Sitemap - 2023 - Lenny's Newsletter

🧠 Community Wisdom: Finding your primary growth channel, employee titles at pre-seed, becoming more customer-focused, how much is too much process, and more

How to tell better stories | Matthew Dicks (Storyworthy)

Failure

The Best of Lenny’s Newsletter 2023

Radical Candor: From theory to practice with author Kim Scott

🧠 Community Wisdom: AMA with Lenny + Monetizing a Santa Claus app, losing trust in a coworker, managing an idea backlog, transitioning into a new head of product role, and more

The full-stack PM | Anuj Rathi (Swiggy, Jupiter Money, Flipkart)

Lessons on building a viral consumer app: The story of Saturn

Crafting a compelling product vision | Ebi Atawodi (YouTube, Netflix, Uber)

🧠 Community Wisdom: Sending a sprint newsletter to stakeholders, favorite resources for building 0-1, managing engineers as a non-technical PM, design timelines in quarterly planning, and much more

The future of AI in software development | Inbal Shani (CPO of GitHub)

My favorite interview questions from 100+ guests

Lessons from going freemium: a decision that broke our business

Billion dollar failures, and billion dollar success | Tom Conrad (Quibi, Pandora, Pets.com, Snap, Zero)

🧠 Community Wisdom: Live AMA with Andy Johns + The cyclic nature of product org design, managing expectations for ship dates, resources for learning prompt engineering, and much more

A new-parent gift guide for product managers

Redefining success, money, and belonging | Paul Millerd (The Pathless Path)

🧠 Community Wisdom: Co-founder matching program + Pricing strategies for new features in a product, balancing UX and functionality, managing non-ICP users in a freemium business model, and much more

The ultimate guide to product operations | Melissa Perri and Denise Tilles

When they hired their first PM

Brian Chesky’s new playbook

🧠 Community Wisdom: AMA with Yuhki Yamashita (CPO of Figma) + How much scope is too much, choosing a mentor, organizing internal feedback, operational readiness, and much more

Marketplace lessons from Uber, Airbnb, Bumble, and more | Ramesh Johari (Stanford professor, startup advisor)

Introducing DRICE: a modern prioritization framework

Mastering product strategy and growing as a PM | Maggie Crowley (Toast, Drift, Tripadvisor)

🧠 Community Wisdom: Having willingness-to-pay conversations, prioritizing customer problems, hiring tips for product designers, handling co-founder disagreements, and more

Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards)

Lessons learned from a startup that didn’t make it

Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology)

🧠 Community Wisdom: AMA with Andy Johns + Calculating TAM for a startup in a new category, coping with job search rejections, shifting from output to an outcome-focused roadmap, and much more

What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom)

Scaling your B2B growth engine

A step-by-step guide to crafting a sales pitch that wins | April Dunford (author of Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch)

🧠 Community Wisdom: Assessing a PM’s writing skills, advice for first-time mentees and mentors, building a sales pipeline, creating your own PM role at a startup, and more

Scaling Duolingo, embracing failure, and insight into Latin America’s tech scene | Gina Gotthilf (Latitud, Duolingo)

How to build a killer sales pitch

Building beautiful products with Stripe’s Head of Design | Katie Dill (Stripe, Airbnb, Lyft)

🧠 Community Wisdom: Getting your product strategy approved, scoping eng time, product strategy templates, onboarding, and more

How to get press for your product | Jason Feifer (editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine)

Skipping newsletter today

Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO)

🧠 Community Wisdom: AMA with Gustaf Alströmer (Group Partner at YC) + Stopping scope creep, continuous discovery in B2B, opportunity solution trees, activation vs. retention, and much more

Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life

Hiring your early team

What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda)

🧠 Community Wisdom: AMA with Dan Hockenmaier + Facilitating a roadmap session, structuring product teams, navigating an acquisition, companies not needing PMs anymore, and much more

Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product)

How Linear builds product

How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise)

🧠 Community Wisdom: Mentoring program applications now open + Managing tension with engineering team, becoming a more technical PM, dealing with an ineffective manager, and much more

