Sitemap - 2021 - Lenny's Newsletter

The Best of 2021

Community Wisdom: Remembering what you’ve read, KPIs for customer support, saying no to customers, finding your first customers, when to hire your 2nd PM, and more

Taking the week off

Community Wisdom: Working with OKRs, learning to be a PM, optimizing a long form, calendar booking tools, evaluating a Head of Product role, and more

The top 5 things PMs should know about engineering

What is a good payback period?

Community Wisdom: Build your MVP without engineers, interviewing senior PMs, managing an intern, paying down tech debt, outcome-based roadmaps, and more

The Atomic Network

The most common pitfalls of new product managers

Community Wisdom: Analytics for early-stage startups, better problem statements, UI/UX design bootcamp as a PM, increasing team morale, and improving your referral programs

A founder’s guide to community

Community Wisdom: Prioritizing your roadmap, getting better at customer discovery, working effectively with your designer, testing for interest with a fake button, how to resign, and much more

Lenny’s holiday gift guide

The most important consumer metrics to track

Community Wisdom: Handling too much responsibility, crafting your product strategy, when to sell, when to stop a successful experiment, going deep vs. going fast, Amplitude vs. Mixpanel, and more

What is product management

Community Wisdom: Examples of amazing product visions, getting better at interviews, switching from PM to eng, answering “how long will this take?”, how to ask about work-life balance, and more

Six rules of hiring for growth

Community Wisdom: Tools to capture feature requests, how much time to spend on QA, co-creating your roadmap, building an analytics product, calculating your hourly rate, and more

Breaking into growth

Community Wisdom: Two announcements, getting promoted to product lead, discussing salary while interviewing, using placebo effect to increase conversion, commission for PMs, changing a CEO's mind

Picking a wedge

Community Wisdom: Salary at early-stage startups, preparing for interviews, group brainstorming tools, receiving feedback, building a flexible roadmap, and much more

Taking the week off

Community Wisdom: Creating a product vision, fostering creativity, breaking down an epic, deciding whether to join an early stage startup, becoming more detailed oriented, and AMA with Zoelle Egner

60 ideas to boost your growth

Community Wisdom: Setting up a family leave policy, creating an LLC for your consulting business, prioritizing buyer vs. user, maintaining a healthy work-life balance, and much more

My all-time favorite reads on product, growth, leadership, writing, investing, and much more

Community Wisdom: Working with teammates in different time zones, decision-making templates, improving your verbal communication, transitioning into the head of product, planning a rebrand, more

Saying no

Community Wisdom: Best tools to maintain your roadmap, answering interview questions about strategy, introducing a non-PM teammate to the PM role, PM salary benchmarks, and much more

The 10 commandments of salary negotiation

Getting more technical

Community Wisdom: Dealing with missed goals, frameworks for 1:1 meetings, becoming a better communicator, creating innovation, how to decide what to build, perfection over progress, and more

How behavioral science can boost your conversion rates

Demand driving supply: The little-understood growth loop behind a surprising number of iconic billion-dollar companies

Community Wisdom: Getting better at strategic thinking, getting discounts when you ask to cancel, identifying the type of software developer you need, org structure, and working with an analyst

Marketplace city expansion strategy

Community Wisdom: Home video setup, celebrating the end of a big project, interview questions to discover jerks, dealing with an ever-changing roadmap, announcing new features, and more

Examples and templates of 1-Pagers and PRDs

Community Wisdom: Happy 50th 🥳 + Getting a product coach, making remote work work, when to incorporate, getting better at copywriting, improving onboarding, and more

GTM motions of 30 B2B SaaS companies

🧠 Community Wisdom: Maintaining self-confidence, dealing with disagreeable engineers, structuring brainstorms, getting real feedback on your performance, dealing with too much content, and more

The Best of Lenny’s Newsletter 2021

Community Wisdom: Reforge, getting buy-in on strategy, examples of great product specs, the best way to quit your job, best note-taking/TODO app, hiring a Head of People, keeping track of who’s away

Five habits of highly annoying product managers

Community Wisdom: Hours worked per day, finding cool swag, checking in on engineering progress, feeling too much pressure, newsletters about data, and top finds this week

How marketplaces win

Community Wisdom: Transitioning from IC to PM manager, visualizing your product flows, negotiating salary, efficient customer interviews, the value of self-serve product demos, and more

Prioritizing

Community Wisdom: Flywheels, knowing if anyone wants what you’re building, roadmapping tools, onboarding new employees, knowing how many user interviews is enough, and discovering internal products

Why now

Community Wisdom: Maintaining a fun remote work environment, keeping teams informed, recruiters getting your attention, organizing internal docs, sharing your early product plan, and SaaS integrations

Kickstarting supply in a labor marketplace

Winning at early-stage hiring

Community Wisdom: When to A/B test, losing interest in your job, hiring a PM externally vs. internally, quick wins, improving app store reviews, and roadmap feature voting

