The Best of Lenny’s Newsletter 2022

If you read one post this year, read this one—my most popular posts and podcasts, categorized and organized

👋 Hey, Lenny here! Welcome to this month’s ✨ free edition ✨ of Lenny’s Newsletter. Each week I humbly tackle reader questions about product, growth, working with humans, and anything else that’s stressing you out about work.

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What a year. The newsletter crossed 300,000 subscribers (from 90K one year ago), the podcast became a top 10 technology podcast, and the subscriber Slack community continues to thrive. I never imagined reaching this scale, and none of this would be possible without you. From the bottom of my heart, thank you. Thank you for reading, for listening, and for subscribing. There’s so much more to come.

To close out the year, like I did last year, I revisited all of my past posts (over 250 of them!), picked out the cream of the crop, and categorized them into handy “What problem do I need help with?” buckets, which you’ll find below.

This post is now the single best way to find my most popular stuff, across both the newsletter and podcast. My long-term vision with the newsletter and podcast is to have an in-depth answer to every question product builders, growth leaders, and founders have. Likely impossible, but let’s try!

Enjoy, and see you in 2023 🥂

The Best of Lenny’s Newsletter

Building product

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

2. My favorite product management templates

3. How Figma builds product

4. How to develop product sense

5. Prioritizing a roadmap

6. Getting better at product strategy

7. How to get better at influence

8. The Minto Pyramid Principle and the SCR framework

9. The top 5 things PMs should know about engineering

10. The nature of product, with Marty Cagan (Silicon Valley Product Group)

11. Five big ideas, with Shreyas Doshi (Stripe, Twitter, Google)

Go-to-market (GTM)

1. How to kickstart and scale a consumer business

2. How to kickstart and scale a marketplace business

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

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

5. The Racecar Growth Framework

6. GTM motions of 30 B2B SaaS companies

7. Positioning

8. Generating buzz

9. Picking a wedge

10. Finding your distribution advantage

Growth strategy

1. Improving retention

2. Improving conversion

3. Increasing virality

4. Building a referrals program

5. Winning at content-driven growth

6. Winning at SEO

7. How to win in consumer subscription

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

9. The ultimate guide to SEO, with Ethan Smith (Graphite)

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

11. How to build a powerful marketing machine, with Emily Kramer (Asana, Carta, MKT1)

Benchmarks and metrics

1. What is good retention

2. What is good monthly churn

3. What is a good payback period

4. What is a good activation rate

5. How to determine your activation metric

6. How to measure cohort retention

7. What is a good growth rate

8. Choosing your north-star metric

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

10. The most important marketplace metrics to track

11. The most important consumer metrics to track

12. The most important consumer subscription metrics to track

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. How to validate your startup idea

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. Surviving as the first product manager

6. Product management career ladders

7. A comprehensive survey of product management

8. Managing up

9. How to know when to stop

10. My favorite PM courses

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

Hiring

1. My favorite PM interview questions

2. Six rules of hiring for growth

3. 14 habits of highly effective product managers

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

5. When to hire your first product manager

6. How to interview product managers

7. The 10 commandments of salary negotiation

Startups and leadership

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

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

3. How Snyk built a product-led growth juggernaut, with Ben Williams (VP of Product at Snyk)

4. An inside look at how the New York Times builds product, with Alex Hardiman (CPO at the New York Times)

5. Startup to exit: Lessons from a first-time founder

6. How to activate your investor network

7. Fundraising

8. A founder’s guide to community

9. Increasing team velocity

10. The secret to a great planning process

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

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

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)

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See you in 2023!

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Sincerely,

Lenny 👋