Becoming evidence-guided | Itamar Gilad (Gmail, YouTube, Microsoft)

The Magic Loop

How to become a category pirate | Christopher Lochhead (author of Play Bigger, Niche Down, Category Pirates, more)

🧠 Community Wisdom: Tracking accomplishments, addressing engineering delays, finding a high-compensation role, dealing with a complainer, and much more

Picking sharp problems, increasing virality, and unique product frameworks | Oji Udezue (Typeform, Twitter, Calendly, Atlassian)

A guide for finding product-market fit in B2B

500,000

When enough is enough | Andy Johns (ex-FB, Twitter, Quora)

🧠 Community Wisdom: Best advice for 0-1 products, designing effective dashboards, managing your mental health, user stories in PRDs, and much more

An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire)

How to find and win your first 10 B2B customers

Inside Etsy’s product, growth, and marketplace evolution | Tim Holley (VP of Product)

🧠 Community Wisdom: AMA with Claire Hughes Johnson + Accountability in OKRs, building problem-solving skills, internal vs. external PM, strategies for landing a job at a startup, and much more

How to identify your ideal customer profile (ICP)

An inside look at Deel’s unprecedented growth | Meltem Kuran Berkowitz (Head of Growth)

🧠 Community Wisdom: Handling work overload, how can PMs showcase their work, the value of a scrum master, hiring an agency vs. hiring a full-time employee, and much more

The ultimate guide to JTBD | Bob Moesta (co-creator of the framework)

How to hire your first growth team

Monetizing passions, scaling marketplaces, and stories from a creator economy vet | Camille Hearst (Spotify, Patreon, Apple, YouTube)

🧠 Community Wisdom: Having effective 1:1s, preparing for PTO, balancing qualitative and quantitative analysis, creating a resume, and much more

How to validate your B2B startup idea

The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway)

🧠 Community Wisdom: Interview questions for designers, engineering updates in all-hands meetings, considering a downgrade in job title, and much more

Relentless curiosity, radical accountability, and HubSpot’s winning growth formula | Christopher Miller (VP of Product, Growth and AI)

How the most successful B2B startups came up with their original idea

Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product)

🧠 Community Wisdom: Instilling a mindset of speed, evaluating performance of a new employee, adjusting pricing for existing users, aligning squad roadmaps, and much more

What is good free-to-paid conversion

How to measure and improve developer productivity | Nicole Forsgren (Microsoft Research, GitHub, Google)

🧠 Community Wisdom: Articulating a vision for a new product, PMing at early-stage vs. later startups, approaching strangers for customer research, flexibility vs. role boundaries, and more

The ultimate guide to A/B testing | Ronny Kohavi (Airbnb, Microsoft, Amazon)

How Shopify builds product

Lenny's Podcast past sponsors

The 10 traits of great PMs, how AI will impact your product, and Slack’s product development process | Noah Weiss (Slack, Foursquare, Google)

🧠 Community Wisdom: AMA with Josh Miller from Arc, being a PM in a sales-led org, collecting feedback from non-tech-savvy customers, a controversial take on design education, and much more

How today’s top consumer brands measure marketing’s impact

LinkedIn’s product evolution and the art of building complex systems | Hari Srinivasan (LinkedIn)

🧠 Community Wisdom: Tech education for non-tech PMs, unconventional startup hierarchies, framing failed startup experience in an interview, cost reduction vs. product development, and much more

M&A, competition, pricing, and investing | Julia Schottenstein (dbt Labs)

How Snowflake builds product

How to ask the right questions, project confidence, and win over skeptics | Paige Costello (Asana, Intercom, Intuit)

🧠 Community Wisdom: Maintaining performance during a personal crisis, pitching your product to leadership, effective tools for product walkthroughs, interviewing, and much more

How to pass any first-round interview (even in a terrible talent market)

Building minimum lovable products, stories from WeWork and Airbnb, and thriving as a PM | Jiaona Zhang (Webflow, WeWork, Airbnb, Dropbox)

🧠 Community Wisdom: The demise of the PM role at Airbnb, how transparent to be with your managers, PM role after product-market fit, what growth engineering is, and much more

