Lenny explains the Minto Pyramid Principle (lead with the answer, then support it with arguments and data) and the Situation-Complication-Resolution (SCR) framework for structuring business narratives. He shows how…
Lenny uses the Lord of the Rings, especially Frodo's journey, as a lens for how product managers can build influence without relying on formal authority. He walks through seven strategies, each illustrated with Airbnb…
Shreyas Doshi argues that most people are poor listeners and that effective interpersonal communication can be built from a small set of foundational axioms rather than memorized tactics. The core idea is that once you…
Jules Walter, a product leader at Google formerly of YouTube and Slack, lays out five tactics for building influence as a PM: gathering intel on how stakeholders decide, framing proposals from their point of view…
“Q: What’s in your podcast stack? I’m approaching two years of podcasting (and just crossed 10M downloads and 3M YouTube views!), so now feels like a good time to reflect on how I got here. I was incredibly hesitant to start a podcast. There are a trillion podcasts, they’re a lot of work, and it’s so dorky to tell people you have a podcast 🤦. But thanks to a nudge from Harry Stebbings, and having a newsletter platform to help kickstart…”
Teresa Torres argues that product teams are sliding back into feature-factory habits as AI tools make shipping faster, and that stakeholders often arrive with solutions rather than problems. Her core advice is to stop…
Teresa Torres profiles Lisa Orr, a product manager who carried her continuous discovery habits from Airship to a new Senior PM role at Human API. The central argument is that good discovery is wasted unless stakeholders…
A reader asks how to manage up with a difficult manager, and the post answers with five practical tactics. The core argument is that managing up is a core skill at every level: communicate proactively, set realistic…
Shivani Berry, a former PM turned leadership coach, argues that buy-in comes from showing teammates how your idea advances their goals. She explains three common failure modes: assuming others think like you, feeling…
Teresa Torres argues that communication is a core product skill and adapts Paul Grice's conversational maxims into four guidelines for product managers: be truthful, be concise, be relevant, and be clear. She urges PMs…
Teresa Torres argues that product managers often fixate on having the 'right answer,' presenting finished backlogs and roadmaps that stakeholders then override with their own opinions. Her remedy is to show the…
Teresa Torres and Petra Wille argue that AI, which makes generating ideas and building products faster, does not remove the need for product managers because the core of product work is relationship work. Aligning…
Teresa Torres argues that product managers often feel frustrated when senior stakeholders override discovery-based recommendations with their own preferred solutions. Because organizations are hierarchies rather than…
Teresa Torres argues that product managers struggle to show stakeholders how they decide what to build, so people assume ideas just appear. Her remedy is radical transparency: define the problem, name the current…
Teresa Torres recounts a early-career design review in which a client dismissed her work as horrible and asked to reuse an existing homepage. Her manager defused the clash by asking her to walk through her reasoning…
Marty Cagan argues that as companies shift from stakeholder-driven feature teams to empowered product teams, the relationship between product teams and stakeholders must change on both sides. Creating a solution…
Teresa Torres argues that the handoff from product managers to engineers is harder than it looks, because the two groups hold different knowledge and often view the same problem from different angles. Drawing on…
This podcast episode features Teresa Torres and Petra Wille discussing how they build conference talks from scratch and how new speakers can get started. They share their distinct processes: Petra works with mind maps…
Executive coach Jack Cohen introduces GAIN, a framework for giving feedback by framing it around the gain people can achieve rather than the pain to avoid. It walks through each element (Goal, Actions, Impacts, Next…
Teresa Torres argues that product managers often make quick, gut-based calls when colleagues ask for features or details, and that the way decisions are made matters as much as the decisions themselves. Drawing on…
This podcast episode argues that conflict on a product team is normal and even healthy, while its total absence often signals a psychological safety problem. Petra Wille and Teresa Torres explore how trios should handle…
Marty Cagan argues that stakeholder management is a frequent pain point for product managers, but it can be substantially improved. He defines stakeholders narrowly as people who hold veto power over launching work…
Marty Cagan argues that as a company scales, the natural sharing of product learnings that happens in a small startup breaks down, so it must be done deliberately. He recommends a recurring, brief update, run by the VP…
Lenny Rachitsky marks his newsletter reaching 500,000 subscribers by sharing ten lessons from building it. His core argument is that quality and consistency matter far more than design, branding, or growth tactics. He…