Lenny's Written Position
Product managers who learn to build with AI tools will have a significant career advantage — it's the most leveraged new skill to develop.
The PM job market is recovering, but the roles that are growing fastest require AI literacy — traditional PM skills alone are no longer sufficient.
The PM role is uniquely positioned to be augmented (not replaced) by AI because the core job is synthesis and judgment, not execution.
The most effective PMs in the AI era are those who can move between strategic thinking and hands-on building — the 'full-stack PM'.
One of the clearest markers of a future generational company is ambition that borders on ludicrous, where the founder's goals sound crazy to most people.
Judging a startup by its current product quality is a trap because almost every iconic product started as something rough or even completely different from what made it successful.
None of the serial early employees at iconic companies found their jobs through applications or recruiters; their paths were serendipitous and driven by personal connections.
The GAIN framework (Goal, Actions, Impacts, Next actions) is more effective than typical feedback because framing feedback around what someone stands to gain is more motivating than focusing on what to avoid.
Sharing observations of actions and their impacts is far more effective than making judgments, because critical judgments almost guarantee defensiveness and derail conversations.
Even flattering judgments like 'You're a rockstar PM' can destroy growth mindset and foster people-pleasing, because if success is attributed to brilliance then failure implies lack of it.
Saying 'I'm giving you these comments because I have very high expectations and I know you can reach them' more than quadrupled revision rates compared to a neutral framing.
Saying 'Feel free to say no' when making a request doubled the percentage of people who said yes, because supporting autonomy preempts resistance and engenders goodwill.
Acknowledging your own contribution to a problem before giving feedback is one of the most disarming approaches available, because it prevents the recipient from fixating on your role in the situation.
The best executive communication follows the SCQA structure: Situation (unambiguous facts), Complication (what's changed), Question (almost always 'What should we do?'), and Answer (resolves the complication 100%).
Schlep blindness causes founders to avoid hard, messy problems in favor of easy ones, but ambitious ideas are doubly valuable because they have intrinsic value and less competition since everyone else is frightened off.
The key to beating burnout is to systematically design a career and lifestyle that make burnout structurally unlikely, rather than relying on resilience or stress management.
Autonomy is the most critical ingredient to being happy at work, and burnout conquerors earn it by consistently delivering results to build trust.
Burnout conquerors overcommunicate not just what they are working on but how they work — their boundaries, constraints, strengths, and decision-making preferences — using a 'How I Work' document.
Burnout conquerors treat wellness as non-negotiable professional infrastructure, with exercise routines more like professional athletes than typical tech workers.
Burnout is organizational warfare, not a personal responsibility — free-pizza Fridays and free mental health sessions are band-aids that signal serious organizational dysfunction.
Who you work with matters more than almost anything else about the job, and choosing a job based on colleagues is the single most cited career choice for avoiding burnout.
Burnout conquerors use four tests to evaluate roles: the relationship test (who you work with), the Sunday test (how you feel before the work week), the energy test (does the work energize you), and the values alignment test (does culture match your core values).
Analytical thinking interviews should follow a five-step linear flow: assumptions and game plan, product rationale, metric framework, goal-setting, and tradeoff evaluation.
Never use averages or ratios as North Star metrics because if your NSM increases while your ecosystem actually shrinks, you get a false positive — a metric that looks great even as the product dies.
The critical 'altitude shift' from company-level metrics to team-level goals is where most candidates stumble, because tracking a metric is fundamentally different from executing against a specific goal.
If you cannot describe a metric to a data scientist in a way that they could run a query with, it is not a useful metric — always define metrics so specifically that someone could implement them tomorrow.
Top candidates in tradeoff evaluation specify what would need to be true for them to change their mind, because it solidifies how they think about the fundamental factors that influence their thinking.
Outlining your game plan at the start of an analytical thinking interview is like sitting down to play a game with someone who knows the rules — it signals to interviewers that you will generate the signals they need.
Almost half (44.67%) of tech workers are currently experiencing significant burnout, and burnout strongly correlates with quitting intentions and low engagement.
Startup founders are the happiest people in tech, scoring highest on career optimism, job enjoyment, engagement, and belonging while having the lowest burnout.
Hybrid workers feel significantly better about their jobs than in-office workers (21% sentiment gap), but in-office workers are slightly more optimistic about their long-term career prospects.
Small-company employees outperform large-company counterparts on nearly every work sentiment measure, and company size is one of the strongest predictors of positive sentiment.
Mid-career tech professionals (7-14 years experience) are struggling the most, showing higher burnout, higher quitting intentions, and lower job enjoyment than both early and late-career workers.
The transition from line manager to manager of managers has a learning curve that is just as steep or steeper than the IC-to-manager transition, yet organizations rarely recognize this.
The difference between standard and exceptional compensation outcomes is not skill or experience but a fundamental shift from asking what a company can offer you to demonstrating how you will solve their most pressing challenges.
Published salary ranges should never be treated as the final word on compensation because strategic negotiation can yield packages that are 2-4x the stated upper limit.
Gathering intelligence about organizational power dynamics, decision-maker psychology, and strategic pain points creates more negotiation leverage than showcasing credentials or experience.
Product leaders have an average tenure of 2.6 years, which is shorter than typical 4-year vesting schedules, making agreement engineering and term definition critical for long-term compensation.
Strategic patience in negotiations, including maintaining multiple opportunities and transparent timelines rather than rushing to accept, consistently produces dramatically better outcomes.
Product sense interviews assess five specific dimensions: clear communication, product motivation, segmentation, problem identification, and solution development, and excellence in one area cannot compensate for weakness in another.
Product sense and analytical thinking interviews originally popularized by Facebook and Google have now been widely adopted across the tech industry, including at Stripe, OpenAI, Block, and even earlier-stage companies.
The best candidates treat product sense interviews as a structured game with clear rules rather than a casual conversation, using waypointing, assumption setting, and game plan articulation to generate clear signals for interviewers.
Strong candidates should spend 3-5 minutes establishing product motivation before diving into segmentation and solutions, connecting the product to deeper human needs rather than just describing features.
Candidates should practice stating assumptions and game plans for 20-30 different product sense questions to build muscle memory and avoid blank-page anxiety during interviews.
Over a third of Palantir's PM alumni have started a company, making it the dominant company for producing founder PMs.
Intercom is the only company to rank in the top 10 on all four career acceleration dimensions for PMs: internal promotions, external promotions, fastest time to promotion, and fastest rise to leadership.
Over 20% of Chime's PM alumni go on to not just start a company but also raise a Series A, making it the top company for producing venture-scale founders.
Stripe PMs do not rank highly on traditional career metrics because they get hired as star PMs at rocketship companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Mercury rather than starting companies or climbing the ladder.
Product teams will shrink by 25-50% due to AI (mostly fewer engineers), while PMs will have more influence and leverage, spending more time in discovery and GTM and less in designing and building.
The median starting base salary for a PM in the U.S. is $112,000 at a public company and $96,000 at a private company, with a 90th-percentile senior IC PM hitting close to $1,000,000 in total comp.
New PM managers make less than senior ICs in total comp ($265,000 vs $425,000), and you have to reach M5 level to out-earn the most senior median IC PM.
U.K. PMs make 65% of what the average U.S. PM makes, Canadian PMs make 60%, and the average European PM makes less than 50% of U.S. PM compensation.
PM base salaries are 15-20% lower at private companies versus public companies, and over 25% lower for product executives, but this is offset by significantly higher equity at private companies.
The median chief product officer makes $1,425,000 in total comp, and the 90th percentile makes nearly $5,000,000.
Revolut, N26, eBay, Plaid, and Intercom are the top five companies that most accelerate PM careers based on promotions, rise to leadership, founder rate, and first-PM rate.
Fintech companies dominate the top 10 PM career accelerators with 5 out of 10 spots, likely because fintech work is on hard mode with complex risk, regulatory, and compliance challenges.
FAANG companies lag behind companies like eBay, Intuit, and LinkedIn in accelerating PM careers, possibly because PMs learn to operate well within that specific company but are less successful elsewhere.
Palantir is the standout company for fostering founders, with almost a quarter of its PM alumni going on to start their own company.
Humor is a learned skill, not a natural talent, and can be developed through studying and practicing specific strategies.
The core mechanism of humor is surprise, achieved through the strategic assembly of specific words spoken in a specific way.
Specificity in language increases humor potential and is risk-free because failed specific details are perceived as informative rather than as failed jokes.
While AI won't replace you directly, those who use AI effectively will have an advantage in promotions and job applications.
Senior individual contributor PMs often out-earn managers, with senior ICs earning a median of $187,500 vs. $162,500 for managers.
The correlation between total compensation and job satisfaction is only moderate (0.31), meaning more money does not strongly predict happiness in a role.
Job level is one of the strongest predictors of PM salary, far more than years of experience, which is actually an anti-pattern for predicting compensation.
The rise of the IC career path is reinforced by recent layoffs disproportionately affecting middle managers, flattening organizations.
Inner conflict between competing internal parts is the major hidden driver of productivity and burnout issues at work, not a lack of productivity tactics.
75% of tech professionals now prioritize salary over equity when evaluating job offers, a significant shift from the traditional 'maximize equity' wisdom.
Men are 2.3 times as likely as women to prefer equity over salary, and each increase in seniority level increases equity preference by a factor of 2.0.
U.S.-based employees are 1.75 times as likely to prioritize equity as those outside the U.S., while EU respondents are 42% less likely to prefer equity.
Prioritizing salary over equity is not necessarily short-sighted because a strong base salary amplifies overall compensation through percentage-based bonuses and raises.
Remote PM jobs have declined approximately 35% from their peak, dropping from over 35% of open roles to 22.5%.
Over one in five open PM roles is in the San Francisco Bay Area, with the share growing 25% year over year from 15.4% to over 20%.
