Lenny's Written Position
The quality of the founders matters above all other variables when evaluating whether to join a startup early.
It is more important for founders to learn quickly and adapt than to have a good initial strategy.
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.
Large brainstorming sessions rarely produce good names because of peer pressure to agree and everyone's need to be right; small teams with esprit de corps generate far better results.
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%).
The best way to manage scaling is to give away your Legos -- resist the instinct to grab back responsibilities from new hires and instead find a bigger, better tower to build.
The biggest barrier to AI adoption at companies is not technology but organizational change, including vague mandates, procurement bottlenecks, and lack of guidance on high-impact use cases.
Saying 'we are AI-first' means nothing if employees do not know what that means for their day-to-day work; successful companies provide specific, concrete tactics employees can adopt.
AI adoption should be tracked as both inputs (who is using AI) and outputs (business value created), and included in performance reviews to create accountability.
Companies should turn their internal AI enthusiasts into teachers by hosting regular demos, hackathons, and dedicated AI experimentation time rather than relying on top-down mandates alone.
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 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).
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.
Almost half (44.67%) of tech workers are currently experiencing significant burnout, and burnout strongly correlates with quitting intentions and low engagement.
Leadership quality may be the single most important lever for retention, with workers under ineffective managers 4.3 times as likely to be at risk of leaving.
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.
Enabling teams to have maximal autonomy, ownership, and purpose are the secret ingredients that make founders 3-4x more optimistic and almost 3x happier than everyone else in tech.
All manager challenges are either directly or indirectly about the skip lead (manager's manager), because the skip lead hires, reviews, and coaches the manager.
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.
Skip leads should never offer strong opinions or make decisions on the spot with skip reports, as this undermines their direct-report managers and creates contradictory directions.
Skip leads should use Andy Grove's task-relevant maturity (TRM) framework to match projects to managers based on each project's scope, risk, and ambiguity and each manager's specific skills and experience.
Covering for a direct-report manager's underperformance is one of the most common and damaging patterns in fast-growing tech companies, driven by shame, fear of confrontation, and insecurity.
Sharing raw work-in-progress with stakeholders builds hype and investment rather than depleting trust, as demonstrated by an engineer posting over 70 prototype videos in Slack before launch.
The best team members are those who opt in rather than being assigned, and if you need to sell someone really hard to join your project, they are probably not the right fit.
You must first build trust by executing well on assigned projects (the meat and potatoes) before leadership will fund your own ambitious ideas (the souffle).
Workplace anger most commonly arises when your expertise is challenged, your autonomy is threatened, your values are compromised, or your identity is dismissed, and it signals an unmet emotional need rather than being the problem itself.
Anger manifests in two forms at work: hot anger (exploding outward with aggression and blame) and cold anger (withdrawing inward with shutdown and self-criticism), and both cause real costs if left unconscious.
A four-step process can transform workplace anger into wisdom: recognize your alarm, do a U-turn to look inward, identify the unmet need, and choose a conscious response.
In the past six months, every one of coach Natalie Rothfels' executive and co-founder clients has been vibrating with deep, persistent anger that was depleting their motivation and making them emotionally exhausted at work.
Product strategy sits between the mission/vision and the roadmap, and a good strategy articulation includes 3-5 focus areas (strategic pillars), explicit areas to deprioritize, and clear explanations for why those choices were made.
Crafting a high-quality 2-year product strategy requires 8-12 weeks through five steps: preparation, strategy sprint, design sprint, document writing, and rollout.
Opportunity areas should be scored along four dimensions: expected impact, certainty of impact, clarity of levers, and uniqueness of levers, with a simple sum and sort to identify the top three strategic pillars.
The most effective strategists are those who can move fluidly between process and content rather than being married to either, wielding each as tools to achieve objectives.
Strategy and execution have a circular symbiotic relationship where each makes the other stronger, and execution should not be gated by strategy work since no-regrets work can proceed in parallel.
If you ask three co-founders to write down their startup's target customer, you typically get three different answers, revealing that obvious strategic alignment is rarely obvious.
Teams should use the Note-and-Vote technique for fast decision-making: silent individual brainstorming, silent voting, brief debate, then the Decider makes the final call.
Product velocity is about speed and direction; when teams focus only on moving fast without alignment on what to work on, trying to move faster can actually slow you down.
Core 4 balances qualitative and quantitative measurements because quantitative data shows what is happening while qualitative insights reveal why, which is necessary to actually change team behavior.
Managers can scale their coaching by distilling their most common feedback into custom GPTs, allowing team members to receive feedback multiple times a day rather than once or twice a week.
If you are skilled at explaining something to people, you are well equipped to teach it to an AI, making great managers uniquely suited to creating effective custom GPTs.
If 2024 was the year of the super IC, 2025 will be the year of the supermanager who harnesses AI to oversee larger, flatter teams and extend coaching beyond just direct reports.
You can reverse-engineer your own managerial intuition into a custom GPT by uploading examples of high-quality and low-quality work, asking the AI to identify specific differences, and then creating a prompt that transforms bad examples into good ones.
Humor is a learned skill, not a natural talent, and can be developed through studying and practicing specific strategies.
Forbes identified a sense of humor as the fourth most important quality in a leader.
Laughter alters brain chemistry by swapping cortisol with dopamine, oxytocin, and endorphins, which enhance learning, connection, and pleasure.
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.
Inner conflict between competing internal parts is the major hidden driver of productivity and burnout issues at work, not a lack of productivity tactics.
Internal Family Systems (IFS) is an effective method for resolving workplace stuckness by identifying and facilitating dialogue between conflicting internal parts.
The parts of ourselves that we judge, shame, or ignore tend to get louder and more extreme, while parts that feel heard become flexible and trusting.
Building internal capacity for navigating inner conflict also develops significantly more empathy and tolerance for external team conflict, a critical leadership skill.
The first step to influencing stakeholders is gathering intel on how each person makes decisions, including their goals, incentives, fears, and who they consult.
Framing proposals from the stakeholder's perspective rather than your own is dramatically more effective because people are more receptive to proposals that address what is top of mind for them.
You should prime both detractors and champions before key decision meetings rather than hoping the meeting goes well, building a coalition of supporters in advance.
People who feel dismissed or misunderstood enter a stress response state and become more defensive, making them resistant to influence and unlikely to reciprocate.
Managing the clock in decision meetings is critical because with senior executives, if you don't exit with a decision, you may not get another meeting for weeks or months.
Maintaining a public ongoing stack rank (OSR) of all projects changes the conversation from 'Why can't we do this one extra thing?' to 'Do you agree that X is more important than Y?'
Steelmanning incoming requests by presenting the strongest possible version of the opposing argument before countering it makes you more persuasive and minimizes surprise in executive meetings.
Framing tradeoffs in terms of company goals rather than team goals is essential because leadership always thinks company-first and is more likely to side with arguments presented that way.
Adding more engineers is never a good solution to a prioritization problem because planning will always scale to match capacity, and you will still have more requests than you can satisfy.
PMs should always communicate an opinionated recommendation rather than presenting two unbiased options, because they have more context than leadership on execution details.
Predicting long-term consequences of short-term requests is a PM superpower because leadership teams want to do the right long-term thing but may be held back by short-term fears.
Setting arbitrary deadlines with collaborators creates a gravitational pull toward completion even when both parties know the deadline is made up.
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.
A 15-minute end-of-day calendar review for the next day transforms morning anxiety from overwhelming to manageable and makes you feel ahead of the curve.
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.
Keeping a waiting-for list of every open request you have made to others is one of the most important habits for building an aura of reliability as a PM.
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 meetings can be replaced with a five-minute async email exchange, saving not just meeting time but also the pre-meeting and post-meeting context-switching overhead.
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.
Companies almost always start with a functional model and should only consider a GM model after having multiple proven product groups, predictable business outcomes, and significant scale.
The closer your North Star metric is to revenue, the more suited your organization is to a GM model; companies with metrics removed from direct revenue (like ad-based businesses) work better with functional structures.
Functional models optimize for product growth through cohesive customer journeys that create organic flywheels, as demonstrated by Shopify becoming the sole system of record for many customers after switching from GM to functional.
Most companies in practice operate in a hybrid model that skews toward GM or functional, because achieving a perfect balance is nearly impossible.
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.
Feature factories can be the right choice for some CEOs, especially visionary founders with a clear view of what needs to be built, and VCs often back these types of leaders pattern-matching to Elon Musk and Steve Jobs.
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.
The best test for whether to pivot or persevere is asking yourself whether you have more or less conviction in the problem and solution now than when you started, knowing everything you know today.
Perplexity structures teams to minimize coordination costs by parallelizing projects and using AI for rubber-duck debugging instead of relying on alignment and consensus.
Asking candidates a contrarian-opinion question breaks the interview performance mindset and reveals authenticity, which is critical because prepared candidates often tell you only what they think you want to hear.
People are rarely accurate about what critiques others have of them but are usually accurate about their own strengths, making the reference-triangulation question particularly revealing.
What matters in decision-making is not that everyone agrees but that everyone is listened to, then the right person makes the decision, communicates it clearly, and rallies everyone around it.
Decision-making frameworks should be reserved for high-stakes one-way-door decisions; most low-risk decisions should be made unilaterally by the owner of that area.
Conventional interviews can be performed without real productivity, and some people who are amazing interviewees turn out to be poor employees, which is why working alongside someone in the trenches is the only reliable signal.
Gong organizes product teams as autonomous pods around problem areas rather than features, gives them extreme autonomy to drive their own agendas, and lets engineers rather than PMs own bug prioritization.
The primary downside of first-principles thinking is that it is extremely difficult and inefficient; you cannot question everything, so the key skill is picking what to question.
To practice first-principles thinking, you must go to the source—visit the factory, read primary research, talk to raw-ingredient makers—and keep asking questions until you get to the end, because people will give you answers they believe to be true that are actually wrong.
Founders should not delegate product strategy to their first PM; the PM should own execution while founders retain strategic direction.
A transparent prioritization framework like DRICE reduces HIPPO-driven decision-making and motivates engineers to contribute ideas by giving them clear rules for getting their ideas prioritized.
Linear avoids durable cross-functional teams and instead assembles project teams that disperse once the project is done, which prevents people from getting trapped in their product area and losing broader context.
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.
A growth leader should not be your first growth hire; instead hire a builder-profile IC focused on a specific growth lever like acquisition or activation, because even experienced leaders take 6-12 months to understand the local problem.
Shopify organizes teams around merchant jobs to be done rather than product features, and each team must think about the full spectrum from first-time seller to enterprise brands like Supreme.
Shopify's CEO Tobi sets yearly themes written from the merchant's perspective, which become the basis for six-month roadmaps and six-week sprint cycles, replacing traditional annual planning that always got torn up by March.
Shopify's internal priorities mantra is: first make the best product for merchants, second make money to do more of number one, and third never reverse priorities one and two.
Snowflake aligns the entire company around 6-10 'big boulders' each year and uses customer scenarios rather than feature-area metrics for quarterly planning, with 85% of ideas coming bottom-up from PMs.
Snowflake has zero tolerance for organizational politics and embeds data scientists directly into each product team so that data-driven decisions are part of the DNA rather than an afterthought.
Snowflake hires 'drivers' instead of 'passengers' and starts almost every product interview with a candidate presentation on any topic they choose to assess communication, passion, and product sense.
If you ask users for feedback but do not act on it, you burn more trust than if you had never asked; the golden rule is to ask for feedback only if you will genuinely consider it.
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.
Hiring the literal world's number one person in each critical discipline creates cascading advantages because top people have disproportionately more access to knowledge, opportunity, and other top talent.
Setting a daily work-hour limit raises the bar for what is worth your time and naturally leads to better prioritization; reduced hours combined with empowering teammates improved both team performance and satisfaction.
Notion has fewer than 15 PMs out of 550 people and waited until they had 50-60 engineers before hiring their first product manager.
Notion uses a four-checkpoint product review process covering problem statement, direction options, full solution with designs, and ship candidate quality check.
Having data, design, research, engineering, PM, UXR, and security all report to the same leader increases proactive information sharing across functions.
EMs and PMs should have joint responsibility for everything including product and business outcomes rather than operating in disjointed spheres of accountability.
Product strategy should start bottom-up with teams closest to the problem developing their own roadmaps, then co-developing the top-level strategy.
OKRs should not be used for performance management because failing to hit a cross-functional OKR doesn't mean everyone tied to that goal underperformed.