What 5 years at Reddit taught us about building for a highly opinionated user base

Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor)

🧠 Community wisdom: Creating a customer feedback community, navigating difficult founder dynamics, how to quickly test ideas, setting up an engineering org, and much more

How to create an exceptional coverage plan for your parental leave

Building high-performing teams | Melissa Tan (Webflow, Dropbox, Canva)

🧠 Community wisdom: Improving communication skills, measuring team satisfaction, developing product sense, in-app messages ownership, and much more

Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor)

The unconventional Palantir principles that catalyzed a generation of startups

Building a long and meaningful career | Nikhyl Singhal (Meta, Google)

🧠 Community Wisdom: Balancing OKRs and day-to-day work, fun product offsite ideas, streamlining analytics tool integration, and more

How a traumatic brain injury made me a better PM—and person

Moving fast and navigating uncertainty | Jeremy Henrickson (Rippling, Coinbase)

🧠 Community Wisdom: Product managers vs. product owners, streamlining internal stakeholder requests, gradual feature release strategy, lessons learned from building APIs, and much more

What working at Figma taught me about customer obsession

Storytelling with Nancy Duarte: How to craft compelling presentations and tell a story that sticks

How Notion builds product

The power of strategic narrative | Andy Raskin

🧠 Community Wisdom: Efficiently run product standups, the thankless part of being a PM, how to let people go, finding a mentor, pushing the wrong things to production, and much more

How Ramp builds product

Lessons from scaling Spotify: The science of product, taking risky bets, and how AI is already impacting the future of music | Gustav Söderström (Co-President, CPO, and CTO at Spotify)

🧠 Community Wisdom: How to be more opinionated about product, thoughts on PRDs, avoiding CEO-imposed roadmaps, explaining PM’s role to leadership, resources for great landing pages, and much more

Lessons on building product sense, navigating AI, optimizing the first mile, and making it through the messy middle | Scott Belsky (Adobe, Behance)

Your startup idea probably isn’t venture-scale

Frameworks for product differentiation, team building, and thinking from first principles | Ayo Omojola (Carbon Health, Cash App)

🧠 Community Wisdom: Explaining strategy to your team, making the most of 1:1s with skip manager, dealing with sales people's requests, mobile app design examples, getting to manager, and much more

How Miro builds product

Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital)

🧠 Community Wisdom: Best resources for creating flowcharts, being more concise, boosting cross-department engagement, dream job offer, wartime vs. peacetime CPOs, and much more

Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe)

How to do linear regression and correlation analysis

How to achieve hypergrowth in your business and career | Carilu Dietrich (Atlassian, Miro, Segment, 1Password)

🧠 Community Wisdom: Hiring your first designer, SEO best practices, how to share different resourcing options, ownership of customer discovery, legal services for startups, and much more

What jury duty taught me about product management

The ultimate guide to product-led sales | Elena Verna

🧠 Community Wisdom: Talking about a failed startup experience, favorite PM tools, paid ads in growth strategy, structuring a growth team, and much more

An inside look at how Miro builds product: Lessons on outmaneuvering competitors, team structure, product quality, and moving fast | Varun Parmar (CPO of Miro)

Discussion: How and where are you finding the best job opportunities?

How to make better decisions and build a joyful career | Ada Chen Rekhi (Notejoy, LinkedIn, SurveyMonkey)

🧠 Community Wisdom: Favorite resources for user onboarding, navigating UX scope creep, must-read resources for new managers, handling not getting paid, coping with others’ success, and much more

How to build a cult-like brand | Laura Modi (Bobbie)

How to use ChatGPT in your PM work

Product lessons from Waymo | Shweta Shrivastava (Waymo, Amazon, Cisco)

🧠 Community Wisdom: Understanding why users churned, prioritizing long-term planning, building features for teams, dealing with office politics, and much more

Driving alignment and urgency within teams, work-life balance, and the changing PM landscape | Nikita Miller (The Knot, Trello)

Taking the week off

The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab)

Lenny’s Newsletter PTO policy

🧠 Community wisdom: Measuring delight, managing an endless backlog, using ChatGPT in your PM work, committing to OKRs, building trust into your product, and more