Writing to-dos on pen and paper and rewriting them each morning on a fresh page is more effective than digital to-do apps because physical lists cannot be swiped away.
You can often back out of commitments your past self agreed to with minimal consequences, and the relief from doing so helps you get better at saying no in the first place.
Conducting both a time audit and an energy audit reveals the gap between your stated priorities and revealed preferences, informing how to restructure your schedule.
Product managers are the best-positioned role in tech to thrive in a world of AI because the PM job is an amalgamation of soft skills that AI will have the toughest time replacing.
The most valued skill set in tech will increasingly shift from building to knowing what to build, giving clear instructions, and having the taste to judge quality.
Engineers and designers with the strongest PM-type skills like identifying customer pain points, understanding business levers, and communicating clearly will do best in an AI world.
Many jobs across industries will start to look more like product management as AI handles execution and humans focus on directing, iterating, and driving adoption.
A top-tier PM with the skills to fully harness AI capabilities is going to be the most valuable role in tech.
Putting to-dos directly on your calendar as events is more effective than using a to-do app because your calendar is your personal roadmap and items not on the roadmap get ignored.
If a task takes less than two minutes, doing it immediately is more efficient than storing and tracking it in a system.
Setting up two to three recurring deep work blocks per week and fiercely protecting them from meeting encroachment is essential for getting real work done.
Most burnout and overwhelm comes not from a lack of productivity tools but from taking on too much work, making saying no the most important productivity skill.
Every successful person became successful because they were skilled at asking for help, and failing to build this muscle actively slows your career trajectory.
The fear of appearing incompetent when asking for help is usually unfounded; people rarely perceive someone as weak or burdensome when they make a thoughtful, unentitled ask.
Effective help requests follow a six-part structure: signpost, clear request, rationale, why them, timeline, and opt-in/out.
Product managers' pride in ownership of problems often makes them resist asking for help, but asking for help actually increases agency, builds higher-trust relationships, and models psychological safety.
There are five distinct types of help you can seek: perspective gathering, information/knowledge, task progression, empathetic support, and advocacy.
Growth roles are the fastest-growing product-adjacent roles in the U.S., growing much faster than sales and marketing roles, potentially signaling an increasing focus on product-led growth.
Product management roles are not shrinking despite layoff fears; there are about 450,000 active PMs in the U.S. with 2,500 to 4,500 being hired each month, holding steady after a 2022 hiring acceleration.
User research is the second-fastest-growing role after going through massive layoffs, as companies realized they went too far in cutting UXR teams.
Scrum master is the only product-adjacent role that is actively shrinking, with more people being let go than hired each month.
Product owner roles are the third-fastest-growing role with around 65,000 active roles, likely partly explained by former scrum masters transitioning to this title.
In blind tests, AI-generated answers beat human PM answers in two out of three core PM tasks (product strategy, defining KPIs, and estimating ROI), with 70-80% of voters correctly identifying the AI answer but still often preferring it.
Most people underestimate how close AI is to replacing human work because evaluations typically use outdated models without prompt engineering, which can yield a 50-60% accuracy boost.
Despite empowered teams being dramatically more popular in stated preference, the majority of PMs still operate on feature teams, often for practical reasons like compensation, visa sponsorship, or not knowing what they are missing.
Feature team PMs who try to behave like empowered PMs without executive support typically deplete their social capital, get perceived as slowing velocity, and get dinged on performance reviews.
The product work on feature teams and empowered teams is largely the same (PRDs, design partnership, research, sales enablement), with empowered teams adding opportunity identification and post-launch iteration.
The key test for whether to say yes to an opportunity is asking 'Would I be excited about this if it were tomorrow?' because it is incredibly easy to say yes to things months in the future that you will regret.
Creating and communicating personal policies like 'I don't do talks or events' is more effective than evaluating each request individually, because people understand and accept policies without taking offense.
Not replying at all often feels better to the recipient than a half-hearted reply, because busy people know you are busy and will assume you did not see the message or it was not a fit.
People who become successful quickly often disappear just as fast because they cannot resist the distraction of new opportunities that take time away from the work that made them successful.
Technical PMs or engineers with product taste will become the most valuable people at a company over time as AI reduces the need for process management and people-guiding skills.
Your first 90 days at a new job have an outsize impact on your next one to two years because they establish trust, influence, and reputation within the org.
AI will have the most profound impact on historically high-value PM skills like strategy, vision, and goal-setting rather than on soft skills like communication, collaboration, and being the glue of a team.
The PM role will not go away but will become even more important, with soft skills like influence, communication, product sense, and creativity becoming increasingly valuable differentiators.
The most revealing interview questions explore times when things did not go as planned, because you learn the most about how a person operates, thinks, and collaborates from their failures.
Most first PMs were IC-level or senior PMs, and nearly a quarter were engineers transitioning into the PM role, rather than directors or VPs.
The Magic Loop for career growth is a five-step process: do your current job well, ask your manager how you can help, do what they ask, ask for work that grows your skills toward a goal, then repeat.
Managers are very rarely offered help by their direct reports, so simply offering to help makes you stand out and creates a collaborative relationship that leads to career growth.
The advanced form of the Magic Loop is to progress from asking what needs to be done, to suggesting ideas, to simply seeing what is needed and doing it autonomously.
Quality plus consistency is all that matters for newsletter growth; design, title, strategy, and growth plans are secondary to publishing valuable content people want to share repeatedly.
Before going all-in on content creation, spend at least 10 years doing the actual work first, because real-life experience is what allows you to contribute something new to the conversation.
For interview prep, pick 3-5 recent major projects and recall every detail about them rather than writing answers to hundreds of behavioral questions, because deep recall of a few projects prevents brain overload and blackouts.
Use STAR++ for behavioral questions: after stating Situation, Tasks, Actions, and Results, add what you learned and how you evolved your approach in a future situation to demonstrate growth mindset.
Interviews are often won or lost by the questions you ask the interviewer at the end; formulating high-signal questions that show you have done your research gets interviewers thinking and makes you stand out.
Start your parental leave coverage plan at least 3-4 months before your due date, assign a single DRI per project or focus area, and finalize the plan one month before the due date in case the baby comes early.
Do not share your contact information broadly during parental leave; plan for very limited or no availability especially in the first few weeks, and let your manager be the single point of contact for emergencies.
Viewing your calendar as an energy management tool and mapping energy levels across the week reveals obvious killers like meeting-heavy Mondays and back-to-back meetings that cause progressive burnout.
Tactical deep breathing with a 2:1 exhale-to-inhale ratio stimulates the parasympathetic nervous system and can calm you down before product reviews or after difficult meetings in as little as 20-30 seconds.
The best way to prepare for the AI future in product management is to dive in and get your hands dirty rather than waiting for the technology to mature.
The single most important thing to do to prepare for potential layoffs is to document your accomplishments with metrics, screenshots, and stories while you still have access.
Creating distance between your work identity and your personal identity is essential preparation for career disruptions like layoffs.
If you want to be great at building product, your preparation should look more like a professional athlete's than someone winging it.
Trust in the workplace works like a battery that you charge by doing things that build trust and tap into when you need people to trust you.
The more you rely on authority to get things done, the more your own authority fades because you become just a middle person without your own voice or decision-making powers.
Two-thirds of companies have both an IC track and a manager track for product managers, with the split typically occurring at the Senior Product Manager level (L6).
The most common PM title sequence is APM to PM to Senior PM to Principal PM on the IC track, and GPM to Director to Senior Director to VP on the management track.
The most common attributes evaluated in PM career ladders are leadership, impact, scope, execution, communication, vision, strategy, collaboration, planning, and technical skills in that order.
PM interview preparation has three parts: research the product and company, practice with real people through mock interviews, and study frameworks and core PM skills.
Preparing for PM interviews gives candidates a big leg up even with just a few hours of effort, despite interviewers believing they can see through preparation to a candidate's true PM nature.
Professionals should define their personal range of tolerance using three lists: intolerables to completely avoid, self-imposed boundaries that promote health, and a plan to flourish with items that put you in your optimal zone.
Mind hours, the time your nervous system is preoccupied with work stress outside of office hours, are the most emotionally taxing part of career progression and most people underestimate how many they accumulate.
Nearly 50% of tech professionals surveyed had thought about changing careers at least three times because it was not worth it, and another 50% had cried because of work at least twice.
A career is better modeled as a series of S-curves stacked on top of each other, with acceleration phases followed by necessary recovery periods, rather than a single continuous upward trajectory.
A PM's job is to deliver business impact by marshaling the resources of their team to identify and solve the most impactful customer problems.
Sabbaticals are a peak life experience ranked alongside having a baby or getting married, and not a single person out of 250+ interviewed has regretted taking extended time off.
Podcast Moments
“Being an IC across this past year gave me so many hard skills I wouldn't have gained if I was just managing. The design process has changed so much that I think design managers need to move back into IC work to truly understand what is happening, so they can be better managers.”
Jenny Wen · Jenny Wen
“Persistence beats intellect, and stamina beats intellect any day of the week, twice on Sunday. The biggest reason successful leaders win is not that they're the smartest — it's that they have enormous staying power in the game.”
Jeetu Patel · Jeetu Patel
“The platform that you choose and the quality of problems that you pick to solve determine a lot of the path of success for you. Harder problems attract better people, and business is a team sport.”
Jeetu Patel · Jeetu Patel
“In a year or two, it's not going to matter. Coding is virtually solved. I imagine a world where everyone is able to program, anyone can just build software any time.”
Boris Cherny · Boris Cherny
“I look for four things in CEOs — my LOCK algorithm. L is for lovable — can I envision following this person? O is obsession with the problem. C is chip on the shoulder. K is deeply knowledgeable about the domain. And I'd add S for student — the best ones are deep, deep students of the game.”
