Sitemap - 2022 - Lenny's Newsletter

🧠 Community Wisdom: Becoming a skilled presenter, utility of user stories, dealing with pay cuts, best practices for analyzing customers interviews, and much more

Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium)

Discussion: What’s your product’s primary growth engine?

How Notion leveraged community to build a $10B business | Camille Ricketts (Notion, First Round Capital)

🧠 Community wisdom: An exclusive Lenny's Newsletter event, structuring your all hands meeting, helping engineers be more product oriented, defining your company's vision early, and much more

The art and science of pricing | Madhavan Ramanujam (Monetizing Innovation, Simon-Kucher)

How to activate your investor network

How to hit revenue targets in a recession | Sahil Mansuri (Bravado)

🧠 Community wisdom: Experimenting with pricing, expanding to new markets, fixing bugs vs. building new features, preparing for B2B customer interviews, and much more

The ultimate guide to SEO | Ethan Smith (Graphite)

Lenny’s Newsletter Holiday Gift Guide 2022

How to be the best coach to product people | Petra Wille (Strong Product People)

🧠 Community wisdom: Measuring team velocity, managing up, reflecting on Ticketmaster/Taylor Swift product failures, selling a UI overhaul to execs, and much more

Startup to exit: Lessons from a first-time founder

What it takes to become a top 1% PM | Ian McAllister (Uber, Amazon, Airbnb)

🧠 Community wisdom: How many customers to interview, running a tight ship on a new team, staying motivated in your day job, managing tight deadlines, how to give notice, and much more

Leaving big tech to build the #1 technology newsletter | Gergely Orosz (The Pragmatic Engineer)

How Figma builds product

An inside look at how the New York Times builds product | Alex Hardiman (CPO at The New York Times)

🧠 Community wisdom: Coaching a talkative employee, GTM planning, running productive meetings, conferences speaking policy, improving collaboration between eng and QA, and much more

How to fire people with grace, work through fear, and nurture innovation | Matt Mochary (CEO coach)

How to determine your activation metric

How Snyk built a product-led growth juggernaut | Ben Williams (VP of Product at Snyk)

🧠 Community wisdom: How to structure daily standups, division of labor between PM and eng, backlog grooming, validating new feature ideas, getting better at problem discovery, and much more

Lessons from one of the world’s top executive recruiters | Lauren Ipsen (Daversa Partners, General Catalyst)

Discussion: What book most helped you become a better product manager?

Building Substack | Sachin Monga (Substack, Facebook)

Community Wisdom: PM product stack, when to build in public, having more efficient 1:1, need for product management courses, managing a difficult engineer, and much more

Category creation and brand building | Barbra Gago (Pando, Miro, Greenhouse, Culture Amp)

What is a good activation rate

How to build trust and grow as a product leader | Fareed Mosavat (Reforge, Slack, Instacart, Zynga, Pixar)

Community Wisdom: Gathering insights from B2B users, prototyping tools, answering data questions, pros and cons of working at an agency, getting user feedback on a new product, and much more

Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook)

Mission → Vision → Strategy → Goals → Roadmap → Task

Building better product roadmaps | Janna Bastow (Mind the Product, ProdPad)

Community Wisdom: Tools for collecting product feedback, building self-confidence, learning to work at a big company, handling demanding stakeholders, and much more

How to build a high-performing growth team | Adam Fishman (Patreon, Lyft, Imperfect Foods)

The Racecar Growth Framework—expanded and illustrated

Developing a growth model + marketplace growth strategy | Dan Hockenmaier (Faire, Thumbtack, Reforge)

Community Wisdom: Planning your sabbatical, when to sunset a feature, returning to work after a maternity break, communicating the value of PM, and more

Taking the week off

Using behavioral science to improve your product | Kristen Berman (Irrational Labs)

Community Wisdom: Mastermind group + Keeping Slack from distracting your team, shipping faster, favorite roadmapping tool, importance of PM domain expertise, tools for sharing user research, and more

Customer-led growth | Georgiana Laudi (Forget The Funnel)

How to get your marketing team to drive more impact

Growth tactics, retention strategies, and becoming a better writer | Julian Shapiro (Demand Curve, Hyper, Webflow, TechCrunch)

Community Wisdom: Improving your copywriting skills, managing a remote/hybrid team, organizing hackathon, balancing PM and PO responsibilities, and more

How to get better at influence

Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy)

Community Wisdom: Learning to manage up, using the Opportunity Solution Tree, guiding a new grad into Product Management, tips to get better at hiring, building a product health dashboard, and more

When and how to invest in new acquisition channels | Adam Grenier (Uber, MasterClass)

When to sunset a feature

How to build a powerful marketing machine | Emily Kramer (Asana, Carta, MKT1)

Community wisdom: Prioritizing delight, when to leave a job, improving your business writing skill, incentivizing coming back into the office, who owns customer success, and more

Open thread: What’s your team’s communication rhythm?

