojola · May 14, 2023
Key learnings- Differentiation must be both different and better in a way end users actually care about; being merely different or merely…
- Find a sharp, memorable point of difference you can state in one line; for Cash App it was instant access to money when…
- Keep a startup-within-a-company small and tightly knit with senior people who trust each other, and fight for each headcount…
Product Talk · Teresa TorresMay 10, 2023
May 10, 2023 · 32 min
Teresa Torres interviews Ellen Juhlin, a product leader at Orion Labs, about how she introduced continuous discovery habits to a team that had been driven by founder-led outputs, sales-driven feature requests, and…
Lenny’s Newsletter♥ 192
May 9, 2023 · 16 min
Subscriber post — summary onlyLenny Rachitsky profiles how Miro builds product, drawing on an interview with its CPO Varun Parmar. The post covers Miro's cross-functional AMPED structure, its three-year vision and annual strategy process, a…
Lenny’s Podcast107 min
Jonathan Becker · May 7, 2023
Key learnings- Don't put all your marketing budget into one paid channel; treat spend like a portfolio and diversify across channels to avoid…
- Judge paid lead-gen by downstream revenue, not cost per lead; a higher-cost lead that converts to valuable customers can…
- Use a lead scoring model fed by CRM revenue data to bid more on audiences likely to become high-value customers, especially when…
Lenny’s Podcast121 min
David Singleton · May 4, 2023
Key learnings- Co-create new products with a small, carefully chosen group of early users, sharing product regularly and expanding only once…
- Engineers at Stripe are expected to act like PMs, so hiring and developing product-minded engineers can reduce the need for early…
- Use friction logging: pick a specific user persona, walk through the product end-to-end, and note every point of friction to find…
Product Talk · Teresa TorresMay 3, 2023
May 3, 2023 · 6 min
Teresa Torres responds to a recommendation in Monetizing Innovation that teams simply ask customers about their willingness to pay, which she firmly rejects. She argues that hypothetical answers are unreliable because…
Lenny’s Newsletter · Free post♥ 203
May 2, 2023 · 16 min
Guest author Olga Berezovsky explains the difference between correlation and linear regression analysis for product teams. Correlation measures how strongly two variables move together on a scale from -1 to 1, and is a…
Lenny’s Podcast80 min
Carilu Dietrich · Apr 30, 2023
Key learnings- Hypergrowth depends on an amazing product that people love, which spreads organically through inbound and viral word of mouth…
- To reach the C-suite, tie your work to revenue, learn how finances work, and think in terms of what the CEO and board care about.
- Take on tours of duty in other departments and volunteer for interim roles, which builds the cross-functional insight and visible…
Lenny’s Newsletter♥ 101
Apr 25, 2023 · 9 min
Subscriber post — summary onlyLenny Rachitsky reflects on serving as juror on a weeklong criminal trial and maps courtroom dynamics onto product management. The post argues that trials offer a useful lens on soft skills like choosing the right…
Lenny’s Podcast105 min
Varun Parmar · Apr 20, 2023
Key learnings- Organize product teams around personas rather than only outcomes, and embed cross-functional roles like product marketing and…
- Treat every release as a move in the competitive game: each shipped change either improves or weakens your position relative to…
- Be the first to hit the learning wall in competitive markets, since speed of learning often determines who wins, even if that…
Product Talk · Teresa TorresApr 19, 2023
Apr 19, 2023 · 16 min
Teresa Torres and members of the Continuous Discovery Habits community share the personal knowledge management (PKM) tools and habits they use to capture, organize, and reuse what they learn about products, customers…