The Best of Lenny’s Newsletter 2021

My all-time best posts

👋 Hey, Lenny here! Welcome to this month’s ✨ free edition ✨ of my weekly newsletter. Each week I humbly tackle reader questions about product, growth, working with humans, and anything else that’s stressing you out at the office. Subscribe to get this newsletter every week 👇

---

Q: I recently discovered your newsletter, and I’m finding it hard to browse your posts. Is there someplace I can find your best stuff, ideally grouped by topic?

After two and a half years of putting out this newsletter every single week, we’re now at over 150 posts. Discoverability has become a problem. So let’s fix that. Below, I’ve collected my best posts, from day one until today, roughly sorted by popularity, across nine topics:

1. 📈 Growth strategy

2. 🤌 Product management, the work

3. 🦸‍♀️ Product management, the career

4. 🔭 Finding product-market fit

5. 📣 Marketing and GTM

6. 🌱 Scaling your startup

7. 🎭 Marketplaces

8. 📊 Metrics

9. 💼 Management and career

Going forward, I’ll make this post a living document to track all the best stuff I put out across any channel, so bookmark it for future reference. And enjoy!

---

📈 Growth strategy

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

2. How the fastest-growing B2B businesses found their first 10 customers

3. Improving retention

4. Improving conversion

5. Increasing virality

6. Building a referrals program

7. Winning at content-driven growth

8. Winning at SEO

9. The Racecar Growth Framework

10. Magical growth loops

11. Six rules of hiring for growth

12. Breaking into growth

🤌 Product management, the work

1. Getting better at product strategy

2. My favorite product management templates

3. Prioritizing a roadmap

4. Where great product roadmap ideas come from

5. The top 5 things PMs should know about engineering

6. The Minto Pyramid Principle and the SCR framework

7. What Buddhism taught me about product management

🦸‍♀️ Product management, the career

1. What is product management

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

3. Should I become a product manager?

4. Becoming a senior product manager

5. My favorite PM interview questions

6. 14 habits of highly effective product managers

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

8. When to hire your first product manager

9. Surviving as the first product manager

10. A comprehensive survey of product management

11. Product management career ladders

🔭 Finding product-market fit

1. How to know if you’ve got product-market fit

2. What it feels like when you’ve found product-market fit

3. How long it takes to find product-market fit

4. What to ask your users about product-market fit

📣 Marketing and GTM

1. Positioning

2. Picking a wedge

3. Generating buzz

4. GTM motions of 30 B2B SaaS companies

5. Finding your distribution advantage

6. How people discover new products

7. Pricing your SaaS product

🌱 Scaling your startup

1. A playbook for fundraising

2. A founder’s guide to community

3. The secret to a great planning process

4. Increasing team velocity

5. Layering sales onto a bottom-up self-serve product

6. What seven years at Airbnb taught me about building a business

🎭 Marketplaces

1. How to kickstart and scale a marketplace business

2. How marketplaces win

3. How marketplaces fail

4. Evaluating a (marketplace) business idea

5. Choosing a take rate

6. Kickstarting supply in a labor marketplace

📊 Metrics

1. What is good retention?

2. What is a good payback period?

3. Choosing your north-star metric

4. Setting goals

5. The most important consumer subscription metrics to track

6. The most important bottom-up SaaS metrics to track

💼 Management and career

1. The 10 commandments of salary negotiation

2. Navigating your early career

3. Performance reviews

4. Managing up

5. On taking time off

To make sure you don’t miss any future posts, and to instantly get access to every past issue, subscribe here 👇

Have a fulfilling and productive week 🙏

---

🔥 Featured job opportunities

1. Snackpass: Product Manager, Payments (SF, NYC, LA, Remote)

2. Fabulous: Product Manager (Remote)

3. Stonks: Backend Web Developer, Founding team (Remote)

4. Gtmhub: Director of Product Management (Remote)

5. Gearflow: Full Stack Software Engineer, Buyer Experience (Chicago/Remote)

6. Contra: Project Manager (SF)

7. Otto: Senior Engineer (Remote)

8. Jetpack Workflow: Product Designer (UI/UX) (Remote)

9. Pallet: Full Stack Software Engineer (NYC/Remote)

10. Runway: Product Manager (Remote)

11. SwagUp: Director, Product Management (Dashboard) (Remote)

12. Whatnot: Product Manager (Remote)

13. Evisort: Senior Product Manager (Remote)

14. Truework: Senior Product Manager (SF)

Browse many more open roles, and add your own, at Lenny’s Job Board.

🧠 Inspiration for the week ahead

1. Watch: Creating a Space Game with OpenAI Codex

2. Read: The French Burglar Who Pulled Off His Generation’s Biggest Art Heist

3. Learn: On Presentations, by Siqi Chen

---

How would you rate this week's newsletter? 🤔

Great • Good • Meh

---

If you’re finding this newsletter valuable, consider sharing it with friends, or subscribing if you haven’t already.

Sincerely,

Lenny 👋