Lenny's Written Position
The best product thinking comes from adjacent fields — psychology, game design, economics — not from product management literature alone.
Starting with JSON data structures (not UI mockups) leads to better AI-generated prototypes because it forces clarity of thinking about the product.
Streak mechanics create powerful habit loops, but they need protective features (streak freezes) to prevent user frustration and churn.
Look for 'Jurassic Park moments' at startups — early prototypes or demos that leave you breathless and feeling like you are being given a clear glimpse of the future, even if the product is ugly and small.
The name you choose for a product or company may be the single most important branding decision you make, yet it is too often delegated to junior staff or tackled in group brainstorming sessions.
Invented names like Pentium actually take less money to build into brands than existing words because they signal 'new and innovative' and generate more attention due to being unexpected.
Effective naming requires building for trust, communicating an original idea rather than describing what the company does, and making the name accessible and easy to process.
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 sound of a brand name matters as much as its meaning: specific sounds create specific impressions, like the 'z' in Azure creating a strong signal and the 'zure' creating a smooth experience.
The two biggest barriers to AI prototyping adoption on product teams are making prototypes look good enough for stakeholders and figuring out team workflows instead of individual silos.
Building a reusable component library is the single biggest improvement teams can make to AI prototyping quality, allowing brand-consistent prototypes without manual cleanup each time.
AI prototyping introduces a new 'medium fidelity' tier — better than napkin drawings but not as polished as finalized Figma mocks — and choosing the right fidelity for each context is critically important.
The 'baselines and forks' workflow — creating a high-quality reproduction of your current product then duplicating it to explore new ideas — is the best way to rapidly test multiple design directions without rebuilding each time.
Using the Figma MCP server with Cursor allows AI agents to autonomously take screenshots, extract design tokens, and get CSS from Figma's Dev Mode, producing prototypes indistinguishable from the real product.
Granola has quickly become the obvious tool for AI meeting note-taking because it works behind the scenes using laptop audio instead of joining calls, and everyone who tries it gets hooked.
The Foundation Sprint is a two-day workshop that helps teams define their Founding Hypothesis by clarifying customer, approach, and differentiation before building anything.
Google Meet succeeded only after the team stripped away complex features like 3D virtual conference rooms and focused on the core hypothesis of being the fastest and easiest video call software.
When choosing tools, user experience now trumps features, as teams are increasingly willing to sacrifice deep functionality for tools that are actually pleasant to use.
Figma is used by 97% of designers as their primary design tool, while Canva is democratizing design for non-designers like PMs, marketers, and engineers.
Adding one-click PayPal and mobile wallet checkout options increased GiveDirectly's online donations by 14%, raising an incremental $1.3 million per year.
A polished homepage redesign with an embedded donation form made visitors 35% more likely to donate, with 20% of the lift from the embedded form and 15% from the design improvement.
Setting the default donation frequency to monthly instead of one-time was more effective than using an interruptive modal, because smart defaults work better than adding friction.
Donor-recipient individual matching did not improve conversion or long-term retention despite being a common nonprofit strategy, but matching donors to a specific village had a 58% higher click-through rate at far lower operational cost.
More than 75% of trial starts occur on the same day a user installs an app, often in the first few minutes, making speed-to-value in onboarding critical for conversion.
Duolingo grew DAUs 4.5x from 2018 to 2022 by focusing on current user retention rate and investing in motivation tactics like streaks, badges, and leaderboards.
Consumer subscription apps should target a Day 1 Paywall View Rate at or above 80% to maximize conversion opportunities.
The first-pass AI product is often a bolt-on or simple chat experience; the high-value experience requires a deeper rethink after understanding what the technology really provides.
Branding AI-powered products as 'AI-powered' increases initial engagement and helps users understand feature capabilities, contrary to the conventional wisdom that users don't care how something is built.
The smallest and almost invisible AI features like pre-filling names and simple data transformations often have bigger customer adoption than big AI features like chatbots or complex agents.