Miro's AMPED structure (Analytics, Marketing, Product, Engineering, Design) brings all required functions into product teams from the start, resulting in more effective product development.
Having OKRs at every organizational level creates overlapping initiatives, excessive process time, and too many priorities, so reducing OKR layers and frequency improves clarity.
Monthly design reviews where the team reviews everything shipped and identifies what is and isn't high quality is more effective for raising the quality bar than abstract principles.
The most effective presentation structure is to tell them what you'll tell them, then tell them, then tell them what you told them.
Don't go into important decision meetings without knowing how key stakeholders will feel; do the pre-work through 15-minute pre-meetings to get alignment in low-stakes one-on-one discussions.
Influence fundamentally boils down to two things: how convincing your evidence is and how much people trust you and your sources.
Duolingo uses a co-lead structure with PM and engineering leads jointly heading each team, which provides complementary skills and divides leadership responsibilities.
Narrowing your team's focus by removing one goal or project is one of the most effective ways to improve team velocity.
OKRs are not a strategy and should not be treated as a replacement for a strategy document that describes broader challenges with a clear why and how.
Heads of growth most commonly report to product leaders (CPO), but sometimes roll up into sales/GTM organizations to better align PLG incentives with revenue targets.
Founders should optimize their investor network for eigenvector centrality (how many people your connections know) rather than degree centrality (how many people you know directly).
It's almost always the founder's fault when they aren't getting value from their investors, because investors have little context and need targeted, time-bounded, specific asks.
Figma deprecated traditional OKRs in favor of headlines, which are claims teams want to make by end of a time period, evaluated by a mix of quantitative and qualitative signals.
PMs are responsible for making crystal clear why the team is solving a particular problem and why it's important over anything else, because clarity on the why empowers everyone to make great decisions.
A product team's strategic hierarchy flows from Mission to Vision to Strategy to Goals to Roadmap to Task, with each level informing the next.
The GACCS framework (Goals, Audience, Creative, Channels, Stakeholders) is a marketing brief that keeps teams from doing busywork and drives cross-team alignment before work begins.
Areas of Responsibility (AORs) where each responsibility has exactly one DRI eliminate wasted time figuring out who to collaborate with and create extreme clarity on ownership.
The seven strategies for improving influence are: make their goals your goals, charge your trust battery, help them see what you see, show success, bring evidence, leverage authority, and be likable.
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.
Before asking someone to do something for you, take 10 seconds to reflect on what they want, then frame your ask in a way that highlights how it helps them hit their goals.
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.
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.
Companies should treat closing a candidate almost exactly the same as closing an investor, because candidates are investing something even more valuable than capital: their time.
In business communication you should start with the answer first and then provide supporting arguments, the opposite of how you naturally arrive at conclusions.
In a business context you should spend minimal time on Situation and Complication to get to the Resolution as quickly as possible, since colleagues want to be informed not entertained.
Consistently shipping small wins builds trust, earns the right to take bigger bets, and prevents your team from becoming a target when new fires arise and leaders look for non-essential projects to cut.
The three most important differentiators of senior PMs versus junior PMs are strategy, autonomy, and nuance rather than better day-to-day execution.
When asked to take on new work, you should reprioritize against existing work and share updated priorities with your manager rather than just absorbing the new task.
The single most effective way to increase team velocity is to narrow the team's focus, as fewer concurrent priorities dramatically improves outcomes on the remaining work.
During a crisis, companies should first determine which of three buckets they fall into: seeing growth, falling apart, or chugging along, and adopt a corresponding strategy of acceleration, survival, or pivoting.
Every company should create a small incident response team with a single DRI, full authority to change anything, blown-up OKRs, and daily standups to move fast during a crisis.
When joining a turnaround situation, set clear expectations with your manager that the next 6-12 months will likely involve less business impact and some team member dissatisfaction.
The Observe-Identify-Share-Act framework, adapted from Nonviolent Communication, is an effective approach for making necessary changes on an underperforming team.
To motivate an underperforming team to embrace change, connect the proposed changes to each key member's personal motivations whether that is driving impact, getting promoted, or achieving work-life balance.
When communicating a project failure to leadership, be up front about it, stay positive, separate the idea from the execution, and most importantly have a clear plan for next steps.
To introduce a growth team to a traditional sales-and-marketing org, bring in external growth experts, get CEO buy-in, and propose a six-month experiment with a small cross-functional team to demonstrate measurable impact.
All you really need for your team to excel is smart and motivated people; if engineers consistently take too long to ship, either intelligence or motivation is the issue to diagnose.
As you progress from IC PM to Director, your gaze rises from week-to-week to years out, and the five most critical traits become long-term strategic thinking, people leadership, stakeholder management, impact orientation, and communication.
Performance reviews done well improve performance, align expectations, and accelerate careers; done poorly, they accelerate departures.
Most performance reviews over-index on development areas, but individuals will have just as much or more impact by flexing what they are really good at, so reviews should highlight a person's superpower.
At Airbnb, CEO Brian Chesky was famous for doubling proposed goals or pushing for 10x, and teams were often shocked at how close they came to hitting these wildly ambitious targets.
The most effective leaders place the team above themselves by deflecting credit and giving presentation opportunities to other team members, which strengthens the team's efficacy.
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
“You have to know the difference between a megatrend and a hype cycle. When there's a megatrend, don't fight it. AI is a megatrend, one of the most foundational movements that we have seen in human history.”
Jeetu Patel · Jeetu Patel
“Every management book says praise in public, criticize in private. I fundamentally disagree. Establish enough trust so you are comfortable critiquing and debating in public. In private, build that trust. In public, you don't want posturing — you want problem-solving.”
Jeetu Patel · Jeetu Patel
“Don't delegate the storytelling. The story is not a marketing exercise after you built the product. The story is why you build the product. If you have seven or eight layers between you and the front line, you can't play the telephone game. Always own telling the story yourself.”
Jeetu Patel · Jeetu Patel
“Permission to play means asking: is this logical for us? Do we have the route to market for mass scale distribution? If you dissipate your caloric burn across too many areas, nothing gets enough girth to drive all the way through. Be extremely selective where you expend your calories.”
Jeetu Patel · Jeetu Patel
“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
“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
“If you want to kill a plant, have two people water it. Every CEO at the adults' table has gone through this and they are religious about the DRI — directly responsible individual.”
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
“EV is enterprise value, TV is your team's value, MEV is your value. Immature managers solve for TV over EV. We always put on the wall: solve for CV, then EV, then TV, then MEV. Customers first, then company, then team, then yourself.”
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
“I always valued optionality, but there's a massive tax in optionality when you can move this fast. Planning cycles used to be a year, now they're three months.”
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
“The Mythical Man-Month predicted software engineering would go where engineers are like surgeons. As a manager, look around corners and unblock people, especially from organizational bottlenecks.”
Sherwin Wu V2 · Sherwin Wu V2
“Companies where AI really works have top-down buy-in combined with bottoms-up adoption. A lot of AI deployments fail because it's an exec mandate, extremely top-down, divorced from what actual work looks like.”
Sherwin Wu V2 · Sherwin Wu V2
“Repair is the number one relationship strategy we have. Secure attachment isn't defined by getting it right all the time — it's defined by an adult who's willing to repair.”
A child psychologist’s guide to working with difficult adults | Dr. Becky Kennedy · Dr. Becky Kennedy
“The idea of being good inside inherently requires us to separate behavior and identity. When someone's late to work a lot, start with: 'This is a good person who is late.'”
A child psychologist’s guide to working with difficult adults | Dr. Becky Kennedy · Dr. Becky Kennedy
“Picture a turbulent flight. The sturdy pilot says: 'I hear you screaming. It makes sense. I know what I'm doing. This turbulence doesn't scare me. I'll see you when we land.' That's sturdy leadership.”
A child psychologist’s guide to working with difficult adults | Dr. Becky Kennedy · Dr. Becky Kennedy
“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
“The most generous interpretation — MGI. The story you tell yourself about your organization at night becomes the leader you are the next morning.”
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
“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
“You need two sales reps hitting quota before you're ready to hire a manager for them. If you hire a VP of sales before then, it's approaching 100% chance of failure.”
We replaced our sales team with 20 AI agents—here’s what happened | Jason Lemkin (SaaStr) · Jason M Lemkin
“What do you want to do your first 30 days? In B2B, if I don't hear 'I'm going to go meet customers,' I'm out.”
We replaced our sales team with 20 AI agents—here’s what happened | Jason Lemkin (SaaStr) · Jason M Lemkin
“In sales, there's rules of eight. Eight SDRs need one manager, eight AEs need a director above them. You can build your whole org with eights.”
We replaced our sales team with 20 AI agents—here’s what happened | Jason Lemkin (SaaStr) · Jason M Lemkin
“It is really important to me that we feel that we've deliberately understaffed every project at the company.”
10 contrarian leadership truths every leader needs to hear | Matt MacInnis (Rippling) · Matt MacInnis
“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
“Processes exist for the sole purpose of lowering beta — decreasing volatility. The downside is they suppress alpha.”
10 contrarian leadership truths every leader needs to hear | Matt MacInnis (Rippling) · Matt MacInnis
“The purest form of ambition and most intense source of energy in the business is the founder CEO. Every next concentric circle of management has the potential to be an order of magnitude drop off in intensity.”
10 contrarian leadership truths every leader needs to hear | Matt MacInnis (Rippling) · Matt MacInnis
“We basically never wanted to play the Silicon Valley game. We could fire 90% of the people and we would move faster.”
The 100-person AI lab that became Anthropic and Google's secret weapon | Edwin Chen (Surge AI) · Edwin Chen
“Most leaders, especially technical leaders, assume they have to have all the answers. But great leaders know that you're training your team to come to you with all of the hard problems.”
A guide to difficult conversations, building high-trust teams, and designing a life you love | Rachel Lockett · Rachel Lockett
“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
“I use a GROW model. G is goal, R is reality, O is options, W is way forward.”
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
“65% of startups fail because of co-founder conflict. Just like couples need a date night, co-founders need regular check-ins.”
A guide to difficult conversations, building high-trust teams, and designing a life you love | Rachel Lockett · Rachel Lockett
“Would you enthusiastically rehire this person for the same role? That's the question we always asked at Stripe.”
A guide to difficult conversations, building high-trust teams, and designing a life you love | Rachel Lockett · Rachel Lockett
“The one-page plan puts your vision and values on the first column, strategic intentions and KPIs on the second, annual goals on the third, and quarterly goals on the fourth.”
A guide to difficult conversations, building high-trust teams, and designing a life you love | Rachel Lockett · Rachel Lockett
“I feel like what we have right now is just a giant piece of shit. If you can't see almost limitless opportunities to improve, then you shouldn't be designing the product.”
Slack founder: Mental models for building products people love ft. Stewart Butterfield · Stewart Butterfield
“At more than one company all hands, I made everyone repeat: In the long run, the measure of our success will be the amount of value that we create for customers.”
Slack founder: Mental models for building products people love ft. Stewart Butterfield · Stewart Butterfield
“Hyper-realistic work-like activities are superficially identical to work but actually fake. Every executive will do it.”
Slack founder: Mental models for building products people love ft. Stewart Butterfield · Stewart Butterfield
“The overwhelming majority of people you hire want to hire more people who report to them because headcount correlates with career trajectory.”
Slack founder: Mental models for building products people love ft. Stewart Butterfield · Stewart Butterfield
“You have to be coldly rational about pivoting because it's humiliating. It feels better to keep doing it until it dies of suffocation.”
Slack founder: Mental models for building products people love ft. Stewart Butterfield · Stewart Butterfield
“Whatever AI does, currently or in the future, is up to us. Every technology is a double-edged sword.”
The Godmother of AI on jobs, robots & why world models are next | Dr. Fei-Fei Li · Dr. Fei Fei Li
“The thing that I love about a crazy big goal is that you feel completely inadequate before it. You want to work really hard to will it into existence.”
The woman behind Canva shares how she built a $42B company from nothing | Melanie Perkins · Melanie Perkins
“I don't have emails on my phone. When I shut my laptop, I actually tune out. Sometimes you can miss the forest from the trees when you're just working harder.”
The woman behind Canva shares how she built a $42B company from nothing | Melanie Perkins · Melanie Perkins
“Step one, build one of the world's most valuable companies. Step two, do the most good we can do. They fuel each other.”
The woman behind Canva shares how she built a $42B company from nothing | Melanie Perkins · Melanie Perkins
“There's many times we took bricks from someone else's house, and they didn't match. Confidence in how we take what is authentic to us and do it at the next level of scale is constant work.”
