Lenny's Written Position
AI is most valuable for PMs as a 'second brain' for synthesis — combining meeting notes, user research, and market data into actionable insights.
Product managers who learn to build with AI tools will have a significant career advantage — it's the most leveraged new skill to develop.
The best product thinking comes from adjacent fields — psychology, game design, economics — not from product management literature alone.
Product managers don't need to understand AI at a technical depth — they need to understand it at the right depth for making product decisions.
The PM job market is recovering, but the roles that are growing fastest require AI literacy — traditional PM skills alone are no longer sufficient.
AI evals are the single most important new skill for product managers working on AI products — more important than prompt engineering.
AI prototyping collapses the traditional design-to-development handoff — PMs can now validate ideas before involving engineering.
The PM role is uniquely positioned to be augmented (not replaced) by AI because the core job is synthesis and judgment, not execution.
The most effective PMs in the AI era are those who can move between strategic thinking and hands-on building — the 'full-stack PM'.
It is more important for founders to learn quickly and adapt than to have a good initial strategy.
Judging a startup by its current product quality is a trap because almost every iconic product started as something rough or even completely different from what made it successful.
Instead of evaluating a startup's current product, look for strong customer pull where users cannot stop talking about the product even when it is early and the market is niche.
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 most common mistake in AI evaluation is starting with off-the-shelf metrics like hallucination or toxicity scores, which often don't correlate with the actual problems users face.
For AI evaluation, binary pass/fail judgments are more effective than 1-to-5 Likert scales because the distinction between adjacent scores is subjective and inconsistent, while nuance is captured in written critiques.
AI products fundamentally break the assumptions of traditional software because they are inherently non-deterministic on both the input side (unpredictable user prompts) and output side (variable model responses).
Every AI product must negotiate a fundamental tradeoff between agency (the system's ability to act autonomously) and control (human oversight), and most teams fail by jumping to full agency before testing under high control.
The CC/CD (Continuous Calibration/Continuous Development) framework requires scoping AI products into versions defined by agency levels, starting with high-control/low-agency and gradually earning more autonomy.
Working with AI is like onboarding a new teammate: you should not hand them your highest-stakes projects on day one but instead start small, observe, build trust, and gradually expand their scope.
Never lead with the technology when building AI products; let the problem, evals, and data guide what gets added next, because too many people focus on chasing tools and frameworks and end up making costly mistakes.
A product succeeds because it solves a problem for people, and the problem should be easy to communicate in a sentence or two that resonates with the target audience.
The best executive communication follows the SCQA structure: Situation (unambiguous facts), Complication (what's changed), Question (almost always 'What should we do?'), and Answer (resolves the complication 100%).
Schlep blindness causes founders to avoid hard, messy problems in favor of easy ones, but ambitious ideas are doubly valuable because they have intrinsic value and less competition since everyone else is frightened off.
Duolingo went from creating 100 courses in 12 years to 150 courses in just 12 months after rebuilding their content creation process with AI.
True AI adoption happens when teams become skeptical of flashy demos and instead demand to see accuracy metrics, evaluation frameworks, and failure modes behind AI products.
Most tech workers are missing out on AI's potential because they are not providing enough context; LLMs feel like blunt, generic instruments when they lack the background knowledge a human colleague would need.
An AI copilot built with ongoing context about your goals, role, projects, team, and org becomes a real thinking partner for long-term complex work, not just a document generator.
Building an AI copilot follows a four-step process analogous to onboarding a teammate: hire it with instructions, onboard it with company knowledge, kick off initiatives in chat threads, and put it to work with simple prompts.
The habit of 'gossiping' to your AI copilot -- casually updating it about conversations, stakeholder changes, and new information via speech-to-text -- is critical for keeping context fresh and effective.
Even when AI is wrong it can be valuable because it spurs you to crystallize what you actually think; the goal is not perfect answers but getting the most out of yourself as a thinking partner.
AI copilot investment earns compound interest: uploading retrospectives and lessons learned from completed initiatives makes the copilot increasingly effective across all future work.
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.
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.
Analytical thinking interviews should follow a five-step linear flow: assumptions and game plan, product rationale, metric framework, goal-setting, and tradeoff evaluation.
Never use averages or ratios as North Star metrics because if your NSM increases while your ecosystem actually shrinks, you get a false positive — a metric that looks great even as the product dies.
The critical 'altitude shift' from company-level metrics to team-level goals is where most candidates stumble, because tracking a metric is fundamentally different from executing against a specific goal.
If you cannot describe a metric to a data scientist in a way that they could run a query with, it is not a useful metric — always define metrics so specifically that someone could implement them tomorrow.
Top candidates in tradeoff evaluation specify what would need to be true for them to change their mind, because it solidifies how they think about the fundamental factors that influence their thinking.
Outlining your game plan at the start of an analytical thinking interview is like sitting down to play a game with someone who knows the rules — it signals to interviewers that you will generate the signals they need.
Every startup and modern product team should be using Linear for task tracking, project organization, and roadmap building — and at this point, most are.
Creating decks and documents is one of the most time-consuming and annoying parts of most product builders' jobs, and AI tools like Gamma are doing for PMs what Cursor is doing for engineers.
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.
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.
Product leaders have an average tenure of 2.6 years, which is shorter than typical 4-year vesting schedules, making agreement engineering and term definition critical for long-term compensation.
AI automations (tools like Zapier Agents, Lindy AI, Relay App) are currently the most practical category of AI agents for helping product managers offload repetitive busywork.
PMs should design AI agents with low downside by restricting outputs to drafts, DMs, and recommendations rather than allowing direct actions like sending emails or posting in channels.
Letting AI summarize everything will quickly degrade a PM's customer intuition; instead PMs should use AI to traverse and cluster data while insisting on exact quotes and direct links to original sources.
AI copilots, AI prototyping tools, and AI agents will converge into unified tools that have deep company context, connect to real-world inputs and outputs, and operate by natural conversation.
Using AI prototyping tools to build production AI agents is tempting but not recommended because it creates maintenance burden, SaaS registration bureaucracy, and compliance overhead that dedicated agent platforms handle out of the box.
AI agents shine at ongoing, one-at-a-time repetitive tasks rather than big one-time batch tasks, and PMs should choose continuous trigger-driven work as their first agent use case.
Product sense interviews assess five specific dimensions: clear communication, product motivation, segmentation, problem identification, and solution development, and excellence in one area cannot compensate for weakness in another.
Product sense and analytical thinking interviews originally popularized by Facebook and Google have now been widely adopted across the tech industry, including at Stripe, OpenAI, Block, and even earlier-stage companies.
The best candidates treat product sense interviews as a structured game with clear rules rather than a casual conversation, using waypointing, assumption setting, and game plan articulation to generate clear signals for interviewers.
Strong candidates should spend 3-5 minutes establishing product motivation before diving into segmentation and solutions, connecting the product to deeper human needs rather than just describing features.
Candidates should practice stating assumptions and game plans for 20-30 different product sense questions to build muscle memory and avoid blank-page anxiety during interviews.
Prototypes should replace PRDs in fast-moving environments because PRDs block valuable design and engineering work, are almost never up-to-date, and become watered-down versions of the actual product once it exists.
Figma Slides launched less than a year ago and is already ahead of Apple Keynote and tied with Canva as a most-used presentation software among Lenny's readers.
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.
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).
Every team member should attend at least 50% of user research sessions because hearing a user directly express a pain point makes team members far more likely to act on it than hearing a secondhand summary.
Over a third of Palantir's PM alumni have started a company, making it the dominant company for producing founder PMs.
Intercom is the only company to rank in the top 10 on all four career acceleration dimensions for PMs: internal promotions, external promotions, fastest time to promotion, and fastest rise to leadership.
Over 20% of Chime's PM alumni go on to not just start a company but also raise a Series A, making it the top company for producing venture-scale founders.
Stripe PMs do not rank highly on traditional career metrics because they get hired as star PMs at rocketship companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Mercury rather than starting companies or climbing the ladder.
The only way Lenny's Newsletter has meaningfully grown is through word of mouth, with the sole exception being Substack's recommendation feature which accounts for roughly half of the journey from 500K to 1M subscribers.
Product teams will shrink by 25-50% due to AI (mostly fewer engineers), while PMs will have more influence and leverage, spending more time in discovery and GTM and less in designing and building.
Roughly half of Lenny's Newsletter audience are PMs, over a quarter are founders, and the fastest-growing segment is non-PMs including engineers, designers, and growth/marketing professionals.
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.
The median starting base salary for a PM in the U.S. is $112,000 at a public company and $96,000 at a private company, with a 90th-percentile senior IC PM hitting close to $1,000,000 in total comp.
New PM managers make less than senior ICs in total comp ($265,000 vs $425,000), and you have to reach M5 level to out-earn the most senior median IC PM.
U.K. PMs make 65% of what the average U.S. PM makes, Canadian PMs make 60%, and the average European PM makes less than 50% of U.S. PM compensation.
PM base salaries are 15-20% lower at private companies versus public companies, and over 25% lower for product executives, but this is offset by significantly higher equity at private companies.
The median chief product officer makes $1,425,000 in total comp, and the 90th percentile makes nearly $5,000,000.
Products click with customers when they make a simple, compelling promise that combines a clear target customer, their problem, a differentiated approach, and why it beats competitors.
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.
Jira dominates project management with 53% market share but simultaneously tops the 'please let us switch' list, while Linear is the fastest-growing alternative already used by over 10% of participants.
Bundling is a powerful distribution strategy but can only get you so far before well-crafted alternatives eat your lunch, as seen with Jira, Microsoft Teams, and Google Slides facing insurgent competitors.
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.
Core 4 is a unified developer productivity framework with four dimensions — Speed, Effectiveness, Quality, and Impact — that unifies the principles behind DORA, SPACE, and DevEx.
Revolut, N26, eBay, Plaid, and Intercom are the top five companies that most accelerate PM careers based on promotions, rise to leadership, founder rate, and first-PM rate.
