Read the original at Lenny’s Newsletter ↗lennysnewsletter.com · subscriber post
By Lenny Rachitsky · lennysnewsletter.com · @lennysan on X · YouTube · LinkedIn
Former Palantir product leader Adam Judelson shares unconventional product lessons from his seven years at the company, including embedding engineers with customers, hiring top talent, skipping a formal sales team, iterating on live products, and tackling the hardest problems. He frames each lesson as phase- and environment-dependent rather than universally applicable.
Subscriber post — summary only01Key takeaways
- Embed engineers fully inside the customer's environment and do their real work long enough to build genuine empathy.
- Hire the single best person for each critical discipline, since top talent unlocks access to even better people.
- Have technically credible builders, not salespeople, handle complex mission-driven sales conversations.
- Iterate with working products when engineers can ship changes fast, but keep traditional validation for high-risk bets.
- Delay building a formal product organization early; a founder-led, engineer-close model can work until product-market fit.
“We didn’t believe in heavy processes, because we felt that formulas and playbooks tacitly give people permission to stop thinking for themselves.”Adam Judelson · Lenny’s Newsletter
02Frameworks mentioned
Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.