“Whenever I write about our focus on cover letters during the hiring process, I'll inevitably receive the "cover letters are still a thing?" or "people still read cover letters?" response from a cadre of characters. Here's one from yesterday: https://x.com/amfonte/status/1924996546896036278 Yes, cover letters are a thing, and we absolutely still read them. And require them. We put significant weight on…”
Lenny Rachitsky lists five habits that make product managers annoying to their teams and suggests how to avoid them. The core argument is that great PMs add much value, but rigid process worship, impulsive…
Coach 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 Rachitsky shares tactics from angel investor and founder Sam Corcos on getting real value from investors. The post argues founders often fail to activate their networks because they don't ask well, and covers…
Melissa Perri argues that a new Chief Product Officer must shift from viewing executives as obstacles to seeing them as teammates with their own goals and constraints. The essay stresses that the CEO relationship is the…
Product teams are often flooded with ideas from customers, stakeholders, and their own discovery work, and need a way to capture them without derailing their workflow. In this Tools of the Trade interview, Teresa Torres…
John Cutler questions the usefulness of personality and strength tests in the workplace. He notes they make for entertaining conversation and can feel uncannily accurate, but seldom improve everyday collaboration. He…
Teresa Torres and Petra Wille rant about how absurd corporate procurement has become for outside experts like speakers and consultants. Torres describes contracts with 80-page ethics policies, 800-question security…
Teresa Torres argues that opportunity solution trees, a simple visual map linking a desired business outcome to customer opportunities, solutions, and assumption tests, help product trios make better product decisions…
Lenny's paid guest post by April Dunford, a positioning expert who has worked with 300+ B2B companies, covers four advanced roadblocks that derail positioning work. It argues that disagreement over competitors, product…
Teresa Torres argues that defining the ideal customer profile should not belong to one function but be shared across product, design, engineering, sales, marketing, customer success, and finance. Cross-functional…
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…
John Cutler argues that AI tools remove not only wasteful friction but also 'positive friction': the productive struggle, debate, and slow sense-making that builds shared understanding and sound judgment in product…
Melissa Perri describes how a typical remote staff meeting can waste the chance to connect and align a team, and argues that remote work mainly amplifies existing meeting problems. She interviews product leaders at…
Julie Zhuo's short essay, titled "I am an idiot," reflects on intellectual humility in an era when AI systems can seem to know more than we do. The piece is framed as personal notes rather than a formal argument, using…
John Cutler critiques the recurring pattern of slides that wrap AI into old SDLC diagrams with logos, claiming the 'bottleneck has moved' and that the answer is settled, even as new methods appear weekly. The essay…
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…
Julie Zhuo's personal essay traces how she came to see herself as an "ice queen": someone who learned to suppress emotion and present a composed, controlled surface. The piece frames emotional guardedness as a…
Teresa Torres argues that even improvements to a product will trigger resistance, because users must adjust to any change. She contrasts Facebook's rocky rollout of the News Feed and Beacon with its smoother launch of…
Lenny Rachitsky shares seven more practical productivity tactics following his popular time management post. The core argument is that small, concrete habits, such as arbitrary deadlines, physical to-do lists, graceful…
Teresa Torres argues that product builders make constant decisions, but human judgment is error-prone, so teams should deliberately design decision-making processes. She identifies eight critical decisions in building…