By Lenny Rachitsky · lennysnewsletter.com · @lennysan on X · YouTube · LinkedIn
Lenny Rachitsky relaunches his dormant newsletter as an advice column on growth, product, and leadership, built from reader questions he previously answered privately or on Twitter. The first installment answers three questions: how to manage up, what a PM should focus on when the team is running smoothly, and how to differentiate a product from competitors. He offers practical tactics such as weekly status emails to a manager, an execution-strategy-vision checklist, and a list of twenty differentiation levers with real-world examples. The piece matters to product people because it turns recurring career and strategy problems into concrete, reusable checklists.
01Key takeaways
- Send a regular update to your manager covering what you need help with, current priorities, and what's on your mind.
- Set expectations on time, resources, and quality, since performance is judged against what was promised.
- When plans change, state the trade-offs explicitly and recommend a path rather than assuming your manager sees what you see.
- When the team is running well, check execution first, then strategy clarity, then whether the long-term vision is understood by everyone.
- Pick one or two clear axes of differentiation, such as best experience, trust, or personalization, rather than trying to be everything to everyone.
- If differentiation is hard, scaling faster than competitors can be a viable path to winning.
02Key sections
- Launching the advice column
- Lenny explains the experiment: answering reader questions in a regular newsletter, with a call for anonymous questions from readers. He frames it as continuing only if it proves valuable.
- Managing up
- He lists five behaviors for managing your manager: over-communicate, set realistic expectations, share trade-offs, re-prioritize transparently, and do great work to earn autonomy.
- Using spare time as a PM
- He proposes a stack to review, moving from execution to strategy to vision, with diagnostic questions at each level, plus ongoing habits of communicating, listening, and having fun.
- Differentiating your product
- He presents twenty differentiation axes, from lowest price to story, and shows how leading companies combine several of them, or instead win by scaling faster.
03From the post
“Thank you for taking a chance on this newsletter. As you may have noticed it’s been relatively dormant for the past few months 😬 It’s time to change that — with a little experiment. Thanks to some of my previous writing (and tweeting), I get a lot of great inbound questions centering around driving growth, building product, and broad leadership skills. The advice I’ve shared seems to resonate with folks (while also selfishly helping me crystalize my own thinking) so I’m going to lean into this. Instead of answering these questions privately, or just on Twitter where they quickly disappear, I’m going to share the advice here in this newsletter. Think of this as an advice column for growth, product, and leadership. I’ll aim to do this every one to two weeks, and depending on the interest, tackle three to five questions each round. On occasion I may have guest contributors, or dive deep into topics. It’s an experiment. If it ends up being valuable, I’ll continue. If not, I’ll stop. CALL TO ACTION: If you are having a hard…”
04Frameworks mentioned
Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.