Experimenting to find the right UI/UX for an AI feature can have an equally big impact on conversion metrics as research updates to the AI model itself.
Companies with proprietary or uniquely structured data sets will have a durable advantage in AI because models are becoming commoditized, and designers will be more important than ever.
The ARIA framework (Analyze, Reduce, Introduce, Assist) provides a structured repeatable process for increasing adoption of existing features that drive growth.
The right time to introduce a feature to users is in context, meaning at a point when the user is most likely to want to use it, rather than during onboarding or via What's New pop-ups.
When copying proven app mechanics like leaderboards, your first MVP should closely resemble an existing successful implementation rather than trying to innovate, then innovate after establishing a baseline.
Hyper-personalizing a product to feel like it was built just for a specific community drives dramatically faster adoption; Saturn achieved majority student body adoption at schools within hours by white-labeling apps with school colors and mascots.
The allure of seeing a new product is the strongest motivator new users have to complete setup, so if you let them skip a critical setup step, their motivation to return and do it later will only decrease.
Linear operates without dedicated product managers for each team; instead PM duties are distributed across engineering and design, because distributing product thinking across the team produces higher quality than outsourcing thinking to a single PM.
Linear uses no A/B tests and no metrics-based goals for individual projects; decisions are based on taste and opinions, validated through beta testing and conviction rather than data.
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 avoids formal OKRs because metrics-driven optimization can lead to local maxima where the product feels incohesive, and they will approve investments even without measurable metrics if the outcome improves craft and quality.
The Trust Vault is a metaphor for how much trust your user base has in you; it can be filled and depleted, and you should measure it with periodic surveys asking users to rate how much they trust your staff to do the right thing.
Public forums are the wrong place for nuanced product discussions; instead form a private advisory council of representative users who can give candid feedback without the incentive to 'win' the conversation.
A service-oriented mindset where the product is just a tool to solve user problems produces better outcomes than a product-oriented mindset where user problems are tools to improve the product.
The feel of software is vital to product-led growth adoption, and launching with a polished but feature-limited product is better than launching with all features but poor feel.
The more frequently a piece of software is used, the more important its feel becomes as a factor in adoption.
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 job of PMs and designers is to turn ambiguity into clarity, first for themselves, then for their teams, and ultimately for customers.
Using alignment widgets for anonymous voting on decisions in product reviews is more powerful than allowing the loudest people in the room to dictate outcomes.
The most common and impactful ways to increase activation are simplifying onboarding UI/UX and reducing onboarding friction, not adding more features.
If a product or feature checks three of five criteria it is probably time to shut it down: less than 5% user engagement, more than 10% team resources to maintain, degrades user experience, misaligned with strategy, and very few vocal users.
Teams almost always wait too long to kill products; in the author's experience at Airbnb, not once did anyone regret a product or feature being sunset.
High-quality photos are instrumental for building trust with customers in marketplaces, and Airbnb's professional photography program along with host profile photos contributed to immediate trust for new visitors.
Removing many small annoyances from a product adds up to something meaningfully valuable, even when no single fix moves metrics significantly.
Facebook Marketplace users initially never used the search bar because years of Facebook usage trained them to scroll, requiring the team to add a prominent search button to change behavior.
Podcast Moments
“This design process that designers have been taught, where you go off and do a bunch of research and discovery, and then you diverge, converge, diverge, converge — we sort of treated as gospel. That's basically dead.”
Jenny Wen · Jenny Wen
“There are basically two types of design work now. The first is supporting implementation and execution — engineers are using their seven Claudes to create features. The second is creating the vision or direction, but now it's a three to six month vision, not a two to five year one, and it's sometimes just creating a prototype that points people in the right direction.”
Jenny Wen · Jenny Wen
“The way you really lose trust around quality and releasing something early is if you release it early and then nothing ever happens. But whenever you put something out early, it's possible to maintain the brand of your company if you commit to iterating, responding to feedback, and continuously shipping improvements.”
