Drawer 01 · 618 notes · 122 people · 2005–2026

Product strategy & vision

Strategy, vision, positioning, moats, and deciding what to build

Q:
Answers from Product strategy & vision notes, cited
Lenny’s Podcast96 min

The ultimate guide to A/B testing

Ronny Kohavi · Jul 27, 2023
Key learnings
  • Test every code change, since even small bug fixes or tiny UI tweaks can have surprising, large impact on key metrics.
  • Expect most ideas to fail: roughly two-thirds to over 90% of experiments in his experience did not move the target metric, so…
  • Allocate a portion of experiments to high-risk, high-reward bets, accepting that about 80% will fail, while keeping most work…
SVPG · Marty CaganOct 2, 2005

Google as the New HP

Oct 2, 2005 · 3 min

Marty Cagan argues that Hewlett-Packard was Silicon Valley's greatest product company because its founders built a culture and structure for continually breeding new products and businesses. By splitting growing…

SVPG · Marty CaganFeb 25, 2009

Visiontyping and the Hands-On Executive

Feb 25, 2009 · 4 min

Cagan argues that when executives are deeply hands-on with products, product teams should use "visiontyping", a lightweight, high-fidelity prototype focused on core concepts rather than completeness. He contrasts three…

SVPG · Marty CaganOct 22, 2007

Personas for Product Management

Oct 22, 2007 · 5 min

Marty Cagan argues that product management is a series of choices about which problems, customers, and features to pursue, and that personas are one of his favorite tools for making them. A persona is an archetype of an…

SVPG · Marty CaganFeb 14, 2022

Introducing LOVED

Feb 14, 2022 · 4 min

Marty Cagan introduces Martina Lauchengco's book LOVED, which argues that product/market fit has two halves: a strong product and a strong market approach. Building on his earlier work on product discovery, he contends…

SVPG · Marty CaganMay 12, 2008

Market Discovery vs. Product Discovery

May 12, 2008

Cagan distinguishes market discovery, which identifies worthwhile opportunities or markets, from product discovery, which determines whether a specific product is valuable, usable, and feasible. He argues the two are…

SVPG · Marty CaganApr 9, 2026

Commercial vs Internal Products

Apr 9, 2026 · 4 min

Marty Cagan argues that internal products, while worth treating as real products, carry a lower bar on value, usability, feasibility and viability than commercial products. Internal users cannot switch to competitors…

Lenny’s Newsletter♥ 26

Evaluating a (marketplace) business idea

Jun 23, 2020 · 11 min
Subscriber post — summary only

Lenny Rachitsky shares how he evaluates marketplace business ideas after reviewing 100+ companies. He argues that founders and investors should first test the underlying business against seven core criteria…

@lennysan · Lenny Rachitsky on X♥ 968
My conversation with Head of ChatGPT and Codex, @thsottiaux We discuss: 🔸 Why the model picker is likely going away 🔸 Why loops and graphs are a passing phase 🔸 Why most actions on the internet will soon be taken by agents 🔸 OpenAI’s approach to AI safety Listen now 👇
SVPG · Marty CaganSep 12, 2023

Who Is Product Operating Model For?

Sep 12, 2023

Marty Cagan addresses a common objection from non-tech companies: that the product operating model doesn't apply to them. He argues that being a 'tech company' is about how a business chooses to power its offering with…

Lenny’s Podcast118 min

Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search

Robby Stein · Oct 10, 2025
Key learnings
  • Search demand is expanding rather than dying: AI lets people ask more and harder questions, so growth comes from new query types…
  • Build a product from a real user problem and stay dissatisfied with the status quo; keep making it better until it tips into…
  • Use a J-curve retention analysis (day 7, 30, 90) to tell whether a product is flattening into real usage or steadily losing users.
Lenny’s Newsletter♥ 20

Marketplace city expansion strategy

Sep 7, 2021 · 16 min
Subscriber post — summary only

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…

Product Talk · Teresa TorresAug 26, 2013

Is Your Idea a Viable Business?

Aug 26, 2013 · 3 min

Teresa Torres argues that most product ideas are born from fleeting thoughts, but only some should become businesses. She offers a set of questions to test an idea's viability before investing heavily. Her approach…

Lenny’s Podcast110 min

How to win in the AI era: Ship a feature every week, embrace technical debt, ruthlessly cut scope, and create magic your competitors can't copy

Gaurav Misra · Mar 27, 2025
Key learnings
  • Aim for every engineer to ship a marketable product each week, sliced down to an MVP so the team can gather real user feedback…
  • When time is tight, cut scope rather than quality: repeatedly remove elements from a feature until removing anything more would…
  • Treat technical debt as financial leverage for startups, but track it like interest: once debt consumes most engineering time…
SVPG · Marty CaganMar 4, 2020

Team Objectives – Action

Mar 4, 2020 · 4 min

Cagan argues that once leaders decide which problems product teams should tackle, the mechanics of assigning objectives matter a great deal. Leaders own the decision of which team takes which problem, guided by product…

Product Talk · Teresa TorresJul 31, 2013

Stop Asking "Whether or Not" Questions

Jul 31, 2013

The author describes a lunchtime request from a sales director to build a feature that could keep a few at-risk customers, and argues that the framing of 'should we build it or not' is too narrow. Drawing on Chip and…

@hnshah · Hiten Shah on X♥ 20
Your story is the operating system for your company. Everything runs on top of it. When the operating system is buggy, everything else slows down.
HEY World · Jason FriedFeb 6, 2025

What's still here?

Feb 6, 2025

Jason Fried argues that while curiosity about what's new is expected, it is more valuable to study what has lasted. Products, practices, and ideas that survive repeated attempts to kill them contain durable lessons…