Sitemap - 2024 - Lenny's Newsletter

How GiveDirectly increased donations by over $3 million/year through experimentation

Identify your bullseye customer in one day | Michael Margolis (UX Research Partner at Google Ventures)

🧠 Community Wisdom: Communication architectures for remote teams, how to add AI note takers to your workflows, when to exercise ISOs, using the latest tools at work, and more

Lenny’s Newsletter holiday gift guide 2024

The ultimate guide to founder-led sales | Jen Abel (co-founder of JJELLYFISH)

🧠 Community Wisdom: Automating customer support, nailing your product overview video, getting deadline estimates from teams in a healthy way, soft skills as you get promoted, and more

Behind the product: Replit | Amjad Masad (co-founder and CEO)

How to become a supermanager with AI

Building Wiz: the fastest-growing startup in history | Raaz Herzberg (CMO and VP Product Strategy)

🧠 Community Wisdom: Managing a goal change, thoughts on professional resume writers, pros and cons of the RICE framework, dividing product ownership into different teams, and more

Becoming an AI PM | Aman Khan (Arize AI, ex-Spotify, Apple, Cruise)

Product manager is an unfair role. So work unfairly.

Everything you’ve ever wanted to know about SAFe and the product owner role | Melissa Perri (author, founder of Product Institute)

🧠 Community Wisdom: Staying productive while going through personal difficulties, doing due diligence on potential co-founders, favorite UX prototyping tools, and more

Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify)

On being funny at work

Just evil enough: Subversive marketing strategies for startups | Alistair Croll (author, advisor, entrepreneur)

🧠 Community Wisdom: Working with a non-technical founder, the pros and cons of a paid-trial interview process, big vs. boutique law firms, streamlining newsletter subscriptions, and more

4 questions Shreyas Doshi wishes he’d asked himself sooner | Former PM leader at Stripe, Twitter, Google

Five proven prompt engineering techniques (and a few more-advanced tactics)

Meta’s Head of Product (and 29th employee) on working with Mark Zuckerberg, early growth tactics, why PMs are like conductors, and more | Naomi Gleit

🧠 Community Wisdom: Codifying a CEO’s product principles, explaining entrepreneurial experience on your resume, building an in-house upskilling program for PMs, an advisor’s hourly rate, and more

How much do U.S. product managers really make?

How to see like a designer: The hidden power of typography and logos | Jessica Hische (Lettering Artist, Author)

🧠 Community Wisdom: Making time to work on nonessential features, the role of principal product manager, doing B2B product surveys, transitioning from startup to enterprise product dev, and more

Becoming more strategic, navigating difficult colleagues, harnessing founder mode, and more | Anneka Gupta (Chief Product Officer at Rubrik)

Why no productivity hack will solve your overwhelm

Why most public speaking advice is wrong—and how to finally overcome your speaking anxiety | Tristan de Montebello (CEO & co-founder of Ultraspeaking)

🧠 Community Wisdom: Using LLMs in your SaaS app, tips for the first marketing hire at an early-stage startup, upskilling on content writing, the best downgrading experience you’ve seen, and more

Behind the product: NotebookLM | Raiza Martin (Senior Product Manager, AI @ Google Labs)

Why cash is king

Becoming a conscious leader: Leading without fear, finding your life’s objective function, and getting better at vision and strategy | John Mark Nickels (Uber, Waymo, DoorDash)

🧠 Community Wisdom: Learning how to delegate, structuring a product discovery process, joining a competitor, automating analysis of user requests, and more

Thinking like a gardener not a builder, organizing teams like slime mold, the adjacent possible, and other unconventional product advice | Alex Komoroske (Stripe, Google)

A PM’s guide to influence

How marketplaces win: Liquidity, growth levers, quality, and more | Benjamin Lauzier (Lyft, Thumbtack, Reforge)

🧠 Community Wisdom: Favorite tools for monitoring in-app activity, dealing with fake accounts, the difference between product management and product ops, being moved into a different role, and more

Lessons in product leadership and AI strategy from Glean, Google, Amazon, and Slack | Tamar Yehoshua (Product at Glean, ex-Google and Slack)

State of the product job market, part 2

Get Perplexity Pro free for 1 year

Becoming a super IC: Lessons from 12 years as a PM individual contributor | Tal Raviv (Product Lead at Riverside)

