Lenny's Written Position
Podcast Moments
“So therefore, when we're making a decision thinking about a problem, we're going to start with what's best for the customer and then come backward from there.”
Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards) · Bill Carr
“We hired a couple of college interns and we brought them in and we were like, people are going to push this magical one button in the Anchor app and they're going to say, I want to distribute my podcast, and your job is going to be to do all that same manual stuff manually, but to them it's going to feel magical.”
Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · Maya Prohovnik
“When I joined, we were about 10-ish folks, about eight engineers, and in three months, we built a competitor to Amex. Six months after that, we built a competitor to Expensify, both publicly traded companies.”
Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product) · Geoff Charles
“I'm very clear that I'm a big fan of test everything, which is any code change that you make, any feature that you introduce has to be in some experiment. Because again, I've observed this sort of surprising result that even small bug fixes, even small changes can sometimes have surprising, unexpected impact.”
The ultimate guide to A/B testing | Ronny Kohavi (Airbnb, Microsoft, Amazon) · Ronny Kohavi
“It's amazing how many times I've seen people come up with new designs or a radical new idea. And they believe in it, and that's okay. I'm just cautioning them all the time to say, 'If you go for something big, try it out, but be ready to fail 80% of the time.'”
The ultimate guide to A/B testing | Ronny Kohavi (Airbnb, Microsoft, Amazon) · Ronny Kohavi
“We did that with a lot of these native audiovisual products like huddles and clips really in the pandemic because our customers were demanding it from us. I think in the AI space, we're trying to hear from customers, what do you wish Slack could do if it had these new superpowers?”
The 10 traits of great PMs, how AI will impact your product, and Slack’s product development process | Noah Weiss (Slack, Foursquare, Google) · Noah Weiss
“Let's incubate a couple teams or prototype, give them space to run and pilot and then get something to launch that's amazing. Blows people away. That's the formula that we've seen.”
The 10 traits of great PMs, how AI will impact your product, and Slack’s product development process | Noah Weiss (Slack, Foursquare, Google) · Noah Weiss
“The way we think about product development at Stripe, it really is to find the correct set of early users to kind of co-create the product with. Maybe the best example of that is Stripe billing.”
Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · David Singleton
“We decided to co-create the product with them. So we had shared Slack channels, we'd actually show them product on a very regular basis, get their feedback on it. And only when that original Alpha group was super, super happy with the product did we then think it might be ready to go to a broader audience.”
Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · David Singleton
“That means that every engineer building product at Stripe really has many of the attributes and will exercise many of the attributes that you'll often find in PMs in other companies.”
Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · David Singleton
“With every release that your competitor is making and every release that you're making, you are either making chess points, moves against them, positive points, or you're going negative.”
An inside look at how Miro builds product: Lessons on outmaneuvering competitors, team structure, product quality, and moving fast | Varun Parmar (CPO of Miro) · Varun Parmar
“Humanizing the product development process means remembering that there are real people on the other side of every feature you ship, and that the metrics you're optimizing for should ultimately map back to improving someone's life.”
Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · Adriel Frederick
Cutting Room Floor
Guest insights on this topic that Lenny hasn't (yet) written about in his newsletters. Potential material for future posts.
“So therefore, when we're making a decision thinking about a problem, we're going to start with what's best for the customer and then come backward from there.”
Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards) · Bill Carr
“We hired a couple of college interns and we brought them in and we were like, people are going to push this magical one button in the Anchor app and they're going to say, I want to distribute my podcast, and your job is going to be to do all that same manual stuff manually, but to them it's going to feel magical.”
Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · Maya Prohovnik
“When I joined, we were about 10-ish folks, about eight engineers, and in three months, we built a competitor to Amex. Six months after that, we built a competitor to Expensify, both publicly traded companies.”
Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product) · Geoff Charles
“It's amazing how many times I've seen people come up with new designs or a radical new idea. And they believe in it, and that's okay. I'm just cautioning them all the time to say, 'If you go for something big, try it out, but be ready to fail 80% of the time.'”
The ultimate guide to A/B testing | Ronny Kohavi (Airbnb, Microsoft, Amazon) · Ronny Kohavi
“We did that with a lot of these native audiovisual products like huddles and clips really in the pandemic because our customers were demanding it from us. I think in the AI space, we're trying to hear from customers, what do you wish Slack could do if it had these new superpowers?”
The 10 traits of great PMs, how AI will impact your product, and Slack’s product development process | Noah Weiss (Slack, Foursquare, Google) · Noah Weiss
“Let's incubate a couple teams or prototype, give them space to run and pilot and then get something to launch that's amazing. Blows people away. That's the formula that we've seen.”
The 10 traits of great PMs, how AI will impact your product, and Slack’s product development process | Noah Weiss (Slack, Foursquare, Google) · Noah Weiss
“We decided to co-create the product with them. So we had shared Slack channels, we'd actually show them product on a very regular basis, get their feedback on it. And only when that original Alpha group was super, super happy with the product did we then think it might be ready to go to a broader audience.”
Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · David Singleton
“That means that every engineer building product at Stripe really has many of the attributes and will exercise many of the attributes that you'll often find in PMs in other companies.”
Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · David Singleton
“With every release that your competitor is making and every release that you're making, you are either making chess points, moves against them, positive points, or you're going negative.”
An inside look at how Miro builds product: Lessons on outmaneuvering competitors, team structure, product quality, and moving fast | Varun Parmar (CPO of Miro) · Varun Parmar
“Humanizing the product development process means remembering that there are real people on the other side of every feature you ship, and that the metrics you're optimizing for should ultimately map back to improving someone's life.”
Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · Adriel Frederick