Writer of Lenny's Newsletter and host of Lenny's Podcast.
A guest post by former Amazon executive Ethan Evans introducing the Magic Loop, a five-step cycle for growing your career by doing your current job well, offering help to your manager, and asking for work tied to your…
Part five of a B2B startup series argues there is no formula for product-market fit, but founders' stories reveal a pattern. It proposes a five-step progression from one loving customer, to a paying customer, to…
“This week the newsletter hit 500,000 subscribers, which I’m told makes it among the top five largest newsletters on Substack and one of the largest newsletters broadly. Friggin’ bonkers. A big round number is a good time to reflect, so I’ve collected some lessons from my journey. I still only sort of know what I’m doing, and it’s unclear where this all goes, but if you’re thinking about embarking on a writing journey, or are just…”
Lenny Rachitsky's fourth installment in his B2B startup series argues that finding your first ten customers starts with trust and hand-to-hand effort, not scalable channels. Drawing on interviews with founders of…
Part three of Lenny Rachitsky's B2B series argues that founders should define their ideal customer profile early, alongside the problem itself. Drawing on interviews with dozens of startup leaders, it outlines a list of…
The post offers a step-by-step guide to hiring and structuring a first growth team, drawing on interviews with a dozen growth practitioners. It argues growth should follow product-market fit, that acquisition is usually…
Part two of a B2B startup series examines how founders validate an idea before committing. Drawing on interviews with about two dozen companies, it lays out four validation paths (manual, listening, prototype with…
Lenny Rachitsky opens a seven-part B2B startup playbook by examining how successful B2B companies found their original ideas. Drawing on dozens of founder interviews, he argues that a strong B2B idea combines an…
Lenny Rachitsky, with OpenView and Pendo, benchmarks free-to-paid conversion from a survey of 1,000+ products, defining good and great rates for freemium, sales-assisted, and free-trial models. It argues conversion…
An interview with Shopify's VP of Product, Glen Coates, on how the company plans around annual CEO themes, avoids OKR-style metrics ownership, reviews work through a staged system, and structures teams around merchant…
Guest authors Michael Kaminsky and Mike Taylor explain how marketers measure incrementality, the true sales caused by spend, using three methods: multi-touch attribution, marketing mix modeling, and conversion lift…
An interview with Snowflake's Director of Product for its Developer Platform and Ecosystem, describing how the company plans, reviews, and organizes product work. It covers annual 'big boulder' planning, six-page plan…
Coach Erika argues that first-round interviews exist mainly to filter candidates, so preparing efficiently matters more than endless practice. She presents a method called Minimum Viable Interview Prep (MVIP) covering…
Two former Reddit leaders outline a four-step framework for building products with a vocal, opinionated user base: measuring trust, listening to representative voices, moving debate into private advisory councils, and…
A guest post by product leader Tamara Hinckley offering a step-by-step playbook for building a parental leave coverage plan. It walks through timing the rollout with stakeholders, choosing a leave timeline, assigning…
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…
Amol Avasare, who runs B2B growth at MasterClass, recounts a traumatic brain injury from a sparring session and the year-long recovery that followed. He argues the experience sharpened his approach to energy, emotions…
Sho Kuwamoto, Figma's VP of Product, argues that Figma's success comes from putting customer needs first, a philosophy built into its culture from the early private beta. He describes how customer support became…
An in-depth look at how Notion builds product, drawn from an interview with its Chief Product and Technology Officer. It covers planning cadences, a four-stage product review process, the small size of the PM team, a…
An interview-based deep dive into how Ramp's product org works, centered on a culture of velocity: planning only as far out as needed, anchoring strategy to the financial model, organizing teams around business…
Lenny explains what investors mean by a "venture-scale" startup: a credible path to roughly $100M in annual revenue and a $1B+ valuation within about a decade. He argues most ideas, including many successful products…
Lenny Rachitsky profiles how Miro builds product, drawing on an interview with its CPO Varun Parmar. The post covers Miro's cross-functional AMPED structure, its three-year vision and annual strategy process, a…
Guest author Olga Berezovsky explains the difference between correlation and linear regression analysis for product teams. Correlation measures how strongly two variables move together on a scale from -1 to 1, and is a…
Lenny Rachitsky reflects on serving as juror on a weeklong criminal trial and maps courtroom dynamics onto product management. The post argues that trials offer a useful lens on soft skills like choosing the right…
Lenny Rachitsky argues that learning to work alongside AI tools like ChatGPT is quickly becoming a baseline skill for product managers, not something that replaces them. The post surveys a dozen concrete ways PMs…
Kyle Poyar argues that product-led growth (PLG) only works economically if customer acquisition cost stays near zero, roughly under $1 per unique website visitor. Using OpenView benchmark funnel math, he shows that a…
Lenny Rachitsky interviews Duolingo VP of Product Cem Kansu about how the company builds product. The post covers its co-lead team structure, quarterly and yearly OKR cycles, a tiered product review process, weekly…
A practical brainstorming list of growth tactics organized by funnel stage and team area: top-of-funnel acquisition (short and long term), monetization, conversion and activation, retention, and team velocity. The post…
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…
Lenny Rachitsky answers a reader worried about layoffs by compiling advice from people who were recently laid off. The post walks through seven preparation steps, including documenting accomplishments, rebuilding your…