Community Wisdom: 200th issue + Convincing leadership to invest in UX, tips for managing your calendar, managing reports at different skill levels, pitching new product ideas, and more

Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author)

Raising a seed round 101

The things engineers are desperate for PMs to understand | Camille Fournier (author of “The Manager’s Path,” ex-CTO at Rent the Runway)

🧠 Community Wisdom: Improving internal communication, working on retention, increasing your odds of getting promoted, when to do SOC 2 compliance, and more

Land your dream job in today’s market: negotiation tactics, job search councils, and more | Phyl Terry (Author, “Never Search Alone”)

How to communicate tradeoffs so leaders will listen

How LinkedIn became interesting: The inside story | Tomer Cohen (CPO at LinkedIn)

🧠 Community Wisdom: Thoughts on PG’s Founder Mode essay, going from manager back to IC, sunsetting a product, 30-60-90-day new job plan, and more

The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”)

The Subscription Value Loop: A framework for growing consumer subscription businesses

Airbnb’s Vlad Loktev on embracing chaos, inquiry over advocacy, poking the bear, and “impact, impact, impact” (Partner at Index Ventures, Airbnb GM/VP Product)

🧠 Community Wisdom: Product coaching, rebuilding trust with your manager, managing up, balancing the needs of different sets of customers, and more

Part 2: Time management techniques that actually work

🧠 Community Wisdom: Addressing bad leadership, succeeding as an introvert PM, measuring the performance of a product org, building confidence in your own product, and more

How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps (co-founder of TBH, Gas, advisor, investor)

Succeeding as an introvert, building zero-to-one, and why you should PM your career like you PM your product | Deb Liu (CEO of Ancestry, ex-Facebook, PayPal, eBay)

Why PMs are best positioned to thrive in an AI world

Unorthodox PM wisdom: Automating user insights, unselling job candidates, logging every decision, more | Kevin Yien (Stripe, Square, Mutiny)

🧠 Community Wisdom: Coping with burnout, handling too much scope, prioritizing internal tools, including a failed startup on your resume, and more

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

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

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

Time management techniques that actually work

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

Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences)

🧠 Community Wisdom: Teaching yourself product management, creating a strategy for a group of products, building a free side product as a growth strategy, the best AI tools for note-taking, and more

How embracing emotions will accelerate your career | Joe Hudson (executive coach, Art of Accomplishment)

Ethan Smith: The power of internal linking for SEO

On asking for help (even when you really don’t want to)

Lessons from scaling Uber and Opendoor | Brian Tolkin (Head of Product at Opendoor, ex-Uber)

🧠 Community Wisdom: What PMs should know about AI/ML products, underappreciated PM skills, collaborating with a product marketer, tracking developer capacity, and more

How should you monetize your AI features?

Announcing the Lenny & Friends Summit 🙌

The ultimate guide to performance marketing | Timothy Davis (Shopify)

🧠 Community Wisdom: Finding work to do as a new PM, learning SQL, involving a designer in the roadmap process, and more

5 essential questions to craft a winning strategy | Roger Martin (author, advisor, speaker)

New data on the product job market

What most people miss about marketing | Rory Sutherland (Vice Chairman of Ogilvy UK, author)

🧠 Community Wisdom: Managing knowledge drain from departed employees, turning around a team, handling unexpected leadership asks, navigating GDPR compliance, your first product hire, and more

Taking the week off

Building a world-class data org | Jessica Lachs (VP of Analytics and Data Science at DoorDash)

🧠 Community Wisdom: Doing a complete app redesign, building a retention strategy, ideal environments for product management growth, setting yourself up for recruitment success, and more

Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead)

How close is AI to replacing product managers?

Pattern Breakers: How to find a breakthrough startup idea | Mike Maples, Jr. (Founding Partner at Floodgate, ex-Product at Silicon Graphics)

🧠 Community Wisdom: How PMs should participate in daily standups, defining effective KPIs for early-stage products, favorite talks from Figma’s Config conference, and more

Counterintuitive advice for building AI products

Meet your Lenny’s Newsletter Fellows ✨

Dylan Field live at Config: Intuition, simplicity, and the future of design

🧠 Community Wisdom: The best product roadmap tools, dealing with ADHD as a product manager, tips for building product toolkits, using interactive demo platforms for self-onboarding, and more

The social radar: Y Combinator’s secret weapon | Jessica Livingston (co-founder of Y Combinator, author, podcast host)

General management, functional, and hybrid models: Which org design works best for top companies?

