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.
The key to useful AI assistance is feeding it context over time, not just asking one-off questions — persistent context makes AI dramatically more useful.
Environmental toxins like PFAS, phthalates, and microplastics are the trans fats of our generation, found in 92-97% of Americans' blood and linked to testosterone, anxiety, cancer, and fertility issues.
The 80/20 of sleep health comes down to three things: exercise during the day, get morning sunlight, and optimize your sleep setup for no external light, quiet, low CO2, and cold temperatures.
Most microplastics are inhaled rather than ingested via water or food, making air purification in your home and office a top priority for toxin mitigation.
Plant protein powders are largely ineffective because they are not bioavailable and are often contaminated with high levels of pesticides, with one test finding glyphosate levels 1,000 times higher than recommended.
The EU bans more than 1,300 chemicals and compounds that the US allows, because the FDA takes an assume-safe-until-proven-harmful approach versus the EU's precautionary do-no-harm approach.
The biggest barrier to AI adoption at companies is not technology but organizational change, including vague mandates, procurement bottlenecks, and lack of guidance on high-impact use cases.
Saying 'we are AI-first' means nothing if employees do not know what that means for their day-to-day work; successful companies provide specific, concrete tactics employees can adopt.
Duolingo went from creating 100 courses in 12 years to 150 courses in just 12 months after rebuilding their content creation process with AI.
Companies should turn their internal AI enthusiasts into teachers by hosting regular demos, hackathons, and dedicated AI experimentation time rather than relying on top-down mandates alone.
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 key to beating burnout is to systematically design a career and lifestyle that make burnout structurally unlikely, rather than relying on resilience or stress management.
Autonomy is the most critical ingredient to being happy at work, and burnout conquerors earn it by consistently delivering results to build trust.
Burnout conquerors overcommunicate not just what they are working on but how they work — their boundaries, constraints, strengths, and decision-making preferences — using a 'How I Work' document.
Burnout conquerors treat wellness as non-negotiable professional infrastructure, with exercise routines more like professional athletes than typical tech workers.
The 'baselines and forks' workflow — creating a high-quality reproduction of your current product then duplicating it to explore new ideas — is the best way to rapidly test multiple design directions without rebuilding each time.
Replit can single-shot fairly sophisticated full-stack applications unlike other vibe-coding platforms, because it automatically tests the apps it builds using its internal browser and auto-fixes issues it finds.
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.
Granola has quickly become the obvious tool for AI meeting note-taking because it works behind the scenes using laptop audio instead of joining calls, and everyone who tries it gets hooked.
Hybrid workers feel significantly better about their jobs than in-office workers (21% sentiment gap), but in-office workers are slightly more optimistic about their long-term career prospects.
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.
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.
The podcast takes less work and generates more revenue than the newsletter, with each podcast episode requiring 3-5 hours versus 10-30 hours per newsletter post.
For creator-driven businesses, prioritizing stamina over virality is essential because one viral post is easy but publishing weekly for five years is what builds a sustainable audience.
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.
ChatGPT is used by 90% of tech professionals surveyed, making it more widely used than Gmail (76%) or Slack (71%), representing the most significant shift in the product team tool stack in recent memory.
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.
Over 50% of tech professionals combine multiple AI assistants for specific use cases, such as ChatGPT plus Claude for thought partnership and ChatGPT plus Perplexity for deep research.
Improving the developer experience score (DXI) by one point saves 13 minutes per week per developer, equivalent to 10 hours annually per developer.
The three most common friction points slowing developer teams down are poor build and test processes, lack of time for deep work, and poor support for production debugging.
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.
The difference between mediocre and mind-blowing AI results comes down to prompt crafting, not the model itself.
Role-playing, style unbundling, emotion prompting, few-shot learning, and synthetic bootstrap are the five most consistently useful prompt engineering techniques.
Adding emotional stakes to a prompt (e.g. 'This task is very important for my career') can elicit more careful and thoughtful AI responses.
Inner conflict between competing internal parts is the major hidden driver of productivity and burnout issues at work, not a lack of productivity tactics.
Internal Family Systems (IFS) is an effective method for resolving workplace stuckness by identifying and facilitating dialogue between conflicting internal parts.
The parts of ourselves that we judge, shame, or ignore tend to get louder and more extreme, while parts that feel heard become flexible and trusting.
Setting arbitrary deadlines with collaborators creates a gravitational pull toward completion even when both parties know the deadline is made up.
Writing to-dos on pen and paper and rewriting them each morning on a fresh page is more effective than digital to-do apps because physical lists cannot be swiped away.