Sequoia CEO coach: Why it’s never been easier to start a company, and never been harder to scale one | Brian Halligan (co-founder, HubSpot) · Brian Halligan
“Boundaries are what you tell someone else you will do, and it requires the other person to do nothing. Too often people confuse requests with boundaries.”
A child psychologist’s guide to working with difficult adults | Dr. Becky Kennedy · Dr. Becky Kennedy
“Optimizing for happiness in childhood is the quickest way to build anxiety and fragility in adulthood. When we're thinking about a resilient work culture, we want people who can say, 'This is hard and I can do hard things.'”
A child psychologist’s guide to working with difficult adults | Dr. Becky Kennedy · Dr. Becky Kennedy
“Dealing with anxiety is a combination of 'I believe you and I believe in you.' Picture someone in a hole — they need you to have one foot in the hole with them and one foot outside.”
A child psychologist’s guide to working with difficult adults | Dr. Becky Kennedy · Dr. Becky Kennedy
“Every PM in the world should be learning to build with AI tools. Not because they'll replace engineers, but because the ability to prototype changes the entire product development cycle.”
Marc Andreessen: The real AI boom hasn’t even started yet · Marc Andreessen
“There has to be a deeper truth to it. There's a serious real narrative to why etiquette matters in 2025 for founders.”
How to show up in any room with a low heart rate: Silicon Valley’s missing etiquette playbook | Sam Lessin · Sam Lessin
“Etiquette is a skill for how to show up in a room with a low heart rate. You kind of want to show up with the self-confidence and the calm of abundance.”
How to show up in any room with a low heart rate: Silicon Valley’s missing etiquette playbook | Sam Lessin · Sam Lessin
“Coming in and saying 'Hey let me give you my four-minute startup spiel' is so self-centered. Think of it like ping pong — hit the ball back.”
How to show up in any room with a low heart rate: Silicon Valley’s missing etiquette playbook | Sam Lessin · Sam Lessin
“In high-growth, you have to hire for the role people will grow into, not the role they're perfect for today. The job changes every 6-12 months.”
The high-growth handbook: Molly Graham’s frameworks for leading through chaos, change, and scale · Molly Graham
“You don't really learn from your mistakes, you learn from your successes. As an early career PM, you should join a winning team.”
10 contrarian leadership truths every leader needs to hear | Matt MacInnis (Rippling) · Matt MacInnis
“The standard playbook is to get product market fit by pivoting every two weeks, chase growth with dark patterns, blitz scale. I've always disagreed. Just build the one thing only you could build.”
The 100-person AI lab that became Anthropic and Google's secret weapon | Edwin Chen (Surge AI) · Edwin Chen
“We're calling it the 'full-stack builder.' A PM who can prototype, run evals, analyze data, and ship small features independently. This is the new bar at LinkedIn.”
Why LinkedIn is turning PMs into AI-powered "full stack builders” | Tomer Cohen (LinkedIn CPO) · Tomer Cohen
“The PMs who are thriving right now are the ones who see AI as expanding their capabilities, not threatening their role. They're building things they never could before.”
Why LinkedIn is turning PMs into AI-powered "full stack builders” | Tomer Cohen (LinkedIn CPO) · Tomer Cohen
“There's actually three levels to listening. Level one is internal. Level two is focused. Level three is global listening — you hear what they're communicating, not just saying.”
A guide to difficult conversations, building high-trust teams, and designing a life you love | Rachel Lockett · Rachel Lockett
“We operate in tech. We're supposed to give all of ourselves purely logically. That's not at all true. The goal of any conflict is to create mutual understanding.”
A guide to difficult conversations, building high-trust teams, and designing a life you love | Rachel Lockett · Rachel Lockett
“My litmus test is 80%. If you're 80% of the time in your gifts, how much energy you have to give to the world.”
A guide to difficult conversations, building high-trust teams, and designing a life you love | Rachel Lockett · Rachel Lockett
“You need to be the physical manifestation of relentlessness. My wife described me in one word: dissatisfied. It's not unhappiness — you want to make it better.”
Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · Robby Stein
“From an entrepreneurship standpoint, it truly is about what insight do I have? Why am I so lucky to have this insight?”
First interview with Scale AI’s CEO: $14B Meta deal, what’s working in enterprise AI, and what frontier labs are building next | Jason Droege · Jason Droege
“The psychological muscle you have to build is to look into the abyss and go, 'that way's slightly better.' If everybody agrees, you didn't add value.”
$46B of hard truths from Ben Horowitz: Why founders fail and why you need to run toward fear (a16z co-founder) · Ben Horowitz
“All plane crashes are a series of bad decisions. None by themselves is that bad. Success works the same way.”
$46B of hard truths from Ben Horowitz: Why founders fail and why you need to run toward fear (a16z co-founder) · Ben Horowitz
“A CEO said, 'My CTO is an asshole.' He didn't want to fire him. That's what you're really saying — you don't know how to have the hard conversation.”
$46B of hard truths from Ben Horowitz: Why founders fail and why you need to run toward fear (a16z co-founder) · Ben Horowitz
“Absolutely yes, you should still learn to code. Most of what you're learning is the ability to logically break down problems.”
How Devin replaces your junior engineers with infinite AI interns that never sleep | Scott Wu (Cognition CEO) · Scott Wu
“Jevons Paradox says that as the price goes down, total spend can go up. As programming becomes more effective, we're going to have a lot more programmers.”
How Devin replaces your junior engineers with infinite AI interns that never sleep | Scott Wu (Cognition CEO) · Scott Wu
“I've learned that optimism is a renewable resource. Satya's ability to generate energy and renew dedication to the mission is unbelievable.”
How 80,000 companies build with AI: products as organisms, the death of org charts, and why agents will outnumber employees by 2026 | Asha Sharma (CVP of AI Platform at Microsoft) · Asha Sharma
“We had this motto: leave nothing to chance. There will never be a time like this. I've never seen anything like it.”
Inside the expert network training every frontier AI model | Garrett Lord (Handshake CEO) · Garrett Lord
“That's not what we're hearing from employers. Being AI native, young people are at a huge advantage.”
Inside the expert network training every frontier AI model | Garrett Lord (Handshake CEO) · Garrett Lord
“The PM role is evolving faster than any other role in tech. The PMs who survive are the ones who keep redefining their own job description every six months.”
The one question that saves product careers | Matt LeMay · Matt LeMay
“Curiosity is an attribute that we think matters so much more than your ML knowledge.”
Inside ChatGPT: The fastest-growing product in history | Nick Turley (Head of ChatGPT at OpenAI) · Nick Turley
“I was mentoring Brian, but he was also my boss. I was 52, the average age was 26. I had to be both wise and curious.”
Brian Chesky's secret mentor who died 9 times, started the Burning Man board, and built the world's first midlife wisdom school | Chip Conley (founder of MEA) · Chip Conley
“If what AI cannot do is the human wisdom piece, is it possible that older managers with more emotional intelligence can be a value?”
Brian Chesky's secret mentor who died 9 times, started the Burning Man board, and built the world's first midlife wisdom school | Chip Conley (founder of MEA) · Chip Conley
“Show up with curiosity and a passionate engagement. People won't notice your wrinkles as much as they'll notice your energy.”
Brian Chesky's secret mentor who died 9 times, started the Burning Man board, and built the world's first midlife wisdom school | Chip Conley (founder of MEA) · Chip Conley
“We are moving from the era of specialists to generalists. AI is accelerating this.”
Brian Chesky's secret mentor who died 9 times, started the Burning Man board, and built the world's first midlife wisdom school | Chip Conley (founder of MEA) · Chip Conley
“I think the PM of the future looks more like a product engineer. Someone who can think strategically but also build and test ideas rapidly. The line between PM and engineer is blurring.”
He saved OpenAI, invented the “Like” button, and built Google Maps: Bret Taylor on the future of careers, coding, agents, and more · Bret Taylor
“In a world of abundance where labor is almost free, what do jobs even look like?”
Benjamin Mann · Benjamin Mann
“The talent wars are real. The expected value of a top researcher is just astronomical.”
Benjamin Mann · Benjamin Mann
“You don't want to walk into the gym on day one and try and deadlift 300 pounds.”
I’ve run 75+ businesses. Here’s why you’re probably chasing the wrong idea. | Andrew Wilkinson (co‑founder of Tiny) · Andrew Wilkinson
“Language actually affects the way you think. Once I heard that and read that, I couldn't stop thinking about it because it just rang so true. When I make slide decks, there were probably a total of 20 words on the entire slide deck. And I spent hours obsessing over them because if you're not intentional about the words you use, those have downstream effects.”
From ChatGPT to Instagram to Uber: The quiet architect behind the world’s most popular products | Peter Deng · Peter Deng
“Product leadership is the type of role where if you are not in control of the voices in your head, they will eat you alive.”
How to build a team that can “take a punch”: A playbook for building resilient, high-performing teams | Hilary Gridley (Head of Core Product, Whoop) · Hilary Gridley
“If they come to me upset, I try to focus them less on how you litigate another person's impression of you and more on what is the action that you can take to counter-program the narrative that you are afraid that this other person has of you.”
How to build a team that can “take a punch”: A playbook for building resilient, high-performing teams | Hilary Gridley (Head of Core Product, Whoop) · Hilary Gridley
“I talk about what I call the magic questions, but the thing about magic questions is they're not actually questions, they're statements and they end with, 'Do you agree?' or 'Is that right?' You're teasing out the mental model rather than asking them to explain it to you.”
How to build a team that can “take a punch”: A playbook for building resilient, high-performing teams | Hilary Gridley (Head of Core Product, Whoop) · Hilary Gridley
“You can be the protagonist in the story of your family, but in the story of your company, you are probably not the protagonist. Some of the best advice I've gotten in my life is: you're not special. Your job is to understand what the CEO's vision is and figure out how to operationalize that.”