Jenny Wen · Jenny Wen
“I think AI will get better at taste and judgment and design. We might be holding onto that a little bit too much. At the end of the day, someone has to decide what is actually going to get built and what actually matters. Someone still needs to be accountable for the decision.”
Jenny Wen · Jenny Wen
“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
“If you make a bunch of practitioners sit together and ask them, 'Is it important to build an actionable feedback loop for AI products?' All of them will agree. But almost nobody does it well.”
Aishwarya Naresh Reganti + Kiriti Badam · Aishwarya Naresh Reganti + Kiriti Badam
“Gamification gets a bad rap because people think of it as badges and points. But the good kind — leaderboards, streaks, social proof — those are fundamentally about making progress visible.”
Elena Verna 4.0 · Elena Verna 4.0
“Notifications are the most underinvested growth lever. Most companies treat them as marketing spam. The companies that win treat every notification as a product decision.”
Elena Verna 4.0 · Elena Verna 4.0
“Imagine you wanted to train a model to write an eight line poem about the moon. Most people check: Is this a poem? Does it contain eight lines? But we are looking for Nobel Prize-winning poetry.”
The 100-person AI lab that became Anthropic and Google's secret weapon | Edwin Chen (Surge AI) · Edwin Chen
“Do you want a model that says 'There are definitely 20 more ways to improve this email' or one that's optimizing for your time and just says 'Your email's great, just send it'?”
The 100-person AI lab that became Anthropic and Google's secret weapon | Edwin Chen (Surge AI) · Edwin Chen
“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
“Along with reduced friction, 'reduce the number of clicks' is almost always exactly the wrong thing. If it takes eight clicks but every one is trivially easy, that's great.”
Slack founder: Mental models for building products people love ft. Stewart Butterfield · Stewart Butterfield
“The owner's delusion is when you think your thing is so important that you don't recognize users are regular human beings who will bounce in a fraction of a second.”
Slack founder: Mental models for building products people love ft. Stewart Butterfield · Stewart Butterfield
“We grew to $100M ARR largely through product-led growth. The key was making the creation experience so fast that people would share their Gamma decks, and viewers would sign up to make their own.”
“Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · Grant Lee
“We use gamification elements — streak-like engagement mechanics, progress indicators — but we never call them that internally. We call them 'momentum features.'”
“Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · Grant Lee
“We get more than a million requests from our community every year. This year we've closed more than 200 loops.”
The woman behind Canva shares how she built a $42B company from nothing | Melanie Perkins · Melanie Perkins
“For Stories, we knew we needed to do something new. We made a bunch of decisions that made it Instagram — letting people upload from camera roll, adding pause.”
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
“If I wrote a book on building great products, it would have three chapters: jobs-to-be-done, analytical rigor in root cause analysis, and designing for clarity instead of cleverness.”
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
“Close Friends totally failed originally. We found it worked for people who added 20 to 30 people because two would reply via DM.”
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 streak is the single most powerful feature Duolingo ever built. But it only works because we invested in making it forgiving — streak freezes, streak repair, grace periods.”
How to find hidden growth opportunities in your product | Albert Cheng (Duolingo, Grammarly, Chess.com) · Albert Cheng
“I start every AI prototype with a JSON schema. Not a wireframe, not a design. JSON. Because it forces you to think about what the product actually does before how it looks.”
The secret to better AI prototypes: Why Tinder’s CPO starts with JSON, not design | Ravi Mehta (product advisor, previously EIR at Reforge) · Ravi Mehta
“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
“These models are living organisms that get better with more interactions. This is the new IP of every company — products that think and live and learn.”
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
“WhatsApp didn't win because it had stickers or stories. It won because of the phone book, reliability, and privacy.”
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
“The best question a PM can ask is 'What would have to be true for this to work?' It saves you from building the wrong thing and from political landmines.”
