Lenny 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…
An interview-based post with April Dunford, a positioning consultant, covering how to diagnose positioning problems, her five-step positioning exercise, and how positioning differs from messaging, branding…
Cagan argues that strong products are the foundation of a sustainable business, and that weak products force sales and marketing into costly workarounds and frustrate customers. The remedy he proposes is a Charter…
Lenny Rachitsky explains what a 'wedge' strategy is, namely entering a large market through a narrow, sharp initial product and segment. He covers when a wedge is most needed (entrenched or crowded markets), why it…
The post examines how fast-growing B2B companies converted early free users into paying customers. It maps three early go-to-market strategies (bottom-up self-service, bottom-up with inside sales, and outbound sales)…
Brian Rothenberg argues that a surprising number of billion-dollar companies, including Airbnb, Uber, Square and Eventbrite, share a little-understood growth loop in which demand-side users convert into supply-side…
Marty Cagan argues that no amount of marketing can rescue a genuinely bad product; asking marketing to make the best of a 'pig' produces 'lipstick on a pig.' He uses Macromedia's Flex as a case study. Flash was a great…
Marty Cagan argues that web products spread worldwide quickly, but making them work well in other countries requires a different product approach than simply localizing a US product. Early companies that handed off US…
This post, step two of a six-part series on launching consumer businesses, argues that early growth depends on picking an almost comically narrow 'super-specific who' as the first target audience. It draws on examples…
Cagan argues that a rebrand rarely fixes a company's real problems, because a brand is not a name, logo, or ad budget but the sum of every way a company touches customers. He contends that strong brands are built on a…
“We've already established that sending product emails is absolutely necessary. So let's take a look at how to design product emails that convert. After all, ineffective product emails aren't much better than not sending product emails at all. Start With a Great Template I like to start”
Marty Cagan argues that as teams move to frequent or continuous delivery, releases can surprise customers and internal stakeholders such as sales, service, and product marketing. Most incremental releases are invisible…
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…
Lenny 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…
Part six of Lenny Rachitsky's B2B startup series covers hiring an early team, organized around four questions: who to hire first, where to find people, how to persuade them to join, and when to bring on a salesperson…
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…
Marty Cagan argues that many product releases fail because the product manager role is poorly defined in companies, and that this is often the root cause of wasted release cycles. He defines the product manager as the…
Marty Cagan argues that many product releases fail because the product manager role is poorly defined in companies, and that this is a root cause of wasted release cycles. He defines the product manager as the single…
Lenny answers a reader's question about growth levers beyond his consumer growth series. He recaps the Racecar Growth Framework (kickstarts, growth engines, lubricants, turbo boosts), then introduces two mid-stage…
This podcast episode features ShowMe's co-founders discussing how they build AI digital sales reps for inbound teams, treating agents as full teammates that run voice and video calls, demo products, and follow up over…
Colin Matthews explains that ChatGPT apps let third-party tools surface interactive widgets inside conversations, creating a potentially major distribution channel. The post covers how users discover apps contextually…
This post sets out what product teams should realistically expect from email metrics: open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and unsubscribes. It explains that open rates are an imperfect approximation…
Marty Cagan argues that product managers should formally assess new product opportunities before building, rather than relying on executive decree, intuition, or a single large customer's funding. He notes that Market…
Teresa Torres addresses a common obstacle to continuous discovery: sales and marketing teams that resist product managers talking to customers. She explains that this resistance usually stems from fear of the unknown…