Lenny's Written Position
Spending time understanding and reframing user problems with strong constraints is more valuable than jumping to solutions, because good framing naturally narrows the solution space.
Keeping track of emerging technology trends at both macro and micro levels helps PMs develop creative product solutions by understanding what is newly possible.
There are only two paths to winning a market according to Michael Porter: performing activities better than rivals (operational effectiveness) or performing different activities (differentiation), and differentiation is more sustainable long-term.
There are seven common ways to differentiate a product: be cheapest, highest quality, most convenient, safest, proprietary, feel-good to buy, or focused on a niche underserved market.
Combining multiple differentiators creates an even stronger competitive position than relying on a single one.
A north star vision is essential for product teams to avoid building a disjointed Frankenstein product, and the investment can range from a single-screen whiteboard session to a months-long high-fidelity prototype.
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.
There are seven distinct types of virality across three categories: word-of-mouth (offline and online), invitation (social, incentivized, utility), and experiential (passive and active).
Positioning defines how your product is a leader at delivering something that a well-defined set of customers cares a lot about, and a shift in positioning can mean the difference between success and failure.
Product planning follows the sequence Mission, Vision, Strategy, Goals, Roadmap, where your strategy is your plan to win that creates alignment, clarity, and focus.
At Airbnb, transitioning from a request-to-book to instant-book model grew instant bookings from 5% to over 80% in two and a half years by setting an ambitious 100% north-star goal.
Podcast Moments
“No Indian has ever been paid an hourly salary in their entire life. So when you're not paid an hourly salary, the concept of time is not the same. And when the concept of time is not the same, paying for time is hard to do. Many Indian languages do not have a word for 'efficiency.'”
Kunal Shah on winning in India, second-order thinking, the philosophy of startups, and more · Kunal Shah
“I'd start with the thing your product does. 'What's the core premise behind it? Why do people use it? What problem does it solve for them?' Go back to basics. And then ask, 'Can AI do that?' And for a lot, the answer is going to be, 'Yes, it can.'”
What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · Paul Adams
“We were obsessed with reducing friction, this was our constant battle. I still don't know how many people know this. I think people think that we had some secret backdoor deal with Apple for distribution, but we just had college students making Apple podcast accounts and then submitting hundreds of thousands of podcasts.”
Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · Maya Prohovnik
“This is the bedrock of virality. Build a great product that solves a sharp problem.”
Picking sharp problems, increasing virality, and unique product frameworks | Oji Udezue (Typeform, Twitter, Calendly, Atlassian) · Oji Udezue
“When the CDC mandated face masks in early April 2020, that's when essentially we went to sleep one day with our typical April traffic, typical April sales, and then it was Black Friday overnight.”
Inside Etsy’s product, growth, and marketplace evolution | Tim Holley (VP of Product) · Tim Holley
“That's what we're trying to do is find, where will people change behavior?”
The ultimate guide to JTBD | Bob Moesta (co-creator of the framework) · Bob Moesta
“We have this mental metaphor that we talk a lot about, getting to the next hill. The actual wording is 'Take bigger boulder bets.' I think teams can often get lost crawling up that hill, not realizing that there's a huge, incredibly beautiful range behind it.”
The 10 traits of great PMs, how AI will impact your product, and Slack’s product development process | Noah Weiss (Slack, Foursquare, Google) · Noah Weiss
“Cash App, as a team we really cared about what we could do that was different and better than what else existed in-market. Being different is not enough, because it's very easy to build a thing that's different from what exists today, because you just have to look at what exists today and build something else.”
Frameworks for product differentiation, team building, and thinking from first principles | Ayo Omojola (Carbon Health, Cash App) · Ayo Omojola
“I think that framework, it actually drives an insane amount of clarity in terms of what you're doing and what the impact is going to be.”
An inside look at how Miro builds product: Lessons on outmaneuvering competitors, team structure, product quality, and moving fast | Varun Parmar (CPO of Miro) · Varun Parmar
“It's also very important to know what you're not building. And this one is not only in big companies, I would say even in startups, it's extremely important to know what you're not building because you could very easily get swayed by customer X telling you to do this, customer Y telling you to do that. And a product that tries to be all things to all people usually doesn't end up going anywhere.”