The one question that saves product careers | Matt LeMay · Matt LeMay
“You're going to be polishing the wrong things in this space. You won't know what to polish until after you ship.”
Inside ChatGPT: The fastest-growing product in history | Nick Turley (Head of ChatGPT at OpenAI) · Nick Turley
“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
“Forget about the word, think about behavior and experience. I'm a big believer in synchronicity. If someone says we make sailboats, I would say forget about sailboats. Go pick out some magazines about hunting or flying. I would bet you $5 that out of those two magazines, you will get a word that you never would've thought of, but somehow it would relate to sailing.”
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
“Sometimes your product actually doesn't matter. At Uber, I learned this because, really, the price and the ETA at Uber was the product. Looking at it from a holistic perspective, we humans consume the entirety of the product. It's not to say that you shouldn't fix the bug, but it doesn't have as much of an impact as something that is more important to people.”
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
“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
“When you show up with an iPhone, you're thinking about sharing. When you show up with a film camera, you're thinking about saving film. When you show up with a digital SLR, you just take a whole bunch of pictures. Be conscious about how the tools you pick are going to impact the thing that you produce.”
35 years of product design wisdom from Apple, Disney, Pinterest, and beyond | Bob Baxley · Bob Baxley
“There's nothing worse than a brilliant image of a fuzzy concept. We live in a time when it's very easy to produce things at incredibly high production values, but they don't mean anything. They're just fancy potato chips. There's no nourishment there.”
35 years of product design wisdom from Apple, Disney, Pinterest, and beyond | Bob Baxley · Bob Baxley
“The biggest role shift is prototyping happening earlier in the process. PMs and designers that have an idea will use Claude and maybe even Artifacts to put together an actual functional demo. That has been very, very helpful.”
Anthropic’s CPO on what comes next | Mike Krieger (co-founder of Instagram) · Mike Krieger
“For utility of AI products, it's three parts: model intelligence, context and memory, and applications and UI. You need all three to converge. MCP tried to tackle the middle one. The difference between the right context and not is entirely the difference between a good answer and a bad answer.”
Anthropic’s CPO on what comes next | Mike Krieger (co-founder of Instagram) · Mike Krieger
“Taste is going to become a distinguishing factor in the age of AI because there's going to be so much drivel that is generated by AI. The companies that are going to distinguish themselves are the ones that show their craft and their true understanding of their product and customer.”
Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman · Krithika Shankarraman
“If you're not prototyping and building to see what you want to build, I think you're doing it wrong. It becomes even more important to have taste-making at the heart of it because otherwise you just have a Frankenstein product.”
Microsoft CPO: If you aren’t prototyping with AI, you’re doing it wrong | Aparna Chennapragada · Aparna Chennapragada
“NLX is the new UX. Conversations also have grammars. They have structures. They have UI elements. They're invisible. What are the new principles, new constructs in natural language as an interface?”
Microsoft CPO: If you aren’t prototyping with AI, you’re doing it wrong | Aparna Chennapragada · Aparna Chennapragada
“Excel is proof that non-coders also have to program. Programming is really powerful and it's the tool that gives all of the non-coders a really powerful programming ability. The learning curve initially might be tricky, but it is because there's so much power and depth in the tool.”
Microsoft CPO: If you aren’t prototyping with AI, you’re doing it wrong | Aparna Chennapragada · Aparna Chennapragada
“We had the opposite problem with voice assistants. We overshot the interface and the intelligence wasn't there. Today, these things have amazing intelligence and the interface we have largely is like the AOL Dial-Up Modem Chatbot.”
Microsoft CPO: If you aren’t prototyping with AI, you’re doing it wrong | Aparna Chennapragada · Aparna Chennapragada
“It's not getting traction. Is it because the underlying idea is wrong? Or maybe your product just sucks? By forcing everyone to build a product that people will love, we kind of cut out this part of uncertainty. We will never compromise on the quality and UX and the aesthetics.”