Fintech companies dominate the top 10 PM career accelerators with 5 out of 10 spots, likely because fintech work is on hard mode with complex risk, regulatory, and compliance challenges.
FAANG companies lag behind companies like eBay, Intuit, and LinkedIn in accelerating PM careers, possibly because PMs learn to operate well within that specific company but are less successful elsewhere.
Teams should balance small optimizations with big bets, because low-hanging fruit like checkout improvements can have a bigger payoff than expected while maintaining team morale when bigger experiments fail.
Teams should treat AI as a true thought partner through back-and-forth iteration rather than relying on copy-pasted single-use prompts or pre-built GPTs.
Senior individual contributor PMs often out-earn managers, with senior ICs earning a median of $187,500 vs. $162,500 for managers.
Job level is one of the strongest predictors of PM salary, far more than years of experience, which is actually an anti-pattern for predicting compensation.
The rise of the IC career path is reinforced by recent layoffs disproportionately affecting middle managers, flattening organizations.
Entry-level IC PMs earn around $112,500, mid-level ICs earn $137,500, and senior ICs earn $187,500, showing nearly $78K growth across the IC track.
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.
Remote PM jobs have declined approximately 35% from their peak, dropping from over 35% of open roles to 22.5%.
Over one in five open PM roles is in the San Francisco Bay Area, with the share growing 25% year over year from 15.4% to over 20%.
The three most common hard skills hiring managers look for from PMs are SQL, Jira, and experience with LLMs, with LLMs being the fastest-growing requirement.
Diversity and scrum master roles are the fastest-shrinking in tech, with only 70 open diversity roles and 74 scrum master roles (none at FAANG).
AI companies are hiring almost exclusively engineers and data scientists; there are only 456 open AI PM roles out of 16,935 total AI company openings.
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.
Product managers are the best-positioned role in tech to thrive in a world of AI because the PM job is an amalgamation of soft skills that AI will have the toughest time replacing.
The most valued skill set in tech will increasingly shift from building to knowing what to build, giving clear instructions, and having the taste to judge quality.
Engineers and designers with the strongest PM-type skills like identifying customer pain points, understanding business levers, and communicating clearly will do best in an AI world.
Many jobs across industries will start to look more like product management as AI handles execution and humans focus on directing, iterating, and driving adoption.
A top-tier PM with the skills to fully harness AI capabilities is going to be the most valuable role in tech.
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.
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.
Product management roles are not shrinking despite layoff fears; there are about 450,000 active PMs in the U.S. with 2,500 to 4,500 being hired each month, holding steady after a 2022 hiring acceleration.
User research is the second-fastest-growing role after going through massive layoffs, as companies realized they went too far in cutting UXR teams.
Scrum master is the only product-adjacent role that is actively shrinking, with more people being let go than hired each month.
Product owner roles are the third-fastest-growing role with around 65,000 active roles, likely partly explained by former scrum masters transitioning to this title.
In blind tests, AI-generated answers beat human PM answers in two out of three core PM tasks (product strategy, defining KPIs, and estimating ROI), with 70-80% of voters correctly identifying the AI answer but still often preferring it.
Most people underestimate how close AI is to replacing human work because evaluations typically use outdated models without prompt engineering, which can yield a 50-60% accuracy boost.
AI's primary weakness in PM tasks is producing tactically comprehensive but not truly strategic answers, while humans win by incorporating unexpected connections, niche references, and genuine strategic thinking.
Even when AI ties with human performance on PM tasks, it is effectively a win for AI because it costs pennies and takes seconds versus hours of human effort.
The best AI features may reduce metrics like time spent in-app because generative AI finds the best product-market fit with products that increase productivity and give time back to people.
Over 50% of product managers now use an AI chatbot daily, and 85% use one weekly, representing an unprecedented pace of tool adoption in the PM profession.
PMs are primarily using AI search tools like Perplexity for six categories of work: growth strategy, finding benchmarks, market research, learning best practices, evaluating tools, and understanding technical jargon.
Despite empowered teams being dramatically more popular in stated preference, the majority of PMs still operate on feature teams, often for practical reasons like compensation, visa sponsorship, or not knowing what they are missing.
Feature team PMs who try to behave like empowered PMs without executive support typically deplete their social capital, get perceived as slowing velocity, and get dinged on performance reviews.
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 product work on feature teams and empowered teams is largely the same (PRDs, design partnership, research, sales enablement), with empowered teams adding opportunity identification and post-launch iteration.
The most common strategy for finding a better idea after a pivot is going all in on an internal tool or piece of tech that showed unexpected pull, followed by narrowing focus to one feature users loved.
Perplexity operates with only two full-time PMs in an organization of 50 people, with typical projects staffed by one to two people and the hardest projects having three or four people max.
Technical PMs or engineers with product taste will become the most valuable people at a company over time as AI reduces the need for process management and people-guiding skills.
Perplexity structures teams to minimize coordination costs by parallelizing projects and using AI for rubber-duck debugging instead of relying on alignment and consensus.
AI products benefit from quarterly planning horizons because the field changes so quickly that committing beyond that is impractical, with weekly 75% goals keeping priorities clear.
Product teams can frequently drive more growth by optimizing engagement with existing key features than by launching new ones, because most new features target only a subset of users.
The ARIA framework (Analyze, Reduce, Introduce, Assist) provides a structured repeatable process for increasing adoption of existing features that drive growth.
AI will have the most profound impact on historically high-value PM skills like strategy, vision, and goal-setting rather than on soft skills like communication, collaboration, and being the glue of a team.
The PM role will not go away but will become even more important, with soft skills like influence, communication, product sense, and creativity becoming increasingly valuable differentiators.
Quality assurance is the PM skill area most likely to be significantly disrupted by AI, as tools can already catch unexpected behaviors by being fed PRDs and testing autonomously.
Duolingo's strategic advantage is that their users consciously want to build a habit, which is an advantage over entertainment apps like Instagram and TikTok where nobody downloads hoping to use them for hours each day.
When prioritizing experiments, you should consider the total size of the user base affected (the whole pie), not just the percentage improvement; opt-out features affect far more users than opt-in features.
Custom GPTs can deliver immediate productivity gains across diverse work functions including UX copy refinement, persona conversations, user research indexing, copy experiment generation, and goal setting.
PMs should consider delivering not just a PRD but also a custom GPT loaded with those same requirements, giving developers an interactive source of truth for brainstorming technical approaches.
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.
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.
Literally every feature Gong develops is designed with a set of design partners, and they keep features in limited availability for months until they deliver expected impact, because only seeing real data in context reveals whether AI recommendations are truly valuable.
Gong deliberately avoids Scrum because they believe it drives urgency via artificial deadlines rather than customer value, and inhibits on-the-fly trade-offs between content, quality, and timelines.
If your startup is not taking off, the most likely cause is not talking to enough users, which means you have not found product-market fit, and nothing else really matters until you do.
First-principles thinking is approaching problems with a beginner's mind by doing the hard work of figuring out what is actually true rather than working within existing assumptions, and many of history's biggest breakthroughs came from this approach.
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.
The typical B2B company waited two to three years to hire their first product manager, usually at 10-15 engineers and 15-25 total employees.
More than half of top B2B companies hired their first PM before finding product-market fit, counter to conventional advice.
Most first PMs were IC-level or senior PMs, and nearly a quarter were engineers transitioning into the PM role, rather than directors or VPs.
Many first PMs come from internal transfers rather than external hires, because trust and existing product knowledge make them more effective.
Founders should not delegate product strategy to their first PM; the PM should own execution while founders retain strategic direction.
By picking even slightly better projects through improved prioritization, a PM can double their team's impact without increasing build speed.
DRICE (Detailed RICE) invests 30 minutes per idea to create bottom-up financial estimates, and teams at Dropbox that used it had twice the impact rate of teams using simpler prioritization.
If your experiment win rate is above 70%, you can delay investing in formal prioritization processes because you are still in the easy-wins phase.
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.
Horizontal products only win when a specific audience encounters enough use cases that they want one tool to address them all, as Figma did for designers and Notion did for product managers.
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.
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.
Linear uses paid work trials of 1-5 days as the final hiring step, where candidates join the team and work on a real project, which gives both sides a much better signal than traditional interviews.
Product-market fit is never a binary yes-or-no moment but a gradual process of finding fit with larger and larger market segments, and many founders never fully feel they have achieved it.
B2B founders should spend 50% of their time talking to customers and 50% building; most technical founders over-index on building and waste time solving problems without real traction behind them.
The strongest validation signal is deep emotional reaction from potential customers; when half the people you talk to start cursing about their current solution unprompted, you know you have found real pain.
Every prosumer collaboration product including Figma, Notion, Coda, Airtable, Miro, and Slack spent three to four years wandering in the dark before finding something that clicked.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Forward-deploying engineers to literally do the customer's job with your product for months at a time produces an order of magnitude more customer understanding than interviews or phone calls.
Delay building a PM organization as long as possible; putting great engineers directly in front of customer problems often produces better results than adding a PM layer that introduces lossy communication.
Build features that magnify value over time by creating growing data assets or network effects where each user's contribution makes the product more valuable for the next user.
Engineers spending 20% of their time on customer support actually makes product development faster, not slower, because teams figure out what matters to customers quickly.
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.
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.
Async product check-ins don't work well for exploring design directions because documenting options in writing is too time-consuming, making synchronous in-person discussions more effective for that stage.
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.
Ramp reached $100 million ARR with fewer than five PMs and fewer than 50 engineers, demonstrating that extreme efficiency is possible by restricting headcount.
Product strategy should start bottom-up with teams closest to the problem developing their own roadmaps, then co-developing the top-level strategy.
PMs should find, pitch, and close the first 5-10 customers for their products themselves before handing off to sales.
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.
Miro's general rule of thumb is to devote 60% of resources to product innovation, 20% to running the business and maintenance, and 20% to reducing tech debt.
Having OKRs at every organizational level creates overlapping initiatives, excessive process time, and too many priorities, so reducing OKR layers and frequency improves clarity.
