SVPG · Marty CaganFeb 20, 2023
Feb 20, 2023 · 5 min
Marty Cagan announces that the next SVPG book, TRANSFORMED, is in progress with Lea, Jon, Christian and Chris as co-authors, targeting early 2024. The book addresses the many established companies that struggle to shift…
Lenny’s Podcast102 min
Patrick Campbell · Feb 19, 2023
Key learnings- Define your values by the trade-offs they force, and assess candidates against them during interviews so misfits are filtered out…
- Ask whether your business can plausibly reach around $1 billion in annual revenue; if not, bootstrapping or building a…
- Campbell argues ProfitWell should have raised money earlier, since it could have pursued a larger outcome sooner, so match…
Lenny’s Podcast87 min
Christine Itwaru · Feb 16, 2023
Key learnings- Product ops can be understood two ways: as a set of systems that help a product team thrive, and as a dedicated person or group…
- Common product ops responsibilities include voice-of-customer synthesis, tooling and data integrations, content and education…
- Frame the role to PMs as protecting their time for customer conversations, which Christine says PMs should never give up, rather…
Product Talk · Teresa TorresFeb 15, 2023
Feb 15, 2023 · 10 min
Teresa Torres ran the inaugural CDH Benchmark survey, collecting responses from 1,999 product people across 78 countries to measure how many teams have adopted continuous discovery habits and whether those habits…
Lenny’s Newsletter♥ 185
Feb 14, 2023 · 21 min
Subscriber post — summary onlyLenny Rachitsky surveys growth inflection stories from roughly two dozen well-known products to find what tends to precede sudden growth jumps. He sorts them into three groups: product improvements, external events that…
Lenny’s Podcast76 min
Lauryn Isford · Feb 12, 2023
Key learnings- Experiment when you need to, mainly as risk mitigation for big changes; let customer research and mockups provide conviction for…
- Onboarding is a critical choke point for self-serve products because downstream conversion, deal closing, and team-wide adoption…
- For complex products, an immersive guided wizard that reduces cognitive load can outperform tooltips; tooltips still have a place…
SVPG · Marty CaganFeb 9, 2023
Feb 9, 2023 · 6 min
Marty Cagan introduces the product operating model as a set of first principles that leading product companies use to consistently create technology-powered solutions that deliver customer value and business results…
Lenny’s Podcast78 min
Keith Yandell · Feb 9, 2023
Key learnings- Hire people better than yourself, then get out of the way; the most valuable managers slowly step back as their team members…
- Write a 'How to work with me' document that states your expectations, known growth areas, and commitments to your team; it helps…
- Help people find their next job, even outside the company; it surfaces retention risks early, lets you plan backfills, and builds…
Product Talk · Teresa TorresFeb 8, 2023
Feb 8, 2023 · 14 min
Teresa Torres argues there is no single perfect tool for recruiting customer interview participants in continuous discovery; the best tool is the one a team will actually use. The article walks through three steps…
SVPG · Marty CaganFeb 8, 2023
Feb 8, 2023
Marty Cagan argues that the real alternative to dedicated Agile coaches is competent line management: engineering, product, and design managers coaching their people in hands-on skills. He contrasts a 'Team Red' that…
Lenny’s Newsletter · Free post♥ 240
Feb 7, 2023 · 20 min
Lenny Rachitsky and Dan Shipper walk through how a Lenny-specific chatbot was built on GPT-3 using his newsletter archive. The piece explains the difference between GPT-3 and ChatGPT, why raw language models tend to…
Lenny’s Podcast64 min
Marily Nika · Feb 5, 2023
Key learnings- Avoid the shiny object trap: only add AI when there is a real, well-defined pain point worth solving, and identify the problem…
- Don't use AI for an MVP; fake the AI behavior with a clickable prototype and test desirability with users first.
- Use ChatGPT as a sounding board for sharpening mission statements and generating user segments, personas, and motivations, while…
Lenny’s Podcast88 min
Eeke de Milliano · Feb 2, 2023
Key learnings- Process reduces variance but can pull down top performers; introduce it deliberately and give high performers escape hatches…
- Reframe failure as learning: rename postmortems 'retrospectives' and have people share failure learnings publicly to normalize…
- Lower the stakes of big bets by using small teams, getting customer feedback early, and not waiting for perfection before testing.