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
“Our goal with Cursor is to invent a new type of programming, a very different way to build software. A world kind of after code. More and more being an engineer will start to feel like being a logic designer, and it will be about specifying your intent.”
The rise of Cursor: The $300M ARR AI tool that engineers can’t stop using | Michael Truell (co-founder and CEO) · Michael Truell
“We should be cannibalizing the existing state of our product every six to 12 months. Every six to 12 months, it should make our existing product look silly. It should almost make the form factor of existing product look dumb.”
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
“People could be more full stack. Imagine a designer that can ship a fully baked product, a product manager that can prototype and ship to production. We shouldn't put limits on ourselves and what we can build.”
Everyone’s an engineer now: Inside v0’s mission to create a hundred million builders | Guillermo Rauch (founder and CEO of Vercel, creators of v0 and Next.js) · Guillermo Rauch
“You can be as ambitious as you want. If you have technical skills, have some suspension of disbelief. Focus more on the product description, what do you want the end user to experience. Try to be open-minded about how well the tool can implement it.”
Everyone’s an engineer now: Inside v0’s mission to create a hundred million builders | Guillermo Rauch (founder and CEO of Vercel, creators of v0 and Next.js) · Guillermo Rauch
“You're trying to figure out how some product should work with AI, you can often reason about it the way you would reason about another human and it works. If I asked you something that I needed to think for 20 seconds to answer, I wouldn't just go mute. I also wouldn't start babbling every single thought.”
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
“I actually think chat is an amazing interface because it's so versatile. It is the way we talk. If I had some more rigid interface, I would be able to speak to you about far fewer things and it would get in the way of maximum communication bandwidth.”
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
“If you're doing a home renovation, you can have the most beautiful rendering of the new bedroom. But if you haven't checked if there's electricity in that wall, it's going to drastically change the cost and the time and everything.”
A better way to plan, build, and ship products | Ryan Singer (creator of “Shape Up,” early employee at 37signals) · Ryan Singer
“We are not going to start something unless we can see the end from the beginning. We're going to go the other way around and say, what is the maximum amount of time we're willing to go before we actually finish something? Six weeks is the maximum we can see into the future.”
A better way to plan, build, and ship products | Ryan Singer (creator of “Shape Up,” early employee at 37signals) · Ryan Singer
“Instead of 'here's your ticket' or 'here's your user story,' it's 'here's the thing you understand, that makes sense, and now you're going to have freedom to figure out how to actually make this a reality.' We see way more engagement, especially from the technical team.”
A better way to plan, build, and ship products | Ryan Singer (creator of “Shape Up,” early employee at 37signals) · Ryan Singer
“Those sessions with Jason, they were short, very intense sessions where you're trying to crack the nut together. It wasn't sitting alone writing a document, it wasn't making a bunch of requirements. It wasn't making a beautiful Figma file. It was this super intense collaborative 'what about this? what about that?'”
A better way to plan, build, and ship products | Ryan Singer (creator of “Shape Up,” early employee at 37signals) · Ryan Singer
“Six weeks is only a maximum. If we think of six weeks as a maximum, that's going to force us to ask some really good questions about what piece of this do we really think we can land. If you try to say in six months we're going to ship this thing, you can't get your arms around all the problems.”
A better way to plan, build, and ship products | Ryan Singer (creator of “Shape Up,” early employee at 37signals) · Ryan Singer
“We have a second roadmap which we think of as a secret roadmap. Nobody has ever asked for anything on it. Given our unique vantage point, we've come up with special ideas that will completely revolutionize how something is used where we can truly change the behavior of the user.”
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
“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
“The biggest secret of Superhuman, which is something that nobody else does, is that we would manually onboard every single new user for the first five years. People would sign up on the wait list, and when we were ready, our growth team would reach out, schedule a call, get on Zoom, and walk the person through every feature, every shortcut, and every workflow for Superhuman.”
