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Substack · Shreyas Doshi♥ 324

10 ideas for 2026

Dec 30, 2025

Shreyas Doshi argues that clear thinking underpins everything product people do, yet most of us have significant gaps in how we reason. In this year-end essay he offers ten ideas for 2026, framed explicitly as useful to…

Lenny’s Podcast123 min

10 contrarian leadership truths every leader needs to hear

Matt MacInnis · Dec 28, 2025
Key learnings
  • Extraordinary outcomes require extraordinary effort; if people feel comfortable at work, something has gone wrong, and leaders…
  • Deliberately understaff projects, since overstaffing invites politics and pulls people onto low-priority work before it is clear…
  • Withholding feedback is selfish because it optimizes for your own comfort; escalate issues in public and give direct feedback…
Substack podcastDec 27, 2025

Is Writing Really Thinking: a deep-dive

Dec 27, 2025
Key learnings
  • Writing can sharpen thinking by forcing you to make vague ideas explicit and expose gaps in your reasoning.
  • The claim 'writing is thinking' is useful but overextended; not all thinking happens through writing, and writing alone does not…
  • Treat writing as one tool among several for thinking, alongside conversation, sketching, and deliberate reflection.
SVPG · Marty CaganDec 19, 2025

The Product Model at Google

Dec 19, 2025 · 11 min

Marty Cagan and Elias Lieberich describe how the product model shows up at Google, a company with nine products that each exceed one billion monthly users. The article frames the model around three parts: leaders…

Lenny’s Podcast117 min

Elena Verna 4.0

Elena Verna 4.0 · Dec 18, 2025
Key learnings
  • Expect most of your classic growth playbook to transfer poorly in fast-moving AI categories; Elena estimates only 30-40% of her…
  • Build in public: pair regular product shipping with founder-led and employee social posts so the market sees constant change and…
  • Give the product away generously, including credits for hackathons and events, since removing the barrier to trying an AI product…
Lenny’s Newsletter♥ 566

How to spot a top 1% startup early

Dec 9, 2025 · 12 min
Subscriber post — summary only

Guest author Terrence Rohan shares how five early employees who joined multiple iconic companies, including Palantir, OpenAI, Stripe, and Spotify, spotted breakout startups early. The post argues that three signals…

Lenny’s Podcast97 min

The 100-person AI lab that became Anthropic and Google's secret weapon

Edwin Chen · Dec 7, 2025
Key learnings
  • Define quality in rich, specific terms for each domain (e.g., what makes a poem Nobel-worthy, not just whether it has eight…
  • Gather thousands of signals on each worker and task, from background and expertise to performance, and use them like an ML…
  • Don't trust benchmarks at face value: many contain wrong answers, and optimizing for them can make models worse at messy…
Lenny’s Podcast88 min

Why LinkedIn is turning PMs into AI-powered "full stack builders”

Tomer Cohen · Dec 4, 2025
Key learnings
  • Prioritize clarity over being right: align the team on the problem and direction even if the bet might be wrong, since confusion…
  • Test whether a disagreement is real or just a misunderstanding by asking people to restate your point in their own words before…
  • Make sure stated priorities match resourcing; if your top initiative lacks your best engineers, the priority is not real.
HEY World · Jason FriedDec 3, 2025

Introducing Fizzy, our newest product

Dec 3, 2025

Jason Fried announces Fizzy, a new kanban-style card-and-column tool from the team behind Basecamp. He argues that popular issue-tracking tools like Trello, Jira, and Asana have grown bloated and complicated, drifting…

SVPG · Marty CaganDec 1, 2025

Stakeholders and the Product Model

Dec 1, 2025 · 7 min

Cagan and Jones argue that moving to a product operating model changes not just product teams but the business stakeholders who rely on them. The shift is from shipping feature roadmaps (output) to solving customer and…

Lenny’s Podcast100 min

What world-class GTM looks like in 2026

Jeanne Grosser · Nov 30, 2025
Key learnings
  • Treat go-to-market as an integrated lifecycle spanning marketing, sales, customer success, and support, mapping the jobs to be…
  • Expect the buyer experience of being sold to to become a differentiator, so design the sales journey as a distinctive, valuable…
  • Frame value around avoiding pain and reducing risk, since many buyers purchase to avoid downside rather than chase upside…
HEY World · Jason FriedNov 29, 2025

A beta is like inviting guests over

Nov 29, 2025

Jason Fried argues that the best time to invite outside users into a product is only a week or two before launch, when it is essentially a near-final release rather than an early beta. At that stage he is not seeking…

Lenny’s Podcast133 min

A guide to difficult conversations, building high-trust teams, and designing a life you love

Rachel Lockett · Nov 23, 2025
Key learnings
  • Coach instead of advising when the person has the context and skills to solve their own problem; advise only when urgency is high…
  • Practice three levels of listening, especially level-three global listening that attends to emotions, body language, and context…
  • Use the GROW model (goal, reality, options, way forward) as a flexible set of powerful questions to unlock someone's own solution.
Medium · Hiten ShahNov 21, 2025

The History of Website Heatmaps

Nov 21, 2025 · 25 min

This essay traces how website heatmaps emerged from a blind spot in early web analytics, which counted page destinations rather than the actual interactions visitors made. Two identically destined links were merged into…

Lenny’s Podcast109 min

Slack founder: Mental models for building products people love ft. Stewart Butterfield

Stewart Butterfield · Nov 20, 2025
Key learnings
  • Plot features on a utility curve to see whether extra investment is still on the steep part of the value gain or has reached…
  • Judge a product by whether users understand what it does; in many places the real challenge is comprehension, not friction, so…
  • Cultivate taste deliberately: taste can be trained, and leaning into craft can become a competitive advantage that less-attentive…