The Best of Lenny’s Newsletter 2023

The single best way to discover my all-time best stuff across both the newsletter and podcast

👋 Hey, Lenny here! Welcome to this month’s ✨ free edition ✨ of Lenny’s Newsletter. Each week I tackle reader questions about building product, driving growth, and accelerating your career.

P.S. Don’t miss my brand-new swag store (find great gifts for your favorite PM, or yourself) and Lennybot (an AI chatbot trained on every newsletter post, podcast interview, and more) ✨

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The end of the year is nigh, and as I do every year (here’s 2021 and 2022), I’ve revisited every single past post and podcast episode (over 400 of them!) and picked out the cream of the crop, organized by their job-to-be-done. This post is now the single best way to find my best stuff across both the newsletter and podcast.

What this collection can help you with:

1. I want to hone my product skills

2. I want to grow my product

3. Help me kickstart and scale my startup

4. I’m feeling stressed and overwhelmed

5. I want to accelerate my PM career

6. I want to learn from how the best companies operate

7. I want to become a better leader

8. I need some benchmarks

9. I need help hiring or interviewing

10. I want to get better at pricing

11. I want to get better at sales

To help make this more skimmable, I’ve added a 🎖️ emoji to posts and podcast episodes that are in the top 15 most popular of all time.

To reflect a bit, this was a big year for me. The newsletter nearly doubled (approaching 600,000 subscribers!), the podcast went from essentially nothing to a top 10 technology podcast in the U.S. (with over 3,000 5-star reviews), and the YouTube channel is about to hit 50,000 subscribers. Most amazing of all, the subscribers are increasingly getting together for IRL meetups all over the world:

Lenny’s Newsletter meetups all over the world

My mind is endlessly boggled by how far this newsletter and community have come, and I’m so incredibly grateful to you for participating, reading, sharing, and supporting this work. Thank you, thank you, thank you. The best is yet to come.

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🎖️ The Best of Lenny’s Newsletter

1. I want to hone my product skills

1. Fundamentals

   1. Mission → Vision → Strategy → Goals → Roadmap → Task 🎖️

   2. How to develop product sense

   3. How to get better at product strategy (plus this and this podcast episode)

   4. How to get better at influence

   5. How to get better at communication: The Minto Pyramid Principle and the SCR framework

   6. Prioritizing + DRICE: a modern prioritization framework

   7. Building beautiful products with Stripe’s Head of Design Katie Dill

2. Frameworks and templates

   1. My favorite product management templates 🎖️

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

   3. The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford)

   4. Build better products with continuous product discovery | Teresa Torres

2. I want to grow my product

1. Growth strategy

   1. The Racecar Growth Framework

   2. Choosing your north-star metric 🎖️

   3. Winning at SEO (plus podcast) 🎖️

   4. Winning at content-driven growth

   5. Picking a wedge

2. Come up with growth ideas

   1. Growth ideas

   2. Generating buzz

3. Optimize funnels

   1. Improving retention

   2. Improving conversion

   3. Increasing virality

   4. Building a referrals program

4. Marketing

   1. Crafting your positioning (plus podcast)

   2. How to get press

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

5. B2B growth

   1. GTM motions of 30 B2B SaaS companies

   2. Five steps to starting your product-led growth motion (plus podcast)

   3. The ultimate guide to product-led sales | Elena Verna

   4. B2B growth with Elena Verna (Amplitude, Miro, SurveyMonkey)

6. B2C growth

   1. How the biggest consumer apps got their first 1,000 users 🎖️

   2. Virality is a myth (mostly)

   3. Growth inflections

7. Marketplace growth

   1. Developing a growth model and marketplace growth strategy, with Dan Hockenmaier (Faire, Thumbtack, Reforge)

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

3. Help me kickstart and scale my startup

1. Guides

   1. How to kickstart and scale a B2B business (7-part series) 🎖️

   2. How to kickstart and scale a B2C business (6-part series) 🎖️

   3. How to kickstart and scale a marketplace business (8-part series)

   4. A guide for finding product-market fit in B2B 🎖️

   5. A guide for finding product-market fit in B2C

2. Improve your execution

   1. Increasing team velocity

   2. The secret to a great planning process

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

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

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

3. Fundraising

   1. Your startup idea probably isn’t venture-scale

   2. How to activate your investor network

   3. A fundraising playbook

4. I’m feeling stressed and overwhelmed

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

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

3. How to know when to stop

4. How to be prepared for layoffs

5. I want to accelerate my PM career

1. Fundamentals

   1. 14 habits of highly effective product managers

   2. How to know if you’re doing a good job as a product manager

   3. What is product management

   4. How to get into product management (and thrive)

   5. Should I become a product manager?

2. Inspiration

   1. The nature of product with Marty Cagan 🎖️

   2. The art of product management with Shreyas Doshi 🎖️

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

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

3. What’s changing in product management

   1. How to use ChatGPT in your PM work 🎖️

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

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

4. Getting promoted

   1. The Magic Loop: A framework for rapid career growth 🎖️

   2. Managing up

   3. Becoming a senior product manager

   4. Product management career ladders

   5. How to get promoted

   6. Surviving as the first product manager

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

   8. A comprehensive survey of product management

6. I want to learn from how the best companies operate

1. Brian Chesky’s new playbook 🎖️ ← Most popular podcast episode of all time

2. How Duolingo reignited user growth 🎖️ ←Most popular post of all time

3. How they build product

   1. How Linear builds product (plus podcast) 🎖️

   2. How Shopify builds product 🎖️

   3. How Ramp builds product (plus podcast) 🎖️

   4. How Notion builds product

   5. How Duolingo builds product

   6. How Figma builds product (plus podcast) 🎖️

4. Additional inside stories from great companies

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

   2. The unconventional Palantir principles that catalyzed a generation of startups

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

   4. What working at Figma taught me about customer obsession

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

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

5. Learning from failure

   1. Lessons learned from a startup that didn’t make it

   2. Lessons from going freemium: a decision that broke our business

7. I want to become a better leader

1. The Power of Performance Reviews: Use This System to Become a Better Manager

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

3. How to create an exceptional coverage plan for your parental leave

8. I need some benchmarks

1. What is good retention

2. What is a good activation rate (and how to determine your activation metric)

3. What is a good payback period

4. What is good monthly churn

5. How to measure cohort retention

6. What is a good growth rate

9. I need help hiring or interviewing

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

2. How to interview product managers

3. My favorite interview questions from 100+ guests

4. My favorite PM interview questions

5. Six rules of hiring for growth

6. When to hire your first product manager

7. The 10 commandments of salary negotiation 🏅

10. I want to get better at pricing

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

2. Pricing your SaaS product, by Patrick Campbell

3. Going freemium, adding a trial, business model disruption, and more

11. I want to get better at sales

1. Founder-led sales, with Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium)

2. The Transition: Layering sales onto a bottom-up self-serve product, by Pete Kazanjy

3. How to hit revenue targets in a recession, with Sahil Mansuri (Bravado)

4. How to build a killer sales pitch (plus podcast)

For more fun, check out Lennybot, or browse the entire archive of posts (sorted by popularity).

Thank you for another great year 🥂

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Sincerely,

Lenny 👋