The woman behind Canva shares how she built a $42B company from nothing | Melanie Perkins · Melanie Perkins
“The non-technical people using AI agents and programming tools to build things is really what's been surprising and amazing.”
How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · Dhanji R. Prasanna
“The power of Conway's Law — how difficult it is to change outcomes without changing the structure of relationships between people.”
How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · Dhanji R. Prasanna
“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
“There's this cult of lean, scrappy, fast. I see the opposite more often — people hold on to small teams too long and the product dies on the vine.”
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
“The worst thing you do as a leader is hesitate on the next decision. Both decisions are horrible. Choose quickly.”
$46B of hard truths from Ben Horowitz: Why founders fail and why you need to run toward fear (a16z co-founder) · Ben Horowitz
“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
“What I was trying to get out in Good Product Manager, Bad Product Manager was the job is fundamentally a leadership job. Nobody actually reports to you.”
$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
“If you don't trust what you see and run at it, you're just not going to be good. CEOs are like great athletes.”
$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
“If you were founding a new company from scratch with the same mission, how would you execute using a fully AI native approach?”
How we restructured Airtable’s entire org for AI | Howie Liu (co-founder and CEO) · Howie Liu
“To be continuously relevant, you have to be of the details. There is no looking at it from 10,000 foot view.”
How we restructured Airtable’s entire org for AI | Howie Liu (co-founder and CEO) · Howie Liu
“It's actually now hard to taste the soup without participating in creating it. To understand the solution space, you have to be in the details.”
How we restructured Airtable’s entire org for AI | Howie Liu (co-founder and CEO) · Howie Liu
“If you want to cancel all your meetings for a day or entire week and just go play around with every AI product, go do it.”
How we restructured Airtable’s entire org for AI | Howie Liu (co-founder and CEO) · Howie Liu
“This person has been tweeting spicy takes not substantiated by real data, yet this particular tweet went super viral.”
How we restructured Airtable’s entire org for AI | Howie Liu (co-founder and CEO) · Howie Liu
“We're approaching a world where the marginal cost of good output approaches zero. The org chart starts to become the work chart.”
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 think about what season are we in? A season can be denoted by secular changes in the industry. We have loose quarterly OKRs and 4-6 week goals.”
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
“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
“Separate engineering team, separate design team, separate finance team. People only had one job — making Handshake AI successful.”
Inside the expert network training every frontier AI model | Garrett Lord (Handshake CEO) · Garrett Lord
“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
“I said, we need to become a wartime company. I rewrote the values designed to be a sharp knife to cut out the parts of the company that wouldn't be effective.”
How Intercom rose from the ashes by betting everything on AI | Eoghan McCabe (founder and CEO) · Eoghan McCabe
“You don't have a choice. AI is going to disrupt in the most aggressive violent ways. If you're not in it, you're about to get kicked out.”
How Intercom rose from the ashes by betting everything on AI | Eoghan McCabe (founder and CEO) · Eoghan McCabe
“It is a small team running ChatGPT. I take inspiration from WhatsApp. You have to treat hiring like executive recruiting.”
Inside ChatGPT: The fastest-growing product in history | Nick Turley (Head of ChatGPT at OpenAI) · Nick Turley
“We would have immense regret if you had a model that was state-of-the-art on health bench and didn't use that to help people.”
Inside ChatGPT: The fastest-growing product in history | Nick Turley (Head of ChatGPT at OpenAI) · Nick Turley
“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
“The employee model is simple: compensation at the base, recognition in the middle, meaning at the top.”
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
“Culture is what happens around here when the boss is not around. The more distributed, the more culture is important.”
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 felt like safety wasn't the top priority there. The case for safety has gotten a lot more concrete.”
Benjamin Mann · Benjamin Mann
“The talent wars are real. The expected value of a top researcher is just astronomical.”
Benjamin Mann · Benjamin Mann
“The biggest mistakes I've made have been going into business models where other people have repeatedly failed.”
I’ve run 75+ businesses. Here’s why you’re probably chasing the wrong idea. | Andrew Wilkinson (co‑founder of Tiny) · Andrew Wilkinson
“When we presented Sonos, it was rejected because it's not entertainment-like. We argued about that because I said, 'This is outside looking in, but I don't see you as an entertainment company.' Humans do like to be comfortable. Part of our job here is to help people to give the confidence going bigger and being uncomfortable.”
Naming expert shares the process behind creating billion-dollar brand names like Azure, Vercel, Windsurf, Sonos, Blackberry, and Impossible Burger | David Placek (Lexicon Branding) · David Placek
“Andy Grove said, 'Because I see the polarization here amongst people. That tells me there's energy for Pentium here.' And he said, 'That's why I think we should go with it.' We do look for that polarization. That's what you want. You don't want to go out in the marketplace with something that doesn't have a level of boldness or intensity.”
Naming expert shares the process behind creating billion-dollar brand names like Azure, Vercel, Windsurf, Sonos, Blackberry, and Impossible Burger | David Placek (Lexicon Branding) · David Placek
“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
“It's really important to give two people on your team different charges. One is like go grow the product and the other one is maintain that beautiful aesthetic, the craft that your product is known for. That tension is extremely healthy. I've seen this at Facebook, Instagram, Airtable, ChatGPT, same exact thing.”
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
“What is much more helpful than understanding what your CEO thinks is understanding how your CEO thinks. When I feel confident that people on my team understand how I think, I don't need to read their emails, I don't need to approve things.”
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 have a 30 days of GPT list of 30 things to do, one every single day. I don't know anyone who has gone through this and not come out the other side feeling a hundred times more confident in their skills. It's built as a habit formation tool, not an education tool.”
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
“Design is trying to imagine the future you want to live in and then take the steps to make it real. Saying a company is design-led does not mean it's designer-led. I've never seen somebody graft it on after the fact. It's there at the beginning in the root DNA or it doesn't exist.”
35 years of product design wisdom from Apple, Disney, Pinterest, and beyond | Bob Baxley · Bob Baxley
“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
“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
“Capital-M Marketing, the marketing team, is responsible for channels and artifacts driving the funnel. But lowercase-m marketing is what do you stand for as a company? It's a whole company motion where the product team, the sales team, and everyone joins to make that happen.”
Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman · Krithika Shankarraman
“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
“My most spectacular failure was being the first PM on Hangouts. We had thousands of people, the entire power of Google, Larry literally sitting with us saying we can do anything we want Chrome to do, and we still didn't manage to build a great messaging product.”
Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · Mayur Kamat
“At Binance, we had this ability to just put 500 people in and solve the problem. It's less about having the 500 people and being able to maneuver them that quickly. I don't think I've been able to do that at any other company.”
Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · Mayur Kamat
“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
“There's no right or wrong decisions. There's just slow and fast decisions. If you make a wrong decision fast enough, you would know it was wrong and you would correct it faster than thinking months for the right decision.”
Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · Mayur Kamat
“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
“If something is 99% done, it's closer to 0% rather than 100%.”
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
“I would add an obsession with building wow product. The product owner is set to this objective that I need to build a product that would make people say wow. Practically, the way we do it is we align a product vision with a reference product.”
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
“When you started a new project, you basically had to organize what they called a murder board. You write up a two-page plan for the project. You invite three or four smart folks who don't know anything about the project and their job is just to tear apart your plan.”
How Palantir built the ultimate founder factory | Nabeel S. Qureshi (founder, writer, ex-Palantir) · Nabeel S. Qureshi
“As soon as we have titles, you have a thing that people are competing for and then you get these very unproductive conflicts. You get people optimizing to game the system. You get Goodhart's law everywhere.”
How Palantir built the ultimate founder factory | Nabeel S. Qureshi (founder, writer, ex-Palantir) · Nabeel S. Qureshi
“When you actually feel that difference between somebody who's just checking the boxes and somebody who's kind of an animal in this way, they'll actually go and pursue and accomplish the end outcome, that difference is very, very big and it matters so much for your first 20 people.”
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
“Why is it that nobody on my team can make a decision without me? Who hired them? How can you hire people whom you expect to make decisions without running them through you if you can't tolerate them making a decision that you disagree with?”
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
“Many people you hear hired too fast, I think we actually hired too slow to begin with. Getting the right group of people into the company was the thing that maybe more than anything else, apart from building the product, we really, really fussed over.”
The rise of Cursor: The $300M ARR AI tool that engineers can’t stop using | Michael Truell (co-founder and CEO) · Michael Truell
“We really have an approach of very radical transparency about everything. Before we went public, we actually shared every bit of information with our employees. Instead of demoralizing people, it gives them a sense of deep partnership.”
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
“We had the daily numbers concept. You buy a TV, put it on the wall, and when you had a new paying account, you had the Simpson saying the same with the $1 million. For new signups, you had a tick. Suddenly, everyone is living it.”
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
“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
“I want the company to almost be like this dehydrated entity. Every hire is like a little bit of water, and we only go back and hire someone when we're back to being dehydrated.”
Building a magical AI code editor used by over 1 million developers in four months: The untold story of Windsurf | Varun Mohan (co-founder and CEO) · Varun Mohan
“You don't win by doing 10 things well. You win by doing one thing really well and maybe you fail nine things. In school you optimize for your total GPA. But for companies, I just need to get an A+ on the one class that matters.”
Building a magical AI code editor used by over 1 million developers in four months: The untold story of Windsurf | Varun Mohan (co-founder and CEO) · Varun Mohan
“My personal belief is that you want to be pretty PM light as an organization. Too many PMs causes problems. We'll fill the world with decks and ideas versus execution. It's a good thing when a PM is working with slightly too many engineers.”
OpenAI’s CPO on how AI changes must-have skills, moats, coding, startup playbooks, more | Kevin Weil (CPO at OpenAI, ex-Instagram, Twitter) · Kevin Weil
“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
“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
“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
“The design team was 10, 12 people at 5,000-6,000 employees. For a long time there were no PMs at all. These weren't your average designers. These were designers who were actually PMs as well. That's what the secret sauce was.”
How to win in the AI era: Ship a feature every week, embrace technical debt, ruthlessly cut scope, and create magic your competitors can't copy | Gaurav Misra (CEO and co-founder of Captions) · Gaurav Misra
“As the company gets bigger, you can actually create alignment by causing internal virality. We would create prototype products, share the build, and it would explode inside the company. Day after day we would hear from engineers, then managers, then VPs, then eventually from Evan.”
How to win in the AI era: Ship a feature every week, embrace technical debt, ruthlessly cut scope, and create magic your competitors can't copy | Gaurav Misra (CEO and co-founder of Captions) · Gaurav Misra
“This is a technique that I call the switch lock. It's born out of the observation that your calendar says what you thought you were going to do, but it's really only your trail of work that describes what you actually did. How can we capture that? So I came up with the following idea. What if I just did whatever the heck I wanted?”
Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · Rahul Vohra
“Most importantly, it's been the people. It's rare to find startups where you have the core group of five, six, seven people that have been there for five years plus.”
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
“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
“Staying small is a feature, not a bug. When you're small, you can move fast. Every person you add is a communication overhead. We stayed at about 50 people for a very long time intentionally.”
Notion’s lost years, its near collapse during Covid, staying small to move fast, the joy and suffering of building horizontal, more | Ivan Zhao (CEO and co-founder) · Ivan Zhao
“WordPress.org is the open source project, WordPress.com is our hosted service, and WP Engine is a company that makes a ton of money from WordPress and gives almost nothing back. They're strip-mining the commons.”
The creator of WordPress opens up about becoming an internet villain, why he’s taking a stand, and the future of open source | Matt Mullenweg (founder and CEO, Automattic) · Matt Mullenweg
“We bought Tumblr for $3 million. But it was free like a puppy, not free like beer. We took on all liabilities, including FTC investigations and lawsuits.”
The creator of WordPress opens up about becoming an internet villain, why he’s taking a stand, and the future of open source | Matt Mullenweg (founder and CEO, Automattic) · Matt Mullenweg
“Every post is eligible for notes. We shouldn't exempt Elon. We shouldn't exempt government figures. Even advertisers can get notes.”
An inside look at X’s Community Notes | Keith Coleman (VP of Product) and Jay Baxter (ML Lead) · Keith Coleman & Jay Baxter
“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
“What is your energy source? My energy source is dissatisfaction with status quo. I think today is the dystopia of the future. It behooves us to try to build the kinds of products that leads towards progress.”