Product Talk · Teresa TorresFeb 1, 2023
Feb 1, 2023 · 3 min
Teresa Torres argues that opportunity mapping, the first step of building an opportunity solution tree, breaks down when teams generate opportunities from memory, which produces vague, unactionable ideas. Actionable…
Lenny’s Newsletter♥ 140
Jan 31, 2023 · 21 min
Subscriber post — summary onlyLenny Rachitsky profiles how Coda's product organization plans, reviews, and builds product, drawing on an interview with CPO Lane Shackleton. The post covers Coda's evolving planning cadence, OKR philosophy, review…
Lenny’s Podcast105 min
Zoelle Egner · Jan 29, 2023
Key learnings- Start with a laughably small MVP, as Zoelle's team did with a spreadsheet and phone calls, to learn what infrastructure you…
- Repeat your core message relentlessly; people fill gaps with wrong assumptions, so the leader's job is saying the same things…
- Punch above your weight as a small company by polishing emails, landing pages, and sample content so customers feel the product…
Lenny’s Podcast69 min
Vijay · Jan 26, 2023
Key learnings- Protect your core product: rather than moving people from the core to new ventures, invest the core's profits into new bets…
- Be cautious adding adjacent products in new categories; bolt-on products that are only mid-tier in crowded categories rarely move…
- When a product is losing customers to competitors, a focused 'speed' phase working directly from ranked churn reasons can close…
Product Talk · Teresa TorresJan 18, 2023
Jan 18, 2023 · 9 min
Teresa Torres profiles product manager Helena Jeret-Mäe at Singularity Creations, who moved from building speculative features on request to a continuous discovery practice. Early on, she built an unused field a…
Lenny’s Newsletter · Free post♥ 83
Jan 17, 2023 · 12 min
Part two of a PLG guide by Hila Qu covers the fourth and fifth steps of launching a product-led growth motion: setting up infrastructure and tooling, then building the team. The core argument is that PLG is…
SVPG · Marty CaganJan 16, 2023
Jan 16, 2023
Marty Cagan reflects on a virtual conference where he was invited to speak to Agile coaches about managing complexity, and urges coaches to watch the recording despite its uncomfortable critiques. He argues that Agile's…
Lenny’s Podcast135 min
John Cutler · Jan 15, 2023
Key learnings- Start with introspection about your own leadership beliefs; you can flex away from your default, but expect to move only…
- Highly performing teams tend to have coherence between their structure and their current strategy; fixing structure to match…
- Top teams hold strong opinions loosely held: they commit to convictions, especially about the power of product, while staying…
Lenny’s Podcast72 min
Naomi Ionita · Jan 12, 2023
Key learnings- Don't set pricing once and forget it; treat it like the roadmap and revisit monetization every 6 to 12 months, especially when…
- Start monetizing earlier than feels comfortable, since delaying cheapens the product, removes pricing feedback loops, and creates…
- Match price to value by choosing a value metric tied to how users get value, so revenue grows naturally as usage increases.
SVPG · Marty CaganJan 11, 2023
Jan 11, 2023 · 25 min
Marty Cagan argues that the product industry needs more skilled product coaches, and that many self-described coaches lack real product experience. He insists that effective product coaching must rest on relevant…
Lenny’s Newsletter · Free post♥ 232
Jan 10, 2023 · 20 min
Hila Qu, a former VP of growth at Acorns and PLG lead at GitLab, lays out a practical guide to starting a product-led growth motion for B2B SaaS. The piece argues that PLG is not just a feature set but a go-to-market…
Lenny’s Podcast87 min
Yuhki Yamashata · Jan 8, 2023
Key learnings- Storytelling is a core PM skill; Yamashita suggests resetting your context and retelling the situation as if the listener knows…
- Own the 'why' of a product: when teams can't have detailed specs, a shared understanding of the problem lets people make good…
- Use the 'five whys' on problems, asking not just why a customer wants a feature but why they have the underlying problem in the…
Lenny’s Podcast88 min
Jules Walter · Jan 5, 2023
Key learnings- Build skills one at a time, dedicating a few months to each with weekly practice tied to a concrete outcome rather than just…
- Create a forcing-function outcome when learning something new, then work backwards to the questions you need answered and seek…
- Practice interviewing with dozens of mock interviews, ideally with people skilled at interviewing, since interviewers rarely give…
Product Talk · Teresa TorresJan 4, 2023
Jan 4, 2023 · 8 min
Teresa Torres reviews 2022, when her business shifted to being course-first and reached far more people than one-on-one coaching ever could. She describes the grind of the pandemic years, including launching several…
Lenny’s Newsletter♥ 148
Jan 3, 2023 · 17 min
Subscriber post — summary onlyLenny Rachitsky argues that true viral growth is rare and short-lived, and that most products spike when a large one-to-many broadcaster shares them. Drawing on Derek Thompson's Hit Makers and examples like Spotify…
SVPG · Marty CaganJan 1, 2023
Jan 1, 2023 · 4 min
Marty Cagan lays out the product operating model, in which a product manager sits on a small cross-functional team alongside a designer, a tech lead and engineers, and is accountable for solving customer problems that…
SVPG · Marty CaganJan 1, 2023
Jan 1, 2023
This is an index page from SVPG (Silicon Valley Product Group) curating its articles on product discovery, the work of deciding what to build before handing it to delivery. The page is organized into four groups…