Lenny's Written Position
Podcast Moments
“You're thinking on a different time horizon. If you're a large organization and you do some performance management process twice a year and you're 0 to 1 incubator, you've already killed it. It's the wrong incentive.”
The happiness and pain of product management | Noam Lovinsky (Grammarly, Facebook, YouTube, Thumbtack) · Noam Lovinsky
“People think invention takes all this time, but you only need two hours once a month. The thing is, once you have one good idea, it often takes years to express that.”
Taking control of your career | Ethan Evans (Amazon) · Ethan Evans 2.0
“Jeff and Amazon had ideas like, 'Let's have Prime shipping.' Prime is still getting better and still being worked on. It's a 20 some year old idea. The Kindle, a decades old idea now still getting better. The point here is you don't need very many good ideas to be seen as tremendously inventive.”
Taking control of your career | Ethan Evans (Amazon) · Ethan Evans 2.0
“We tend to undervalue the things we're good at. We tend to think work has to be unpleasant. And so if something is easy and fun, we don't tend to think it's valuable. You should go do the thing that you feel guilty to get paid for, if there's a thing like that, and do the hell out of it.”
How to be more innovative | Sam Schillace (Microsoft deputy CTO, creator of Google Docs) · Sam Schillace
“Lots of people gravitate in this direction of like, let's go do unpleasant things and grind our way through the career because that's the way to make it. But the reality is... if you get pleasure from doing something that people want to pay you for, do it the best you can do it, as hard as you can do it. Work doesn't necessarily have to be hard.”
How to be more innovative | Sam Schillace (Microsoft deputy CTO, creator of Google Docs) · Sam Schillace
“My belief is that, like any domain or industry, the more it matters, the more the design matters. What happens is whenever there's a new paradigm, I don't know, like the mobile or the web or something the first iterations of those products existing there, they don't have to be super well designed necessarily because they are the first.”
Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · Karri Saarinen
“You have to allocate sometimes to these high risk, high reward ideas. We're going to try something that's most likely to fail. But if it does win, it's going to be a home run. And you have to be ready to understand and agree that most will fail.”
The ultimate guide to A/B testing | Ronny Kohavi (Airbnb, Microsoft, Amazon) · Ronny Kohavi
“We have this mental metaphor that we talk a lot about, getting to the next hill. The actual wording is 'Take bigger boulder bets.' I think teams can often get lost crawling up that hill, not realizing that there's a huge, incredibly beautiful range behind it.”
The 10 traits of great PMs, how AI will impact your product, and Slack’s product development process | Noah Weiss (Slack, Foursquare, Google) · Noah Weiss
“Let's incubate a couple teams or prototype, give them space to run and pilot and then get something to launch that's amazing. Blows people away. That's the formula that we've seen.”
The 10 traits of great PMs, how AI will impact your product, and Slack’s product development process | Noah Weiss (Slack, Foursquare, Google) · Noah Weiss
“If you take people that are just super smart, they've never done it before, one advantage of that is they can innovate because I think they come in with, I don't know anything. Let me just figure this out.”
Building high-performing teams | Melissa Tan (Webflow, Dropbox, Canva) · Melissa Tan
“Process, by definition, is variance reducing. You're introducing it because you worry that the variance in your org is too high. The cost of that is while you are reducing the standard and bringing folks up to the average, you're also bringing other folks down to the average. And oftentimes, the folks you're bringing down are your highest performers, your most creative thinkers.”
How to foster innovation and big thinking | Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe) · Eeke de Milliano
“Being optimistic about technology is actually a useful trait as a product leader. If you're always skeptical about what technology can do, you'll miss the moments when it can truly change things.”
Manik Gupta (ex-CPO Uber, Google Maps) on how to build consumer apps, why it’s useful to be optimistic about technology, creating inflections in your PM career, the changing CPO role, and more · Manik Gupta
Cutting Room Floor
Guest insights on this topic that Lenny hasn't (yet) written about in his newsletters. Potential material for future posts.