Tobi Lutke · Tobi Lutke
“Pessimism sounds extremely sophisticated. Optimism always sounds dumb or at least naive. The most powerful unquantifiable things in the world of business are fun and delight.”
Tobi Lutke · Tobi Lutke
“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
“Everyone at Shopify has to be able to build something with AI. If you're not learning how to use these tools, you're falling behind. We made this a company-wide expectation.”
Tobi Lutke · Tobi Lutke
“If most people are doing it a certain way, I by default don't want to do it that way. That's not contrarianism for its own sake, it's just that the default path is usually optimized for average outcomes.”
Tobi Lutke · Tobi Lutke
“I started noticing that there was a certain mystique and aura about product strategy. There was this perception that some people were intrinsically really good at strategy and others were not. It was almost as if there was a strategy gene.”
An operator’s guide to product strategy | Chandra Janakiraman (CPO at VRChat, ex-Meta, Headspace, Zynga) · Chandra Janakiraman
“There is a smallest flavor of it which focuses on solving problems, they're called present forward, and it typically operates in a two-year horizon. We use a five-stage process to get there and it takes about eight to 12 weeks.”
An operator’s guide to product strategy | Chandra Janakiraman (CPO at VRChat, ex-Meta, Headspace, Zynga) · Chandra Janakiraman
“I actually don't recommend thinking about resources in the strategy phase, because what you're saying is 'these are the areas of focus' and the resourcing question becomes more relevant from a road mapping standpoint.”
An operator’s guide to product strategy | Chandra Janakiraman (CPO at VRChat, ex-Meta, Headspace, Zynga) · Chandra Janakiraman
“The reason I think this process works is there is a ton of alignment built in. It goes back to human psychology of just something that comes from you feels a lot more familiar and easy to accept.”
An operator’s guide to product strategy | Chandra Janakiraman (CPO at VRChat, ex-Meta, Headspace, Zynga) · Chandra Janakiraman
“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
“The biggest lesson from that era is you have to be willing to cannibalize yourself. If you're not willing to disrupt your own product, someone else will do it for you.”
Behind the founder: Drew Houston (Dropbox) · Drew Houston
“Hope for the future is so important. I know this is going to be challenging for you to hear, not going to promote you, but I want you to know this. It's really important to me that you're able to succeed in your career here.”
Scripts for difficult conversations: Giving hard feedback, navigating defensiveness, the three questions you should end every meeting with, more | Alisa Cohn (executive coach) · Alisa Cohn
“They're trying now to be the leader who everyone loves, but what really needs to happen very often is, we need to drive towards results. This employee continuing to not really do a great job, you don't want to push them because you don't want to upset them. Ultimately, that leads to the demise of your company.”
Scripts for difficult conversations: Giving hard feedback, navigating defensiveness, the three questions you should end every meeting with, more | Alisa Cohn (executive coach) · Alisa Cohn
“When someone gets defensive, don't match their energy. Say: 'I can see this is hard to hear. I want to give you a moment. We can come back to this.' That pause is incredibly powerful.”
Scripts for difficult conversations: Giving hard feedback, navigating defensiveness, the three questions you should end every meeting with, more | Alisa Cohn (executive coach) · Alisa Cohn
“In everything always talk from the customer's perspective, from the market's perspective, from the competitor's perspective. The very small number of PMs do that. They get dragged into internal politics, scrum management.”
Why great AI products are all about the data | Shaun Clowes (CPO Confluent, ex-Salesforce, Atlassian) · Shaun Clowes
“I actually never look at the stock. I find the stock to be very distracting. The stock isn't the goal. That's not why we're doing this.”
Behind the founder: Marc Benioff · Marc Benioff
“I keep having these existential freakout moments about AI. This is really moving fast.”
Behind the founder: Marc Benioff · Marc Benioff
“Number two is I need to find more fuel in the company to fuel this idea because this is clearly a breakthrough product, so how do I get everyone focused on it.”
Behind the founder: Marc Benioff · Marc Benioff
“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
“Tobi looked at me and he goes, 'You should tell everyone this story.' He goes, 'I will always come down harshly on people who do not take risks, and you did not take a risk in this case. But if you take a risk and it doesn't work out, you'll never get in trouble.'”
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
“I define good taste as knowing what other people want just before they do. People are seen as having good taste when they bring something to the world that the world didn't necessarily expect but is glad to see.”
Seth Godin's best tactics for building remarkable products, strategies, brands and more · Seth Godin
“To be a founder is a state of being, it's an attitude. To be a CEO is a craft. The more founders who can accept that those are two separate things and they're both equally important to build an ascendant startup, the better all of us will be.”
How a great founder becomes a great CEO | Jonathan Lowenhar (co-founder of Enjoy The Work) · Jonathan Lowenhar
“Founder mode gets me angry. That article just got me hot. It really felt like an excuse. We were giving founders permission to not learn the job.”
How a great founder becomes a great CEO | Jonathan Lowenhar (co-founder of Enjoy The Work) · Jonathan Lowenhar
“There are these two phases to a startup journey. Phase one is finding product-market fit. Phase two is building the company. Most founders focus entirely on phase one and never learn how to do phase two.”
How a great founder becomes a great CEO | Jonathan Lowenhar (co-founder of Enjoy The Work) · Jonathan Lowenhar
“The greatest CEOs know when to calibrate which one is needed. It's not manager mode is bad, it's that you need both modes and you need to know when to deploy each.”
How a great founder becomes a great CEO | Jonathan Lowenhar (co-founder of Enjoy The Work) · Jonathan Lowenhar
“Shopify doesn't have KPIs in the traditional sense. We have a north star which is GMS, gross merchandise sales, and everything else is context. We trust people to make good decisions.”
Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · Archie Abrams
“We build toward a 100-year vision. That sounds abstract but it changes every decision. You stop optimizing for this quarter's numbers and start building things that compound.”
Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · Archie Abrams
“Most doors that look like two-way doors are actually one-way doors. They are two-way doors at Bezos' level, but as a PM leader, for you, they are a one-way door, and that's making you busy.”
Shreyas Doshi Live · Shreyas Doshi Live
“The pre-mortem is the most powerful tool I've found. Before you start a project, imagine it's failed. Now write down why it failed. You'll surface risks your team would never bring up otherwise.”
4 questions Shreyas Doshi wishes he’d asked himself sooner | Former PM leader at Stripe, Twitter, Google · Shreyas Doshi
“Product work happens at three levels: impact, execution, and optics. Most execution problems are actually strategy problems. When you can't get alignment, it's because there's no clear strategy, not because people aren't executing.”
4 questions Shreyas Doshi wishes he’d asked himself sooner | Former PM leader at Stripe, Twitter, Google · Shreyas Doshi
“I really believe in frameworks for things that helps drive extreme clarity. There needs to be one canonical doc. Everyone should know exactly where the canonical doc is. That's the one place I can go to get all the information I need about a project and it will link to all the other docs.”
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
“It also gives people a framework to plug into. A lot of times the creation of a pre-read for these discussions involves many different people from many different teams and functions. If you have a traffic light, they can own filling out their cell, they can own the rationale behind the legal position on option one, two, and three.”
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
“People are always like, 'What are you training for?' And I'm like, 'I'm training for life.' I have four musties: eat, sleep a long time, and exercise. Those are the things that I need in order to perform.”
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
“I'm trying to find blocks in my day that I can spend time thinking and also within those blocks, they don't have to be alone time. They can also be scheduling my chief of staff and my head of data to bounce ideas off of as a sounding board because that is the process that I know best for me in terms of really developing a first party perspective.”
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
“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
“So much of the way that we tackle problems and build products is this builder mindset. Part of the problem though is it can't possibly create more value than the effort that you put into it. What I look for instead are things that can be gardened, things that can grow on their own and that you can direct or maybe give a little bit of extra energy to or curate over.”
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
“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
“You don't want any of this... Like people in the organization, they ask mom, they asked dad and they got different opinions and playing one against the other. That doesn't work.”
Lessons in product leadership and AI strategy from Glean, Google, Amazon, and Slack | Tamar Yehoshua (Product at Glean, ex-Google and Slack) · Tamar Yehoshua
“Hoarding credit. PMs, they tend to be the front-facing person for initiative. Engineers sometimes think that they don't get the credit for their work because the PM takes all the glory and all the credit for the project that they really worked very hard on.”
The things engineers are desperate for PMs to understand | Camille Fournier (author of “The Manager’s Path,” ex-CTO at Rent the Runway) · Camille Fournier
“The next thing that engineers really get annoyed about with PMs, when they just don't understand the details and act like they don't matter, it just shows a real lack of empathy for the work that engineers are doing and I think it really can be very off-putting.”
The things engineers are desperate for PMs to understand | Camille Fournier (author of “The Manager’s Path,” ex-CTO at Rent the Runway) · Camille Fournier
“When you get to offer stage, I send an email and I say all the terrible things that are probably going to reinforce their fears. If you can tell them that upfront and they can read that whole email and still be equally excited to join you, find yourself a A+ hire.”
Unorthodox PM wisdom: Automating user insights, unselling job candidates, logging every decision, more | Kevin Yien (Stripe, Square, Mutiny) · Kevin Yien
“The brain is like a college campus that has different departments in it. Most people rely on their history department way too much. If you instead send things to the more experimental, open-minded science department, the more creative art department, you get dramatically better answers.”
Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · Evan LaPointe
“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
“If mission, vision, values was an airline, you would not allow any family to fly on that airline. It does not arrive at most of its intended destinations.”
Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · Evan LaPointe
“Alpha is quite simply daydreaming. Beta is productivity mode. And then gamma is your brain's intense focus. We generally spend too much time in beta in work.”
Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · Evan LaPointe
“If 25% of your year is spent in gamma and alpha, you're probably a lot better off than the teams who spend less than 25% of their year thinking deep, and being in this more daydreaming mode.”
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
“Uber always has this mentality and Opendoor does two of the product operations, twin turbine jet plane where you can fly the plane on one engine for a little bit if you need to, but it's operating most efficiently and effectively if both are working together.”
Lessons from scaling Uber and Opendoor | Brian Tolkin (Head of Product at Opendoor, ex-Uber) · Brian Tolkin
“Gave a really deep understanding of how the business actually works. It's a pretty good foundation for then going on to say, okay, what do we actually want to build in a more scalable technology way.”
Lessons from scaling Uber and Opendoor | Brian Tolkin (Head of Product at Opendoor, ex-Uber) · Brian Tolkin
“I've slept on the floor in China before launching uberPOOL, and when you reflect the stress onto your teams, everybody tenses out. It counterintuitively doesn't produce better outcomes.”
Lessons from scaling Uber and Opendoor | Brian Tolkin (Head of Product at Opendoor, ex-Uber) · Brian Tolkin
“I'm always forward thinking, backwards planning. 'Where do you want to be and ultimately how do you think you're going to get there?' Because say your goal is to be on all platforms... forward think, that's where you want to be. Now let's backwards plan.”
The ultimate guide to performance marketing | Timothy Davis (Shopify) · Timothy Davis
“What's taught now in business schools generally sucks. People aren't prepared educationally, and they sure don't get prepared for it in companies. It's intellectually challenging and it's emotionally intimidating.”
5 essential questions to craft a winning strategy | Roger Martin (author, advisor, speaker) · Roger Martin
“You have to have answers to five questions. What's your winning aspiration? Where to play? How can you win? What capabilities do you have to have that your competitors don't? And then, what enabling management systems do you have to put in place?”
5 essential questions to craft a winning strategy | Roger Martin (author, advisor, speaker) · Roger Martin
“You have to be either differentiated or low cost, there's no way to protect yourself if you're not one of those two.”
5 essential questions to craft a winning strategy | Roger Martin (author, advisor, speaker) · Roger Martin
“For me, analytics is a business impact driving function and not purely a service function, not just answering the why, but answering the, 'What do we do now that we know this?'”
Building a world-class data org | Jessica Lachs (VP of Analytics and Data Science at DoorDash) · Jess Lachs
“Yes, you are a data scientist, but your goal is to figure out what's happening. And if that means that you're going to pick up the phone and call customers, then that is what you're going to do to roll up your sleeves.”
Building a world-class data org | Jessica Lachs (VP of Analytics and Data Science at DoorDash) · Jess Lachs
“Not having things be your idea I think is really powerful. I just talked to 50 customers who all yelled the same thing. Here they are in varieties of quotes and forms... Cool. What else could we want to do? The majority failure mode is we do nothing.”
Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · Jeff Weinstein
“I find proof of existence to be an incredibly powerful proof, rather than proof by theory or proof by debate. It's like, 'Look, we did it one time.'”
Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · Jeff Weinstein
“I remember writing the first draft and sending it to him because it was... and he wrote back, 'This doesn't sound like you yet.' The willingness to entrust a new person to provide their own perspective... that really spoke to me, and I rewrote it completely.”
Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · Jeff Weinstein
“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
“A startup never beats a big company by executing better than the big company. Startup wins over the big company because it proposes a radically different future, disorients the incumbent, and sort of chaotically moves people to that different future.”
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 mistake that most companies make is they say, 'I've got this new pattern-breaking idea. It needs to be a third of my business in 24 months.' Bad strategy... Pattern-breaking products have different types of leadership, different types of go-to-market motion, different risk profiles.”
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 most important thing we did at YC was create an environment where founders could be honest about their problems. Most founders are performing for investors and the outside world. At YC dinners, they could let their guard down.”
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
“If we all agree that the feeling of something should be, I'm sitting in Dolores Park with my friends on a sunny Saturday, then people will just naturally build something that feels more consistent.”
Making an impact through authenticity and curiosity | Ami Vora (CPO at Faire, ex-WhatsApp, FB, IG) · Ami Vora
“When I joined WhatsApp, one of the most striking things was the discipline of saying no. The product had like 50 engineers serving a billion users. That level of focus is extraordinary.”
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
“I needed the rest of the company to go away so we could get the autonomy to test the things that we needed, but it's not going to scale. That is not going to respect all design guidelines.”
Hard-won lessons building 0 to 1 inside Atlassian | Tanguy Crusson (Head of Jira Product Discovery) · Tanguy Crusson
“In my opinion everyone can be a product engineer. They just need to be exposed to the right user context. The right user context is 10 customers you know by name, you know their context, you know their problems.”
Hard-won lessons building 0 to 1 inside Atlassian | Tanguy Crusson (Head of Jira Product Discovery) · Tanguy Crusson
“No one is going to read a research report that takes 30 minutes to read. Everyone is happy to watch a three-minute snippet with four customers talking about something.”
Hard-won lessons building 0 to 1 inside Atlassian | Tanguy Crusson (Head of Jira Product Discovery) · Tanguy Crusson
“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
“Fall in love, fall in love, fall in love, fall in love with the problem, and then actually what you're trying to do is engage everyone else to fall in love with the same problem, to go into this journey, into this path and follow your leadership there.”
Lessons from a two-time unicorn builder, 50-time startup advisor, and 20-time company board member | Uri Levine (co-founder of Waze) · Uri Levine
“Every time that you hire someone new, mark your calendars for 30 days down the road and ask yourself one question, knowing what I know today, would I hire this person? If the answer is no, fire them immediately.”
Lessons from a two-time unicorn builder, 50-time startup advisor, and 20-time company board member | Uri Levine (co-founder of Waze) · Uri Levine
“I run everyone through the culture of Canva. One of those sections is on giving away your Lego, finding joy in the other things of building a team, passing on your experience, helping other people do great writing or great product building or great engineering.”
Inside Canva: Coaches not managers, giving away your Legos, and running profitably | Cameron Adams (co-founder and CPO) · Cam Adams
“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
“I didn't want to do product management like they did at Google, and that's because of the different cultures. I have seen product managers at other companies who are very independent of teams and that seems very weird to me. For us, product managers are really connected.”
Inside Canva: Coaches not managers, giving away your Legos, and running profitably | Cameron Adams (co-founder and CPO) · Cam Adams
“We've been profitable from very early on. That changes everything about how you make decisions. You're not on someone else's timeline. You're on your own timeline.”
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
“At Slack, one of the things I learned was that the best product decisions came from people who were willing to say what they actually thought, even when it was uncomfortable. The culture rewarded directness.”
Why not asking for what you want is holding you back | Kenneth Berger (exec coach, first PM at Slack) · Kenneth Berger
“Kevin Systrom in the early days of Instagram, I heard him say it at a conference. We may not be right, but at least we are clear. Even if your strategy isn't right, you have a very clear idea of what was supposed to be happening.”
Be fundamentally different, not incrementally better | Jag Duggal (Nubank, Facebook, Google, Quantcast) · Jag Duggal
“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
“You're on a treadmill and if you stop running on that treadmill, you get creamed, but it's not power. The things that drive operational excellence can be mimicked.”
Business strategy with Hamilton Helmer (author of 7 Powers) · Hamilton Helmer
“It's so incredibly necessary in improving decision quality to take what's implicit and make it explicit. It's not that intuition is crap, your intuition is sometimes right. If you don't make it explicit, then you don't get to find out when it's wrong.”
This will make you a better decision-maker | Annie Duke (author of “Thinking in Bets” and “Quit,” former pro poker player) · Annie Duke
“People generally think the purpose of a meeting is for three things, discover, discuss, decide. The only thing that's ever supposed to happen in a meeting is the discussion part.”
This will make you a better decision-maker | Annie Duke (author of “Thinking in Bets” and “Quit,” former pro poker player) · Annie Duke
“So a pre-mortem, it's great only if you set up kill criteria. Commit to actions that you're going to take if you see those signals.”
This will make you a better decision-maker | Annie Duke (author of “Thinking in Bets” and “Quit,” former pro poker player) · Annie Duke
“When you're making a decision where the outcome is very long-term, you need to focus on the quality of the process, not the quality of the outcome. Because the outcome is going to be affected by so many things you can't control.”
This will make you a better decision-maker | Annie Duke (author of “Thinking in Bets” and “Quit,” former pro poker player) · Annie Duke
“The most important thing about quitting is to set your criteria in advance. Decide when you will quit before you start. Once you're in it, your sunk cost bias will keep you going way too long.”
This will make you a better decision-maker | Annie Duke (author of “Thinking in Bets” and “Quit,” former pro poker player) · Annie Duke
“We wanted to change the lack of ambition, the lack of creativity, the lack of customers feeling that the product had changed at all.”
Twitter’s former Head of Product opens up: being fired, meeting Elon, changing stagnant culture, building consumer product, more | Kayvon Beykpour · Kayvon Beykpour
“The sacred cows are like their own roadmap. What are all the things that you think we're not allowed to change? Let's start there.”
Twitter’s former Head of Product opens up: being fired, meeting Elon, changing stagnant culture, building consumer product, more | Kayvon Beykpour · Kayvon Beykpour
“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
“The number one thing that changed Twitter's shipping velocity was just getting people to believe they were allowed to ship. The culture had become so risk-averse that people self-censored their own ambition.”
Twitter’s former Head of Product opens up: being fired, meeting Elon, changing stagnant culture, building consumer product, more | Kayvon Beykpour · Kayvon Beykpour
“I feel that you don't care and I feel you're being insensitive are not feelings, and that's where we make our biggest mistakes when it comes to feedback.”
How to build deeper, more robust relationships | Carole Robin (Stanford GSB professor, “Touchy Feely”) · Carole Robin
“Questions that start with what, when, where, how. Stay away from why.”
How to build deeper, more robust relationships | Carole Robin (Stanford GSB professor, “Touchy Feely”) · Carole Robin
“We don't understand that we are only privy to two out of the three, so I know what's going on for me and I know what I did. I have no idea what happened on your end.”
How to build deeper, more robust relationships | Carole Robin (Stanford GSB professor, “Touchy Feely”) · Carole Robin
“Anger is a secondary emotion. Really what's going on is you're afraid or you're hurt.”
How to build deeper, more robust relationships | Carole Robin (Stanford GSB professor, “Touchy Feely”) · Carole Robin
“The most robust relationships are the ones that have been through conflict and survived. If you've never had a hard conversation with someone, you don't actually have a deep relationship. You have a pleasant one.”
How to build deeper, more robust relationships | Carole Robin (Stanford GSB professor, “Touchy Feely”) · Carole Robin
“My take is that your scope is the world. Nothing should ever perceive as being out of bounds.”
Vision, conviction, and hype: How to build 0 to 1 inside a company | Mihika Kapoor (Product at Figma) · Mihika Kapoor
“We have this concept called Maker Week, which is our internal hackathon, giving people the breathing space to see ahead into the horizon and be wildly ambitious.”
Vision, conviction, and hype: How to build 0 to 1 inside a company | Mihika Kapoor (Product at Figma) · Mihika Kapoor
“The way I think about hype is that it's a tool. You need internal hype to get resources and attention. But you have to back it up with substance. Hype without substance erodes trust very quickly.”
Vision, conviction, and hype: How to build 0 to 1 inside a company | Mihika Kapoor (Product at Figma) · Mihika Kapoor
“I think the best PMs are unreasonable. Not in a bad way, but they refuse to accept the constraints that everyone else accepts. They ask, what if we just didn't have that constraint?”
Vision, conviction, and hype: How to build 0 to 1 inside a company | Mihika Kapoor (Product at Figma) · Mihika Kapoor
“People often think that I get hired into later stage companies because I'm supposed to teach them how to operate like a big company, and in fact, I say I'm hired to remind them they can operate like a startup.”
Bending the universe in your favor | Claire Vo (LaunchDarkly, Color, Optimizely, ChatPRD) · Claire Vo
“I communicate to my leaders that my expectation is they bring in the clock speed one click faster. If you think something needs to be done this year, it needs to be done this half.”
Bending the universe in your favor | Claire Vo (LaunchDarkly, Color, Optimizely, ChatPRD) · Claire Vo
“I'm using CPTO for short code of running product and engineering design functionally together. There should be no debates over what's best for product or what's best for engineering, what's best for design speed. What is best for the organization?”
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
“I could become passively okay at management with some training, with some coaching. I don't want to spend any years of my life becoming passively okay at something.”
Zigging vs. zagging: How HubSpot built a $30B company | Dharmesh Shah (co-founder/CTO) · Dharmesh Shah
“A lot of CEOs have done well because they follow the 'dharma' of the founders quite well. They have not diluted the dharma of the founders who have started these companies, and managed to sustain that. Maintaining 'dharma', where I will say that 'These principles were given to me and I'm going to sustain this and make it even bigger,' comes from the humility of saying that there is something that was built with some pure form factor.”
Kunal Shah on winning in India, second-order thinking, the philosophy of startups, and more · Kunal Shah
“When superheroes discover what their superpowers actually are, they wreak havoc and they make a mess, and it's uncomfortable. And even Superman tries to get rid of his superpowers. It's hard to know what you're really great at.”
How to discover your superpowers, own your story, and unlock personal growth | Donna Lichaw (author of The Leader’s Journey) · Donna Lichaw
“The most effective stories are the ones that we tell ourselves. They may or may not be true; our brain doesn't know the difference. Once you can really understand that, you may as well leverage it to be that hero.”
How to discover your superpowers, own your story, and unlock personal growth | Donna Lichaw (author of The Leader’s Journey) · Donna Lichaw
“The relationship we all have is so much better because we get on top of these things early.”
Lessons from Atlassian: Launching new products, getting buy-in, and staying ahead of the competition | Megan Cook (head of product, Jira) · Megan Cook
“If you say, 'Do you have any feedback for me?' You're wasting your breath. The other person's going to say, 'Oh no, everything's fine.' The question that I like to ask is, 'What could I do or stop doing that would make it easier to work with me?'”
Radical Candor: From theory to practice with author Kim Scott · Kim Scott
“If they won't do, why won't they? Are they not aligned to you? Do they not agree with your vision? Do they not just have enough time? You need to really go deeper there.”
The full-stack PM | Anuj Rathi (Swiggy, Jupiter Money, Flipkart) · Anuj Rathi
“As a leader, do you have the right people in terms of capability? If not, is the right answer for us to coach them or to really put them... or mentor them, or move them to some other place because maybe their capability is suited elsewhere?”
The full-stack PM | Anuj Rathi (Swiggy, Jupiter Money, Flipkart) · Anuj Rathi
“I do not believe in being liked. I believe in being loved. And love is the choice to extend yourself for the spiritual growth of oneself or another. When you are extending yourself, you're not nice. It sometimes is having hard conversations.”
Crafting a compelling product vision | Ebi Atawodi (YouTube, Netflix, Uber) · Ebi Atawodi
“It's knowing that, oh, there's a human, they know I care about them. So when the feedback is coming like raw, they know that it's in their best interest because I've shown enough times that I genuinely care about the person behind the role.”
Crafting a compelling product vision | Ebi Atawodi (YouTube, Netflix, Uber) · Ebi Atawodi
“Opportunity set B is what's available to you, even though nobody's asking you to do it. What I have found throughout my own career is that opportunity set B is always more important, infinitely more important. Opportunity set A, everything that's asked of you. Opportunity set B is where growth happens.”
