Marty Cagan argues that deep experience in a specific product domain is usually less important for product managers than people assume. He recounts two cases where a strong PM was doubted for lacking domain experience…
Part two of Lenny's pivot series argues that pivoting is fundamentally about opportunity cost and distinguishes early ideation pivots from hard pivots on live products. It draws on founder-reported data to suggest…
“There's been a lot of confusion around brainstorming these days. First, there was the New Yorker article by Jonah Lehrer claiming that brainstorming doesn't work. Scott Berkun wrote a rebuttal arguing Lehrer's logic was flawed. Twitter exploded with comments. I'm going to try to make sense”
Teresa Torres argues that hiring for product management should hinge on demonstrated ability rather than credentials. As a hiring manager and consultant, she says she cares about none of the usual gatekeepers, such as…
Lenny Rachitsky examines whether a startup needs a strong 'why now'—a clear reason the product is only possible at this moment. He argues it improves odds by enabling a 10x better product or a new untapped market, but…
Lenny Rachitsky examines whether startups need a strong 'why now' to win over investors and build large businesses. He argues a clear answer helps, since it can enable a much better product or open an untapped market…
Marty Cagan argues that the word "beta" has become so ambiguous that its meaning depends on what a team is trying to accomplish. He describes four distinct uses: a QA phase handled with real users, a gentle deployment…
Lenny Rachitsky introduces a two-part series on startup pivots, drawing on research into 30+ successful pivots. The post points to a companion spreadsheet covering why each company pivoted, how long it took, how the new…
Teresa Torres extends her earlier post on user stories by walking through the INVEST criteria (Independent, Negotiable, Valuable, Estimatable, Small, Testable) with concrete examples. She argues that stories should be…
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…
This week on the podcast, @vlaurenlee from @Shopify shared how her team is using AI to solve AI problems, instead of waiting years for interaction data. "You're basically imparting all of your product intuition into an LLM to then shape yet another LLM." /2