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.
Learning to work alongside AI will quickly become table stakes for product managers, just as Grammarly became for writing and Copilot for engineering.
The best way to prepare for the AI future in product management is to dive in and get your hands dirty rather than waiting for the technology to mature.
Duolingo uses a co-lead structure with PM and engineering leads jointly heading each team, which provides complementary skills and divides leadership responsibilities.
Duolingo runs over 200 A/B tests at any given time, testing every product change as an experiment before rolling it out.
For mature product teams, balancing resources as a 50/50 portfolio between big features and incremental improvements is optimal because incremental changes compound but you must avoid local maxima.
Feature-based teams without clear success metrics can measure progress through a combination of internal dogfooding buzz, user research, public forum sentiment, and long-term holdout experiments.
The majority of growth inflections at successful companies sprang from a product improvement rather than external events or growth tactics.
Figma's biggest growth inflection was the release of Team Libraries in 2017, which provided so much leverage to design teams that it changed the competitive conversation.
Planning should take up no more than 10% of the execution time period, so quarterly planning should take less than nine days.
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.
The job of PMs and designers is to turn ambiguity into clarity, first for themselves, then for their teams, and ultimately for customers.
Product teams should distinguish between input metrics they can control and output metrics like activation that are lagging indicators, and goal themselves on input metrics.
If you want to be great at building product, your preparation should look more like a professional athlete's than someone winging it.
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.
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.
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.
You need goals before you can align around a roadmap because when prioritizing ideas you look at ROI, and the impact you're prioritizing against is based on how much a project will impact your goals.
A strategy is essentially a short description of your plan to win, with 3 to 5 concrete investments that, if you get right, will bring you closer to winning.
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.
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.
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.
A feature with low measurable impact can still be worth keeping if it supports the company's long-term strategy, as was the case with Airbnb's Superhost program which initially showed little measurable impact but was aligned with strategy.
Product-market fit should be thought of as a spectrum of confidence that changes over time rather than a binary you-have-it or you-don't one-way door.
Two-thirds of companies have both an IC track and a manager track for product managers, with the split typically occurring at the Senior Product Manager level (L6).
The most common PM title sequence is APM to PM to Senior PM to Principal PM on the IC track, and GPM to Director to Senior Director to VP on the management track.
The most common attributes evaluated in PM career ladders are leadership, impact, scope, execution, communication, vision, strategy, collaboration, planning, and technical skills in that order.
PM interview preparation has three parts: research the product and company, practice with real people through mock interviews, and study frameworks and core PM skills.
You need to talk to an average of 23 PM candidates to hire one great one, with only 13% of inbound applicants making it to the first screen.
The six core IC PM skills to interview for are communication, collaboration, execution, strategy, impact, and product sense.
The project portion of PM interviews is the most informative component because it is the only time you see a candidate tackle a chunky new problem, watch them in action, and discuss their approach.
Product sense is not something you need to be born with; it is a learned skill that can be developed through deliberate practice in empathy and creativity.
People do not get promoted for doing their jobs well; they get promoted by demonstrating their potential to do more through taking on increased scope.
The five most common pitfalls for new PMs are: being a Coordinator (no point of view), a Dictator (micro-managing), a Dreamer (too much strategy), a Feature Factory (shipping without strategy), and a Busted Umbrella (failing to shield the team).
Shipping is not success; success is shipping work that has meaningful business impact, high ROI relative to alternatives, and moves you closer to your strategy.
Web3 PMs are responsible for the success of communities rather than increasing acquisition, engagement, or revenue metrics; the role prioritizes execution over vision.
Product managers are not yet common or well understood in web3 because the 0-1 phase depends more on technical infrastructure, cryptoeconomics, and community than on traditional PM skills.
A technical background is a superpower for product managers because it enables better decisions, understanding of trade-offs, more accurate estimates, and more confident communication with engineers.
Almost every software product is built with the same three fundamental parts: a client, a server, and a database, and understanding this architecture helps PMs collaborate more effectively.
A PM's job is to deliver business impact by marshaling the resources of their team to identify and solve the most impactful customer problems.
The PM role varies dramatically across companies along two axes: which skills matter most and how much influence a PM has, with Zynga at the mini-CEO end and Apple at the project-manager end.
PMs should learn their company's tech stack, sensitive points in the codebase, the build and deploy process, how to contribute small code changes, and technical basics.
Being able to make small frontend changes like copy and color fixes yourself will result in more polished products shipped faster and win you points with engineers.
Great PMs take pride in the clarity and conciseness of their documents, emails, presentations, and meetings because people judge the quality of thinking by the quality of communication.
Great PMs build an aura of 'I have got this' by rarely dropping balls, coming prepared, and ensuring colleagues know that assigned tasks will get done.
Greater focus on fewer metrics leads to greater impact; teams should narrow to the two or three metrics that most directly drive business success.
An IC product manager's performance can be evaluated with three questions in priority order: is the team delivering business impact, are you personally contributing, and do stakeholders regard you highly.
The approach to transitioning into a growth PM role is simple: ask your manager for it, learn growth fundamentals through structured study, and then do actual growth work to demonstrate capability.
The SCR (Situation-Complication-Resolution) framework combined with the Minto Pyramid is an effective structure for any business proposal, email, strategy doc, or presentation.
PMs should trust the designer's expertise on user experience decisions, defer to them in their area of expertise, and protect uninterrupted maker time for creative work.
Including designers early in the product development process saves time and money because they inform with user voice, catalyze with creative ideas, and gain context for better execution.
So-called 'design goals' like consistency, usability, and accessibility are actually business goals because they directly drive conversion, loyalty, and efficiency.
To protect long-term big-bet projects at large companies, spend 80% of team time on short-term incremental wins and 20% on high-risk long-term bets to create 'cover fire' of consistent results.
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.
A product strategy has three components -- vision, strategic framework, and roadmap -- and newer PMs prioritize by incremental value while senior PMs prioritize by progress toward long-term vision.
The median time to progress from entry-level PM to senior PM is about 3 years, making it the longest single milestone in the PM career path.
You should skip running an A/B experiment when it will take too long to get actionable results, when the downside risk is low and setup effort is high, or when the change only has long-term effects.
Communication, execution, and product sense are the three most frequently valued PM skills, while design/UX, empathy, and raw intelligence are least frequently valued.
PMs believe they have more influence than their teammates think they do -- 80% according to PM respondents vs 70% from non-PM respondents.
A PM's work breaks down into three categories: shaping the product (customer research, strategy, specs), shipping the product (timelines, tradeoffs, QA), and synchronizing the people (alignment, buy-in, communication).
Engineers should pursue product management if they are more excited about business and customer challenges than technical ones, often have strong UX opinions teammates agree with, and could see themselves never coding professionally again.
The three most important PM skills to develop when transitioning from startup to big company are communication, influence without authority, and data-driven decision making.
As a founder, your job is to win at all costs and chaos gets swept under the rug, but as a PM your job is to avoid chaos, avoid changing course, and keep the team running smoothly.
Early in your PM career, the four things to focus on are shipping wins, learning best practices, getting baseline credentials, and starting your network.
Wherever the majority of your growth comes from determines who is driving the ship: product-led companies like Dropbox, engineering-led like Stripe, sales-led like Salesforce, or marketing-led like DTC brands.
An internal transfer program is by far the best way to break into product management because it is the easiest, least risky, and provides the most support.
When pursuing an initiative in an ambiguous area of ownership, communicate your intent and proceed rather than blocking on approval, creating a culture of impact over ownership.
Having a data scientist on your cross-functional team is like having a superpower, but to get the most value you should treat them as a partner by sharing the what and why, not just queries to run.
A new PM joining a team should focus on building trust in the first 30 days by asking questions and finding quick wins, improving execution in days 30-60, and developing strategy and vision in days 60-90.
Nailing the problem statement is the single most important step in solving any problem, and simple projects with vague problem statements go in circles while complex projects with strong problem statements sail smoothly.
Find your fulfillment in solving problems, not in forever keeping problems from arising, because fires will always burn, people will get upset, and things will go wrong as a natural order.
Nothing, no matter how well it's working, is going to last, so welcome change, anticipate it, and use it to your advantage rather than clinging to existing ideas, products, or strategies.
The seven core PM skills in order of importance are strategic thinking, execution, communication, leadership through influence, data-informed decision making, product taste, and always being prepared.
The four most common paths into product management are internal transition at a large company, finding a junior PM role, joining a startup with a burning need, and starting your own company.
Nothing is more certain to cause a project to fail than a misunderstanding of the problem you are solving, and the three steps to avoid this are crystallize the problem, align your team on it, and keep coming back to it throughout execution.
Podcast Moments
“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
“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
“The six things you need to build a great company, in descending order: timing, market, team, product, brand, distribution. You don't have all six, you don't win. A great team in a bad market gets dragged down — the market always wins.”
Jeetu Patel · Jeetu Patel
“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
“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
“Every startup that I've seen fizzle out is not because OpenAI or a big lab has come and squashed them. It's because they built something that didn't resonate with customers.”
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
“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
“Every PM in the world should be learning to build with AI tools. Not because they'll replace engineers, but because the ability to prototype changes the entire product development cycle.”
Marc Andreessen: The real AI boom hasn’t even started yet · Marc Andreessen
“I'm a PM at Meta with zero coding background. I built a full internal tool using Cursor in three days. It's now used by my entire team daily.”
The non-technical PM’s guide to building with Cursor | Zevi Arnovitz (Meta) · Zevi Arnovitz
“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
“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
“Product market fit is a sort of thing where you absolutely know it when you see it. The Silicon Valley 'never quit' mindset is not pro-entrepreneur, it's pro-venture capitalist.”
10 contrarian leadership truths every leader needs to hear | Matt MacInnis (Rippling) · Matt MacInnis
“The market is immutable. No amount of tweeting, advertising is going to change whether the market wants your product.”