How to build a team that can “take a punch”: A playbook for building resilient, high-performing teams | Hilary Gridley (Head of Core Product, Whoop) · Hilary Gridley
“I went to Pinterest and did not have a successful time. I came in thinking I was supposed to behave the way I behaved at Apple, which is very direct, fighting hard. I didn't give myself time to recalibrate to the Pinterest culture.”
35 years of product design wisdom from Apple, Disney, Pinterest, and beyond | Bob Baxley · Bob Baxley
“I've very explicitly been using AI as a life coach. One prompt was, 'What's an outdated mindset that I'm holding onto that's not still serving me?' It came back with a very polite response about being wedded to the idea of control. It suggested: try to focus on choreography over control.”
35 years of product design wisdom from Apple, Disney, Pinterest, and beyond | Bob Baxley · Bob Baxley
“John Hobolt risked his whole career sending a memo to champion Lunar Orbit Rendezvous when no one at NASA believed in it. Ideas need champions. They need champions willing to put themselves on the line for them. Have the courage of your convictions and fight as hard as you can.”
35 years of product design wisdom from Apple, Disney, Pinterest, and beyond | Bob Baxley · Bob Baxley
“The conventional wisdom for many CMOs is to be a T-shaped marketer. I think this chameleon CMO concept means modern marketing leaders have to be really good at a bunch of different things. Maybe going from T-shaped to comb-shaped is probably the right approach.”
Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman · Krithika Shankarraman
“Alex Allgood had a floating desk. He would move his desk to the department which had the highest leverage opportunity. He would sit there until that problem was solved. You could literally visualize him working on the highest leverage problem by his desk moving.”
Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · Mayur Kamat
“A full calendar is a badge of shame, not a badge of honor. If you have hundreds of meetings, hundreds of one-on-ones, daily standups, a lot of recurring meetings, you just can't find time to go work on high leverage problems.”
Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · Mayur Kamat
“I was working on this idea that should just work and it didn't. I tried to make personalization work in Google Search. Then I started working on Google Now, which was a twist: on the phone, we should push content. That was a pivotal moment. Being early is the same as being wrong.”
Microsoft CPO: If you aren’t prototyping with AI, you’re doing it wrong | Aparna Chennapragada · Aparna Chennapragada
“Everyone is striving for talented, skillful, smart people. Revolut values way more raw intellect and this unquenched hunger to build things rather than experience.”
How Revolut trains world-class product managers: The “local CEO” model, raw intellect over experience, and a cultural obsession with building wow products | Dmitry Zlokazov (Head of Product) · Dmitry Zlokazov
“We started building a website that allows people to buy cinema tickets online. We built end-to-end hardware, stainless steel scanners, hacked the SMS standard to send QR codes to Nokia phones. We spent all our investment on hardware without any proven business model. We were just enjoying building a product we would love to use.”
How Revolut trains world-class product managers: The “local CEO” model, raw intellect over experience, and a cultural obsession with building wow products | Dmitry Zlokazov (Head of Product) · Dmitry Zlokazov
“If you're excited to build certain things, never hesitate to do it. The best way is probably your own startup, which will give you the steepest possible learning curve, but if you want to join a company, try to choose the one that has the highest entrepreneurial spirit and will allow you to work as close to a mode of a founder as you possibly can.”
How Revolut trains world-class product managers: The “local CEO” model, raw intellect over experience, and a cultural obsession with building wow products | Dmitry Zlokazov (Head of Product) · Dmitry Zlokazov
“They were extremely careful about only making people PMs who had first proven themselves out as forward deployed engineers. You basically could not become a PM any other way.”
How Palantir built the ultimate founder factory | Nabeel S. Qureshi (founder, writer, ex-Palantir) · Nabeel S. Qureshi
“I think it's very hard to not be anchored to your own experience and your conceptions of a problem. One thing I've seen in really strong founders is they're able to drop a bunch of those assumptions and almost treat a new opportunity as a completely blank slate.”
How Palantir built the ultimate founder factory | Nabeel S. Qureshi (founder, writer, ex-Palantir) · Nabeel S. Qureshi
“The question that I often ask is how have I been complicit in creating the conditions I say I don't want. The purpose of this question is actually to evoke your own agency.”
How have I been complicit in creating the conditions I say I don’t want? | Jerry Colonna (CEO of Reboot, executive coach, former VC) · Jerry Colonna
“When we become attached to the outcome, we inadvertently fuel our own suffering. The deeper attachment is see, I'm not nothing. See, I'm not a nobody, I'm a somebody, and that's the source of the suffering.”
How have I been complicit in creating the conditions I say I don’t want? | Jerry Colonna (CEO of Reboot, executive coach, former VC) · Jerry Colonna
“Teams are groups, and there are group dynamics that always happen. Until you make conscious the unconscious patterns operating in the group, the group will continue to repeat those patterns and you will blame somebody in the group.”
How have I been complicit in creating the conditions I say I don’t want? | Jerry Colonna (CEO of Reboot, executive coach, former VC) · Jerry Colonna
“When we get too fixed on the proper way to do things, we're setting ourselves up for attachment and therefore suffering. Stay attached to the growth and hold mindset a little loosely.”
How have I been complicit in creating the conditions I say I don’t want? | Jerry Colonna (CEO of Reboot, executive coach, former VC) · Jerry Colonna
“There were personally times when suddenly I saw how my biggest strength, like mastering all the details and having everything in my head, created damage by continuing to do the same thing. Don't be afraid to let go of things that you think are superpowers.”
Inside monday.com’s transformation: radical transparency, impact over output, and their path to $1B ARR | Daniel Lereya (Chief Product and Technology Officer) · Daniel Lereya
“Think about LLMs as Oracles that can write software for you, but there's a limit. It's not writing the compiler from scratch. The engineers that learn foundational infrastructure are probably going to be extremely empowered still, for years to come.”
Everyone’s an engineer now: Inside v0’s mission to create a hundred million builders | Guillermo Rauch (founder and CEO of Vercel, creators of v0 and Next.js) · Guillermo Rauch
“You can continue to think that way and your career might be fine, but if you embrace that if you manage your boss, they're going to appreciate you much more, you're going to get more opportunities, you're going to have more trust with them.”
Become a better communicator: Specific frameworks to improve your clarity, influence, and impact | Wes Kao (coach, entrepreneur, advisor) · Wes Kao
“As you move up the triangle of the content hierarchy of BS, there's less and less room for BS. In a cohort-based course where your students are right there with you, if you're saying something that doesn't really make sense, there could be a whole conversation happening in Zoom chat.”
Become a better communicator: Specific frameworks to improve your clarity, influence, and impact | Wes Kao (coach, entrepreneur, advisor) · Wes Kao
“The idea behind the state change method is that you should punctuate your monologues with state changes. State changes are anything that shakes your audience awake and adds variety. Every three to five minutes, go ahead and put in a state change.”
Become a better communicator: Specific frameworks to improve your clarity, influence, and impact | Wes Kao (coach, entrepreneur, advisor) · Wes Kao
“When you're talking to someone and explaining something, there's usually a moment where their eyes light up because they are genuinely interested. Make note of those moments because their face can't lie. Cut out all the parts that make people go dead in the eyes.”
Become a better communicator: Specific frameworks to improve your clarity, influence, and impact | Wes Kao (coach, entrepreneur, advisor) · Wes Kao
“Alex would always talk about trade-offs. He'd say, 'Yes, I can design this PDF for you. That means the thing I was going to work on today will have to wait.' It went from a conversation about yes or no into how do we make sure the right things get done.”
Become a better communicator: Specific frameworks to improve your clarity, influence, and impact | Wes Kao (coach, entrepreneur, advisor) · Wes Kao
“It's always good to just have the perspective of, you should start companies to keep the mindset that you're doing it to have fun. So, stoked to see where this goes, one way or the other. It's going to be interesting.”
Inside Bolt: From near-death to ~$40m ARR in 5 months—one of the fastest-growing products in history | Eric Simons (founder and CEO of StackBlitz) · Eric Simons
“I think the number one most important skill when AI can do more and more is taste, like having really good taste for what to build and what is a great product. And so in some ways, the people that are like the best product people, like you, I actually think they're going to become more and more important over time.”
Building Lovable: $10M ARR in 60 days with 15 people | Anton Osika (co-founder and CEO) · Anton Osika
“I think if you spend a full week on trying to reach an outcome, the best way to learn is I want to do this thing and then I want to use AI to do that thing. And you've spent a full week, you are in the top 1% in the global population. And if you surround yourself with friends who have this obsession or they also care a lot about this, then you'd be quickly in the top 0.1%.”
Building Lovable: $10M ARR in 60 days with 15 people | Anton Osika (co-founder and CEO) · Anton Osika
“The opt in is important, and it may even be that you want to opt in at one point in your life, and maybe at another point in your life something else is better. Whatever it is you're choosing to do, it's nice to be opting in to feel like it's aligned with how you want to spend your time.”
An inside look at X’s Community Notes | Keith Coleman (VP of Product) and Jay Baxter (ML Lead) · Keith Coleman & Jay Baxter
“When I first came to Anthropic and I was like, 'Oh my God, I really love front-end engineering.' And then the reason why I switched to research is because I realized, 'Oh my God, Claude is getting better at front-end. Claude is getting better at coding.'”
OpenAI researcher on why soft skills are the future of work | Karina Nguyen (Research at OpenAI, ex-Anthropic) · Karina Nguyen
“I only lived one life, so I can't Monte Carlo all the decisions I make and just figure out which ones ended up being load bearing.”
Tobi Lutke · Tobi Lutke
“Imagine that you're walking home from work, you see this bright, shiny object, and you realize it's a magic lamp. And you rub the lamp and this genie comes out and the genie says, 'Hey, I can give you one wish. Whatever you throw yourself into with your whole life and your career, it's going to turn out great.'”