The role of AI in product development | Ryan J. Salva (VP of Product at GitHub, Copilot)

Community wisdom: Introducing the Community Wisdom Library + Creating an online presence as a PM, doing a market analysis, aligning product and engineering, whether to pursue a startup idea, and more

How to grow a subscription business | Yuriy Timen (Grammarly, Canva, Airtable)

How to measure cohort retention

Persuasive communication and managing up | Wes Kao (Maven, Seth Godin, Section4)

🧠 Community wisdom: September community meetups + Having difficult conversation, setting up analytics, books recommendations for new managers, product demos, and much more

All the ways to grow your product

The nature of product | Marty Cagan, Silicon Valley Product Group

🧠 Community wisdom: Getting around Stripe’s fees, resume tools, giving a board observer right to investors, and much more

The art of building legendary brands | Arielle Jackson (Google, Square, Marketer in Residence at First Round Capital)

Kickstarting and scaling a consumer business—Step 6: SCALE: Build your growth engine

The rituals of great teams | Shishir Mehrotra of Coda, YouTube, Microsoft

🧠 Community wisdom: August meetups + dealing with intense imposter syndrome, building a roadmap, defining your KPIs , and much more

How to kickstart and scale a consumer business—Step 5: RETAIN: Iterate until enough people stick around

How to launch and grow your product | Ryan Hoover of Product Hunt and Weekend Fund

🧠 Community wisdom: AMA with Deb Liu + Managing incoming feature requests, feeling overwhelmed by managing five PMs, dealing with unexpected eng blockers, going after laid off talents, and more

How to own your career growth and become a powerful product leader | Deb Liu, Ancestry (ex-Facebook, PayPal)

Community thread: Have a question about kickstarting and scaling a consumer business? AMA

How to scrappily hire for, measure, and unlock growth | Crystal Widjaja, Gojek and Kumu

Community wisdom: Building a customer advisory group, incentivizing user interviews, explaining that you got laid off, managing reluctant consulting clients, thoughts on NPS, and more

How to create a winning product strategy | Melissa Perri

How to kickstart and scale a consumer business—Step 4: Find your early adopters by doing things that don’t scale

How to unlock your product leadership skills | Ken Norton, Ex-Google

Community wisdom: What level of transparency is normal, is a bad designer better than no designer, leading through influence, coaching confidence and communication, and more

How to sell your ideas and rise within your company | Casey Winters, Eventbrite

How to kickstart and scale a consumer business—Step 3: Craft your pitch

Nickey Skarstad (Airbnb, Etsy, Shopify, Duolingo) on translating vision into goals, operationalizing product quality, second-order decisions, brainstorming, influence, and much more

Community wisdom: Becoming a better communicator, what makes of great product culture, balancing IC and management work, debating product org structure, and more

Manik Gupta (ex-CPO Uber, Google Maps) on how to build consumer apps, why it’s useful to be optimistic about technology, creating inflections in your PM career, the changing CPO role, and more

How to kickstart and scale a consumer business—Step 2: Identify your super-specific who

Merci Grace (ex-Head of Growth at Slack) on PLG, interviewing, storytelling, building a diverse team, hiring salespeople, building a growth team, and much more

Community wisdom: Mentorship program update + new podcast episode + aligning initiatives to revenue, running one week sprints, online games for remote teams, and more

How to kickstart and scale a consumer business

Sanchan Saxena (VP of Product at Coinbase) on the inside story of how Airbnb made it through Covid; what he’s learned from Brian Chesky, Brian Armstrong, and Kevin Systrom; much more

Community Wisdom: More July meetups + Getting engineers to take support cases, when to do A/B tests, assessing your own PM skills, and more

Teresa Torres on how to interview customers, automating continuous discovery, the opportunity solution tree framework, making the case for user research, common interviewing mistakes, and much more

Community thread: What’s your favorite interview question?

Brandon Chu on building product at Shopify, how writing changed the trajectory of his career, the habits that make you a great PM, pros and cons of being a platform PM, how Shopify got through Covid

🧠 Community Wisdom: Meetups in July + quantifying impact, differentiating, inspiring engineers, recreating a vision, building a data-based backlink strategy, and more

Elena Verna on how B2B growth is changing, product-led growth, product-led sales, why you should go freemium not trial, what features to make free, and much more

What COVID taught me about product management

Gibson Biddle on his DHM product strategy framework, GEM roadmap prioritization framework, 5 Netflix strategy mini case studies, building a personal board of directors, and much more

Community Wisdom: Handling stress, pushing back on feature factory, transitioning from design to PM, helping your engineers move faster, finding PMF, and more

Jackie Bavaro on getting better at product strategy, what exactly is strategy, PM pitfalls to avoid, advancing your career, getting into management, and much more

How to build trust in a marketplace

Gokul Rajaram on designing your product development process, when and how to hire your first PM, a playbook for hiring leaders, getting ahead in you career, how to get started angel investing, more

Community Wisdom: Podcast update + prioritizing at an early-stage startup, playbooks for product discovery, demonstrating your PM skills to recruiters, moving from VC to PM, and more

April Dunford on product positioning, segmentation, and optimizing your sales process

I’ve launched a podcast!