10 contrarian leadership truths every leader needs to hear | Matt MacInnis (Rippling) · Matt MacInnis
“Point solutions don't have enough data in the age of AI to be useful. If you own the mine with the data, you can make money.”
10 contrarian leadership truths every leader needs to hear | Matt MacInnis (Rippling) · Matt MacInnis
“We're calling it the 'full-stack builder.' A PM who can prototype, run evals, analyze data, and ship small features independently. This is the new bar at LinkedIn.”
Why LinkedIn is turning PMs into AI-powered "full stack builders” | Tomer Cohen (LinkedIn CPO) · Tomer Cohen
“The PMs who are thriving right now are the ones who see AI as expanding their capabilities, not threatening their role. They're building things they never could before.”
Why LinkedIn is turning PMs into AI-powered "full stack builders” | Tomer Cohen (LinkedIn CPO) · Tomer Cohen
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“You're not just responsible for creating the product, but also creating the market. It's almost impossible to create a new idea in someone's head.”
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
“I realized the North Star challenge of AI is visual intelligence. Our human brains use about 50% of our neurons on visual processing. This is fundamentally a big data problem.”
The Godmother of AI on jobs, robots & why world models are next | Dr. Fei-Fei Li · Dr. Fei Fei Li
“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
“We didn't worry about competitors at all. It's better to solve a small number of people's problem really well.”
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
“A lot of engineers think code quality is important to building a successful product. The two have nothing to do with each other. YouTube was storing videos as blobs in MySQL.”
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
“Product managers don't need to understand backpropagation. But they need to understand what a model can and can't do, what evals mean, and how to think about AI reliability.”
Al Engineering 101 with Chip Huyen (Nvidia, Stanford, Netflix) · Chip Huyen
“AI is expansionary. There's actually just more and more questions being asked and curiosity that can be fulfilled now with AI.”
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
“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
“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
“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 general trend is going from models knowing things to models doing things. That's where environments come into play.”
First interview with Scale AI’s CEO: $14B Meta deal, what’s working in enterprise AI, and what frontier labs are building next | Jason Droege · Jason Droege
“The best PMs I know right now are all building. Not writing specs and throwing them over the wall. Actually building prototypes, testing them with users, iterating in real-time.”
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
“PMs should own evals, not engineers. It's a product quality question, not a technical one. The PM should define what 'good' looks like.”
Why AI evals are the hottest new skill for product builders | Hamel Husain & Shreya Shankar (creators of the #1 eval course) · Hamel Husain & Shreya Shankar
“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
“Devin is best on tasks that are well-defined. Quick front-end features, bug fixes, testing — things easy to verify.”
How Devin replaces your junior engineers with infinite AI interns that never sleep | Scott Wu (Cognition CEO) · Scott Wu
“As a PM, you need to start looking more like a hybrid PM prototyper, who has some good design sensibilities.”
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
“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
“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
“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
“People abhorred our pricing. It was a meme. Part of the problem was our strategy, super unfocused.”
How Intercom rose from the ashes by betting everything on AI | Eoghan McCabe (founder and CEO) · Eoghan McCabe
“The PM role is evolving faster than any other role in tech. The PMs who survive are the ones who keep redefining their own job description every six months.”
The one question that saves product careers | Matt LeMay · Matt LeMay
“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
“This is a pattern with AI, you won't know what to polish until after you ship. My dream is that we ship daily.”
Inside ChatGPT: The fastest-growing product in history | Nick Turley (Head of ChatGPT at OpenAI) · Nick Turley
“If we're shipping a feature and it doesn't get 2X better as the model gets 2X smarter, it's probably not a feature we should be shipping.”
Inside ChatGPT: The fastest-growing product in history | Nick Turley (Head of ChatGPT at OpenAI) · Nick Turley
“I started writing evals before I knew what an eval was because I was just outlining clearly specified ideal behavior.”
Inside ChatGPT: The fastest-growing product in history | Nick Turley (Head of ChatGPT at OpenAI) · Nick Turley
“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
“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
“I think the PM of the future looks more like a product engineer. Someone who can think strategically but also build and test ideas rapidly. The line between PM and engineer is blurring.”
He saved OpenAI, invented the “Like” button, and built Google Maps: Bret Taylor on the future of careers, coding, agents, and more · Bret Taylor
“When we talk about pricing, many people gravitate to dollar figures. But price is a measure of value.”
Pricing your AI product: Lessons from 400+ companies and 50 unicorns | Madhavan Ramanujam · Madhavan Ramanujam
“They moved the price from 79 to 99, and built a decoy at 299. It was a 30+ percent increase in MRR.”
Pricing your AI product: Lessons from 400+ companies and 50 unicorns | Madhavan Ramanujam · Madhavan Ramanujam
“Don't give the farm away in your entry level product. Use the compromise effect so people avoid the extremes.”
Pricing your AI product: Lessons from 400+ companies and 50 unicorns | Madhavan Ramanujam · Madhavan Ramanujam
“What you want is problems where the pain level is really high and the existing solutions are really bad.”
I’ve run 75+ businesses. Here’s why you’re probably chasing the wrong idea. | Andrew Wilkinson (co‑founder of Tiny) · Andrew Wilkinson
“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
“AGI is just necessary but not sufficient. A lot of the value is still going to require a bunch of hustle from a lot of builders to really turn that new source of energy and channel it into something that we humans want to use that solves some of our problems.”
From ChatGPT to Instagram to Uber: The quiet architect behind the world’s most popular products | Peter Deng · Peter Deng
“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
“When you go from one to 100, you have to plan your chess moves out in advance and build systems that are going to let you go sustainably faster. Sometimes you have to go slow to go fast. I like to think that Newsfeed has stood the test of time because we thought very carefully about how people wanted to interact.”
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
“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
“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
“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
“Instead, look yourself in the mirror and embrace who you are and what you could be rather than who others are. We have a super strong developer brand. Can we lean into the fact that builders love using Claude? Those builders aren't all just engineers.”
Anthropic’s CPO on what comes next | Mike Krieger (co-founder of Instagram) · Mike Krieger
“I think you know when your product is really serving people. So much of when you get really metrics obsessed is when you're trying to convince yourself that it is when it's not. That's our north star: do we repeatedly hear from people that Claude is unlocking their own creativity?”
Anthropic’s CPO on what comes next | Mike Krieger (co-founder of Instagram) · Mike Krieger
“Strategy is a little bit overrated for product. For most product managers, your strategy should be, 'How fast can I go from hypothesis to data?'”
Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · Mayur Kamat
“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
“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
“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
“Three inflection points for great products: technology shift, consumer behavior shift, and business model shift. At least two out of three should be true for any good product. With AI, the monetization is a whole different story -- we've just barely scratched the surface.”
Microsoft CPO: If you aren’t prototyping with AI, you’re doing it wrong | Aparna Chennapragada · Aparna Chennapragada
“I was working on this idea that should just work and it didn't. I tried to make personalization work in Google Search. Then I started working on Google Now, which was a twist: on the phone, we should push content. That was a pivotal moment. Being early is the same as being wrong.”
Microsoft CPO: If you aren’t prototyping with AI, you’re doing it wrong | Aparna Chennapragada · Aparna Chennapragada
“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
“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
“We started building a website that allows people to buy cinema tickets online. We built end-to-end hardware, stainless steel scanners, hacked the SMS standard to send QR codes to Nokia phones. We spent all our investment on hardware without any proven business model. We were just enjoying building a product we would love to use.”
How Revolut trains world-class product managers: The “local CEO” model, raw intellect over experience, and a cultural obsession with building wow products | Dmitry Zlokazov (Head of Product) · Dmitry Zlokazov
“They were extremely careful about only making people PMs who had first proven themselves out as forward deployed engineers. You basically could not become a PM any other way.”
How Palantir built the ultimate founder factory | Nabeel S. Qureshi (founder, writer, ex-Palantir) · Nabeel S. Qureshi
“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
“Every week, you would have a cadence where Monday you go in, do your meetings. Monday night, you build something. Tuesday, you show it to somebody. Tuesday, you get the feedback. Tuesday night, you iterate on it. You get four or five of these cycles every single week.”
How Palantir built the ultimate founder factory | Nabeel S. Qureshi (founder, writer, ex-Palantir) · Nabeel S. Qureshi
“I think it's very hard to not be anchored to your own experience and your conceptions of a problem. One thing I've seen in really strong founders is they're able to drop a bunch of those assumptions and almost treat a new opportunity as a completely blank slate.”
How Palantir built the ultimate founder factory | Nabeel S. Qureshi (founder, writer, ex-Palantir) · Nabeel S. Qureshi
“We actually announced five different new products simultaneously. People said we're going to confuse our current users. But we managed to transform the company in a very short amount of time. Not taking bold risks is a risk for itself.”
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
“More time creates more questions. It creates more complications. We really encourage people to get really fast to production, to put traps for themselves that are called by time and not by effort.”
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
“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
“Now we have 600 engineers. Some of the best things created with v0 have not come from our engineering team. They've come from the marketing team, the sales team, the product management team. The product management team is fascinating, because now they're actually building the product.”
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
“The AI models that you're using today is the worst AI model you will ever use for the rest of your life. Every two months, computers can do something they've never been able to do before and you need to completely think differently about what you're doing.”
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
“We have this philosophy of model maximalism. Our general mindset is in two months there's going to be a better model and it's going to blow away whatever the current set of limitations are. If you're building right on the edge of the capabilities, keep going because you're doing something right.”
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
“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
“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
“Every piece of debt that you take on you have to pay interest on. 1% or 2% of your time every day. If you take on enough debt, you'll be paying 80 or 90% interest and you won't have time to do anything new. You have a technical debt runway.”
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
“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
“At Captions, we're going even one step further. Why shouldn't the PM understand marketing? I actually think PMs should own all the way to marketing. Search marketing is just placing a button to your product in Google. That's almost a product surface.”
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
“You have to deliberately not act on the feedback of many of your early users, and this is at the same time as listening to people intensely and building what people want. That's what we're here to do, is to make something that people want, but it can't be all people.”