How to break out of autopilot and create the life you want | Graham Weaver (Stanford GSB professor, founder of Alpine Investors) · Graham Weaver
“Most people are on autopilot. They're making decisions based on what they fell into, not what they actually want. Breaking out of autopilot requires you to first notice you're on it.”
How to break out of autopilot and create the life you want | Graham Weaver (Stanford GSB professor, founder of Alpine Investors) · Graham Weaver
“The hard path and the easy path both take the same amount of time. The hard path is the one where you do the thing you're afraid of. The easy path is the one where you avoid it. But at the end of your life, the hard path gives you a much better outcome.”
How to break out of autopilot and create the life you want | Graham Weaver (Stanford GSB professor, founder of Alpine Investors) · Graham Weaver
“Write down the things you're tolerating. The things you're putting up with that you know you shouldn't be. That list is your roadmap for transformation.”
How to break out of autopilot and create the life you want | Graham Weaver (Stanford GSB professor, founder of Alpine Investors) · Graham Weaver
“Why is it that product management is still such a relatively undeveloped discipline? We're like 15 to 20 years into this, and so there's something about the current state of product management that isn't getting at the truly important things.”
Why great AI products are all about the data | Shaun Clowes (CPO Confluent, ex-Salesforce, Atlassian) · Shaun Clowes
“If we were doctors, you'd be like, 'That's totally unacceptable.' Imagine if after 20 years of medical practice, most doctors still couldn't reliably diagnose common conditions.”
Why great AI products are all about the data | Shaun Clowes (CPO Confluent, ex-Salesforce, Atlassian) · Shaun Clowes
“If you do the hard path and it doesn't work, actually you still win because you've now done something hard. You've probably worked with smart people. You've learned something along the way that is valuable.”
How Shopify builds a high-intensity culture | Farhan Thawar (VP and Head of Eng) · Farhan Thawar
“Everything you know is wrong. The reason I like that one is it's this notion of if all the knowledge you knew was incorrect, could you from first principles build up a view of the world?”
How Shopify builds a high-intensity culture | Farhan Thawar (VP and Head of Eng) · Farhan Thawar
“The founders who scale are the ones who realize that their job description changes every six months. What got you here won't get you there, and that's not a failure, it's the nature of the journey.”
How a great founder becomes a great CEO | Jonathan Lowenhar (co-founder of Enjoy The Work) · Jonathan Lowenhar
“Taste is about the ability to identify what is really good without needing to see its results. It requires zero taste right now for anybody to say Jensen is a genius. To be able to say that in 2010, that requires taste.”
Shreyas Doshi Live · Shreyas Doshi Live
“Our jobs get frustrating when we behave, most of the time, in misalignment with our superpowers and who we truly are at our core. I have a preferred level at which I like to operate.”
Shreyas Doshi Live · Shreyas Doshi Live
“A PM cannot outsource their perspective or delegate their thinking through people and process. For me that has been a learning curve and I am trying to, as someone who's very consensus driven, I want to hear all the different opinions from all the different people. I can still do that... and then use all of that to synthesize my own.”
Meta’s Head of Product (and 29th employee) on working with Mark Zuckerberg, early growth tactics, why PMs are like conductors, and more | Naomi Gleit · Naomi Gleit
“The biggest thing that I can do to improve my surfing is to improve my confidence. The best thing you can actually do in that situation is stand up into your fear, is to ride the wave. That is the safest thing you can do.”
Meta’s Head of Product (and 29th employee) on working with Mark Zuckerberg, early growth tactics, why PMs are like conductors, and more | Naomi Gleit · Naomi Gleit
“When people say, 'I want someone that's strategic,' what they're really saying is, 'I want someone that can come up with and articulate a compelling and simple why behind the decisions and the direction of the company and product.'”
Becoming more strategic, navigating difficult colleagues, harnessing founder mode, and more | Anneka Gupta (Chief Product Officer at Rubrik) · Anneka Gupta
“The second piece is, 'I want someone that's going to champion and be a change agent to do things that may be hard but actually best for the long-term interest of the product or company, even though those things are not going to be easy to execute on.' And I think if you have one without the other, ultimately people are not going to see you as strategic.”
Becoming more strategic, navigating difficult colleagues, harnessing founder mode, and more | Anneka Gupta (Chief Product Officer at Rubrik) · Anneka Gupta
“People tend to get into a public speaking voice. We'll be in a class and they'll be chatting normally and look super normal. And then we'll say, 'Okay, now just a timer, I'm just going to give you a speech. Just speak for 60 seconds so we get a baseline,' and I click play, and suddenly they enter into a different version of themselves, a professional version.”
Why most public speaking advice is wrong—and how to finally overcome your speaking anxiety | Tristan de Montebello (CEO & co-founder of Ultraspeaking) · Tristan de Montebello
“The games are meant to put you in a state of turbulence and find out what was easy, what was hard, what am I noticing? If you did a rep and you got it and it went perfectly, then you're learning nothing. A really easy rep is not worth much. The only reps that are worth something are the ones where you feel an edge.”
Why most public speaking advice is wrong—and how to finally overcome your speaking anxiety | Tristan de Montebello (CEO & co-founder of Ultraspeaking) · Tristan de Montebello
“It's so much more freeing, powerful, connecting, and effective to speak conversation.”
Why most public speaking advice is wrong—and how to finally overcome your speaking anxiety | Tristan de Montebello (CEO & co-founder of Ultraspeaking) · Tristan de Montebello
“Get clear on your objective function, and one way that I've gotten clear on it is trying to think about it from future me because five years from now, I'm not going to give a if I made the presentation slightly better, but I'm going to care a lot about what kind of relationship I have with my daughters.”
Becoming a conscious leader: Leading without fear, finding your life’s objective function, and getting better at vision and strategy | John Mark Nickels (Uber, Waymo, DoorDash) · John Mark Nickels
“Not to be morbid, but most of us just aren't really tuned into an awareness that our lives will come to an end. We try to pretend like we're going to live forever and just not think about it. And the horror of it is that we succeed. To me, an awareness and mindfulness that our lives will come to an end punctuates reality in a way that requires me to rethink my priorities.”
Becoming a conscious leader: Leading without fear, finding your life’s objective function, and getting better at vision and strategy | John Mark Nickels (Uber, Waymo, DoorDash) · John Mark Nickels
“Do things that give you energy that you're proud of, and happiness is reality minus expectations I think are really simple clarifying words.”
Thinking like a gardener not a builder, organizing teams like slime mold, the adjacent possible, and other unconventional product advice | Alex Komoroske (Stripe, Google) · Alex Komoroske
“Make sure you go somewhere where you have a good engineering partner. Because if you have great ideas of what to build but you can't get them built, then you go nowhere. So that has to be part of your evaluation criteria that you meet and value your engineering partner before you join.”
Lessons in product leadership and AI strategy from Glean, Google, Amazon, and Slack | Tamar Yehoshua (Product at Glean, ex-Google and Slack) · Tamar Yehoshua
“When you're looking for a job, you need a spear and not a net. What happens when we're building a product? Same thing, right? We want this product to be for everyone, but we've learned with product market fit that doesn't work. We need a narrow, clear focus.”
Land your dream job in today’s market: negotiation tactics, job search councils, and more | Phyl Terry (Author, “Never Search Alone”) · Phyl Terry
“While it's hard to figure out your candidate market fit, it's also a relief to know it's not about you. So what I ask people to do is I ask them to think about what they want and what they don't want. Now, you might not think that that's a radical step, but most people don't do that. When they get laid off, they spray and pray.”
Land your dream job in today’s market: negotiation tactics, job search councils, and more | Phyl Terry (Author, “Never Search Alone”) · Phyl Terry
“There's no I in team. Well, there is an I in village, and the I in village is that when you start to interview and negotiate, you've got to be in charge. I want you to play to win, not not to lose.”
Land your dream job in today’s market: negotiation tactics, job search councils, and more | Phyl Terry (Author, “Never Search Alone”) · Phyl Terry
“We all talk about product sense. To me, it's just a fancy way of saying you can make good decisions with insufficient data. PMs need as many reps as possible in making decisions, documenting the rationale behind those decisions, and then crucially seeing the outcome of them.”
Unorthodox PM wisdom: Automating user insights, unselling job candidates, logging every decision, more | Kevin Yien (Stripe, Square, Mutiny) · Kevin Yien
“It's critical to ask what kind of experience am I? Not how good am I at my job, how much do I know, how critical am I to this process, but am I a miserable experience? If the answer is yes, don't worry too much about the other pieces yet. You got to fix that first.”
Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · Evan LaPointe
“It's the fact that they have emotions that they are not sitting, feeling, or expressing. Whatever emotion that you're trying to avoid, you are inviting into your life in exactly the way that you're trying to avoid it.”
How embracing emotions will accelerate your career | Joe Hudson (executive coach, Art of Accomplishment) · Joe Hudson
“What most people try to do is they try to stop it, and that doesn't work very well. I think the best way to work with the voice in the head is to pick an experiment every day and respond to the voice in the head in a new way every day. One of my favorite responses is, 'Oh, I see that you're really scared. Don't worry. I'm right here with you. I got you.'”
How embracing emotions will accelerate your career | Joe Hudson (executive coach, Art of Accomplishment) · Joe Hudson
“A lot of the people in my circles may have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to try to arrange a life that they enjoy, and it doesn't fucking work.”
How embracing emotions will accelerate your career | Joe Hudson (executive coach, Art of Accomplishment) · Joe Hudson
“You are one of the best people I've ever worked with at solving problems three through 100, but I need you stuck on problems one and two.”
Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · Jeff Weinstein
“It's a lonely existence, and it's okay if most people don't like your idea. It doesn't mean you're right, but it sure as heck doesn't mean you're wrong either. There's not enough people in this world willing to stick their neck out for things that they believe that they see before the rest of us.”