Product lessons from Waymo | Shweta Shrivastava (Waymo, Amazon, Cisco) · Shweta Shriva
“I am kind of annoyed at how much super apps are being mentioned these days. All of the things that are really appealing -- lower customer acquisition costs, higher attach rates, higher retention, the ease of cross-selling -- all of these things sound great, but in reality, a lot of those benefits don't pan out. There needs to be a unifying concept across all of your services for your users to think about your product in a sensible way.”
Taxi mafias, cash vaults, and 100% MoM growth: The story behind Southeast Asia’s biggest startup | Kevin Aluwi (Gojek) · Kevin Aluwi
“Strategy is really just an integrated set of choices that outline how you're going to win in whatever marketplace you choose. A good product strategy is going to answer questions like what's your winning aspiration? But maybe more importantly, where are you going to play? What are the markets you're going to go after? What are the segments? What are the personas? And then, how are you going to win with a target audience?”
Behind the scenes of Calendly’s rapid growth | Annie Pearl (CPO) · Annie Pearl
“The whole point about a roadmap is that it's not designed to be your plan. I think about it as being a prototype for your strategy. What I mean by that is we talk about prototyping all the time in the lean world and a prototype is essentially a way of checking your assumptions.”
Building better product roadmaps | Janna Bastow (Mind the Product, ProdPad) · Janna Bastow
“So at the feature level, you'd prototype by doing a design, a mockup, and you'd take that mockup and you'd share it with somebody and say, 'Here's a mockup of the feature that I'm trying to build. What do you think?' And they'd tell you what's right or wrong, and you'd throw out the original prototype, because it wasn't very good and you'd make a new one.”
Building better product roadmaps | Janna Bastow (Mind the Product, ProdPad) · Janna Bastow
“People don't buy the problem, they buy your solution. Obviously they don't buy it if it's not solving something they care about, but there are many products that are solving what they care about. The real question is, do you solve it better than everybody else so that they buy you?”
The nature of product | Marty Cagan, Silicon Valley Product Group · Marty Cagan
“You've been hired by a competitor to design a me too version of product. What is the bare minimum of what you need to build? And then, you ran out of resources. You get a quarter of the time and a quarter of the team. What do you actually build? And then, you've decided you can differentiate in only one place. What do you do to differentiate?”
The rituals of great teams | Shishir Mehrotra of Coda, YouTube, Microsoft · Shishir Mehrotra
“I ended up going to a ton of Agile conferences and speaking about product management, and I started to learn that there was this product owner role in Scrum.”
How to create a winning product strategy | Melissa Perri · Melissa Perri
“The DHM framework stands for Delight customers, in Hard to copy ways, that are Margin enhancing. Every product strategy hypothesis should answer these three questions. If you can do all three, you've got a real strategy. If you can only do one or two, you've got a tactic.”
Gibson Biddle on his DHM product strategy framework, GEM roadmap prioritization framework, 5 Netflix strategy mini case studies, building a personal board of directors, and much more · Gibson Biddle
“Strategy is a set of choices about what you're going to do and what you're not going to do, in order to achieve your goals. The most common mistake I see is that people confuse strategy with goals. Your goal might be to grow 50%, but that's not a strategy. The strategy is how you're going to get there.”
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.
“No Indian has ever been paid an hourly salary in their entire life. So when you're not paid an hourly salary, the concept of time is not the same. And when the concept of time is not the same, paying for time is hard to do. Many Indian languages do not have a word for 'efficiency.'”
Kunal Shah on winning in India, second-order thinking, the philosophy of startups, and more · Kunal Shah
“I'd start with the thing your product does. 'What's the core premise behind it? Why do people use it? What problem does it solve for them?' Go back to basics. And then ask, 'Can AI do that?' And for a lot, the answer is going to be, 'Yes, it can.'”