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
“I believe that every product should be positioned around a single primary attribute. In our case, that attribute is speed. Now, lots of products try to be good at everything. That tends to be a mistake, because if you try to stand for everything, you stand for nothing.”
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
“On any Figma URL, when you're looking at a design that you've made, if you just put bolt.new in front of that URL and hit enter, it's going to suck that design into Bolt, and turn it into a full stack app or mobile app, just out of the box.”
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
“The best word for a great product is that it's lovable. A lot of jargon that I like to use to emphasize what we should be striving for is building a minimum lovable product and then building a lovable product and then building an absolutely lovable product. So I took that jargon with me in the company name.”
Building Lovable: $10M ARR in 60 days with 15 people | Anton Osika (co-founder and CEO) · Anton Osika
“The joy and suffering of building horizontal is that you're competing with everyone. Every feature you build, there's a company that does only that one thing. But the magic is in the integration.”
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
“Tumblr had these multiple post types. You could post a chat, an image. They were one of the first to support video, so they did a lot of product innovation under the leadership of David Karp.”
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
“Someone on X can see a post. If they think it's misleading, they can propose a note that they think other people might find informative. Other people can then rate that note.”
An inside look at X’s Community Notes | Keith Coleman (VP of Product) and Jay Baxter (ML Lead) · Keith Coleman & Jay Baxter
“We actually look for agreement from people who have disagreed in the past. And what we see is when people actually have that sort of surprising agreement, that's what makes the notes so neutral and accurate.”
An inside look at X’s Community Notes | Keith Coleman (VP of Product) and Jay Baxter (ML Lead) · Keith Coleman & Jay Baxter
“Creative thinking and you kind of want to generate a bunch of ideas and filter through them. I think it's actually really, really hard to teach the model how to be aesthetic or really good visual design or how to be extremely creative.”
OpenAI researcher on why soft skills are the future of work | Karina Nguyen (Research at OpenAI, ex-Anthropic) · Karina Nguyen
“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
“We think about it as we're building the tool we want to use. And if it becomes bloated, we'll feel it first. We're our own most demanding users.”
Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product) · Nan Yu
“Craft is not about making things pretty. Craft is about caring about every detail of the experience. It's the error states, the loading states, the edge cases that nobody thinks about.”
Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product) · Nan Yu
“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
“Quality is not luxury. Quality is not perfection. Quality means meeting spec, and if you meet spec, you're done. If you don't think the spec is good enough, make a better spec.”
Seth Godin's best tactics for building remarkable products, strategies, brands and more · Seth Godin
“Most people are better at understanding the feelings and sensations that typography and logos give us than they give themselves credit for, because what we are as people are endless absorbers of patterns, and information, and all this kind of stuff as we move throughout the world.”
How to see like a designer: The hidden power of typography and logos | Jessica Hische (Lettering Artist, Author) · Jessica Hische
“A good exercise is just like looking at fonts that are available in the world and asking yourself, 'What feeling does this give me?'”
How to see like a designer: The hidden power of typography and logos | Jessica Hische (Lettering Artist, Author) · Jessica Hische
“I think of intuition as a hypothesis generator. Intuition is not always right, but it gives you a starting point. And then you have to go validate it.”
Dylan Field live at Config: Intuition, simplicity, and the future of design · Dylan Field
“We have this thing called a simplicity review. Every quarter we look at things that have gotten more complex and we ask, can we simplify this? It's a forcing function to keep things simple.”
Dylan Field live at Config: Intuition, simplicity, and the future of design · Dylan Field
“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
“At Gojek, we had to build products for a market where people were coming online for the first time. You can't assume anything about user behavior. You have to go watch them use the product in their environment.”
A framework for PM skill development | Vikrama Dhiman (Gojek) · Vikrama Dhiman
“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
“We lean heavily into designing and prototyping even before a project gets a green light. If you and your team do your job correctly, what does the world look like?”