Pattern Breakers: How to find a breakthrough startup idea | Mike Maples, Jr. (Founding Partner at Floodgate, ex-Product at Silicon Graphics) · Mike Maples Jr
“The future of PMs, I think, is going to be much more about taste and judgment and less about process. The PMs who are going to thrive are the ones who can look at something and say, this is good or this is not good.”
Dylan Field live at Config: Intuition, simplicity, and the future of design · Dylan Field
“One of the things I noticed is that the founders who struggled the most were the ones who were not resilient. It wasn't about the idea. It was about whether they could take a punch and keep going.”
The social radar: Y Combinator’s secret weapon | Jessica Livingston (co-founder of Y Combinator, author, podcast host) · Jessica Livingston
“I really enjoy being right and then it turns out in the working world, that did not serve me so great. I think the hard part is sublimating your ego a little bit and saying it's more important to get to the outcome than to be right.”
Making an impact through authenticity and curiosity | Ami Vora (CPO at Faire, ex-WhatsApp, FB, IG) · Ami Vora
“Curiosity is a superpower in product. When someone says something you disagree with, instead of arguing, try saying 'fascinating, tell me more.' You will learn things you never expected.”
Making an impact through authenticity and curiosity | Ami Vora (CPO at Faire, ex-WhatsApp, FB, IG) · Ami Vora
“The reason why you should pay attention to this is because it leads to a lot of good things, salary, getting promoted, being happy in your career, being less stressed.”
The paths to power: How to grow your influence and advance your career | Jeffrey Pfeffer (author of 7 Rules of Power, professor at Stanford GSB) · Jeffrey Pfeffer
“This is not about personality. These are skills they can be mastered.”
The paths to power: How to grow your influence and advance your career | Jeffrey Pfeffer (author of 7 Rules of Power, professor at Stanford GSB) · Jeffrey Pfeffer
“You need to get over the idea that the world is a just world. The world is not a just world. Good performance by itself is not sufficient.”
The paths to power: How to grow your influence and advance your career | Jeffrey Pfeffer (author of 7 Rules of Power, professor at Stanford GSB) · Jeffrey Pfeffer
“Network relentlessly. The data on this is overwhelming. The size of your network and the strength of your network ties predict your career outcomes more than almost anything else.”
The paths to power: How to grow your influence and advance your career | Jeffrey Pfeffer (author of 7 Rules of Power, professor at Stanford GSB) · Jeffrey Pfeffer
“Show up in a powerful fashion. Your body language, the way you speak, how much space you take up in a room. People make judgments about your power in milliseconds and those judgments stick.”
The paths to power: How to grow your influence and advance your career | Jeffrey Pfeffer (author of 7 Rules of Power, professor at Stanford GSB) · Jeffrey Pfeffer
“Once you've acquired power, what you did to get there will be forgiven, forgotten, or both. The historical record is very clear on this.”
The paths to power: How to grow your influence and advance your career | Jeffrey Pfeffer (author of 7 Rules of Power, professor at Stanford GSB) · Jeffrey Pfeffer
“We don't really have managers, but everyone at Canva has a coach. They're constantly working with you to look at your skills, but also when it might be time to move on to the next level.”
Inside Canva: Coaches not managers, giving away your Legos, and running profitably | Cameron Adams (co-founder and CPO) · Cam Adams
“The core idea is ask for what you want. Turns out when you actually ask for what you want out loud, you're much more likely to get it.”
Why not asking for what you want is holding you back | Kenneth Berger (exec coach, first PM at Slack) · Kenneth Berger
“For me, the impact was about making this work sustainable so that we're not burning out or selling out, but actually able to pursue these hard goals that we have in startups.”
Why not asking for what you want is holding you back | Kenneth Berger (exec coach, first PM at Slack) · Kenneth Berger
“The biggest sign is when you notice a gap between what you want and what you're asking for. You might want a promotion, but you're not saying it. You might want more resources, but you're hoping someone notices.”
Why not asking for what you want is holding you back | Kenneth Berger (exec coach, first PM at Slack) · Kenneth Berger
“People think asking for what they want is selfish. But actually, when you're clear about what you need, you make it easier for everyone around you. Ambiguity is what creates conflict.”
Why not asking for what you want is holding you back | Kenneth Berger (exec coach, first PM at Slack) · Kenneth Berger
“I created a career growth framework for product managers, which comprises of three things. What you produce, what you bring to the table, and what's your operating model.”
A framework for PM skill development | Vikrama Dhiman (Gojek) · Vikrama Dhiman
“Can you show me your last PRD? Can you show me the last product note that you sent? Can you show me the product strategy doc? You must have that impact through the artifacts that you work on.”
A framework for PM skill development | Vikrama Dhiman (Gojek) · Vikrama Dhiman
“How you view change, whether you are focusing on things you control, and third is how you see yourself. The moment you are able to correct those stories, you may be back on the growth path again.”
A framework for PM skill development | Vikrama Dhiman (Gojek) · Vikrama Dhiman
“The operating model is actually the most underrated part. How do you make decisions? How do you communicate? How do you handle ambiguity? These are the things that separate senior PMs from everyone else.”
A framework for PM skill development | Vikrama Dhiman (Gojek) · Vikrama Dhiman
“I was like, 'I might flame out completely, but Hell if I don't try.'”
Twitter’s former Head of Product opens up: being fired, meeting Elon, changing stagnant culture, building consumer product, more | Kayvon Beykpour · Kayvon Beykpour
“A good pivot is like going home. It's warmer, it's closer to something that you're an expert at.”
Lessons from 1,000+ YC startups: Resilience, tar pit ideas, pivoting, more | Dalton Caldwell (Y Combinator, Managing Director) · Dalton Caldwell
“Is it going to eliminate PMs next year? Probably not. Are the skills required going to shift? Yes. Could they shift much faster than we all anticipate? Probably.”
Bending the universe in your favor | Claire Vo (LaunchDarkly, Color, Optimizely, ChatPRD) · Claire Vo
“The thing about bending the universe in your favor is it's not about luck. It's about creating as many surface areas for good things to happen as possible. Say yes to things, be visible, put yourself out there, and over time, the opportunities compound.”
Bending the universe in your favor | Claire Vo (LaunchDarkly, Color, Optimizely, ChatPRD) · Claire Vo
“There's leadership all over the place, but that's your job.”
How to unlock your product leadership skills | Ken Norton, Ex-Google · Ken Norton
Cutting Room Floor
Guest insights on this topic that Lenny hasn't (yet) written about in his newsletters. Potential material for future posts.
“Being an IC across this past year gave me so many hard skills I wouldn't have gained if I was just managing. The design process has changed so much that I think design managers need to move back into IC work to truly understand what is happening, so they can be better managers.”
Jenny Wen · Jenny Wen
“Dealing with anxiety is a combination of 'I believe you and I believe in you.' Picture someone in a hole — they need you to have one foot in the hole with them and one foot outside.”
A child psychologist’s guide to working with difficult adults | Dr. Becky Kennedy · Dr. Becky Kennedy
“There has to be a deeper truth to it. There's a serious real narrative to why etiquette matters in 2025 for founders.”
How to show up in any room with a low heart rate: Silicon Valley’s missing etiquette playbook | Sam Lessin · Sam Lessin
“Coming in and saying 'Hey let me give you my four-minute startup spiel' is so self-centered. Think of it like ping pong — hit the ball back.”
How to show up in any room with a low heart rate: Silicon Valley’s missing etiquette playbook | Sam Lessin · Sam Lessin
“In high-growth, you have to hire for the role people will grow into, not the role they're perfect for today. The job changes every 6-12 months.”
The high-growth handbook: Molly Graham’s frameworks for leading through chaos, change, and scale · Molly Graham
“There's actually three levels to listening. Level one is internal. Level two is focused. Level three is global listening — you hear what they're communicating, not just saying.”
A guide to difficult conversations, building high-trust teams, and designing a life you love | Rachel Lockett · Rachel Lockett
“We operate in tech. We're supposed to give all of ourselves purely logically. That's not at all true. The goal of any conflict is to create mutual understanding.”
A guide to difficult conversations, building high-trust teams, and designing a life you love | Rachel Lockett · Rachel Lockett
“You need to be the physical manifestation of relentlessness. My wife described me in one word: dissatisfied. It's not unhappiness — you want to make it better.”
Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · Robby Stein
“From an entrepreneurship standpoint, it truly is about what insight do I have? Why am I so lucky to have this insight?”
First interview with Scale AI’s CEO: $14B Meta deal, what’s working in enterprise AI, and what frontier labs are building next | Jason Droege · Jason Droege
“All plane crashes are a series of bad decisions. None by themselves is that bad. Success works the same way.”
$46B of hard truths from Ben Horowitz: Why founders fail and why you need to run toward fear (a16z co-founder) · Ben Horowitz
“A CEO said, 'My CTO is an asshole.' He didn't want to fire him. That's what you're really saying — you don't know how to have the hard conversation.”
$46B of hard truths from Ben Horowitz: Why founders fail and why you need to run toward fear (a16z co-founder) · Ben Horowitz
“I've learned that optimism is a renewable resource. Satya's ability to generate energy and renew dedication to the mission is unbelievable.”
How 80,000 companies build with AI: products as organisms, the death of org charts, and why agents will outnumber employees by 2026 | Asha Sharma (CVP of AI Platform at Microsoft) · Asha Sharma
“We had this motto: leave nothing to chance. There will never be a time like this. I've never seen anything like it.”
Inside the expert network training every frontier AI model | Garrett Lord (Handshake CEO) · Garrett Lord
“Curiosity is an attribute that we think matters so much more than your ML knowledge.”