Making an impact through authenticity and curiosity | Ami Vora (CPO at Faire, ex-WhatsApp, FB, IG)

🧠 Community Wisdom: What user segments to focus on, analyzing user feedback from Intercom-like platforms, communicating career aspirations without threatening my manager’s position, and much more

When and how to run a billboard campaign

Hard-won lessons building 0 to 1 inside Atlassian | Tanguy Crusson (Head of Jira Product Discovery)

🧠 Community Wisdom: Staying impartial when you don’t like a product, marketing-led vs. founder-led sales, dealing with an intimidating superior, and more

The paths to power: How to grow your influence and advance your career | Jeffrey Pfeffer (author of 7 Rules of Power, professor at Stanford GSB)

How to use Perplexity in your PM work

Lessons from a two-time unicorn builder, 50-time startup advisor, and 20-time company board member | Uri Levine (co-founder of Waze)

🧠 Community Wisdom: Your career after becoming a parent, finding the right GTM strategy, aligning product and sales, tools to quickly build a landing page, advice for a new-grad PM, and more

In defense of feature team product managers

Inside Canva: Coaches not managers, giving away your Legos, and running profitably | Cameron Adams (co-founder and CPO)

The surprising truth about what closes deals: Insights from 2.5m sales conversations | Matt Dixon (author of The Challenger Sale and The JOLT Effect)

Taking the week off

Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart)

🧠 Community Wisdom: How often you should talk to customers, what to expect from an MBA, B2E product management, template for sales call feedback, and more

On saying no

Why not asking for what you want is holding you back | Kenneth Berger (exec coach, first PM at Slack)

🧠 Community Wisdom: Favorite prioritization frameworks, companies rescinding offers, fiction book recommendations, ideas for celebrating employee anniversaries, getting into fintech, and more

Be fundamentally different, not incrementally better | Jag Duggal (Nubank, Facebook, Google, Quantcast)

The art of the pivot, part 2: How, why, and when to pivot

A framework for PM skill development | Vikrama Dhiman (Gojek)

🧠 Community Wisdom: Why LinkedIn added games, repairing a stakeholder relationship, working with a difficult VP of Revenue, companies with great PMF and bad execution, and more

The art of the pivot, part 1: The definitive list of successful pivots

Business strategy with Hamilton Helmer (author of 7 Powers)

🧠 Community Wisdom: Overcoming anxiety in front of large groups, what to optimize for in a career, involving designers in planning, using work laptop for side project, and more

This will make you a better decision maker | Annie Duke (author of “Thinking in Bets” and “Quit”, former pro poker player)

How Perplexity builds product

Twitter’s former Head of Product opens up: being fired, meeting Elon, changing stagnant culture, building consumer product, more | Kayvon Beykpour

🧠 Community Wisdom: Favorite AI courses for PMs, tools for recording and summarizing meetings, dealing with a patronizing colleague, KPIs for a product lead aiming for a Head of Product role, more

How to build deeper, more robust relationships | Carole Robin (Stanford GSB professor, “Touchy Feely”)

How to make an impact in your first 90 days

Vision, conviction, and hype: How to build 0 to 1 inside a company | Mihika Kapoor (Product at Figma)

🧠 Community Wisdom: Demonstrating leadership skills in an interview, dealing with criticism from a stakeholder, boosting collaboration with a co-founder, handling unsuccessful A/B tests, and more

Lessons from 1,000+ YC startups: Resilience, tar pit ideas, pivoting, more | Dalton Caldwell (Y Combinator, Managing Director)

How to accelerate growth by focusing on the features you already have

The GitLab way: Kindness, transparency, and short toes | David DeSanto (CPO)

🧠 Community Wisdom: Getting engineering help to build an MVP, navigating product-area boundary issues, creating an empowering environment for devs, examples of great onboarding, and more

A framework for finding product-market fit | Todd Jackson (First Round Capital)

How AI will impact product management

Bending the universe in your favor | Claire Vo (LaunchDarkly, Color, Optimizely, ChatPRD)