You can often back out of commitments your past self agreed to with minimal consequences, and the relief from doing so helps you get better at saying no in the first place.
A 15-minute end-of-day calendar review for the next day transforms morning anxiety from overwhelming to manageable and makes you feel ahead of the curve.
Conducting both a time audit and an energy audit reveals the gap between your stated priorities and revealed preferences, informing how to restructure your schedule.
Putting to-dos directly on your calendar as events is more effective than using a to-do app because your calendar is your personal roadmap and items not on the roadmap get ignored.
If a task takes less than two minutes, doing it immediately is more efficient than storing and tracking it in a system.
Keeping a waiting-for list of every open request you have made to others is one of the most important habits for building an aura of reliability as a PM.
Setting up two to three recurring deep work blocks per week and fiercely protecting them from meeting encroachment is essential for getting real work done.
Most meetings can be replaced with a five-minute async email exchange, saving not just meeting time but also the pre-meeting and post-meeting context-switching overhead.
Most burnout and overwhelm comes not from a lack of productivity tools but from taking on too much work, making saying no the most important productivity skill.
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.
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.
The key test for whether to say yes to an opportunity is asking 'Would I be excited about this if it were tomorrow?' because it is incredibly easy to say yes to things months in the future that you will regret.
Creating and communicating personal policies like 'I don't do talks or events' is more effective than evaluating each request individually, because people understand and accept policies without taking offense.
Not replying at all often feels better to the recipient than a half-hearted reply, because busy people know you are busy and will assume you did not see the message or it was not a fit.
People who become successful quickly often disappear just as fast because they cannot resist the distraction of new opportunities that take time away from the work that made them successful.
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.
When Italy banned ChatGPT, coder productivity fell by 50%, while Duolingo reported a 25% increase in developer velocity using GitHub Copilot and Shopify wrote over a million lines of code with Copilot.
The advanced form of the Magic Loop is to progress from asking what needs to be done, to suggesting ideas, to simply seeing what is needed and doing it autonomously.
Quality plus consistency is all that matters for newsletter growth; design, title, strategy, and growth plans are secondary to publishing valuable content people want to share repeatedly.
There is a strong correlation between time spent on a post and how well it performs; Lenny spends a median of 10 hours per post with some taking hundreds of hours.
Before going all-in on content creation, spend at least 10 years doing the actual work first, because real-life experience is what allows you to contribute something new to the conversation.
Viewing your calendar as an energy management tool and mapping energy levels across the week reveals obvious killers like meeting-heavy Mondays and back-to-back meetings that cause progressive burnout.
Setting a daily work-hour limit raises the bar for what is worth your time and naturally leads to better prioritization; reduced hours combined with empowering teammates improved both team performance and satisfaction.
Tactical deep breathing with a 2:1 exhale-to-inhale ratio stimulates the parasympathetic nervous system and can calm you down before product reviews or after difficult meetings in as little as 20-30 seconds.
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.
If your speed of shipping is extremely high, the cost of being wrong is much lower, making velocity itself a competitive advantage.
Learning to work alongside AI will quickly become table stakes for product managers, just as Grammarly became for writing and Copilot for engineering.
Narrowing your team's focus by removing one goal or project is one of the most effective ways to improve team velocity.
Planning should take up no more than 10% of the execution time period, so quarterly planning should take less than nine days.
Much marketing work misses the mark because of six common failures: no goal, no prioritization, created for no one, work that does not stand out, no distribution plan, and experts excluded from the process.
The two most important principles for an effective sabbatical are taking enough time off and actually disconnecting from work.
The single most effective way to increase team velocity is to narrow the team's focus, as fewer concurrent priorities dramatically improves outcomes on the remaining work.
Blocking off dedicated deep work time on your calendar and defending it aggressively is one of the most effective ways for PMs to increase productivity.
Having a trusted TODO system with concrete actions and a list of people you are waiting on eliminates the time wasted re-figuring out what to work on.
Podcast Moments
“It's not just designers who are feeling like, 'Oh yeah, we have to keep up with engineers.' I think even engineers are like, 'How do we keep up with ourselves?'”
Jenny Wen · Jenny Wen
“Productivity per engineer has increased 200%. I have never enjoyed coding as much as I do today, because I don't have to deal with all the minutia.”
Boris Cherny · Boris Cherny
“IC engineers are becoming tech leads. They're managing fleets and fleets of agents. I know many engineers on my team have 10 to 20 threads being pulled on at the same time.”
Sherwin Wu V2 · Sherwin Wu V2
“The Mythical Man-Month predicted software engineering would go where engineers are like surgeons. As a manager, look around corners and unblock people, especially from organizational bottlenecks.”