Inside ChatGPT: The fastest-growing product in history | Nick Turley (Head of ChatGPT at OpenAI) · Nick Turley
“I was mentoring Brian, but he was also my boss. I was 52, the average age was 26. I had to be both wise and curious.”
Brian Chesky's secret mentor who died 9 times, started the Burning Man board, and built the world's first midlife wisdom school | Chip Conley (founder of MEA) · Chip Conley
“Show up with curiosity and a passionate engagement. People won't notice your wrinkles as much as they'll notice your energy.”
Brian Chesky's secret mentor who died 9 times, started the Burning Man board, and built the world's first midlife wisdom school | Chip Conley (founder of MEA) · Chip Conley
“We are moving from the era of specialists to generalists. AI is accelerating this.”
Brian Chesky's secret mentor who died 9 times, started the Burning Man board, and built the world's first midlife wisdom school | Chip Conley (founder of MEA) · Chip Conley
“In a world of abundance where labor is almost free, what do jobs even look like?”
Benjamin Mann · Benjamin Mann
“The talent wars are real. The expected value of a top researcher is just astronomical.”
Benjamin Mann · Benjamin Mann
“You don't want to walk into the gym on day one and try and deadlift 300 pounds.”
I’ve run 75+ businesses. Here’s why you’re probably chasing the wrong idea. | Andrew Wilkinson (co‑founder of Tiny) · Andrew Wilkinson
“Product leadership is the type of role where if you are not in control of the voices in your head, they will eat you alive.”
How to build a team that can “take a punch”: A playbook for building resilient, high-performing teams | Hilary Gridley (Head of Core Product, Whoop) · Hilary Gridley
“I went to Pinterest and did not have a successful time. I came in thinking I was supposed to behave the way I behaved at Apple, which is very direct, fighting hard. I didn't give myself time to recalibrate to the Pinterest culture.”
35 years of product design wisdom from Apple, Disney, Pinterest, and beyond | Bob Baxley · Bob Baxley
“I've very explicitly been using AI as a life coach. One prompt was, 'What's an outdated mindset that I'm holding onto that's not still serving me?' It came back with a very polite response about being wedded to the idea of control. It suggested: try to focus on choreography over control.”
35 years of product design wisdom from Apple, Disney, Pinterest, and beyond | Bob Baxley · Bob Baxley
“John Hobolt risked his whole career sending a memo to champion Lunar Orbit Rendezvous when no one at NASA believed in it. Ideas need champions. They need champions willing to put themselves on the line for them. Have the courage of your convictions and fight as hard as you can.”
35 years of product design wisdom from Apple, Disney, Pinterest, and beyond | Bob Baxley · Bob Baxley
“The conventional wisdom for many CMOs is to be a T-shaped marketer. I think this chameleon CMO concept means modern marketing leaders have to be really good at a bunch of different things. Maybe going from T-shaped to comb-shaped is probably the right approach.”
Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman · Krithika Shankarraman
“Alex Allgood had a floating desk. He would move his desk to the department which had the highest leverage opportunity. He would sit there until that problem was solved. You could literally visualize him working on the highest leverage problem by his desk moving.”
Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · Mayur Kamat
“I was working on this idea that should just work and it didn't. I tried to make personalization work in Google Search. Then I started working on Google Now, which was a twist: on the phone, we should push content. That was a pivotal moment. Being early is the same as being wrong.”
Microsoft CPO: If you aren’t prototyping with AI, you’re doing it wrong | Aparna Chennapragada · Aparna Chennapragada
“Teams are groups, and there are group dynamics that always happen. Until you make conscious the unconscious patterns operating in the group, the group will continue to repeat those patterns and you will blame somebody in the group.”
How have I been complicit in creating the conditions I say I don’t want? | Jerry Colonna (CEO of Reboot, executive coach, former VC) · Jerry Colonna
“When we get too fixed on the proper way to do things, we're setting ourselves up for attachment and therefore suffering. Stay attached to the growth and hold mindset a little loosely.”
How have I been complicit in creating the conditions I say I don’t want? | Jerry Colonna (CEO of Reboot, executive coach, former VC) · Jerry Colonna
“As you move up the triangle of the content hierarchy of BS, there's less and less room for BS. In a cohort-based course where your students are right there with you, if you're saying something that doesn't really make sense, there could be a whole conversation happening in Zoom chat.”
Become a better communicator: Specific frameworks to improve your clarity, influence, and impact | Wes Kao (coach, entrepreneur, advisor) · Wes Kao
“The idea behind the state change method is that you should punctuate your monologues with state changes. State changes are anything that shakes your audience awake and adds variety. Every three to five minutes, go ahead and put in a state change.”
Become a better communicator: Specific frameworks to improve your clarity, influence, and impact | Wes Kao (coach, entrepreneur, advisor) · Wes Kao
“When you're talking to someone and explaining something, there's usually a moment where their eyes light up because they are genuinely interested. Make note of those moments because their face can't lie. Cut out all the parts that make people go dead in the eyes.”
Become a better communicator: Specific frameworks to improve your clarity, influence, and impact | Wes Kao (coach, entrepreneur, advisor) · Wes Kao
“I think if you spend a full week on trying to reach an outcome, the best way to learn is I want to do this thing and then I want to use AI to do that thing. And you've spent a full week, you are in the top 1% in the global population. And if you surround yourself with friends who have this obsession or they also care a lot about this, then you'd be quickly in the top 0.1%.”
Building Lovable: $10M ARR in 60 days with 15 people | Anton Osika (co-founder and CEO) · Anton Osika
“The opt in is important, and it may even be that you want to opt in at one point in your life, and maybe at another point in your life something else is better. Whatever it is you're choosing to do, it's nice to be opting in to feel like it's aligned with how you want to spend your time.”
An inside look at X’s Community Notes | Keith Coleman (VP of Product) and Jay Baxter (ML Lead) · Keith Coleman & Jay Baxter
“I only lived one life, so I can't Monte Carlo all the decisions I make and just figure out which ones ended up being load bearing.”
Tobi Lutke · Tobi Lutke
“Imagine that you're walking home from work, you see this bright, shiny object, and you realize it's a magic lamp. And you rub the lamp and this genie comes out and the genie says, 'Hey, I can give you one wish. Whatever you throw yourself into with your whole life and your career, it's going to turn out great.'”
How to break out of autopilot and create the life you want | Graham Weaver (Stanford GSB professor, founder of Alpine Investors) · Graham Weaver
“Most people are on autopilot. They're making decisions based on what they fell into, not what they actually want. Breaking out of autopilot requires you to first notice you're on it.”
How to break out of autopilot and create the life you want | Graham Weaver (Stanford GSB professor, founder of Alpine Investors) · Graham Weaver
“The hard path and the easy path both take the same amount of time. The hard path is the one where you do the thing you're afraid of. The easy path is the one where you avoid it. But at the end of your life, the hard path gives you a much better outcome.”
How to break out of autopilot and create the life you want | Graham Weaver (Stanford GSB professor, founder of Alpine Investors) · Graham Weaver
“Write down the things you're tolerating. The things you're putting up with that you know you shouldn't be. That list is your roadmap for transformation.”
How to break out of autopilot and create the life you want | Graham Weaver (Stanford GSB professor, founder of Alpine Investors) · Graham Weaver
“Why is it that product management is still such a relatively undeveloped discipline? We're like 15 to 20 years into this, and so there's something about the current state of product management that isn't getting at the truly important things.”
Why great AI products are all about the data | Shaun Clowes (CPO Confluent, ex-Salesforce, Atlassian) · Shaun Clowes
“If we were doctors, you'd be like, 'That's totally unacceptable.' Imagine if after 20 years of medical practice, most doctors still couldn't reliably diagnose common conditions.”
Why great AI products are all about the data | Shaun Clowes (CPO Confluent, ex-Salesforce, Atlassian) · Shaun Clowes
“If you do the hard path and it doesn't work, actually you still win because you've now done something hard. You've probably worked with smart people. You've learned something along the way that is valuable.”
How Shopify builds a high-intensity culture | Farhan Thawar (VP and Head of Eng) · Farhan Thawar
“Everything you know is wrong. The reason I like that one is it's this notion of if all the knowledge you knew was incorrect, could you from first principles build up a view of the world?”
How Shopify builds a high-intensity culture | Farhan Thawar (VP and Head of Eng) · Farhan Thawar
“The founders who scale are the ones who realize that their job description changes every six months. What got you here won't get you there, and that's not a failure, it's the nature of the journey.”
How a great founder becomes a great CEO | Jonathan Lowenhar (co-founder of Enjoy The Work) · Jonathan Lowenhar
“Taste is about the ability to identify what is really good without needing to see its results. It requires zero taste right now for anybody to say Jensen is a genius. To be able to say that in 2010, that requires taste.”
Shreyas Doshi Live · Shreyas Doshi Live
“Our jobs get frustrating when we behave, most of the time, in misalignment with our superpowers and who we truly are at our core. I have a preferred level at which I like to operate.”
Shreyas Doshi Live · Shreyas Doshi Live
“A PM cannot outsource their perspective or delegate their thinking through people and process. For me that has been a learning curve and I am trying to, as someone who's very consensus driven, I want to hear all the different opinions from all the different people. I can still do that... and then use all of that to synthesize my own.”
Meta’s Head of Product (and 29th employee) on working with Mark Zuckerberg, early growth tactics, why PMs are like conductors, and more | Naomi Gleit · Naomi Gleit
“The biggest thing that I can do to improve my surfing is to improve my confidence. The best thing you can actually do in that situation is stand up into your fear, is to ride the wave. That is the safest thing you can do.”
Meta’s Head of Product (and 29th employee) on working with Mark Zuckerberg, early growth tactics, why PMs are like conductors, and more | Naomi Gleit · Naomi Gleit
“When people say, 'I want someone that's strategic,' what they're really saying is, 'I want someone that can come up with and articulate a compelling and simple why behind the decisions and the direction of the company and product.'”
