This issue of Lenny Rachitsky's newsletter answers three reader questions about career and organizational challenges in product work. The first, drawing on growth leader Brian Balfour, explains how to break into a…
Melissa Perri and Kevin Broom argue that SaaS companies chasing net retention above 100% through land-and-expand can clash with customers who believe their subscription already covers new features. Using fast food menus…
Marty Cagan argues that in empowered product teams, the quality of decisions depends not only on logic and data but on how they are made, so that teammates, executives, stakeholders and customers can understand and…
Marty Cagan argues that integrity is the foundation of trust in empowered product teams, and that trust rests on both competence and character. He acknowledges that integrity is hard to maintain, since product managers…
Lenny Rachitsky closes his eight-part marketplace growth series by asking founders and operators what they would do differently. The answers cluster around a few recurring regrets: spreading effort too thin instead of…
Melissa Perri argues that a product roadmap is a communication tool, not just a planning artifact, so it deserves deliberate design for each audience. She covers practical choices: consistent color coding, quarterly…
This post, part three of a marketplace series, lays out ten strategies that leaders at large marketplaces such as Airbnb, Uber, DoorDash, Etsy and Lyft use to protect service quality as they scale. The most common…
This post, the second part of a marketplace growth series, examines which growth levers the largest marketplaces rely on once they move past early experimentation. Drawing on interviews with leaders from roughly…
This Product in Practice piece profiles Chris Hockley, a lean agile coach at SuperAwesome, who introduced the opportunity solution tree to several product teams through a staggered rollout. He found that teams grasped…
This post is Part 1 of a Phase 2 series on scaling marketplaces, asking how a company can tell whether it is supply-constrained or demand-constrained once it has product-market fit. The author argues the answer is…
This is Part 4 of Lenny Rachitsky's marketplace series, focused on driving initial demand after supply is underway. It argues that the timing of investing in demand depends on product-market fit, where growth comes…
Marty Cagan explains how SVPG operates: it advises startups and growth-stage companies and runs public and private workshops on how strong product teams work. Demand far exceeds capacity, which he attributes to SVPG's…
This third installment of a marketplace growth series examines how leading marketplaces bootstrapped their initial supply, which is the side that most marketplaces remain constrained on. Drawing on interviews with…
This second installment of a marketplace growth series tackles the chicken-and-egg problem: once a marketplace is constrained by geography or category, founders must decide whether to concentrate resources on supply or…
This is the first part of a multi-post playbook by Lenny Rachitsky, drawn from interviews with people who built marketplaces like Airbnb, DoorDash, Uber, Etsy and Thumbtack. The core argument is that the chicken-and-egg…
Teresa Torres publishes a running list of product, UX, and product-management conferences planned for 2020, organized by month with dates, names, and locations. The list is explicitly non-exhaustive and invites readers…
Marty Cagan argues that the most important thing a product manager coach brings is the right mindset, not just the right tools. Techniques like 1:1s can backfire if the manager uses them to assign tasks rather than…
This issue of Lenny Rachitsky's newsletter covers three reader questions. The first asks how a bootstrapped founder should offer a late-joining CTO equity without deterring investors; guest Hunter Walk advises common…
This weekly Q&A from Lenny Rachitsky covers three reader questions: how to communicate a failed MVP to leadership, how a product manager can persuade a founder to change a core idea under board pressure, and what to…
Marty Cagan argues that customer-centricity is a core trait for product managers that is shaped heavily by company culture and by what leaders demonstrate. He stresses that the true customer should be defined narrowly…
This weekly newsletter answers three reader questions on product work. A guest contributor, Hiten Shah, argues that remote teams suffer from miscommunication and that clarity, written documentation, screenshare-based…
Marty Cagan argues that Imposter Syndrome is real and healthy when understood correctly: it is a signal that you have not prepared enough. Rather than trying to push past the fear, he uses it as motivation to study…
This issue of Lenny Rachitsky's newsletter answers three reader questions. The first addresses impostor syndrome in product management, with a guest contribution from executive coach Kate Hosie reframing it through…
Teresa Torres argues that most managers claim to manage by outcomes but in practice still manage by outputs, dictating features, projects, and fixed roadmaps. The root cause she identifies is a trust problem: managers…
Lenny Rachitsky's early newsletter answers three reader questions: how to motivate engineers to hit arbitrary deadlines, where to find real PM career ladders, and how to get executives to accept more actionable customer…
Lenny Rachitsky's weekly Q&A newsletter tackles three practical questions: how a startup founder can tell they are approaching product/market fit, what matters most when interviewing for a Director of PM role, and…
The article argues that the old advice to ignore competitors no longer holds, since new SaaS competitors appear constantly and may encroach from adjacent markets. Competitor research, done properly, is a way to learn…
Lenny Rachitsky and Nels Gilbreth argue that annual and quarterly planning is painful for most organizations because it asks many people to imagine futures, agree on one, and plan a path to it. Drawing on dozens of…
This edition of Lenny Rachitsky's Q&A newsletter answers three reader questions about early-stage product and team building. It lays out five tactics for solving the marketplace cold-start problem, mostly centered on…
Lenny Rachitsky's first weekly Q&A newsletter answers three reader questions: how to learn growth as a PM moving into a growth role, what a new PM should do in their first 90 days to earn trust, and whether an MBA is…