Sherwin Wu V2 · Sherwin Wu V2
“Companies where AI really works have top-down buy-in combined with bottoms-up adoption. A lot of AI deployments fail because it's an exec mandate, extremely top-down, divorced from what actual work looks like.”
Sherwin Wu V2 · Sherwin Wu V2
“We live in a bubble in Silicon Valley. A lot of work that runs our entire economy is not open-ended knowledge work — it's repeatable business processes with standard operating procedures.”
Sherwin Wu V2 · Sherwin Wu V2
“The trick is parallelization. Run five agents at once on different parts of the problem. Your job becomes orchestration, not execution.”
The power user’s guide to Codex: parallelizing workflows, planning techniques, advanced context engineering tips, automating code reviews, and more | Alexander Embiricos · Alexander Embiricos
“We basically never wanted to play the Silicon Valley game. We could fire 90% of the people and we would move faster.”
The 100-person AI lab that became Anthropic and Google's secret weapon | Edwin Chen (Surge AI) · Edwin Chen
“Do you want a model that says 'There are definitely 20 more ways to improve this email' or one that's optimizing for your time and just says 'Your email's great, just send it'?”
The 100-person AI lab that became Anthropic and Google's secret weapon | Edwin Chen (Surge AI) · Edwin Chen
“My litmus test is 80%. If you're 80% of the time in your gifts, how much energy you have to give to the world.”
A guide to difficult conversations, building high-trust teams, and designing a life you love | Rachel Lockett · Rachel Lockett
“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
“I don't have emails on my phone. When I shut my laptop, I actually tune out. Sometimes you can miss the forest from the trees when you're just working harder.”
The woman behind Canva shares how she built a $42B company from nothing | Melanie Perkins · Melanie Perkins
“We find engineering teams that are very AI forward are reporting about eight to 10 hours saved per week. This is the worst it will ever be. This is now the baseline.”
How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · Dhanji R. Prasanna
“He built this system where Goose is essentially just watching everything he does all the time. A few hours later Goose has already tried to build that feature and opened a PR.”
How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · Dhanji R. Prasanna
“Vibe coding is highly limiting. We're trying to push Goose to work not just for five minutes at a time but for hours.”
How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · Dhanji R. Prasanna
“The non-technical people using AI agents and programming tools to build things is really what's been surprising and amazing.”
How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · Dhanji R. Prasanna
“Our whole team is only 15 engineers. Most folks work with up to five Devins at once. Devin merges several hundred pull requests into production every month.”
How Devin replaces your junior engineers with infinite AI interns that never sleep | Scott Wu (Cognition CEO) · Scott Wu
“Defining the problem is probably 10% of the average software engineer's time. 90% is Kubernetes errors, debugging, migrations. Devin allows engineers to go from bricklayer to architect.”
How Devin replaces your junior engineers with infinite AI interns that never sleep | Scott Wu (Cognition CEO) · Scott Wu
“If you want to cancel all your meetings for a day or entire week and just go play around with every AI product, go do it.”
How we restructured Airtable’s entire org for AI | Howie Liu (co-founder and CEO) · Howie Liu
“We're approaching a world where the marginal cost of good output approaches zero. The org chart starts to become the work chart.”
How 80,000 companies build with AI: products as organisms, the death of org charts, and why agents will outnumber employees by 2026 | Asha Sharma (CVP of AI Platform at Microsoft) · Asha Sharma
“That's not what we're hearing from employers. Being AI native, young people are at a huge advantage.”
Inside the expert network training every frontier AI model | Garrett Lord (Handshake CEO) · Garrett Lord
“In a world of abundance where labor is almost free, what do jobs even look like?”
Benjamin Mann · Benjamin Mann
“It's like having the world's most reliable employee who costs $200 a month. Do all jobs just become a single prompt?”
I’ve run 75+ businesses. Here’s why you’re probably chasing the wrong idea. | Andrew Wilkinson (co‑founder of Tiny) · Andrew Wilkinson
“Studies have shown that using bad prompts can get you down to 0% on a problem, and good prompts can boost you up to 90%. People will always be saying, 'It's dead,' or, 'It's going to be dead with the next model version,' but then it comes out and it's not.”
AI prompt engineering in 2025: What works and what doesn’t | Sander Schulhoff (Learn Prompting, HackAPrompt) · Sander Schulhoff
“My best advice on how to improve your prompting skills is actually just trial and error. But if there were one technique that I could recommend, it is few-shot prompting, which is just giving the AI examples of what you want it to do.”