How to get press for your product | Jason Feifer (editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine) · Jason Feifer
“Moments that stretch you or moments that you feel uncomfortable in or you find yourself saying, 'Oh shit. I shouldn't be here,' or, 'I'm under qualified to be here,' those are the moments you should be seeking out. A much sharper way is like, 'Hey, how many oh shit moments have you had in the last six months?'”
What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · Lane Shackleton
“The future needs you.”
How to become a category pirate | Christopher Lochhead (author of Play Bigger, Niche Down, Category Pirates, more) · Christopher Lochhead
“Those Steve Jobs' lore was that if you were in an elevator with him, you better be prepared to talk about what you do at the company because he had a habit of getting in the elevator and looking at you and saying, 'What do you do? What do you do here?' And there were also rumors that people who had not given him a good answer, that ended up being their last day at Apple.”
Monetizing passions, scaling marketplaces, and stories from a creator economy vet | Camille Hearst (Spotify, Patreon, Apple, YouTube) · Camille Hearst
“So there was someone who worked in my department before I got there who got in an elevator and looked up and Steve was approaching him and so he went to press the button to open the door and accidentally pressed the one to close the door. And it was like frantically pressing the button, trying to open the door, but accidentally pressing the closed door button and the elevator going to its destination.”
Monetizing passions, scaling marketplaces, and stories from a creator economy vet | Camille Hearst (Spotify, Patreon, Apple, YouTube) · Camille Hearst
“And apparently he got off and just bolted straight up, ran down the hallway.”
Monetizing passions, scaling marketplaces, and stories from a creator economy vet | Camille Hearst (Spotify, Patreon, Apple, YouTube) · Camille Hearst
“When you do that, we look hungry, so let's keep feeding us, right?”
Relentless curiosity, radical accountability, and HubSpot’s winning growth formula | Christopher Miller (VP of Product, Growth and AI) · Christopher Miller
“The thing I would say is bring the insight. Know thy customer. Know thy market. Know thy competitors. Know thy numbers. Know thy product.”
How to ask the right questions, project confidence, and win over skeptics | Paige Costello (Asana, Intercom, Intuit) · Paige Costello
“I felt more relaxed. I was like, 'Oh, yeah, I can do both. It will be fine.'”
How to ask the right questions, project confidence, and win over skeptics | Paige Costello (Asana, Intercom, Intuit) · Paige Costello
“It's very, very tempting to float up here as a leader and say, 'Hey, you take that hill over there. You guys do this over here.' When in fact, where you really learn where the challenges are, or the problems or the successes is by just being there with the people in the trenches on one of the things.”
Moving fast and navigating uncertainty | Jeremy Henrickson (Rippling, Coinbase) · Jeremy Henrickson
“Whichever one seems hardest or most complicated. And so I try to do that as often as I can, and I found that I always learn a lot by going through that detailed exercise.”
Moving fast and navigating uncertainty | Jeremy Henrickson (Rippling, Coinbase) · Jeremy Henrickson
“Where you really learn where the challenges are, or the problems or the successes is by just being there with the people in the trenches.”
Moving fast and navigating uncertainty | Jeremy Henrickson (Rippling, Coinbase) · Jeremy Henrickson
“Challenging your own assumptions. Listening with an open mind but then are you proactively trying to challenge your own assumptions is extremely important. As a big enough product manager as well as a seasoned product leader, if you're not doing enough of that, then I think you might not be listening well. If there's no conflict, if there's no contention, then something is missing.”
Product lessons from Waymo | Shweta Shrivastava (Waymo, Amazon, Cisco) · Shweta Shriva
“If you're not sure who the decision maker is, one, it's probably you. And I'd rather you act that way than not because you're going to slow the whole company down. Follow a process and get it done, and don't forget to actually make a decision. Too many people get stuck and it makes your work terrible. What do we all care about? Progress, impact, momentum. Be a force for positive momentum and it will be actually a real career maker.”
Lessons from scaling Stripe | Claire Hughes Johnson (former COO of Stripe) · Claire Hughes Johnson
“The biggest marker that I've seen between a botched layoff and a successful layoff is at the moment someone hears that they no longer have a job, did they hear it from their manager in a one-on-one? If that's when they heard it, it'll be okay. But if they heard it in an email, in a group chat, in any kind of thing where they were sitting next to other people, it wasn't personalized, that is terrible. That's when people get really angry.”
How to fire people with grace, work through fear, and nurture innovation | Matt Mochary (CEO coach) · Matt Mochary
“Pushback is, I couldn't imagine a word more viscerally that makes you feel like you're sort of physically going against what somebody else wants, and it gears people into a mindset of then, well, how should I push back. It starts from a place of I need to disagree, I need to say no.”
Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy) · Jason Shah
“I don't know how to articulate that feeling, but that flutter in your stomach that you wake up with in the morning of just anxiety and stress and worry. Being a CEO or founder makes it slightly harder, because you still have to put on this mask.”
How to launch and grow your product | Ryan Hoover of Product Hunt and Weekend Fund · Ryan Hoover
“Helping people see why your team should get more resources, you have to actually share what you do.”
How to own your career growth and become a powerful product leader | Deb Liu, Ancestry (ex-Facebook, PayPal) · Deb Liu
“Going from senior PM to management is one of the hardest transitions because you have to stop being the person with the best ideas and start being the person who creates the environment where the best ideas emerge from your team.”
Jackie Bavaro on getting better at product strategy, what exactly is strategy, PM pitfalls to avoid, advancing your career, getting into management, and much more · Jackie Bavaro
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
“You have to know the difference between a megatrend and a hype cycle. When there's a megatrend, don't fight it. AI is a megatrend, one of the most foundational movements that we have seen in human history.”
Jeetu Patel · Jeetu Patel
“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
“In sales, there's rules of eight. Eight SDRs need one manager, eight AEs need a director above them. You can build your whole org with eights.”
We replaced our sales team with 20 AI agents—here’s what happened | Jason Lemkin (SaaStr) · Jason M Lemkin
“The purest form of ambition and most intense source of energy in the business is the founder CEO. Every next concentric circle of management has the potential to be an order of magnitude drop off in intensity.”
10 contrarian leadership truths every leader needs to hear | Matt MacInnis (Rippling) · Matt MacInnis
“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
“65% of startups fail because of co-founder conflict. Just like couples need a date night, co-founders need regular check-ins.”
A guide to difficult conversations, building high-trust teams, and designing a life you love | Rachel Lockett · Rachel Lockett
“Would you enthusiastically rehire this person for the same role? That's the question we always asked at Stripe.”
A guide to difficult conversations, building high-trust teams, and designing a life you love | Rachel Lockett · Rachel Lockett
“I feel like what we have right now is just a giant piece of shit. If you can't see almost limitless opportunities to improve, then you shouldn't be designing the product.”
Slack founder: Mental models for building products people love ft. Stewart Butterfield · Stewart Butterfield
“The overwhelming majority of people you hire want to hire more people who report to them because headcount correlates with career trajectory.”
Slack founder: Mental models for building products people love ft. Stewart Butterfield · Stewart Butterfield
“You have to be coldly rational about pivoting because it's humiliating. It feels better to keep doing it until it dies of suffocation.”
Slack founder: Mental models for building products people love ft. Stewart Butterfield · Stewart Butterfield
“Whatever AI does, currently or in the future, is up to us. Every technology is a double-edged sword.”
The Godmother of AI on jobs, robots & why world models are next | Dr. Fei-Fei Li · Dr. Fei Fei Li
“The thing that I love about a crazy big goal is that you feel completely inadequate before it. You want to work really hard to will it into existence.”
The woman behind Canva shares how she built a $42B company from nothing | Melanie Perkins · Melanie Perkins
“Step one, build one of the world's most valuable companies. Step two, do the most good we can do. They fuel each other.”
The woman behind Canva shares how she built a $42B company from nothing | Melanie Perkins · Melanie Perkins
“There's many times we took bricks from someone else's house, and they didn't match. Confidence in how we take what is authentic to us and do it at the next level of scale is constant work.”
The woman behind Canva shares how she built a $42B company from nothing | Melanie Perkins · Melanie Perkins
“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
“There's this cult of lean, scrappy, fast. I see the opposite more often — people hold on to small teams too long and the product dies on the vine.”
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
“The worst thing you do as a leader is hesitate on the next decision. Both decisions are horrible. Choose quickly.”
$46B of hard truths from Ben Horowitz: Why founders fail and why you need to run toward fear (a16z co-founder) · Ben Horowitz
“What I was trying to get out in Good Product Manager, Bad Product Manager was the job is fundamentally a leadership job. Nobody actually reports to you.”
$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
“If you don't trust what you see and run at it, you're just not going to be good. CEOs are like great athletes.”
$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
“If you were founding a new company from scratch with the same mission, how would you execute using a fully AI native approach?”
How we restructured Airtable’s entire org for AI | Howie Liu (co-founder and CEO) · Howie Liu
“To be continuously relevant, you have to be of the details. There is no looking at it from 10,000 foot view.”
How we restructured Airtable’s entire org for AI | Howie Liu (co-founder and CEO) · Howie Liu
“It's actually now hard to taste the soup without participating in creating it. To understand the solution space, you have to be in the details.”
How we restructured Airtable’s entire org for AI | Howie Liu (co-founder and CEO) · Howie Liu
“This person has been tweeting spicy takes not substantiated by real data, yet this particular tweet went super viral.”
How we restructured Airtable’s entire org for AI | Howie Liu (co-founder and CEO) · Howie Liu
“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
“I said, we need to become a wartime company. I rewrote the values designed to be a sharp knife to cut out the parts of the company that wouldn't be effective.”
How Intercom rose from the ashes by betting everything on AI | Eoghan McCabe (founder and CEO) · Eoghan McCabe
“You don't have a choice. AI is going to disrupt in the most aggressive violent ways. If you're not in it, you're about to get kicked out.”
How Intercom rose from the ashes by betting everything on AI | Eoghan McCabe (founder and CEO) · Eoghan McCabe
“We would have immense regret if you had a model that was state-of-the-art on health bench and didn't use that to help people.”
Inside ChatGPT: The fastest-growing product in history | Nick Turley (Head of ChatGPT at OpenAI) · Nick Turley
“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
“The employee model is simple: compensation at the base, recognition in the middle, meaning at the top.”
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
“Culture is what happens around here when the boss is not around. The more distributed, the more culture is important.”
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 felt like safety wasn't the top priority there. The case for safety has gotten a lot more concrete.”
Benjamin Mann · Benjamin Mann
“The talent wars are real. The expected value of a top researcher is just astronomical.”
Benjamin Mann · Benjamin Mann
“The biggest mistakes I've made have been going into business models where other people have repeatedly failed.”
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
“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
“At Binance, we had this ability to just put 500 people in and solve the problem. It's less about having the 500 people and being able to maneuver them that quickly. I don't think I've been able to do that at any other company.”
Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · Mayur Kamat
“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
“If something is 99% done, it's closer to 0% rather than 100%.”
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
“When you started a new project, you basically had to organize what they called a murder board. You write up a two-page plan for the project. You invite three or four smart folks who don't know anything about the project and their job is just to tear apart your plan.”
How Palantir built the ultimate founder factory | Nabeel S. Qureshi (founder, writer, ex-Palantir) · Nabeel S. Qureshi
“As soon as we have titles, you have a thing that people are competing for and then you get these very unproductive conflicts. You get people optimizing to game the system. You get Goodhart's law everywhere.”
How Palantir built the ultimate founder factory | Nabeel S. Qureshi (founder, writer, ex-Palantir) · Nabeel S. Qureshi
“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
“You don't win by doing 10 things well. You win by doing one thing really well and maybe you fail nine things. In school you optimize for your total GPA. But for companies, I just need to get an A+ on the one class that matters.”
Building a magical AI code editor used by over 1 million developers in four months: The untold story of Windsurf | Varun Mohan (co-founder and CEO) · Varun Mohan
“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
“This is a technique that I call the switch lock. It's born out of the observation that your calendar says what you thought you were going to do, but it's really only your trail of work that describes what you actually did. How can we capture that? So I came up with the following idea. What if I just did whatever the heck I wanted?”
Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · Rahul Vohra
“Most importantly, it's been the people. It's rare to find startups where you have the core group of five, six, seven people that have been there for five years plus.”