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
“You can classify anything that you build in a company into one of two categories, solution deepening and market widening. Solution deepening means making your product better for its existing users, but not making it available to more users. Whereas market widening means making your product available to more users, but not making the product itself any better.”
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
“If you haven't tried Superhuman, then gosh, what are you doing? Getting through your email twice as fast, responding one to two days sooner, saving four hours or more every single week, they're all real.”
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 would say, talk to this thing like you do a Linear ticket, or a JIRA ticket. That would be my advice. Talk to this like you're talking to one of the developers on your team. Be specific on things that matter. And on things where you can let it be creative, you can just say, 'Hey, make it prettier.' And it does a really good job when you give it just, vibes.”
Inside Bolt: From near-death to ~$40m ARR in 5 months—one of the fastest-growing products in history | Eric Simons (founder and CEO of StackBlitz) · Eric Simons
“I think the number one most important skill when AI can do more and more is taste, like having really good taste for what to build and what is a great product. And so in some ways, the people that are like the best product people, like you, I actually think they're going to become more and more important over time.”
Building Lovable: $10M ARR in 60 days with 15 people | Anton Osika (co-founder and CEO) · Anton Osika
“The big learning is that you have to start with how is this product working end-to-end and then add AI or think where should we add AI. You really want to see what does the big picture of the user experience look like, and then add something with AI to solve specific problems.”
Building Lovable: $10M ARR in 60 days with 15 people | Anton Osika (co-founder and CEO) · Anton Osika
“We called it sugar-coated broccoli. People don't want to eat the broccoli but people like sugar, so it gave them the sugar then hide your broccoli inside of it.”
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
“I think one element is we have to be very honest about what we don't know and we don't know users. It took us two years to realize we need to build a productivity tool.”
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
“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
“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
“People talk about this as if there were a trade-off because when they think about speed, the thing they over-index on is rushing or being sloppy. What they should be indexing on is being really competent.”
Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product) · Nan Yu
“You have some rough time budget for how long you think something's going to take. By the time 10% of it has passed, after week one, you have something that works that tests some key hypothesis internally.”
Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product) · Nan Yu
“We don't have product managers at Linear. Engineers own the product decisions. That forces everyone to think about why they're building something, not just how.”
Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product) · Nan Yu
“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
“2015 was a pivotal year where things started to shift. It was clear that winter was coming. We had to completely rethink who we were and what we were building for.”
Behind the founder: Drew Houston (Dropbox) · Drew Houston
“What I've learned building Dropbox Dash is that AI is going to change the fundamental interface for how people interact with their information. Search becomes the new file system.”
Behind the founder: Drew Houston (Dropbox) · Drew Houston
“Why is it that product management is still such a relatively undeveloped discipline? We're like 15 to 20 years into this, and so there's something about the current state of product management that isn't getting at the truly important things.”
Why great AI products are all about the data | Shaun Clowes (CPO Confluent, ex-Salesforce, Atlassian) · Shaun Clowes
“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
“The way AI will most impact product management is data management. If you don't have your data house in order, your AI products will be garbage. Data is the moat, not the model.”
Why great AI products are all about the data | Shaun Clowes (CPO Confluent, ex-Salesforce, Atlassian) · Shaun Clowes
“If we were doctors, you'd be like, 'That's totally unacceptable.' Imagine if after 20 years of medical practice, most doctors still couldn't reliably diagnose common conditions.”
Why great AI products are all about the data | Shaun Clowes (CPO Confluent, ex-Salesforce, Atlassian) · Shaun Clowes
“What Duolingo really focuses on is, how do we help users build habits around language learning? Getting a user to come back the next day is the biggest problem to solve.”
Behind the product: Duolingo streaks | Jackson Shuttleworth (Group PM, Retention Team) · Jackson Shuttleworth
“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
“If you don't build the network effect into what you are making, you are almost certainly going to fail. The question is, will this work better for my users if they tell other people about it?”
Seth Godin's best tactics for building remarkable products, strategies, brands and more · Seth Godin
“When you choose your smallest viable audience, what language they speak, how much money they have, what problem they're trying to solve, you have chosen everything that's going to go into the product and what your future is going to be like.”
Seth Godin's best tactics for building remarkable products, strategies, brands and more · Seth Godin
“I was hired as the first product manager. I sat in on those calls. I still did not exactly understand what we were going to build, which was confusing. And that ended up pivoting us around to cloud security.”
Building Wiz: the fastest-growing startup in history | Raaz Herzberg (CMO and VP Product Strategy) · Raaz Herzberg
“Our product strategy is simple: we want to be the operating system for cloud security. Every new product we build has to connect to the graph. That's our moat.”
Building Wiz: the fastest-growing startup in history | Raaz Herzberg (CMO and VP Product Strategy) · Raaz Herzberg
“One of the core reasons was I was always super busy. There were about 16 or 17 years where I was just incredibly busy, and because I was incredibly busy, I was extremely stressed.”
Shreyas Doshi Live · Shreyas Doshi Live
“Because I had a real product strategy, not one of those fake ones, a real product strategy that I had gotten alignment on with everybody, my planning for this major product for Stripe took me like three days.”
Shreyas Doshi Live · Shreyas Doshi Live
“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
“Taste is about the ability to identify what is really good without needing to see its results. It requires zero taste right now for anybody to say Jensen is a genius. To be able to say that in 2010, that requires taste.”
Shreyas Doshi Live · Shreyas Doshi Live
“Our jobs get frustrating when we behave, most of the time, in misalignment with our superpowers and who we truly are at our core. I have a preferred level at which I like to operate.”
Shreyas Doshi Live · Shreyas Doshi Live
“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
“The LNO framework: categorize every task as Leverage, Neutral, or Overhead. Do leverage tasks at 100%, neutral at 80%, and overhead at the minimum acceptable quality.”
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
“The biggest prioritization mistake is using impact-effort matrices. They give you a false sense of rigor. In reality, the highest-impact items are almost never low effort, and the low-effort items are almost never high impact.”
4 questions Shreyas Doshi wishes he’d asked himself sooner | Former PM leader at Stripe, Twitter, Google · Shreyas Doshi
“Thinking is cheap, so you should do more thinking, not less. The bias toward action in tech is overdone. Sometimes the highest leverage thing you can do is sit and think for two days before making a decision.”
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
“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
“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
“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
“We've forgotten a world without aggregators. Aggregators make sense in the late stage of an era. At the beginning, they curtail too much exploration.”
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
“Software is alchemy. It's the ability to extend human agency beyond ourselves to create something that can then combine with what others have created in unexpected and unforeseen ways. And somehow in the past decade, we've become convinced that all of this potential should be squeezed into about a dozen little boxes on your phone.”
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
“I think when you're running a marketplace, you tend to sit in your ivory tower a little bit, looking at stats and thinking like, 'If only we could get people to do X, it'd be better for everyone.' I think that's missing the point that we're humans.”
How marketplaces win: Liquidity, growth levers, quality, and more | Benjamin Lauzier (Lyft, Thumbtack, Reforge) · Benjamin Lauzier
“I'm a huge believer in market forces and empowerment, so provide guardrails for what a good experience is in your marketplace, set a clear bar for quality, and provide the right coaching and tools for supply to be successful, and then take a step back and see where the gaps are.”
How marketplaces win: Liquidity, growth levers, quality, and more | Benjamin Lauzier (Lyft, Thumbtack, Reforge) · Benjamin Lauzier
“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
“Think of SEO as a product. The product managers are the people that should be thinking about this SEO question because it's a product question. This is a user that's doing their own self-discovery journey. If you can't answer the question about what is it that someone's going to do a search on, then don't do SEO.”
Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · Eli Schwartz
“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
“I start with the value that's uncovered through the test. So with a company, I'll say, 'This is what the must have value is according to our most passionate customers, and we want to think about a metric that reflects us delivering that value.'”
The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · Sean Ellis
“Honored to be on a product management podcast for a person who doesn't believe product management is real.”
How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps (co-founder of TBH, Gas, advisor, investor) · Nikita Bier
“The PM job can become a little too internal, influencing my stakeholders and getting alignment and all these things. But if you can't sell or support your own product, I don't trust you to build the product.”
Unorthodox PM wisdom: Automating user insights, unselling job candidates, logging every decision, more | Kevin Yien (Stripe, Square, Mutiny) · Kevin Yien
“We all talk about product sense. To me, it's just a fancy way of saying you can make good decisions with insufficient data. PMs need as many reps as possible in making decisions, documenting the rationale behind those decisions, and then crucially seeing the outcome of them.”
Unorthodox PM wisdom: Automating user insights, unselling job candidates, logging every decision, more | Kevin Yien (Stripe, Square, Mutiny) · Kevin Yien
“I use AI to essentially do a voice-of-the-customer pipeline automatically. It processes all customer calls, tags them with themes, and then I can go pull up exactly what people said about a given topic.”
Unorthodox PM wisdom: Automating user insights, unselling job candidates, logging every decision, more | Kevin Yien (Stripe, Square, Mutiny) · Kevin Yien
“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
“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
“The moment the customer felt compelled enough to go out of their way to talk about some problem, that's an unbelievable gift. I will leave a meeting to just get one message back to them.”
Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · Jeff Weinstein
“What was the value that we're trying to produce for the customer and can we measure it from their perspective? And okay, how do you know you have product market fit? Charts that showcase things are going up into the right on one hand and then tweets on the other.”
Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · Jeff Weinstein
“We show up four to eight people total pretend to be some company with some outcome problem. Rule one is you do not work at Stripe and rule two is we're not here to solve any problems. This is just about practicing empathy for the customer.”
Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · Jeff Weinstein
“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
“The way inventions happen is people get their hands dirty, being awake to the possibility that secrets are there. If you're living in the future and you notice what's missing, your intuition about what to build is far more likely to be right.”
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
“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
“The future of PMs, I think, is going to be much more about taste and judgment and less about process. The PMs who are going to thrive are the ones who can look at something and say, this is good or this is not good.”