🧠 Community Wisdom: Explaining a short job tenure, who should own technical documentation, managing data requests, best practices for app tutorials, and more

Zigging vs. zagging: How HubSpot built a $30B company | Dharmesh Shah (co-founder/CTO)

The secret to Duolingo’s exponential growth

How to speak more confidently and persuasively | Matt Abrahams (professor, podcast host, author, speaker)

🧠 Community Wisdom: Favorite user research tools, scaling a B2B SaaS startup, effective product positioning, equity crowdfunding, integrating networking into a job search, and more

Become a more technical product manager

Kunal Shah on winning in India, second-order thinking, the philosophy of startups, and more

🧠 Community Wisdom: Identifying good product managers, improving your business skills, bridging the divide between Product and Go-to-Market, giving actionable design feedback, and more

The ultimate guide to PR | Emilie Gerber (founder of Six Eastern)

Taking the week off

The happiness and pain of product management | Noam Lovinsky (Grammarly, Facebook, YouTube, Thumbtack)

My podcast tech stack, workflows, and lessons

Product management theater | Marty Cagan (Silicon Valley Product Group)

🧠 Community Wisdom: Dealing with lack of recognition, implementing modern product processes in non-tech orgs, running a bug bounty program, when to do competitive analysis, and more

Inside TikTok: Culture, strategy, monetization, and more | Ray Cao (Global Head of Monetization Product Strategy and Operations)

How to successfully launch on Product Hunt (when it’s right for your startup)

Making Meta | Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth (CTO)

🧠 Community Wisdom: Ideas for celebrating big launches, balancing large and small bets, handling unexpected compensation demands, making your video look better, and more

How to learn the most about a candidate from a single interview question

How to discover your superpowers, own your story, and unlock personal growth | Donna Lichaw (author of The Leader’s Journey)

🧠 Community Wisdom: Dealing with an undermining manager, skill set for an AI PM, best practices for triaging support tickets, finding a North Star metric, and more

How Netflix builds a culture of excellence | Elizabeth Stone (CTO)

You should be playing with GPTs at work

Building a world-class sales org | Jason Lemkin (SaaStr)

🧠 Community Wisdom: Calculating your hourly rate as a consultant, creating a strategy for a multi-part product, questions to ask during a reference check, strategies for discovery pre-PMF, and more

The ultimate guide to willingness-to-pay

Making time for what matters | Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky (authors of Sprint and Make Time, co-founders of Character Capital)

🧠 Community Wisdom: Product development in a big company, collaboration between sales and product teams, liquidity in a digital product marketplace, improving team alignment, and more

Inside OpenAI | Logan Kilpatrick (head of developer relations)

My favorite decision-making frameworks

Lessons from Atlassian: Launching new products, getting buy-in, and staying ahead of the competition | Megan Cook (head of product, Jira)

🧠 Community Wisdom: Writing detailed PRDs, how to think more clearly, preparing your team for parental leave, getting insights from user session recordings, and more

Adding a work trial to your interview process

Managing nerves, anxiety, and burnout | Jonny Miller (Nervous System Mastery)

🧠 Community Wisdom: Getting your first Product Manager title, recommendations for a family live-abroad experience, getting better at product strategy, and more

Geoffrey Moore on finding your beachhead, crossing the chasm, and dominating a market

How Gong builds product

Good Strategy, Bad Strategy | Richard Rumelt

🧠 Community Wisdom: Whether you need to post on LinkedIn to be a successful PM, picking an analytics tool for an early-stage startup, keeping track of ideas and feedback, and more

The art and wisdom of changing teams | Heidi Helfand (author of Dynamic Reteaming)

How to describe your business as an equation

Taking control of your career | Ethan Evans (Amazon)

🧠 Community Wisdom: Getting better at estimation, increasing visibility with executives, overcoming analysis paralysis, managing Slack overload, navigating an internal transfer, and more

How to be more innovative | Sam Schillace (Microsoft deputy CTO, creator of Google Docs)

What to do if your product isn’t taking off

The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg)

🧠 Community Wisdom: How to identify good PM candidates, building a 0-1 product inside a company, managing no-shows in user interviews, integrating OKRs with a flexible product roadmap, and more

The UX research reckoning is here | Judd Antin (Airbnb, Meta)

Inspiration for the year ahead