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
“Staying small is a feature, not a bug. When you're small, you can move fast. Every person you add is a communication overhead. We stayed at about 50 people for a very long time intentionally.”
Notion’s lost years, its near collapse during Covid, staying small to move fast, the joy and suffering of building horizontal, more | Ivan Zhao (CEO and co-founder) · Ivan Zhao
“WordPress.org is the open source project, WordPress.com is our hosted service, and WP Engine is a company that makes a ton of money from WordPress and gives almost nothing back. They're strip-mining the commons.”
The creator of WordPress opens up about becoming an internet villain, why he’s taking a stand, and the future of open source | Matt Mullenweg (founder and CEO, Automattic) · Matt Mullenweg
“We bought Tumblr for $3 million. But it was free like a puppy, not free like beer. We took on all liabilities, including FTC investigations and lawsuits.”
The creator of WordPress opens up about becoming an internet villain, why he’s taking a stand, and the future of open source | Matt Mullenweg (founder and CEO, Automattic) · Matt Mullenweg
“Every post is eligible for notes. We shouldn't exempt Elon. We shouldn't exempt government figures. Even advertisers can get notes.”
An inside look at X’s Community Notes | Keith Coleman (VP of Product) and Jay Baxter (ML Lead) · Keith Coleman & Jay Baxter
“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
“What is your energy source? My energy source is dissatisfaction with status quo. I think today is the dystopia of the future. It behooves us to try to build the kinds of products that leads towards progress.”
Tobi Lutke · Tobi Lutke
“Pessimism sounds extremely sophisticated. Optimism always sounds dumb or at least naive. The most powerful unquantifiable things in the world of business are fun and delight.”
Tobi Lutke · Tobi Lutke
“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
“Everyone at Shopify has to be able to build something with AI. If you're not learning how to use these tools, you're falling behind. We made this a company-wide expectation.”
Tobi Lutke · Tobi Lutke
“If most people are doing it a certain way, I by default don't want to do it that way. That's not contrarianism for its own sake, it's just that the default path is usually optimized for average outcomes.”
Tobi Lutke · Tobi Lutke
“I started noticing that there was a certain mystique and aura about product strategy. There was this perception that some people were intrinsically really good at strategy and others were not. It was almost as if there was a strategy gene.”
An operator’s guide to product strategy | Chandra Janakiraman (CPO at VRChat, ex-Meta, Headspace, Zynga) · Chandra Janakiraman
“There is a smallest flavor of it which focuses on solving problems, they're called present forward, and it typically operates in a two-year horizon. We use a five-stage process to get there and it takes about eight to 12 weeks.”
An operator’s guide to product strategy | Chandra Janakiraman (CPO at VRChat, ex-Meta, Headspace, Zynga) · Chandra Janakiraman
“I actually don't recommend thinking about resources in the strategy phase, because what you're saying is 'these are the areas of focus' and the resourcing question becomes more relevant from a road mapping standpoint.”
An operator’s guide to product strategy | Chandra Janakiraman (CPO at VRChat, ex-Meta, Headspace, Zynga) · Chandra Janakiraman
“The reason I think this process works is there is a ton of alignment built in. It goes back to human psychology of just something that comes from you feels a lot more familiar and easy to accept.”
An operator’s guide to product strategy | Chandra Janakiraman (CPO at VRChat, ex-Meta, Headspace, Zynga) · Chandra Janakiraman
“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
“The biggest lesson from that era is you have to be willing to cannibalize yourself. If you're not willing to disrupt your own product, someone else will do it for you.”
Behind the founder: Drew Houston (Dropbox) · Drew Houston
“Hope for the future is so important. I know this is going to be challenging for you to hear, not going to promote you, but I want you to know this. It's really important to me that you're able to succeed in your career here.”
Scripts for difficult conversations: Giving hard feedback, navigating defensiveness, the three questions you should end every meeting with, more | Alisa Cohn (executive coach) · Alisa Cohn
“They're trying now to be the leader who everyone loves, but what really needs to happen very often is, we need to drive towards results. This employee continuing to not really do a great job, you don't want to push them because you don't want to upset them. Ultimately, that leads to the demise of your company.”
Scripts for difficult conversations: Giving hard feedback, navigating defensiveness, the three questions you should end every meeting with, more | Alisa Cohn (executive coach) · Alisa Cohn
“When someone gets defensive, don't match their energy. Say: 'I can see this is hard to hear. I want to give you a moment. We can come back to this.' That pause is incredibly powerful.”
Scripts for difficult conversations: Giving hard feedback, navigating defensiveness, the three questions you should end every meeting with, more | Alisa Cohn (executive coach) · Alisa Cohn
“In everything always talk from the customer's perspective, from the market's perspective, from the competitor's perspective. The very small number of PMs do that. They get dragged into internal politics, scrum management.”
Why great AI products are all about the data | Shaun Clowes (CPO Confluent, ex-Salesforce, Atlassian) · Shaun Clowes
“I actually never look at the stock. I find the stock to be very distracting. The stock isn't the goal. That's not why we're doing this.”
Behind the founder: Marc Benioff · Marc Benioff
“I keep having these existential freakout moments about AI. This is really moving fast.”
Behind the founder: Marc Benioff · Marc Benioff
“Number two is I need to find more fuel in the company to fuel this idea because this is clearly a breakthrough product, so how do I get everyone focused on it.”
Behind the founder: Marc Benioff · Marc Benioff
“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
“I define good taste as knowing what other people want just before they do. People are seen as having good taste when they bring something to the world that the world didn't necessarily expect but is glad to see.”
Seth Godin's best tactics for building remarkable products, strategies, brands and more · Seth Godin
“To be a founder is a state of being, it's an attitude. To be a CEO is a craft. The more founders who can accept that those are two separate things and they're both equally important to build an ascendant startup, the better all of us will be.”
How a great founder becomes a great CEO | Jonathan Lowenhar (co-founder of Enjoy The Work) · Jonathan Lowenhar
“Founder mode gets me angry. That article just got me hot. It really felt like an excuse. We were giving founders permission to not learn the job.”
How a great founder becomes a great CEO | Jonathan Lowenhar (co-founder of Enjoy The Work) · Jonathan Lowenhar
“There are these two phases to a startup journey. Phase one is finding product-market fit. Phase two is building the company. Most founders focus entirely on phase one and never learn how to do phase two.”
How a great founder becomes a great CEO | Jonathan Lowenhar (co-founder of Enjoy The Work) · Jonathan Lowenhar
“The greatest CEOs know when to calibrate which one is needed. It's not manager mode is bad, it's that you need both modes and you need to know when to deploy each.”
How a great founder becomes a great CEO | Jonathan Lowenhar (co-founder of Enjoy The Work) · Jonathan Lowenhar
“Most doors that look like two-way doors are actually one-way doors. They are two-way doors at Bezos' level, but as a PM leader, for you, they are a one-way door, and that's making you busy.”
Shreyas Doshi Live · Shreyas Doshi Live
“The pre-mortem is the most powerful tool I've found. Before you start a project, imagine it's failed. Now write down why it failed. You'll surface risks your team would never bring up otherwise.”
4 questions Shreyas Doshi wishes he’d asked himself sooner | Former PM leader at Stripe, Twitter, Google · Shreyas Doshi
“Product work happens at three levels: impact, execution, and optics. Most execution problems are actually strategy problems. When you can't get alignment, it's because there's no clear strategy, not because people aren't executing.”
4 questions Shreyas Doshi wishes he’d asked himself sooner | Former PM leader at Stripe, Twitter, Google · Shreyas Doshi
“I really believe in frameworks for things that helps drive extreme clarity. There needs to be one canonical doc. Everyone should know exactly where the canonical doc is. That's the one place I can go to get all the information I need about a project and it will link to all the other docs.”
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
“It also gives people a framework to plug into. A lot of times the creation of a pre-read for these discussions involves many different people from many different teams and functions. If you have a traffic light, they can own filling out their cell, they can own the rationale behind the legal position on option one, two, and three.”
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
“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
“The brain is like a college campus that has different departments in it. Most people rely on their history department way too much. If you instead send things to the more experimental, open-minded science department, the more creative art department, you get dramatically better answers.”
Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · Evan LaPointe
“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
“If mission, vision, values was an airline, you would not allow any family to fly on that airline. It does not arrive at most of its intended destinations.”
Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · Evan LaPointe
“If 25% of your year is spent in gamma and alpha, you're probably a lot better off than the teams who spend less than 25% of their year thinking deep, and being in this more daydreaming mode.”
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
“Uber always has this mentality and Opendoor does two of the product operations, twin turbine jet plane where you can fly the plane on one engine for a little bit if you need to, but it's operating most efficiently and effectively if both are working together.”
Lessons from scaling Uber and Opendoor | Brian Tolkin (Head of Product at Opendoor, ex-Uber) · Brian Tolkin
“Gave a really deep understanding of how the business actually works. It's a pretty good foundation for then going on to say, okay, what do we actually want to build in a more scalable technology way.”
Lessons from scaling Uber and Opendoor | Brian Tolkin (Head of Product at Opendoor, ex-Uber) · Brian Tolkin
“I've slept on the floor in China before launching uberPOOL, and when you reflect the stress onto your teams, everybody tenses out. It counterintuitively doesn't produce better outcomes.”
Lessons from scaling Uber and Opendoor | Brian Tolkin (Head of Product at Opendoor, ex-Uber) · Brian Tolkin
“I'm always forward thinking, backwards planning. 'Where do you want to be and ultimately how do you think you're going to get there?' Because say your goal is to be on all platforms... forward think, that's where you want to be. Now let's backwards plan.”
The ultimate guide to performance marketing | Timothy Davis (Shopify) · Timothy Davis
“What's taught now in business schools generally sucks. People aren't prepared educationally, and they sure don't get prepared for it in companies. It's intellectually challenging and it's emotionally intimidating.”
5 essential questions to craft a winning strategy | Roger Martin (author, advisor, speaker) · Roger Martin
“You have to have answers to five questions. What's your winning aspiration? Where to play? How can you win? What capabilities do you have to have that your competitors don't? And then, what enabling management systems do you have to put in place?”
5 essential questions to craft a winning strategy | Roger Martin (author, advisor, speaker) · Roger Martin
“You have to be either differentiated or low cost, there's no way to protect yourself if you're not one of those two.”
5 essential questions to craft a winning strategy | Roger Martin (author, advisor, speaker) · Roger Martin
“For me, analytics is a business impact driving function and not purely a service function, not just answering the why, but answering the, 'What do we do now that we know this?'”
Building a world-class data org | Jessica Lachs (VP of Analytics and Data Science at DoorDash) · Jess Lachs
“Yes, you are a data scientist, but your goal is to figure out what's happening. And if that means that you're going to pick up the phone and call customers, then that is what you're going to do to roll up your sleeves.”
Building a world-class data org | Jessica Lachs (VP of Analytics and Data Science at DoorDash) · Jess Lachs
“I find proof of existence to be an incredibly powerful proof, rather than proof by theory or proof by debate. It's like, 'Look, we did it one time.'”
Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · Jeff Weinstein
“I remember writing the first draft and sending it to him because it was... and he wrote back, 'This doesn't sound like you yet.' The willingness to entrust a new person to provide their own perspective... that really spoke to me, and I rewrote it completely.”
Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · Jeff Weinstein
“A startup never beats a big company by executing better than the big company. Startup wins over the big company because it proposes a radically different future, disorients the incumbent, and sort of chaotically moves people to that different future.”
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 mistake that most companies make is they say, 'I've got this new pattern-breaking idea. It needs to be a third of my business in 24 months.' Bad strategy... Pattern-breaking products have different types of leadership, different types of go-to-market motion, different risk profiles.”
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 most important thing we did at YC was create an environment where founders could be honest about their problems. Most founders are performing for investors and the outside world. At YC dinners, they could let their guard down.”
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
“If we all agree that the feeling of something should be, I'm sitting in Dolores Park with my friends on a sunny Saturday, then people will just naturally build something that feels more consistent.”
Making an impact through authenticity and curiosity | Ami Vora (CPO at Faire, ex-WhatsApp, FB, IG) · Ami Vora
“I needed the rest of the company to go away so we could get the autonomy to test the things that we needed, but it's not going to scale. That is not going to respect all design guidelines.”
Hard-won lessons building 0 to 1 inside Atlassian | Tanguy Crusson (Head of Jira Product Discovery) · Tanguy Crusson
“No one is going to read a research report that takes 30 minutes to read. Everyone is happy to watch a three-minute snippet with four customers talking about something.”
