This post is mostly a promotional announcement for a part-time PM course aimed at early-career product managers, with a reader Q&A in the middle. The core advice in the Q&A explains how to move from a generalist PM role…
“I know. Email is dead. Everyone is Facebook messaging, texting, and tweeting instead. So why am I asking about email? Because when it comes to products, email is far from dead. I'm not going to beat a dead horse. Lots of people have written about this. Instead, I'm”
Lenny Rachitsky surveys about two dozen venture investors on what growth rates count as good or great at each stage of a business. The post argues that early-stage investors weigh time-to-$1M ARR, retention, and…
Teresa Torres describes how a weekend of family play turned her from a mobile-game holdout into a heavy user of Words with Friends, Draw Something, and Scramble. She uses a 2012 Journal of Product Innovation Management…
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…
Olga Berezovsky, guest-writing for Lenny Rachitsky, argues that cohort retention is widely misunderstood and costly to get wrong, and offers a practical guide to measuring it. She recommends defining "active" by the…
Lenny answers a reader's question about how to build a business 'flywheel,' a visual model of which business elements reinforce each other to accelerate growth. He explains how to brainstorm one from assets, actions…
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 compiles lessons from founders and early growth leaders at marketplaces like Lyft, Thumbtack, Rover, and Udemy on how to earn trust between strangers. The core argument is that trust is built through a…
Lenny Rachitsky surveyed hundreds of product managers, then ran follow-up calls, to collect concrete ways PMs use Perplexity, the AI-powered search engine, in their daily work. The post groups 27 real prompts into six…
A paid newsletter post summarizing Lenny Rachitsky's podcast conversation with SEO expert Ethan Smith. It explains the three main types of SEO, contrasts contextual and navigational internal links, and argues that…
Lenny Rachitsky surveys founders and growth leads from Grubhub, OpenTable, Caviar, Instacart, Snackpass and Peerspace on how marketplaces expanded into new cities. The core argument is that expansion should follow once…
Lenny Rachitsky analyzes how 30 fast-growing B2B SaaS companies chose their go-to-market motions, covering product-led versus sales-led approaches, top-down versus bottom-up targeting, and which market segments they…
Lenny Rachitsky's annual year-end roundup revisits his past newsletter posts and podcast episodes and reorganizes the best of them by reader job-to-be-done, such as sharpening product skills, growing a product, scaling…
Lenny Rachitsky answers a reader's question about which metrics matter for a consumer app, arguing the right metrics depend on how the business makes money. He walks through five consumer models (trial-based…
Lenny Rachitsky opens with a note on the war in Ukraine and ways to help, then answers a reader question about waitlist conversion. Drawing on founder input, he shares rough conversion benchmarks for free sign-ups, paid…
Lenny Rachitsky answers a reader question by outlining the metrics that matter for consumer subscription businesses, split into content, software, and physical goods models. The post argues that success depends on six…
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…
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…
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…
Melissa Perri argues that product leaders planning a company's next phase should survey a standard set of growth strategies rather than fixate on a single path. She organizes 16 options around three business objectives…
Teresa Torres argues that a well-designed email template is not enough; product teams must also manage deliverability, the process of getting messages past ISP and client spam filters into real inboxes. She outlines how…
Brian Ta, a former SEO lead at Airbnb, Strava, and AngelList, explains how to run SEO experiments on sites with thousands of programmatic pages. He argues SEO tests must be bucketed at the page level rather than the…
Jason Fried describes an experiment for a free in-person Basecamp event in Chicago: attendees pay a $100 refundable deposit at registration and get the cash back at the door if they show up. The problem is that free…