How to know if you're doing a good job as a product manager

Community Wisdom: Managing conflict, making a case to improve your product’s UI, favorite analytics tools, transitioning from data engineering to PM, and dealing with a bad manager

Finding your distribution advantage

Community Wisdom: Waitlist vs. self-serve, feeling disempowered, talking to engineers about their velocity, building relationship with teammates, asking to switch teams, structuring mobile teams

Choosing Your North Star Metric

My favorite PM interview questions

Community Wisdom: Fireside chat with Teresa Torres, impactful landing page changes, ensuring work-life balance, titles, going from B2C to B2B, and standard stock option grants

Getting buy-in

How people discover new products

Community Wisdom: Supporting your team through hard times, up-leveling your team, keeping documentation up to date, involving engineers early on, describing a PMs job, jamming on ideas

How long it takes to find Product-Market Fit

Community Wisdom: Improving your writing, bonding with your teammates, learning basic financial concepts, handling pricing complaints, and transitioning from founder to PM

Skills PMs need to build

Community Wisdom: Fixing other departments, giving hard feedback to interview candidates, quickly evaluating new hires, aligning product and sales, and learning to do user research

Healing your co-founder relationship

🤩 Community Wisdom: Stepping up into head of product, building trust joining remotely, screening APM candidates, synthesizing qualitative data, fun ways to welcome new employees, and more

Types of business models

🤩 Community Wisdom: Getting over the fear of talking to your customers, mapping out your customer journey, quickly creating exec-level communications, OKRs on platform teams, mentoring, and more

14 habits of highly effective product managers

🤩 Community Wisdom: Encouraging more talking to customers, reducing churn, naming your teams, ending Zooms on time, favorite survey tools PLUS meet our community's pets!

Three myths about sabbatical programs

🤩 Community Wisdom: Handling mansplaining in the workspace, growth frameworks, engineers interviewing PMs, and marketplace metrics

On taking time off

🤩 Community Wisdom: Finding your professional life mission, succeeding as a VP, calculating retention, favorite prototyping tools, mixpanel experts, and product SWAT teams

Why marketplaces fail

🤩 Community Wisdom: Examples of great product vision, screening APM candidates, building trust with your sales team, capturing insights App store reviews, company vs. position, raising a seed round

Choosing a take rate

🤩 Community Wisdom: Improving presentation skills, taking a sabbatical, onboarding new employees, variable comp, keeping cross-functional teams updated, and better storytelling

The Minto Pyramid Principle and the SCR Framework

🤩 Community Wisdom: Staying on top of team’s activity in a remote world, team updates template, PM as cheerleader, moving from eng to PM, hiring a VP of Engineering, and designers interviewing PMs

The PM 🤝 Design Partnership

🤩 Community Wisdom: Frequency of metrics reviews, strengthening attention to detail, OKRs vs. roadmaps, SEO content, and maintaining alignment

Defending your big bets

🤩 Community Wisdom: Understanding designer jargon, eng vs. PM responsibilities, finding user research participants, creating shareable usage stats, and roadmaps informing OKRs

What's in your software stack — Product, Design, Analytics, DS, Research, and more

🤩 Community Wisdom: Motivating your team to work faster, hiring after a Series A, people management software, email platforms, and mentorship

Content-driven growth

🤩 Community Wisdom: Docs vs. slides, being misled during the hiring process, creating a Slack community for beta tester, incentivizing advisors, and scaling user research

Examples of great job postings

🤩 Community Wisdom: Bringing joy to the workday in Slack, hiring APMs, getting more out of podcasts, prioritizing new integrations, and what to ask churned customers

Li Jin launches Atelier Ventures, her debut fund to invest in the passion economy

🤩 Community Wisdom: Time spent working vs. learning, being in the room where it happens, accelerating early PM career, DS org structure, and improving ways of working

Becoming a senior Product Manager

🤩 Community Wisdom: Product specs, questions to ask on reference calls, evaluating a startup job offer, interviewing your future boss, and professional services org structures

How to increase virality

🤩 Community wisdom: Amplitude’s unbounded retention, evaluating a PM, collecting user feedback, copywriting, and open-sourcing

Positioning

🤩 Community wisdom: Paternity leave, marketplace retention, transitioning into PM, writing status reports, manager vs. IC career route, and much more

Should I become a product manager

🤩 Community wisdom: Lazy founders, PMs and data, Zoom fatigue, non-cross-functional teams, and much more

Increasing team velocity

🤩 Community wisdom: Customer advisory councils, skip-levels, benchmarks, take-home assignments, interview questions, NPS, and much more

The most important consumer subscription metrics to track

🤩 Community Wisdom: Favorite product discoveries this year, making OKRs outcome-based, working with customer success, and much more