Working notes from product people

Ask the people who’ve done it.

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Answers quote and cite the source notes

01 — TopicsFourteen drawers, sorted.

3 more drawersBrowse all 14 topics →
Open drawer · 11

Metrics, data & experimentation

316 notes · 58 people · 2005–2026
Lenny’s Newsletter · Free post♥ 108

Choosing Your North Star Metric

Jun 16, 2021

“This is just quick email to let you know I wrote a guest post for Future (a16z’s new media site) that I’m pretty excited about. It’s a guide for helping you choose your North Star Metric(s), based on a survey of current and past employees at over 40 of today’s most successful growth-stage companies. Check out the table below for a glimpse of what you’ll find. Your North Star Metric is your strategy, and your strategy is your North Star…”

@ttorres · Teresa Torres on X♥ 97
"The only way to know if our AI products and workflows are any good is with evals." 💡 If you're using AI to write PRDs, analyze customer feedback, or build customer-facing AI products, you need to understand evals. This guide breaks down what evals actually are and why product teams should be…
Lenny’s Newsletter · Free post♥ 172

How to measure cohort retention

Aug 30, 2022 · 18 min

Olga Berezovsky, guest-writing for Lenny Rachitsky, argues that cohort retention is widely misunderstood and costly to get wrong, and offers a practical guide to measuring it. She recommends defining "active" by the…

Lenny’s Podcast96 min

The ultimate guide to A/B testing

Ronny Kohavi · Jul 27, 2023
Key learnings
  • Test every code change, since even small bug fixes or tiny UI tweaks can have surprising, large impact on key metrics.
  • Expect most ideas to fail: roughly two-thirds to over 90% of experiments in his experience did not move the target metric, so…
  • Allocate a portion of experiments to high-risk, high-reward bets, accepting that about 80% will fail, while keeping most work…
Lenny’s Newsletter · Free post♥ 1,022

How Duolingo reignited user growth

Feb 28, 2023 · 21 min

Jorge Mazal, former CPO of Duolingo, recounts how the company reversed a slide in daily active user growth and eventually grew DAU about 4.5x over four years. The journey began with failed attempts: a…

@ttorres · Teresa Torres on X♥ 9
💭 "I wish I could click on this card and be like, 'Clean this up.'" When a customer pointed out a flat, unstructured branch in her AI-generated opportunity solution tree, it sparked a three-week journey to fix the problem at its source. Here's what you'll learn from this article: How one customer…

02 — FrameworksModels, annotated.

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03 — PeopleWho wrote the notes.

All 10 people →

04 — QuestionsAnswered from the notes.

All 32 questions →

Where notes come from

NewsletterLenny’s Newsletter106 free posts, with a longer excerpt.
Subscriber postsSummary only229 paid posts: our summary, at most two short quotes, and a link.
PodcastLenny’s Podcast322 episodes, each with 5–8 key learnings and timestamps.
EssaysSVPG · The Beautiful Mess499 essays from Marty Cagan and John Cutler.
Substack & blogsShreyas · Julie · Jason · Hiten577 essays and posts from independent writers.
XPosts on product58 posts, filtered for product relevance.