Lenny Rachitsky answers a reader's question about which metrics matter for a consumer app, arguing the right metrics depend on how the business makes money. He walks through five consumer models (trial-based…
“I often get asked for book recommendations related to product management. This is a hard question to answer. There are a lot of great books out there. But I think the most important aspect of being a good product manager requires working from the perspective of the whole business. It'”
Hiten Shah traces how Square went from a 2009 idea born of a lost glassblowing sale to a company valued in the billions, by solving the costly problem of card acceptance for small businesses. He highlights the simple…
Lenny Rachitsky benchmarks what counts as good and great monthly SaaS churn, drawing on growth leaders and ProfitWell data across B2C, SMB/mid-market, and enterprise segments. He argues churn should be read by price…
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…
Marty Cagan argues that the product industry needs more skilled product coaches, and that many self-described coaches lack real product experience. He insists that effective product coaching must rest on relevant…
Lenny Rachitsky and growth advisor Yuriy Timen ran a benchmarking survey of over 500 product teams to answer what counts as a good activation rate. The article defines activation as the share of new users who reach a…
Teresa Torres argues that B2B and B2C discovery are less different than people assume, since most consumer products also serve multiple stakeholders such as advertisers or content providers. The key issue in enterprise…
Jason Fried describes an experiment for a free in-person Basecamp event in Chicago: attendees pay a $100 refundable deposit at registration and get the cash back at the door if they show up. The problem is that free…
Teresa Torres and Petra Wille discuss the practical pain of global invoicing and EU tax compliance for small international online businesses. They argue that platforms and product teams often miss small regulatory…
Lenny Rachitsky explains why marketplaces fail, drawing on dozens of failed examples. He argues the core causes mirror any startup: lacking product-market fit on demand or supply, poor liquidity, weak unit economics…
Marty Cagan argues that the true measure of a product manager is the success of their product, but that picking the right success metric is hard. He proposes the Net Promoter Score (NPS), which asks customers how likely…
Lenny Rachitsky reviews more than 140 of his angel investments, sharing seven surprises, a practical path into angel investing, and his startup evaluation criteria. His core argument is that access to good deals and a…
Lenny Rachitsky answers a SaaS founder's question about when a small startup should raise money and start hiring. His core guideline is to wait until product/market fit is found, since hiring before then slows a company…
Marty Cagan and Martina Lauchengco argue that the terms "product" and "solution" are often misused, especially in enterprise and infrastructure software. They define a real product as one customers pay for, that works…
Lenny Rachitsky and Louise Beryl analyze over 5,000 survey responses from newsletter subscribers to benchmark U.S. product manager salaries by level. The headline finding is the rise of the individual contributor path…
The post answers how to increase a product's virality, first arguing that virality should only be a primary growth engine when the product naturally suits it, versus performance marketing, content, or sales. It defines…
Lenny Rachitsky shares compensation benchmarks for product managers across the U.S., Europe, the U.K., and Canada, using Pave data drawn from over 23,000 PMs. The post breaks down base salary, equity, and total comp by…
Cagan argues that the traditional role of the salesperson is shrinking as customers now research, trial, and buy products online before ever talking to a rep. He identifies the main barriers that kept people buying…