What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · Paul Adams
“We were obsessed with reducing friction, this was our constant battle. I still don't know how many people know this. I think people think that we had some secret backdoor deal with Apple for distribution, but we just had college students making Apple podcast accounts and then submitting hundreds of thousands of podcasts.”
Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · Maya Prohovnik
“This is the bedrock of virality. Build a great product that solves a sharp problem.”
Picking sharp problems, increasing virality, and unique product frameworks | Oji Udezue (Typeform, Twitter, Calendly, Atlassian) · Oji Udezue
“When the CDC mandated face masks in early April 2020, that's when essentially we went to sleep one day with our typical April traffic, typical April sales, and then it was Black Friday overnight.”
Inside Etsy’s product, growth, and marketplace evolution | Tim Holley (VP of Product) · Tim Holley
“That's what we're trying to do is find, where will people change behavior?”
The ultimate guide to JTBD | Bob Moesta (co-creator of the framework) · Bob Moesta
“We have this mental metaphor that we talk a lot about, getting to the next hill. The actual wording is 'Take bigger boulder bets.' I think teams can often get lost crawling up that hill, not realizing that there's a huge, incredibly beautiful range behind it.”
The 10 traits of great PMs, how AI will impact your product, and Slack’s product development process | Noah Weiss (Slack, Foursquare, Google) · Noah Weiss
“I think that framework, it actually drives an insane amount of clarity in terms of what you're doing and what the impact is going to be.”
An inside look at how Miro builds product: Lessons on outmaneuvering competitors, team structure, product quality, and moving fast | Varun Parmar (CPO of Miro) · Varun Parmar
“I am kind of annoyed at how much super apps are being mentioned these days. All of the things that are really appealing -- lower customer acquisition costs, higher attach rates, higher retention, the ease of cross-selling -- all of these things sound great, but in reality, a lot of those benefits don't pan out. There needs to be a unifying concept across all of your services for your users to think about your product in a sensible way.”
Taxi mafias, cash vaults, and 100% MoM growth: The story behind Southeast Asia’s biggest startup | Kevin Aluwi (Gojek) · Kevin Aluwi
“Strategy is really just an integrated set of choices that outline how you're going to win in whatever marketplace you choose. A good product strategy is going to answer questions like what's your winning aspiration? But maybe more importantly, where are you going to play? What are the markets you're going to go after? What are the segments? What are the personas? And then, how are you going to win with a target audience?”
Behind the scenes of Calendly’s rapid growth | Annie Pearl (CPO) · Annie Pearl
“The whole point about a roadmap is that it's not designed to be your plan. I think about it as being a prototype for your strategy. What I mean by that is we talk about prototyping all the time in the lean world and a prototype is essentially a way of checking your assumptions.”
Building better product roadmaps | Janna Bastow (Mind the Product, ProdPad) · Janna Bastow
“So at the feature level, you'd prototype by doing a design, a mockup, and you'd take that mockup and you'd share it with somebody and say, 'Here's a mockup of the feature that I'm trying to build. What do you think?' And they'd tell you what's right or wrong, and you'd throw out the original prototype, because it wasn't very good and you'd make a new one.”
Building better product roadmaps | Janna Bastow (Mind the Product, ProdPad) · Janna Bastow
“You've been hired by a competitor to design a me too version of product. What is the bare minimum of what you need to build? And then, you ran out of resources. You get a quarter of the time and a quarter of the team. What do you actually build? And then, you've decided you can differentiate in only one place. What do you do to differentiate?”
The rituals of great teams | Shishir Mehrotra of Coda, YouTube, Microsoft · Shishir Mehrotra
“I ended up going to a ton of Agile conferences and speaking about product management, and I started to learn that there was this product owner role in Scrum.”
How to create a winning product strategy | Melissa Perri · Melissa Perri
“Strategy is a set of choices about what you're going to do and what you're not going to do, in order to achieve your goals. The most common mistake I see is that people confuse strategy with goals. Your goal might be to grow 50%, but that's not a strategy. The strategy is how you're going to get there.”
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