Dylan Field live at Config: Intuition, simplicity, and the future of design · Dylan Field
“I think the hill climb metaphor is really useful. You might be on a local maximum, but if you want to get to the global maximum, you sometimes have to go downhill first. That's terrifying for a company.”
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
“The company has a tendency to over-invest. Startups have the benefit of starving, and so you need to create scarcity. What we try to do is remind everyone things are going to fail, let's not drag the rest of the company into it.”
Hard-won lessons building 0 to 1 inside Atlassian | Tanguy Crusson (Head of Jira Product Discovery) · Tanguy Crusson
“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
“This concept of incubate by working on something on the side, iterate until you've got it right and then integrate it back into the main product is something I would definitely do again.”
Hard-won lessons building 0 to 1 inside Atlassian | Tanguy Crusson (Head of Jira Product Discovery) · Tanguy Crusson
“The Safety Funnel is amazing. You basically put a hard stop and you limit the number of people who had bad experiences. And you do that for a while, up until you can prove it's amazing and then you invite more people.”
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 value is not about what the product does. The value is about the problem you solve. If you can describe the problem in a way that the person you're talking to says, 'oh my God, I have that problem,' you've won.”
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
“Product-market fit is a journey, not a destination. With Waze, we changed the product significantly three or four times before we got it right. The first version, nobody used. The second version, a few people used. The third version, people started using and telling their friends.”
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 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
“The biggest unlock for growth at Canva was making the product useful for teams, not just individuals. When one person brings Canva into a team, suddenly 10 people are using it.”
Inside Canva: Coaches not managers, giving away your Legos, and running profitably | Cameron Adams (co-founder and CPO) · Cam Adams
“What I call the anti-pattern of what we want to do. Someone says, 'Hey, you know what? This would be great to build.' And you go pull data to go justify why that would be great to build. Call that identify, justify, execute. First you have to really understand from first principles what is actually going on. So understand, identify, execute.”
Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · Bangaly Kaba
“When you're in a hypergrowth product, it's really important to understand who your users are today and the persona of the user, what motivates them, why they're using it, but then also to understand who is the next user? Who is the user who could be using this product, but for some reason it doesn't work for them.”
Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · Bangaly Kaba
“We had to convince Kevin and Mikey that it was actually not the right thing to do to prioritize celebrities to everybody because we were basically biting our nose to spank our face. The regular person wasn't having a great experience.”
Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · Bangaly Kaba
“Usually it's somewhere in the onboarding to habit-building experience. What does it take for someone to actually understand the value, that first moment, that first aha moment in the product? And a lot of teams, it's shocking how many teams don't really understand what that moment is for them.”
Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · Bangaly Kaba
“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
“We're not trying to be incrementally better, we are trying to be fundamentally different. We want our customers to love us fanatically.”
Be fundamentally different, not incrementally better | Jag Duggal (Nubank, Facebook, Google, Quantcast) · Jag Duggal
“We built a lending product, we built an investment product, we built an insurance product, we built a series of small business products. We rarely scale a project until we know the Sean Ellis score hit a threshold that we find really compelling.”
Be fundamentally different, not incrementally better | Jag Duggal (Nubank, Facebook, Google, Quantcast) · Jag Duggal
“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
“One of the things we do at Nubank is we ask every product team to articulate what we call a 'magic moment.' What is the moment when the customer goes from 'this is interesting' to 'I love this'?”
Be fundamentally different, not incrementally better | Jag Duggal (Nubank, Facebook, Google, Quantcast) · Jag Duggal
“80% to 90% of our growth is through word of mouth. That only happens if your product is fundamentally different. No one tells their friends about something that's slightly better. They tell their friends about something that blew their mind.”
Be fundamentally different, not incrementally better | Jag Duggal (Nubank, Facebook, Google, Quantcast) · Jag Duggal
“I created a career growth framework for product managers, which comprises of three things. What you produce, what you bring to the table, and what's your operating model.”
A framework for PM skill development | Vikrama Dhiman (Gojek) · Vikrama Dhiman
“Can you show me your last PRD? Can you show me the last product note that you sent? Can you show me the product strategy doc? You must have that impact through the artifacts that you work on.”
A framework for PM skill development | Vikrama Dhiman (Gojek) · Vikrama Dhiman
“How you view change, whether you are focusing on things you control, and third is how you see yourself. The moment you are able to correct those stories, you may be back on the growth path again.”
A framework for PM skill development | Vikrama Dhiman (Gojek) · Vikrama Dhiman
“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 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
“Power requires a benefit and a barrier, so he's taking care of the benefit part by saying a castle, you have to have a pretty good understanding of why it's a castle and not a shack.”
Business strategy with Hamilton Helmer (author of 7 Powers) · Hamilton Helmer
“There's a thing called power progression. There are times when certain types of power are available. The path to power is where the rubber meets the road.”
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
“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
“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
“Live video taught me that you can build a product that people don't ask for and they don't know they want, and it can become something they can't live without. Periscope was that for me.”
Twitter’s former Head of Product opens up: being fired, meeting Elon, changing stagnant culture, building consumer product, more | Kayvon Beykpour · Kayvon Beykpour
“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 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
“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
“The founders who do best at YC are the ones who are resilient. They take the feedback, they iterate quickly, and they don't get emotionally attached to any single version of the product. They're attached to the problem.”
Lessons from 1,000+ YC startups: Resilience, tar pit ideas, pivoting, more | Dalton Caldwell (Y Combinator, Managing Director) · Dalton Caldwell
“Finding product-market fit is the single most important thing that your startup does in the first three years, and it's just underexplored and it's just underexplained as a topic.”
A framework for finding product-market fit | Todd Jackson (First Round Capital) · Todd Jackson
“We've published dozens of articles on the First Round Review, and we have found a very consistent set of patterns, demand satisfaction, and efficiency. But the interesting thing is that you don't go for all three of them from the very beginning.”
A framework for finding product-market fit | Todd Jackson (First Round Capital) · Todd Jackson
“You've got the persona, the problem, the promise, and the product. Lattice kept the first one but changed the others. Vanta changed all four.”
A framework for finding product-market fit | Todd Jackson (First Round Capital) · Todd Jackson
“The best signal that you have nascent product-market fit is when customers start pulling the product from you. You don't have to push it anymore. They're asking you for it. That's a qualitative signal that data won't show you.”
A framework for finding product-market fit | Todd Jackson (First Round Capital) · Todd Jackson
“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
“Is it going to eliminate PMs next year? Probably not. Are the skills required going to shift? Yes. Could they shift much faster than we all anticipate? Probably.”
Bending the universe in your favor | Claire Vo (LaunchDarkly, Color, Optimizely, ChatPRD) · Claire Vo
“I try to explain to people that the real essence of this job is that you wake up on behalf of someone else to solve a problem for them, and you have to do it well enough that they give you something back in return. That's kind of the real essence of it, and that's, I always call it a certificate of appreciation.”
The essence of product management | Christian Idiodi (SVPG) · Christian Idiodi
“If it's not fun, you're probably not doing it right. If it's not hard, you're probably also not doing it right.”
The essence of product management | Christian Idiodi (SVPG) · Christian Idiodi
“And it could be in the form of revenue, engagement, loyalty, reference, all of those things.”
The essence of product management | Christian Idiodi (SVPG) · Christian Idiodi
“Marketplaces are a little bit like a game of whac-a-mole. We decided to build some custom bespoke features that were really going to direct new supply to more experienced folks on the other side of the market. Good. And then lo and behold, now the existing folks on the other side are having a worse experience.”
Marketplace lessons from Uber, Airbnb, Bumble, and more | Ramesh Johari (Stanford professor, startup advisor) · Ramesh Johari
“Your metrics just keep moving around. And that's because the whac-a-mole game here is ultimately about moving attention and inventory around.”
Marketplace lessons from Uber, Airbnb, Bumble, and more | Ramesh Johari (Stanford professor, startup advisor) · Ramesh Johari
“If you ever find yourself saying something like, that's not my job, that's probably a thing you should do. You can spend your life getting frustrated at that or you can just get over and get the work done. And people who are willing to just get the work done will move faster.”
Mastering product strategy and growing as a PM | Maggie Crowley (Toast, Drift, Tripadvisor) · Maggie Crowley
“As a PM, for better or for worse, you're oftentimes the emotional center of the team and it's your job to keep people motivated, keep people excited, keep them bought into the project, and you just have to keep that optimism going and it's hard work.”
Mastering product strategy and growing as a PM | Maggie Crowley (Toast, Drift, Tripadvisor) · Maggie Crowley
“Their products will be more successful and they probably aren't carrying around all that anger and crappy emotion because... you just have to do whatever it takes.”
Mastering product strategy and growing as a PM | Maggie Crowley (Toast, Drift, Tripadvisor) · Maggie Crowley
“But it gave us some evidence to go and say, 'Hey, we should try and build this thing.'”
Becoming evidence-guided | Itamar Gilad (Gmail, YouTube, Microsoft) · Itamar Gilad
“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
“Your brain is so accustomed to having a scarcity mindset as opposed to creating alternative options or seeing a different path. Effectively, there's this notion of, 'How might the opposite be true?' The moment I challenged myself and said, 'How might the opposite be true?' my shoulders dropped.”
How to ask the right questions, project confidence, and win over skeptics | Paige Costello (Asana, Intercom, Intuit) · Paige Costello
“I think it's really important to become really good at and also known for something. You could be known for shepherding the most complex launches because you're just so good at quarterbacking.”
Building minimum lovable products, stories from WeWork and Airbnb, and thriving as a PM | Jiaona Zhang (Webflow, WeWork, Airbnb, Dropbox) · Jiaona Zhang
“Find something that you can be really, really good at. And the reason I give that advice is because when you do that, you can crush the projects that you get because you're making a name for yourself, reputation, and then you are giving more responsibility.”