Becoming more strategic, navigating difficult colleagues, harnessing founder mode, and more | Anneka Gupta (Chief Product Officer at Rubrik) · Anneka Gupta
“The second piece is, 'I want someone that's going to champion and be a change agent to do things that may be hard but actually best for the long-term interest of the product or company, even though those things are not going to be easy to execute on.' And I think if you have one without the other, ultimately people are not going to see you as strategic.”
Becoming more strategic, navigating difficult colleagues, harnessing founder mode, and more | Anneka Gupta (Chief Product Officer at Rubrik) · Anneka Gupta
“People tend to get into a public speaking voice. We'll be in a class and they'll be chatting normally and look super normal. And then we'll say, 'Okay, now just a timer, I'm just going to give you a speech. Just speak for 60 seconds so we get a baseline,' and I click play, and suddenly they enter into a different version of themselves, a professional version.”
Why most public speaking advice is wrong—and how to finally overcome your speaking anxiety | Tristan de Montebello (CEO & co-founder of Ultraspeaking) · Tristan de Montebello
“The games are meant to put you in a state of turbulence and find out what was easy, what was hard, what am I noticing? If you did a rep and you got it and it went perfectly, then you're learning nothing. A really easy rep is not worth much. The only reps that are worth something are the ones where you feel an edge.”
Why most public speaking advice is wrong—and how to finally overcome your speaking anxiety | Tristan de Montebello (CEO & co-founder of Ultraspeaking) · Tristan de Montebello
“It's so much more freeing, powerful, connecting, and effective to speak conversation.”
Why most public speaking advice is wrong—and how to finally overcome your speaking anxiety | Tristan de Montebello (CEO & co-founder of Ultraspeaking) · Tristan de Montebello
“Get clear on your objective function, and one way that I've gotten clear on it is trying to think about it from future me because five years from now, I'm not going to give a if I made the presentation slightly better, but I'm going to care a lot about what kind of relationship I have with my daughters.”
Becoming a conscious leader: Leading without fear, finding your life’s objective function, and getting better at vision and strategy | John Mark Nickels (Uber, Waymo, DoorDash) · John Mark Nickels
“Not to be morbid, but most of us just aren't really tuned into an awareness that our lives will come to an end. We try to pretend like we're going to live forever and just not think about it. And the horror of it is that we succeed. To me, an awareness and mindfulness that our lives will come to an end punctuates reality in a way that requires me to rethink my priorities.”
Becoming a conscious leader: Leading without fear, finding your life’s objective function, and getting better at vision and strategy | John Mark Nickels (Uber, Waymo, DoorDash) · John Mark Nickels
“Do things that give you energy that you're proud of, and happiness is reality minus expectations I think are really simple clarifying words.”
Thinking like a gardener not a builder, organizing teams like slime mold, the adjacent possible, and other unconventional product advice | Alex Komoroske (Stripe, Google) · Alex Komoroske
“Make sure you go somewhere where you have a good engineering partner. Because if you have great ideas of what to build but you can't get them built, then you go nowhere. So that has to be part of your evaluation criteria that you meet and value your engineering partner before you join.”
Lessons in product leadership and AI strategy from Glean, Google, Amazon, and Slack | Tamar Yehoshua (Product at Glean, ex-Google and Slack) · Tamar Yehoshua
“When you're looking for a job, you need a spear and not a net. What happens when we're building a product? Same thing, right? We want this product to be for everyone, but we've learned with product market fit that doesn't work. We need a narrow, clear focus.”
Land your dream job in today’s market: negotiation tactics, job search councils, and more | Phyl Terry (Author, “Never Search Alone”) · Phyl Terry
“While it's hard to figure out your candidate market fit, it's also a relief to know it's not about you. So what I ask people to do is I ask them to think about what they want and what they don't want. Now, you might not think that that's a radical step, but most people don't do that. When they get laid off, they spray and pray.”
Land your dream job in today’s market: negotiation tactics, job search councils, and more | Phyl Terry (Author, “Never Search Alone”) · Phyl Terry
“There's no I in team. Well, there is an I in village, and the I in village is that when you start to interview and negotiate, you've got to be in charge. I want you to play to win, not not to lose.”
Land your dream job in today’s market: negotiation tactics, job search councils, and more | Phyl Terry (Author, “Never Search Alone”) · Phyl Terry
“It's critical to ask what kind of experience am I? Not how good am I at my job, how much do I know, how critical am I to this process, but am I a miserable experience? If the answer is yes, don't worry too much about the other pieces yet. You got to fix that first.”
Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · Evan LaPointe
“It's the fact that they have emotions that they are not sitting, feeling, or expressing. Whatever emotion that you're trying to avoid, you are inviting into your life in exactly the way that you're trying to avoid it.”
How embracing emotions will accelerate your career | Joe Hudson (executive coach, Art of Accomplishment) · Joe Hudson
“What most people try to do is they try to stop it, and that doesn't work very well. I think the best way to work with the voice in the head is to pick an experiment every day and respond to the voice in the head in a new way every day. One of my favorite responses is, 'Oh, I see that you're really scared. Don't worry. I'm right here with you. I got you.'”
How embracing emotions will accelerate your career | Joe Hudson (executive coach, Art of Accomplishment) · Joe Hudson
“A lot of the people in my circles may have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to try to arrange a life that they enjoy, and it doesn't fucking work.”
How embracing emotions will accelerate your career | Joe Hudson (executive coach, Art of Accomplishment) · Joe Hudson
“It's a lonely existence, and it's okay if most people don't like your idea. It doesn't mean you're right, but it sure as heck doesn't mean you're wrong either. There's not enough people in this world willing to stick their neck out for things that they believe that they see before the rest of us.”
Pattern Breakers: How to find a breakthrough startup idea | Mike Maples, Jr. (Founding Partner at Floodgate, ex-Product at Silicon Graphics) · Mike Maples Jr
“One of the things I noticed is that the founders who struggled the most were the ones who were not resilient. It wasn't about the idea. It was about whether they could take a punch and keep going.”
The social radar: Y Combinator’s secret weapon | Jessica Livingston (co-founder of Y Combinator, author, podcast host) · Jessica Livingston
“I really enjoy being right and then it turns out in the working world, that did not serve me so great. I think the hard part is sublimating your ego a little bit and saying it's more important to get to the outcome than to be right.”
Making an impact through authenticity and curiosity | Ami Vora (CPO at Faire, ex-WhatsApp, FB, IG) · Ami Vora
“The reason why you should pay attention to this is because it leads to a lot of good things, salary, getting promoted, being happy in your career, being less stressed.”
The paths to power: How to grow your influence and advance your career | Jeffrey Pfeffer (author of 7 Rules of Power, professor at Stanford GSB) · Jeffrey Pfeffer
“This is not about personality. These are skills they can be mastered.”
The paths to power: How to grow your influence and advance your career | Jeffrey Pfeffer (author of 7 Rules of Power, professor at Stanford GSB) · Jeffrey Pfeffer
“You need to get over the idea that the world is a just world. The world is not a just world. Good performance by itself is not sufficient.”
The paths to power: How to grow your influence and advance your career | Jeffrey Pfeffer (author of 7 Rules of Power, professor at Stanford GSB) · Jeffrey Pfeffer
“Network relentlessly. The data on this is overwhelming. The size of your network and the strength of your network ties predict your career outcomes more than almost anything else.”
The paths to power: How to grow your influence and advance your career | Jeffrey Pfeffer (author of 7 Rules of Power, professor at Stanford GSB) · Jeffrey Pfeffer
“Show up in a powerful fashion. Your body language, the way you speak, how much space you take up in a room. People make judgments about your power in milliseconds and those judgments stick.”
The paths to power: How to grow your influence and advance your career | Jeffrey Pfeffer (author of 7 Rules of Power, professor at Stanford GSB) · Jeffrey Pfeffer
“Once you've acquired power, what you did to get there will be forgiven, forgotten, or both. The historical record is very clear on this.”
The paths to power: How to grow your influence and advance your career | Jeffrey Pfeffer (author of 7 Rules of Power, professor at Stanford GSB) · Jeffrey Pfeffer
“The core idea is ask for what you want. Turns out when you actually ask for what you want out loud, you're much more likely to get it.”
Why not asking for what you want is holding you back | Kenneth Berger (exec coach, first PM at Slack) · Kenneth Berger
“I created a career growth framework for product managers, which comprises of three things. What you produce, what you bring to the table, and what's your operating model.”
A framework for PM skill development | Vikrama Dhiman (Gojek) · Vikrama Dhiman
“Can you show me your last PRD? Can you show me the last product note that you sent? Can you show me the product strategy doc? You must have that impact through the artifacts that you work on.”
A framework for PM skill development | Vikrama Dhiman (Gojek) · Vikrama Dhiman
“How you view change, whether you are focusing on things you control, and third is how you see yourself. The moment you are able to correct those stories, you may be back on the growth path again.”
A framework for PM skill development | Vikrama Dhiman (Gojek) · Vikrama Dhiman
“I was like, 'I might flame out completely, but Hell if I don't try.'”
Twitter’s former Head of Product opens up: being fired, meeting Elon, changing stagnant culture, building consumer product, more | Kayvon Beykpour · Kayvon Beykpour
“A good pivot is like going home. It's warmer, it's closer to something that you're an expert at.”
Lessons from 1,000+ YC startups: Resilience, tar pit ideas, pivoting, more | Dalton Caldwell (Y Combinator, Managing Director) · Dalton Caldwell
“The thing about bending the universe in your favor is it's not about luck. It's about creating as many surface areas for good things to happen as possible. Say yes to things, be visible, put yourself out there, and over time, the opportunities compound.”
Bending the universe in your favor | Claire Vo (LaunchDarkly, Color, Optimizely, ChatPRD) · Claire Vo