Hard-won lessons building 0 to 1 inside Atlassian | Tanguy Crusson (Head of Jira Product Discovery) · Tanguy Crusson
“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
“Every time that you hire someone new, mark your calendars for 30 days down the road and ask yourself one question, knowing what I know today, would I hire this person? If the answer is no, fire them immediately.”
Lessons from a two-time unicorn builder, 50-time startup advisor, and 20-time company board member | Uri Levine (co-founder of Waze) · Uri Levine
“I run everyone through the culture of Canva. One of those sections is on giving away your Lego, finding joy in the other things of building a team, passing on your experience, helping other people do great writing or great product building or great engineering.”
Inside Canva: Coaches not managers, giving away your Legos, and running profitably | Cameron Adams (co-founder and CPO) · Cam Adams
“I didn't want to do product management like they did at Google, and that's because of the different cultures. I have seen product managers at other companies who are very independent of teams and that seems very weird to me. For us, product managers are really connected.”
Inside Canva: Coaches not managers, giving away your Legos, and running profitably | Cameron Adams (co-founder and CPO) · Cam Adams
“We've been profitable from very early on. That changes everything about how you make decisions. You're not on someone else's timeline. You're on your own timeline.”
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
“At Slack, one of the things I learned was that the best product decisions came from people who were willing to say what they actually thought, even when it was uncomfortable. The culture rewarded directness.”
Why not asking for what you want is holding you back | Kenneth Berger (exec coach, first PM at Slack) · Kenneth Berger
“Kevin Systrom in the early days of Instagram, I heard him say it at a conference. We may not be right, but at least we are clear. Even if your strategy isn't right, you have a very clear idea of what was supposed to be happening.”
Be fundamentally different, not incrementally better | Jag Duggal (Nubank, Facebook, Google, Quantcast) · Jag Duggal
“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
“You're on a treadmill and if you stop running on that treadmill, you get creamed, but it's not power. The things that drive operational excellence can be mimicked.”
Business strategy with Hamilton Helmer (author of 7 Powers) · Hamilton Helmer
“It's so incredibly necessary in improving decision quality to take what's implicit and make it explicit. It's not that intuition is crap, your intuition is sometimes right. If you don't make it explicit, then you don't get to find out when it's wrong.”
This will make you a better decision-maker | Annie Duke (author of “Thinking in Bets” and “Quit,” former pro poker player) · Annie Duke
“People generally think the purpose of a meeting is for three things, discover, discuss, decide. The only thing that's ever supposed to happen in a meeting is the discussion part.”
This will make you a better decision-maker | Annie Duke (author of “Thinking in Bets” and “Quit,” former pro poker player) · Annie Duke
“So a pre-mortem, it's great only if you set up kill criteria. Commit to actions that you're going to take if you see those signals.”
This will make you a better decision-maker | Annie Duke (author of “Thinking in Bets” and “Quit,” former pro poker player) · Annie Duke
“When you're making a decision where the outcome is very long-term, you need to focus on the quality of the process, not the quality of the outcome. Because the outcome is going to be affected by so many things you can't control.”
This will make you a better decision-maker | Annie Duke (author of “Thinking in Bets” and “Quit,” former pro poker player) · Annie Duke
“The most important thing about quitting is to set your criteria in advance. Decide when you will quit before you start. Once you're in it, your sunk cost bias will keep you going way too long.”
This will make you a better decision-maker | Annie Duke (author of “Thinking in Bets” and “Quit,” former pro poker player) · Annie Duke
“We wanted to change the lack of ambition, the lack of creativity, the lack of customers feeling that the product had changed at all.”
Twitter’s former Head of Product opens up: being fired, meeting Elon, changing stagnant culture, building consumer product, more | Kayvon Beykpour · Kayvon Beykpour
“The sacred cows are like their own roadmap. What are all the things that you think we're not allowed to change? Let's start there.”
Twitter’s former Head of Product opens up: being fired, meeting Elon, changing stagnant culture, building consumer product, more | Kayvon Beykpour · Kayvon Beykpour
“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
“We don't understand that we are only privy to two out of the three, so I know what's going on for me and I know what I did. I have no idea what happened on your end.”
How to build deeper, more robust relationships | Carole Robin (Stanford GSB professor, “Touchy Feely”) · Carole Robin
“Anger is a secondary emotion. Really what's going on is you're afraid or you're hurt.”
How to build deeper, more robust relationships | Carole Robin (Stanford GSB professor, “Touchy Feely”) · Carole Robin
“My take is that your scope is the world. Nothing should ever perceive as being out of bounds.”
Vision, conviction, and hype: How to build 0 to 1 inside a company | Mihika Kapoor (Product at Figma) · Mihika Kapoor
“We have this concept called Maker Week, which is our internal hackathon, giving people the breathing space to see ahead into the horizon and be wildly ambitious.”
Vision, conviction, and hype: How to build 0 to 1 inside a company | Mihika Kapoor (Product at Figma) · Mihika Kapoor
“The way I think about hype is that it's a tool. You need internal hype to get resources and attention. But you have to back it up with substance. Hype without substance erodes trust very quickly.”
Vision, conviction, and hype: How to build 0 to 1 inside a company | Mihika Kapoor (Product at Figma) · Mihika Kapoor
“I think the best PMs are unreasonable. Not in a bad way, but they refuse to accept the constraints that everyone else accepts. They ask, what if we just didn't have that constraint?”
Vision, conviction, and hype: How to build 0 to 1 inside a company | Mihika Kapoor (Product at Figma) · Mihika Kapoor
“People often think that I get hired into later stage companies because I'm supposed to teach them how to operate like a big company, and in fact, I say I'm hired to remind them they can operate like a startup.”
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
“I could become passively okay at management with some training, with some coaching. I don't want to spend any years of my life becoming passively okay at something.”
Zigging vs. zagging: How HubSpot built a $30B company | Dharmesh Shah (co-founder/CTO) · Dharmesh Shah
“A lot of CEOs have done well because they follow the 'dharma' of the founders quite well. They have not diluted the dharma of the founders who have started these companies, and managed to sustain that. Maintaining 'dharma', where I will say that 'These principles were given to me and I'm going to sustain this and make it even bigger,' comes from the humility of saying that there is something that was built with some pure form factor.”
Kunal Shah on winning in India, second-order thinking, the philosophy of startups, and more · Kunal Shah
“When superheroes discover what their superpowers actually are, they wreak havoc and they make a mess, and it's uncomfortable. And even Superman tries to get rid of his superpowers. It's hard to know what you're really great at.”
How to discover your superpowers, own your story, and unlock personal growth | Donna Lichaw (author of The Leader’s Journey) · Donna Lichaw
“The most effective stories are the ones that we tell ourselves. They may or may not be true; our brain doesn't know the difference. Once you can really understand that, you may as well leverage it to be that hero.”
How to discover your superpowers, own your story, and unlock personal growth | Donna Lichaw (author of The Leader’s Journey) · Donna Lichaw
“The relationship we all have is so much better because we get on top of these things early.”
Lessons from Atlassian: Launching new products, getting buy-in, and staying ahead of the competition | Megan Cook (head of product, Jira) · Megan Cook
“As a leader, do you have the right people in terms of capability? If not, is the right answer for us to coach them or to really put them... or mentor them, or move them to some other place because maybe their capability is suited elsewhere?”
The full-stack PM | Anuj Rathi (Swiggy, Jupiter Money, Flipkart) · Anuj Rathi
“I do not believe in being liked. I believe in being loved. And love is the choice to extend yourself for the spiritual growth of oneself or another. When you are extending yourself, you're not nice. It sometimes is having hard conversations.”
Crafting a compelling product vision | Ebi Atawodi (YouTube, Netflix, Uber) · Ebi Atawodi
“The future needs you.”
How to become a category pirate | Christopher Lochhead (author of Play Bigger, Niche Down, Category Pirates, more) · Christopher Lochhead
“Those Steve Jobs' lore was that if you were in an elevator with him, you better be prepared to talk about what you do at the company because he had a habit of getting in the elevator and looking at you and saying, 'What do you do? What do you do here?' And there were also rumors that people who had not given him a good answer, that ended up being their last day at Apple.”
Monetizing passions, scaling marketplaces, and stories from a creator economy vet | Camille Hearst (Spotify, Patreon, Apple, YouTube) · Camille Hearst
“So there was someone who worked in my department before I got there who got in an elevator and looked up and Steve was approaching him and so he went to press the button to open the door and accidentally pressed the one to close the door. And it was like frantically pressing the button, trying to open the door, but accidentally pressing the closed door button and the elevator going to its destination.”
Monetizing passions, scaling marketplaces, and stories from a creator economy vet | Camille Hearst (Spotify, Patreon, Apple, YouTube) · Camille Hearst
“And apparently he got off and just bolted straight up, ran down the hallway.”
Monetizing passions, scaling marketplaces, and stories from a creator economy vet | Camille Hearst (Spotify, Patreon, Apple, YouTube) · Camille Hearst
“When you do that, we look hungry, so let's keep feeding us, right?”
Relentless curiosity, radical accountability, and HubSpot’s winning growth formula | Christopher Miller (VP of Product, Growth and AI) · Christopher Miller
“The thing I would say is bring the insight. Know thy customer. Know thy market. Know thy competitors. Know thy numbers. Know thy product.”
How to ask the right questions, project confidence, and win over skeptics | Paige Costello (Asana, Intercom, Intuit) · Paige Costello
“I felt more relaxed. I was like, 'Oh, yeah, I can do both. It will be fine.'”
How to ask the right questions, project confidence, and win over skeptics | Paige Costello (Asana, Intercom, Intuit) · Paige Costello
“It's very, very tempting to float up here as a leader and say, 'Hey, you take that hill over there. You guys do this over here.' When in fact, where you really learn where the challenges are, or the problems or the successes is by just being there with the people in the trenches on one of the things.”
Moving fast and navigating uncertainty | Jeremy Henrickson (Rippling, Coinbase) · Jeremy Henrickson
“Whichever one seems hardest or most complicated. And so I try to do that as often as I can, and I found that I always learn a lot by going through that detailed exercise.”
Moving fast and navigating uncertainty | Jeremy Henrickson (Rippling, Coinbase) · Jeremy Henrickson
“Where you really learn where the challenges are, or the problems or the successes is by just being there with the people in the trenches.”
Moving fast and navigating uncertainty | Jeremy Henrickson (Rippling, Coinbase) · Jeremy Henrickson
“Challenging your own assumptions. Listening with an open mind but then are you proactively trying to challenge your own assumptions is extremely important. As a big enough product manager as well as a seasoned product leader, if you're not doing enough of that, then I think you might not be listening well. If there's no conflict, if there's no contention, then something is missing.”
Product lessons from Waymo | Shweta Shrivastava (Waymo, Amazon, Cisco) · Shweta Shriva
“If you're not sure who the decision maker is, one, it's probably you. And I'd rather you act that way than not because you're going to slow the whole company down. Follow a process and get it done, and don't forget to actually make a decision. Too many people get stuck and it makes your work terrible. What do we all care about? Progress, impact, momentum. Be a force for positive momentum and it will be actually a real career maker.”
Lessons from scaling Stripe | Claire Hughes Johnson (former COO of Stripe) · Claire Hughes Johnson
“The biggest marker that I've seen between a botched layoff and a successful layoff is at the moment someone hears that they no longer have a job, did they hear it from their manager in a one-on-one? If that's when they heard it, it'll be okay. But if they heard it in an email, in a group chat, in any kind of thing where they were sitting next to other people, it wasn't personalized, that is terrible. That's when people get really angry.”
How to fire people with grace, work through fear, and nurture innovation | Matt Mochary (CEO coach) · Matt Mochary
“I don't know how to articulate that feeling, but that flutter in your stomach that you wake up with in the morning of just anxiety and stress and worry. Being a CEO or founder makes it slightly harder, because you still have to put on this mask.”
How to launch and grow your product | Ryan Hoover of Product Hunt and Weekend Fund · Ryan Hoover
“Helping people see why your team should get more resources, you have to actually share what you do.”
How to own your career growth and become a powerful product leader | Deb Liu, Ancestry (ex-Facebook, PayPal) · Deb Liu
“Going from senior PM to management is one of the hardest transitions because you have to stop being the person with the best ideas and start being the person who creates the environment where the best ideas emerge from your team.”
Jackie Bavaro on getting better at product strategy, what exactly is strategy, PM pitfalls to avoid, advancing your career, getting into management, and much more · Jackie Bavaro