Thinking beyond frameworks | Casey Winters (Pinterest, Eventbrite, Airbnb, Tinder, Canva, Reddit, Grubhub)

Product-led marketing

Taxi mafias, cash vaults, and 100% MoM growth: The story behind Southeast Asia’s biggest startup | Kevin Aluwi (Gojek)

🧠 Community wisdom: How to reject candidates well, joining a startup as a PM, vetting growth agencies, pricing a pilot, announcing an org reshuffle, and much more

Navigating comms and PR | Lulu Cheng Meservey (Substack, Activision Blizzard)

How Duolingo builds product

Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO)

🧠 Community Wisdom: Building processes as a first PM, B2B product management, product designer's job vs. product manager, setting up analytics, onboarding new hires, and much more

The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford)

Lenny’s Newsletter Slack Community

Growth ideas

Hot takes and techno-optimism from tech’s top power couple | Sriram and Aarthi

🧠 Community Wisdom: Announcement + Transferring internally into PM, dealing with micromanagement, surviving as the first PM, developing relationship with EMs, interviewing, and much more

Career frameworks, A/B testing mistakes, counterintuitive onboarding tips, selling to developers | Laura Schaffer (VP of Growth at Amplitude)

Discussion: What’s your favorite product and why?

Lessons from scaling Stripe | Claire Hughes Johnson (ex-COO of Stripe)

🧠 Community Wisdom: Pros and cons of being the first PM, explaining a short job tenure, Linkedin’s open to work badge, finding the root cause of UX issues, and much more

Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb)

How Duolingo reignited user growth

Behind the scenes of Calendly’s rapid growth | Annie Pearl (CPO)

🧠 Community Wisdom: Influencing company strategy, product roadmap tools, how to evaluate job offers, when qualitative and quantitative don’t tell the same story, SaaS sales podcast, and more

An inside look at how CNN builds product | Upasna Gautam

How to be prepared for layoffs

10 lessons on bootstrapping a $200m business | Patrick Campbell (ProfitWell)

🧠 Community Wisdom: Ageism in tech, risks and rewards of personal branding, how to think about positioning, the best SQL courses, defining moats for early stage startups, and much more

Understanding the role of product ops | Christine Itwaru (Pendo)

Growth inflections

Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable)

🧠 Community Wisdom: Does the team even need me, avoiding burning out, the value of PM certificates, validating wedges, managing founder conflicts, and much more

Leading with empathy | Keith Yandell (DoorDash, Uber)

I built a Lenny chatbot using GPT-3. Here’s how to build your own.

AI and product management | Marily Nika (Meta, Google)

🧠 Community Wisdom: User research for PMs, how to say no to feature requests, giving UI/UX feedback to designers, product updates at a board meeting, and much more

How to foster innovation and big thinking | Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe)

How Coda builds product

Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner

🧠 Community Wisdom: Strategy vs. OKRs, being intentional about your career, skills to focus on as a new PM, and more

An inside look at Mixpanel’s product journey | Vijay Iyengar (Head of Product)

Discussion: What’s one change you've made to your product development process in the past year that’s had the most impact on your team’s success?

🧠 Community Wisdom: Better sprint demo meetings, struggling with ADHD, understanding what agile really means, structuring product teams around product areas vs. user journeys, and more

Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace)

Five steps to starting your product-led growth motion, part 2

What differentiates the highest-performing product teams | John Cutler (Amplitude, The Beautiful Mess)

🧠 Community Wisdom: Importance of titles, effectively working with OKRs, root cause analysis, bringing up parental leave in interviews, working backwards, and much more

How to price your product | Naomi Ionita (Menlo Ventures)

Five steps to starting your product-led growth motion

An inside look at how Figma builds product | Yuhki Yamashita (CPO of Figma)

🧠 Community Wisdom: Leading product pre-PMF, favorite resources for a new manager, tracking your impact, scaling customer support, and much more

Leveraging mentors to uplevel your career | Jules Walter (YouTube, Slack)

Virality is a myth (mostly)