Vision, conviction, and hype: How to build 0 to 1 inside a company | Mihika Kapoor (Product at Figma) · Mihika Kapoor
“One of the biggest shortcomings of AI is that it's optimized for the demo or optimized for the tweet. It's not really useful to enter a prompt and get an output that you can't interact with.”
Vision, conviction, and hype: How to build 0 to 1 inside a company | Mihika Kapoor (Product at Figma) · Mihika Kapoor
“The more it matters, the more the design matters. Whenever there's a new paradigm, the first iterations of those products don't have to be super well designed. Then, as you build the 100,000 different email clients, any email client now has to be pretty good to be even considered.”
Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · Karri Saarinen
“Today it's almost a very basic thing now. Pretty much from the very beginning, you need pretty high level design for people to even pay attention or consider you seriously.”
Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · Karri Saarinen
“My belief is that, like any domain or industry, the more it matters, the more the design matters. What happens is whenever there's a new paradigm, I don't know, like the mobile or the web or something the first iterations of those products existing there, they don't have to be super well designed necessarily because they are the first.”
Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · Karri Saarinen
“We're using a lot of human driving data to train our deep models. So it's important to make sure that the behavior of the car doesn't seem robotic, it can feel quite unnatural. And from the get-go, we focused on building a fully autonomous system. So it's important to have that familiarity, that trust, building with the riders where they're not daunted by technology, they don't feel like they're sitting in our walk. It has to feel very human-like, but in a good way.”
Product lessons from Waymo | Shweta Shrivastava (Waymo, Amazon, Cisco) · Shweta Shriva
“In behavioral economics, you combine the field of psychology and economics and say, 'Look, people make decisions with lots of emotion. We are present bias. We over-weighed our present selves. We follow social norms.' But the good news is that we do these things in predictable ways.”
Using behavioral science to improve your product | Kristen Berman (Irrational Labs) · Kristen Berman
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
“Do you want a model that says 'There are definitely 20 more ways to improve this email' or one that's optimizing for your time and just says 'Your email's great, just send it'?”
The 100-person AI lab that became Anthropic and Google's secret weapon | Edwin Chen (Surge AI) · Edwin Chen
“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
“For Stories, we knew we needed to do something new. We made a bunch of decisions that made it Instagram — letting people upload from camera roll, adding pause.”
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
“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
“These models are living organisms that get better with more interactions. This is the new IP of every company — products that think and live and learn.”
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
“The best question a PM can ask is 'What would have to be true for this to work?' It saves you from building the wrong thing and from political landmines.”
The one question that saves product careers | Matt LeMay · Matt LeMay
“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
“Excel is proof that non-coders also have to program. Programming is really powerful and it's the tool that gives all of the non-coders a really powerful programming ability. The learning curve initially might be tricky, but it is because there's so much power and depth in the tool.”
Microsoft CPO: If you aren’t prototyping with AI, you’re doing it wrong | Aparna Chennapragada · Aparna Chennapragada
“We should be cannibalizing the existing state of our product every six to 12 months. Every six to 12 months, it should make our existing product look silly. It should almost make the form factor of existing product look dumb.”
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
“Instead of 'here's your ticket' or 'here's your user story,' it's 'here's the thing you understand, that makes sense, and now you're going to have freedom to figure out how to actually make this a reality.' We see way more engagement, especially from the technical team.”
A better way to plan, build, and ship products | Ryan Singer (creator of “Shape Up,” early employee at 37signals) · Ryan Singer
“Six weeks is only a maximum. If we think of six weeks as a maximum, that's going to force us to ask some really good questions about what piece of this do we really think we can land. If you try to say in six months we're going to ship this thing, you can't get your arms around all the problems.”