“You're thinking on a different time horizon. If you're a large organization and you do some performance management process twice a year and you're 0 to 1 incubator, you've already killed it. It's the wrong incentive.”
The happiness and pain of product management | Noam Lovinsky (Grammarly, Facebook, YouTube, Thumbtack) · Noam Lovinsky
“People think invention takes all this time, but you only need two hours once a month. The thing is, once you have one good idea, it often takes years to express that.”
Taking control of your career | Ethan Evans (Amazon) · Ethan Evans 2.0
“Jeff and Amazon had ideas like, 'Let's have Prime shipping.' Prime is still getting better and still being worked on. It's a 20 some year old idea. The Kindle, a decades old idea now still getting better. The point here is you don't need very many good ideas to be seen as tremendously inventive.”
Taking control of your career | Ethan Evans (Amazon) · Ethan Evans 2.0
“We tend to undervalue the things we're good at. We tend to think work has to be unpleasant. And so if something is easy and fun, we don't tend to think it's valuable. You should go do the thing that you feel guilty to get paid for, if there's a thing like that, and do the hell out of it.”
How to be more innovative | Sam Schillace (Microsoft deputy CTO, creator of Google Docs) · Sam Schillace
“Lots of people gravitate in this direction of like, let's go do unpleasant things and grind our way through the career because that's the way to make it. But the reality is... if you get pleasure from doing something that people want to pay you for, do it the best you can do it, as hard as you can do it. Work doesn't necessarily have to be hard.”
How to be more innovative | Sam Schillace (Microsoft deputy CTO, creator of Google Docs) · Sam Schillace
“My belief is that, like any domain or industry, the more it matters, the more the design matters. What happens is whenever there's a new paradigm, I don't know, like the mobile or the web or something the first iterations of those products existing there, they don't have to be super well designed necessarily because they are the first.”
Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · Karri Saarinen
“You have to allocate sometimes to these high risk, high reward ideas. We're going to try something that's most likely to fail. But if it does win, it's going to be a home run. And you have to be ready to understand and agree that most will fail.”
The ultimate guide to A/B testing | Ronny Kohavi (Airbnb, Microsoft, Amazon) · Ronny Kohavi
“We have this mental metaphor that we talk a lot about, getting to the next hill. The actual wording is 'Take bigger boulder bets.' I think teams can often get lost crawling up that hill, not realizing that there's a huge, incredibly beautiful range behind it.”
The 10 traits of great PMs, how AI will impact your product, and Slack’s product development process | Noah Weiss (Slack, Foursquare, Google) · Noah Weiss
“Let's incubate a couple teams or prototype, give them space to run and pilot and then get something to launch that's amazing. Blows people away. That's the formula that we've seen.”
The 10 traits of great PMs, how AI will impact your product, and Slack’s product development process | Noah Weiss (Slack, Foursquare, Google) · Noah Weiss
“If you take people that are just super smart, they've never done it before, one advantage of that is they can innovate because I think they come in with, I don't know anything. Let me just figure this out.”
Building high-performing teams | Melissa Tan (Webflow, Dropbox, Canva) · Melissa Tan
“Process, by definition, is variance reducing. You're introducing it because you worry that the variance in your org is too high. The cost of that is while you are reducing the standard and bringing folks up to the average, you're also bringing other folks down to the average. And oftentimes, the folks you're bringing down are your highest performers, your most creative thinkers.”
How to foster innovation and big thinking | Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe) · Eeke de Milliano
“Being optimistic about technology is actually a useful trait as a product leader. If you're always skeptical about what technology can do, you'll miss the moments when it can truly change things.”
Manik Gupta (ex-CPO Uber, Google Maps) on how to build consumer apps, why it’s useful to be optimistic about technology, creating inflections in your PM career, the changing CPO role, and more · Manik Gupta