Shreyas Doshi on pre-mortems, the LNO framework, the three levels of product work, why most execution problems are strategy problems, and ROI vs. opportunity cost thinking

Julie Zhuo on accelerating your career, impostor syndrome, writing, building product sense, using intuition vs. data, hiring designers, and moving into management

Welcome to my new podcast!

Community Wisdom: Mentorship program, community meetups + who should own QA, leveling up your design skills, increasing onboarding conversion, leaving on good terms, managing a large redesigns, more

Open thread: How is the market downturn impacting your team, and company?

🧠 Community Wisdom: New mentorship matching program + upcoming meetup dates + leading your team through layoffs, asking for budget for self-development, feeling disposable as a manager, and much more

Product management career ladders

Community Wisdom: Collaborating with the customer support team, figuring out what to work on next, keeping departments aligned, when to skip user research, hiring designers, and much more

How to win in consumer subscription

Community Wisdom: Working with a coach, how far ahead to plan, defining activation, churn, and LTV, dealing with a coworker who steals your ideas, the economics of tech products, and more

How to validate your startup idea

Community Wisdom: Feeling like product management is not for you, advice for first-time managers, determining the right product lead to product manager ratio, career leveling templates, and more

Open thread: How is your product team organized?

Community Wisdom: Product Manager vs. Product Owner, learning to be a user researcher, learning to vet feature requests, remotely onboarding new employees, should a PM be loved by developers, and more

What is a good growth rate

Community Wisdom: Dealing with being underpaid, knowledge sharing across the product team, getting up to speed on Web3, responsibilities of a Lead PM, 1:1s templates, and more

Preparing for a PM interview

Community Wisdom: Dealing with constant criticism, learning endless PMs skills, disagreements about speed vs. quality, disliking strategy, spring tools, and hiring interns

How to know when to stop

Community Wisdom: Dealing with impostor syndrome as a PM, interviewing UX/UI designers, roadmap frameworks, feedback for stellar reports, transactional email vendors, doing competition research, more

Open thread: What does your product development process look like?

Community Wisdom: PMing internal products, planning a reorg, staying involved as a Group PM, referred users churning, building a knowledge base, measuring the impact of new integrations, and more

The most important marketplace metrics to track

Community Wisdom: The relationship between growth marketing and growth PM, influencing engineers, repairing a broken coworker relationship, pricing your product, white-labelling your product, and more

How to interview product managers

Community Wisdom: Getting better at delegating, metrics for raising a Series A, understanding Product Marketing Manager, advice to first-time homeowner, asking users for their gender, and more

How to develop product sense

Community Wisdom: Your first 30/60/90 days, building a great PM-Eng relationship, when to copy vs. innovate, copywriting courses, conducting sensitive user research, fintech newsletters, and more

Freemium vs. trial

What is good waitlist conversion

Community Wisdom: Thoughts on OKRs, handling bad performance, book recommendations for scaling a startup, tools for managing your backlog, organizing a hackathon, preparing for 1:1s, and more

Reforge applications open (and taking a sick day)

🧠 Community Wisdom: Practicing customer discovery interviews, tracking many experiments, experiment results not matching real life, luxury positioning, job titles in resume, and more

A product manager’s guide to web3

Community Wisdom: New recruiter directory + AMA with Teresa Torres + Shifting culture from reactive to proactive, continuous discovery habits, handling product delays, moving into management, and more

What is good monthly churn

Community Wisdom: Meeting with your skip-level manager, learning to do customer interviews, prioritization frameworks, product marketing newsletters, measuring product value

How to get promoted

Community Wisdom: Coaching ten direct reports, building product sense, transitioning to PM inside a company, reporting to a non-PM, public roadmapping tools, and more

Lessons from 140+ angel investments

Community Wisdom: When to add layers to a product org, staying aligned, sending lots of emails, getting people to log in, and PM course recommendation

The inside story of Facebook Marketplace

Community Wisdom: We're launching a mentorship program 🙌 + remembering information, title vs. impact, revamping a product, kick-off meetings, doing QA without QA, and much more

Differentiating your product

Community Wisdom: Framing trade-off decisions, onboarding a new PM, when to buy a .com domain, qualities of a great CEO, collaborating with customer success, great API documentation, and much more

Prioritizing at startups