A better way to plan, build, and ship products | Ryan Singer (creator of “Shape Up,” early employee at 37signals) · Ryan Singer
“The joy and suffering of building horizontal is that you're competing with everyone. Every feature you build, there's a company that does only that one thing. But the magic is in the integration.”
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
“Tumblr had these multiple post types. You could post a chat, an image. They were one of the first to support video, so they did a lot of product innovation under the leadership of David Karp.”
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
“Someone on X can see a post. If they think it's misleading, they can propose a note that they think other people might find informative. Other people can then rate that note.”
An inside look at X’s Community Notes | Keith Coleman (VP of Product) and Jay Baxter (ML Lead) · Keith Coleman & Jay Baxter
“We actually look for agreement from people who have disagreed in the past. And what we see is when people actually have that sort of surprising agreement, that's what makes the notes so neutral and accurate.”
An inside look at X’s Community Notes | Keith Coleman (VP of Product) and Jay Baxter (ML Lead) · Keith Coleman & Jay Baxter
“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
“We think about it as we're building the tool we want to use. And if it becomes bloated, we'll feel it first. We're our own most demanding users.”
Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product) · Nan Yu
“Craft is not about making things pretty. Craft is about caring about every detail of the experience. It's the error states, the loading states, the edge cases that nobody thinks about.”
Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product) · Nan Yu
“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
“Quality is not luxury. Quality is not perfection. Quality means meeting spec, and if you meet spec, you're done. If you don't think the spec is good enough, make a better spec.”
Seth Godin's best tactics for building remarkable products, strategies, brands and more · Seth Godin
“A good exercise is just like looking at fonts that are available in the world and asking yourself, 'What feeling does this give me?'”
How to see like a designer: The hidden power of typography and logos | Jessica Hische (Lettering Artist, Author) · Jessica Hische
“I think of intuition as a hypothesis generator. Intuition is not always right, but it gives you a starting point. And then you have to go validate it.”
Dylan Field live at Config: Intuition, simplicity, and the future of design · Dylan Field
“We have this thing called a simplicity review. Every quarter we look at things that have gotten more complex and we ask, can we simplify this? It's a forcing function to keep things simple.”
Dylan Field live at Config: Intuition, simplicity, and the future of design · Dylan Field
“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
“At Gojek, we had to build products for a market where people were coming online for the first time. You can't assume anything about user behavior. You have to go watch them use the product in their environment.”
A framework for PM skill development | Vikrama Dhiman (Gojek) · Vikrama Dhiman
“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
“One of the biggest shortcomings of AI is that it's optimized for the demo or optimized for the tweet. It's not really useful to enter a prompt and get an output that you can't interact with.”
Vision, conviction, and hype: How to build 0 to 1 inside a company | Mihika Kapoor (Product at Figma) · Mihika Kapoor
“Today it's almost a very basic thing now. Pretty much from the very beginning, you need pretty high level design for people to even pay attention or consider you seriously.”
Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · Karri Saarinen
“My belief is that, like any domain or industry, the more it matters, the more the design matters. What happens is whenever there's a new paradigm, I don't know, like the mobile or the web or something the first iterations of those products existing there, they don't have to be super well designed necessarily because they are the first.”
Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · Karri Saarinen
“We're using a lot of human driving data to train our deep models. So it's important to make sure that the behavior of the car doesn't seem robotic, it can feel quite unnatural. And from the get-go, we focused on building a fully autonomous system. So it's important to have that familiarity, that trust, building with the riders where they're not daunted by technology, they don't feel like they're sitting in our walk. It has to feel very human-like, but in a good way.”
Product lessons from Waymo | Shweta Shrivastava (Waymo, Amazon, Cisco) · Shweta Shriva
“In behavioral economics, you combine the field of psychology and economics and say, 'Look, people make decisions with lots of emotion. We are present bias. We over-weighed our present selves. We follow social norms.' But the good news is that we do these things in predictable ways.”
Using behavioral science to improve your product | Kristen Berman (Irrational Labs) · Kristen Berman