Building minimum lovable products, stories from WeWork and Airbnb, and thriving as a PM | Jiaona Zhang (Webflow, WeWork, Airbnb, Dropbox) · Jiaona Zhang
“Folks planning their weddings, think of it as an emotional, high stakes thing that you're hopefully going to do once, and so the pressure is really there. Not unlike product managers, ultimately wedding planning is this huge project where you have a bunch of stakeholders, friends, family. You need to manage multiple vendors, and the time horizon for a wedding once you're engaged is anywhere from 12 to 18 months.”
Driving alignment and urgency within teams, work-life balance, and the changing PM landscape | Nikita Miller (The Knot, Trello) · Nikita Miller
“There are probably, I call them techno utopians who would say, feed all data to the algorithm, give it an objective, and it will do the right thing. And I was like yeah, the reason that falls down is the algorithms don't understand long term effects often, nor do they understand how people might respond to it, nor do they understand your intent for the product.”
Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · Adriel Frederick
“When you are working on algorithmic heavy products, your job is figuring out what the algorithm should be responsible for, what people are responsible for, and the framework for making decisions.”
Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · Adriel Frederick
“Some of the best PMs I have ever worked with are terrible PMs for their career. They just drift from job to job. 'Hey, should I take this role or this role? How do I think about this?' But if I said you had to write a spec for your career, what does success look like? How are you going to get there?”
How to own your career growth and become a powerful product leader | Deb Liu, Ancestry (ex-Facebook, PayPal) · Deb Liu
“This product owner role did not emerge from product management as we know it today. It was a way to help the developers prioritize what to work on.”
How to create a winning product strategy | Melissa Perri · Melissa Perri
“You don't have any formal authority, but you're a leader. You're expected to lead.”
How to unlock your product leadership skills | Ken Norton, Ex-Google · Ken Norton
“There's leadership all over the place, but that's your job.”
How to unlock your product leadership skills | Ken Norton, Ex-Google · Ken Norton
“The habit that separates great PMs from good PMs is the ability to zoom out and zoom in. You need to be able to think about the 3-year vision and then immediately switch to thinking about the specific copy on a button. Most PMs are good at one but not both.”
Brandon Chu on building product at Shopify, how writing changed the trajectory of his career, the habits that make you a great PM, pros and cons of being a platform PM, how Shopify got through Covid · Brandon Chu
“Being a platform PM is one of the hardest jobs in product because your customer is another PM. They're opinionated, they think they know what they need, and they're building on top of your work. But it's also one of the most leveraged roles because everything you build gets multiplied.”
Brandon Chu on building product at Shopify, how writing changed the trajectory of his career, the habits that make you a great PM, pros and cons of being a platform PM, how Shopify got through Covid · Brandon Chu
“To get better at strategy, you need to study more strategies. Read case studies, read annual reports, look at what great companies are doing and try to reverse-engineer their strategy. Most PMs don't do this enough.”
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.
“I realized the North Star challenge of AI is visual intelligence. Our human brains use about 50% of our neurons on visual processing. This is fundamentally a big data problem.”
The Godmother of AI on jobs, robots & why world models are next | Dr. Fei-Fei Li · Dr. Fei Fei Li
“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
“AI is expansionary. There's actually just more and more questions being asked and curiosity that can be fulfilled now with AI.”
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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“If we're shipping a feature and it doesn't get 2X better as the model gets 2X smarter, it's probably not a feature we should be shipping.”
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
“Don't give the farm away in your entry level product. Use the compromise effect so people avoid the extremes.”
Pricing your AI product: Lessons from 400+ companies and 50 unicorns | Madhavan Ramanujam · Madhavan Ramanujam
“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
“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
“Instead, look yourself in the mirror and embrace who you are and what you could be rather than who others are. We have a super strong developer brand. Can we lean into the fact that builders love using Claude? Those builders aren't all just engineers.”
Anthropic’s CPO on what comes next | Mike Krieger (co-founder of Instagram) · Mike Krieger
“Strategy is a little bit overrated for product. For most product managers, your strategy should be, 'How fast can I go from hypothesis to data?'”
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
“Three inflection points for great products: technology shift, consumer behavior shift, and business model shift. At least two out of three should be true for any good product. With AI, the monetization is a whole different story -- we've just barely scratched the surface.”
Microsoft CPO: If you aren’t prototyping with AI, you’re doing it wrong | Aparna Chennapragada · Aparna Chennapragada
“I was working on this idea that should just work and it didn't. I tried to make personalization work in Google Search. Then I started working on Google Now, which was a twist: on the phone, we should push content. That was a pivotal moment. Being early is the same as being wrong.”
Microsoft CPO: If you aren’t prototyping with AI, you’re doing it wrong | Aparna Chennapragada · Aparna Chennapragada
“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
“We actually announced five different new products simultaneously. People said we're going to confuse our current users. But we managed to transform the company in a very short amount of time. Not taking bold risks is a risk for itself.”
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
“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
“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
“Every piece of debt that you take on you have to pay interest on. 1% or 2% of your time every day. If you take on enough debt, you'll be paying 80 or 90% interest and you won't have time to do anything new. You have a technical debt runway.”
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
“At Captions, we're going even one step further. Why shouldn't the PM understand marketing? I actually think PMs should own all the way to marketing. Search marketing is just placing a button to your product in Google. That's almost a product surface.”
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
“We called it sugar-coated broccoli. People don't want to eat the broccoli but people like sugar, so it gave them the sugar then hide your broccoli inside of it.”
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
“I think one element is we have to be very honest about what we don't know and we don't know users. It took us two years to realize we need to build a productivity tool.”
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
“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
“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
“You have some rough time budget for how long you think something's going to take. By the time 10% of it has passed, after week one, you have something that works that tests some key hypothesis internally.”
Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product) · Nan Yu
“We don't have product managers at Linear. Engineers own the product decisions. That forces everyone to think about why they're building something, not just how.”
Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product) · Nan Yu
“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
“2015 was a pivotal year where things started to shift. It was clear that winter was coming. We had to completely rethink who we were and what we were building for.”
Behind the founder: Drew Houston (Dropbox) · Drew Houston
“What I've learned building Dropbox Dash is that AI is going to change the fundamental interface for how people interact with their information. Search becomes the new file system.”
Behind the founder: Drew Houston (Dropbox) · Drew Houston
“Why is it that product management is still such a relatively undeveloped discipline? We're like 15 to 20 years into this, and so there's something about the current state of product management that isn't getting at the truly important things.”
Why great AI products are all about the data | Shaun Clowes (CPO Confluent, ex-Salesforce, Atlassian) · Shaun Clowes
“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
“The way AI will most impact product management is data management. If you don't have your data house in order, your AI products will be garbage. Data is the moat, not the model.”
Why great AI products are all about the data | Shaun Clowes (CPO Confluent, ex-Salesforce, Atlassian) · Shaun Clowes
“If we were doctors, you'd be like, 'That's totally unacceptable.' Imagine if after 20 years of medical practice, most doctors still couldn't reliably diagnose common conditions.”
Why great AI products are all about the data | Shaun Clowes (CPO Confluent, ex-Salesforce, Atlassian) · Shaun Clowes
“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
“If you don't build the network effect into what you are making, you are almost certainly going to fail. The question is, will this work better for my users if they tell other people about it?”
Seth Godin's best tactics for building remarkable products, strategies, brands and more · Seth Godin
“When you choose your smallest viable audience, what language they speak, how much money they have, what problem they're trying to solve, you have chosen everything that's going to go into the product and what your future is going to be like.”
Seth Godin's best tactics for building remarkable products, strategies, brands and more · Seth Godin
“I was hired as the first product manager. I sat in on those calls. I still did not exactly understand what we were going to build, which was confusing. And that ended up pivoting us around to cloud security.”
Building Wiz: the fastest-growing startup in history | Raaz Herzberg (CMO and VP Product Strategy) · Raaz Herzberg
“Our product strategy is simple: we want to be the operating system for cloud security. Every new product we build has to connect to the graph. That's our moat.”
Building Wiz: the fastest-growing startup in history | Raaz Herzberg (CMO and VP Product Strategy) · Raaz Herzberg
“One of the core reasons was I was always super busy. There were about 16 or 17 years where I was just incredibly busy, and because I was incredibly busy, I was extremely stressed.”
Shreyas Doshi Live · Shreyas Doshi Live
“Because I had a real product strategy, not one of those fake ones, a real product strategy that I had gotten alignment on with everybody, my planning for this major product for Stripe took me like three days.”
Shreyas Doshi Live · Shreyas Doshi Live
“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
“Taste is about the ability to identify what is really good without needing to see its results. It requires zero taste right now for anybody to say Jensen is a genius. To be able to say that in 2010, that requires taste.”
Shreyas Doshi Live · Shreyas Doshi Live
“Our jobs get frustrating when we behave, most of the time, in misalignment with our superpowers and who we truly are at our core. I have a preferred level at which I like to operate.”
Shreyas Doshi Live · Shreyas Doshi Live
“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
“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
“We've forgotten a world without aggregators. Aggregators make sense in the late stage of an era. At the beginning, they curtail too much exploration.”
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
“Software is alchemy. It's the ability to extend human agency beyond ourselves to create something that can then combine with what others have created in unexpected and unforeseen ways. And somehow in the past decade, we've become convinced that all of this potential should be squeezed into about a dozen little boxes on your phone.”
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
“I think when you're running a marketplace, you tend to sit in your ivory tower a little bit, looking at stats and thinking like, 'If only we could get people to do X, it'd be better for everyone.' I think that's missing the point that we're humans.”
How marketplaces win: Liquidity, growth levers, quality, and more | Benjamin Lauzier (Lyft, Thumbtack, Reforge) · Benjamin Lauzier
“I'm a huge believer in market forces and empowerment, so provide guardrails for what a good experience is in your marketplace, set a clear bar for quality, and provide the right coaching and tools for supply to be successful, and then take a step back and see where the gaps are.”
How marketplaces win: Liquidity, growth levers, quality, and more | Benjamin Lauzier (Lyft, Thumbtack, Reforge) · Benjamin Lauzier
“Think of SEO as a product. The product managers are the people that should be thinking about this SEO question because it's a product question. This is a user that's doing their own self-discovery journey. If you can't answer the question about what is it that someone's going to do a search on, then don't do SEO.”
Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · Eli Schwartz
“Honored to be on a product management podcast for a person who doesn't believe product management is real.”
How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps (co-founder of TBH, Gas, advisor, investor) · Nikita Bier
“I use AI to essentially do a voice-of-the-customer pipeline automatically. It processes all customer calls, tags them with themes, and then I can go pull up exactly what people said about a given topic.”
Unorthodox PM wisdom: Automating user insights, unselling job candidates, logging every decision, more | Kevin Yien (Stripe, Square, Mutiny) · Kevin Yien
“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
“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
“What was the value that we're trying to produce for the customer and can we measure it from their perspective? And okay, how do you know you have product market fit? Charts that showcase things are going up into the right on one hand and then tweets on the other.”
Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · Jeff Weinstein
“We show up four to eight people total pretend to be some company with some outcome problem. Rule one is you do not work at Stripe and rule two is we're not here to solve any problems. This is just about practicing empathy for the customer.”
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
“The way inventions happen is people get their hands dirty, being awake to the possibility that secrets are there. If you're living in the future and you notice what's missing, your intuition about what to build is far more likely to be right.”
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
“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
“I think the hill climb metaphor is really useful. You might be on a local maximum, but if you want to get to the global maximum, you sometimes have to go downhill first. That's terrifying for a company.”
Making an impact through authenticity and curiosity | Ami Vora (CPO at Faire, ex-WhatsApp, FB, IG) · Ami Vora
“The company has a tendency to over-invest. Startups have the benefit of starving, and so you need to create scarcity. What we try to do is remind everyone things are going to fail, let's not drag the rest of the company into it.”
Hard-won lessons building 0 to 1 inside Atlassian | Tanguy Crusson (Head of Jira Product Discovery) · Tanguy Crusson
“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
“This concept of incubate by working on something on the side, iterate until you've got it right and then integrate it back into the main product is something I would definitely do again.”
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 value is not about what the product does. The value is about the problem you solve. If you can describe the problem in a way that the person you're talking to says, 'oh my God, I have that problem,' you've won.”
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 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
“When you're in a hypergrowth product, it's really important to understand who your users are today and the persona of the user, what motivates them, why they're using it, but then also to understand who is the next user? Who is the user who could be using this product, but for some reason it doesn't work for them.”
Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · Bangaly Kaba
“We had to convince Kevin and Mikey that it was actually not the right thing to do to prioritize celebrities to everybody because we were basically biting our nose to spank our face. The regular person wasn't having a great experience.”
Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · Bangaly Kaba
“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
“80% to 90% of our growth is through word of mouth. That only happens if your product is fundamentally different. No one tells their friends about something that's slightly better. They tell their friends about something that blew their mind.”
Be fundamentally different, not incrementally better | Jag Duggal (Nubank, Facebook, Google, Quantcast) · Jag Duggal
“I created a career growth framework for product managers, which comprises of three things. What you produce, what you bring to the table, and what's your operating model.”
A framework for PM skill development | Vikrama Dhiman (Gojek) · Vikrama Dhiman
“Can you show me your last PRD? Can you show me the last product note that you sent? Can you show me the product strategy doc? You must have that impact through the artifacts that you work on.”
A framework for PM skill development | Vikrama Dhiman (Gojek) · Vikrama Dhiman
“How you view change, whether you are focusing on things you control, and third is how you see yourself. The moment you are able to correct those stories, you may be back on the growth path again.”
A framework for PM skill development | Vikrama Dhiman (Gojek) · Vikrama Dhiman
“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
“Power requires a benefit and a barrier, so he's taking care of the benefit part by saying a castle, you have to have a pretty good understanding of why it's a castle and not a shack.”
Business strategy with Hamilton Helmer (author of 7 Powers) · Hamilton Helmer
“There's a thing called power progression. There are times when certain types of power are available. The path to power is where the rubber meets the road.”
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
“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
“Live video taught me that you can build a product that people don't ask for and they don't know they want, and it can become something they can't live without. Periscope was that for me.”
Twitter’s former Head of Product opens up: being fired, meeting Elon, changing stagnant culture, building consumer product, more | Kayvon Beykpour · Kayvon Beykpour
“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
“The founders who do best at YC are the ones who are resilient. They take the feedback, they iterate quickly, and they don't get emotionally attached to any single version of the product. They're attached to the problem.”
Lessons from 1,000+ YC startups: Resilience, tar pit ideas, pivoting, more | Dalton Caldwell (Y Combinator, Managing Director) · Dalton Caldwell
“Finding product-market fit is the single most important thing that your startup does in the first three years, and it's just underexplored and it's just underexplained as a topic.”
A framework for finding product-market fit | Todd Jackson (First Round Capital) · Todd Jackson
“We've published dozens of articles on the First Round Review, and we have found a very consistent set of patterns, demand satisfaction, and efficiency. But the interesting thing is that you don't go for all three of them from the very beginning.”
A framework for finding product-market fit | Todd Jackson (First Round Capital) · Todd Jackson
“You've got the persona, the problem, the promise, and the product. Lattice kept the first one but changed the others. Vanta changed all four.”
A framework for finding product-market fit | Todd Jackson (First Round Capital) · Todd Jackson
“The best signal that you have nascent product-market fit is when customers start pulling the product from you. You don't have to push it anymore. They're asking you for it. That's a qualitative signal that data won't show you.”
A framework for finding product-market fit | Todd Jackson (First Round Capital) · Todd Jackson
“I try to explain to people that the real essence of this job is that you wake up on behalf of someone else to solve a problem for them, and you have to do it well enough that they give you something back in return. That's kind of the real essence of it, and that's, I always call it a certificate of appreciation.”
The essence of product management | Christian Idiodi (SVPG) · Christian Idiodi
“If it's not fun, you're probably not doing it right. If it's not hard, you're probably also not doing it right.”
The essence of product management | Christian Idiodi (SVPG) · Christian Idiodi
“And it could be in the form of revenue, engagement, loyalty, reference, all of those things.”
The essence of product management | Christian Idiodi (SVPG) · Christian Idiodi
“Marketplaces are a little bit like a game of whac-a-mole. We decided to build some custom bespoke features that were really going to direct new supply to more experienced folks on the other side of the market. Good. And then lo and behold, now the existing folks on the other side are having a worse experience.”
Marketplace lessons from Uber, Airbnb, Bumble, and more | Ramesh Johari (Stanford professor, startup advisor) · Ramesh Johari
“Your metrics just keep moving around. And that's because the whac-a-mole game here is ultimately about moving attention and inventory around.”
Marketplace lessons from Uber, Airbnb, Bumble, and more | Ramesh Johari (Stanford professor, startup advisor) · Ramesh Johari
“As a PM, for better or for worse, you're oftentimes the emotional center of the team and it's your job to keep people motivated, keep people excited, keep them bought into the project, and you just have to keep that optimism going and it's hard work.”
Mastering product strategy and growing as a PM | Maggie Crowley (Toast, Drift, Tripadvisor) · Maggie Crowley
“Their products will be more successful and they probably aren't carrying around all that anger and crappy emotion because... you just have to do whatever it takes.”
Mastering product strategy and growing as a PM | Maggie Crowley (Toast, Drift, Tripadvisor) · Maggie Crowley
“But it gave us some evidence to go and say, 'Hey, we should try and build this thing.'”
Becoming evidence-guided | Itamar Gilad (Gmail, YouTube, Microsoft) · Itamar Gilad
“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
“Your brain is so accustomed to having a scarcity mindset as opposed to creating alternative options or seeing a different path. Effectively, there's this notion of, 'How might the opposite be true?' The moment I challenged myself and said, 'How might the opposite be true?' my shoulders dropped.”
How to ask the right questions, project confidence, and win over skeptics | Paige Costello (Asana, Intercom, Intuit) · Paige Costello
“Folks planning their weddings, think of it as an emotional, high stakes thing that you're hopefully going to do once, and so the pressure is really there. Not unlike product managers, ultimately wedding planning is this huge project where you have a bunch of stakeholders, friends, family. You need to manage multiple vendors, and the time horizon for a wedding once you're engaged is anywhere from 12 to 18 months.”
Driving alignment and urgency within teams, work-life balance, and the changing PM landscape | Nikita Miller (The Knot, Trello) · Nikita Miller
“There are probably, I call them techno utopians who would say, feed all data to the algorithm, give it an objective, and it will do the right thing. And I was like yeah, the reason that falls down is the algorithms don't understand long term effects often, nor do they understand how people might respond to it, nor do they understand your intent for the product.”
Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · Adriel Frederick
“When you are working on algorithmic heavy products, your job is figuring out what the algorithm should be responsible for, what people are responsible for, and the framework for making decisions.”
Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · Adriel Frederick
“Some of the best PMs I have ever worked with are terrible PMs for their career. They just drift from job to job. 'Hey, should I take this role or this role? How do I think about this?' But if I said you had to write a spec for your career, what does success look like? How are you going to get there?”
How to own your career growth and become a powerful product leader | Deb Liu, Ancestry (ex-Facebook, PayPal) · Deb Liu
“This product owner role did not emerge from product management as we know it today. It was a way to help the developers prioritize what to work on.”
How to create a winning product strategy | Melissa Perri · Melissa Perri
“Being a platform PM is one of the hardest jobs in product because your customer is another PM. They're opinionated, they think they know what they need, and they're building on top of your work. But it's also one of the most leveraged roles because everything you build gets multiplied.”
Brandon Chu on building product at Shopify, how writing changed the trajectory of his career, the habits that make you a great PM, pros and cons of being a platform PM, how Shopify got through Covid · Brandon Chu
“To get better at strategy, you need to study more strategies. Read case studies, read annual reports, look at what great companies are doing and try to reverse-engineer their strategy. Most PMs don't do this enough.”
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