AI prompt engineering in 2025: What works and what doesn’t | Sander Schulhoff (Learn Prompting, HackAPrompt) · Sander Schulhoff
“Role prompting does not work. On those older models, maybe it worked. On the more modern ones, it doesn't help at all for accuracy-based tasks. But giving a role really helps for expressive tasks, writing tasks, summarizing tasks.”
AI prompt engineering in 2025: What works and what doesn’t | Sander Schulhoff (Learn Prompting, HackAPrompt) · Sander Schulhoff
“Decomposition is another really effective technique. You say, 'Hey, don't answer this. Before answering it, tell me what are some subproblems that would need to be solved first?' And then you ask it to solve each of those subproblems one by one.”
AI prompt engineering in 2025: What works and what doesn’t | Sander Schulhoff (Learn Prompting, HackAPrompt) · Sander Schulhoff
“What is much more helpful than understanding what your CEO thinks is understanding how your CEO thinks. When I feel confident that people on my team understand how I think, I don't need to read their emails, I don't need to approve things.”
How to build a team that can “take a punch”: A playbook for building resilient, high-performing teams | Hilary Gridley (Head of Core Product, Whoop) · Hilary Gridley
“I have a 30 days of GPT list of 30 things to do, one every single day. I don't know anyone who has gone through this and not come out the other side feeling a hundred times more confident in their skills. It's built as a habit formation tool, not an education tool.”
How to build a team that can “take a punch”: A playbook for building resilient, high-performing teams | Hilary Gridley (Head of Core Product, Whoop) · Hilary Gridley
“I've very explicitly been using AI as a life coach. One prompt was, 'What's an outdated mindset that I'm holding onto that's not still serving me?' It came back with a very polite response about being wedded to the idea of control. It suggested: try to focus on choreography over control.”
35 years of product design wisdom from Apple, Disney, Pinterest, and beyond | Bob Baxley · Bob Baxley
“A full calendar is a badge of shame, not a badge of honor. If you have hundreds of meetings, hundreds of one-on-ones, daily standups, a lot of recurring meetings, you just can't find time to go work on high leverage problems.”
Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · Mayur Kamat
“When we become attached to the outcome, we inadvertently fuel our own suffering. The deeper attachment is see, I'm not nothing. See, I'm not a nobody, I'm a somebody, and that's the source of the suffering.”
How have I been complicit in creating the conditions I say I don’t want? | Jerry Colonna (CEO of Reboot, executive coach, former VC) · Jerry Colonna
“When we get too fixed on the proper way to do things, we're setting ourselves up for attachment and therefore suffering. Stay attached to the growth and hold mindset a little loosely.”
How have I been complicit in creating the conditions I say I don’t want? | Jerry Colonna (CEO of Reboot, executive coach, former VC) · Jerry Colonna
“I would bias less toward trying in one go to tell the model exactly what to do. Instead chop things up into bits. You're specifying a little bit, getting a little bit of work. At the same time, explicitly try to fall on your face and discover the limits of what the models can do.”
The rise of Cursor: The $300M ARR AI tool that engineers can’t stop using | Michael Truell (co-founder and CEO) · Michael Truell
“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
“We tasked everyone at our company to build an app with Windsurf. We've saved over half a million dollars of SaaS products we were going to buy because our go-to-market team has now built apps instead of buying them.”
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
“As you move up the triangle of the content hierarchy of BS, there's less and less room for BS. In a cohort-based course where your students are right there with you, if you're saying something that doesn't really make sense, there could be a whole conversation happening in Zoom chat.”
Become a better communicator: Specific frameworks to improve your clarity, influence, and impact | Wes Kao (coach, entrepreneur, advisor) · Wes Kao
“The idea behind the state change method is that you should punctuate your monologues with state changes. State changes are anything that shakes your audience awake and adds variety. Every three to five minutes, go ahead and put in a state change.”
Become a better communicator: Specific frameworks to improve your clarity, influence, and impact | Wes Kao (coach, entrepreneur, advisor) · Wes Kao
“Alex would always talk about trade-offs. He'd say, 'Yes, I can design this PDF for you. That means the thing I was going to work on today will have to wait.' It went from a conversation about yes or no into how do we make sure the right things get done.”
Become a better communicator: Specific frameworks to improve your clarity, influence, and impact | Wes Kao (coach, entrepreneur, advisor) · Wes Kao
“Our engineering goal is every engineer should ship a marketable product every week.”
How to win in the AI era: Ship a feature every week, embrace technical debt, ruthlessly cut scope, and create magic your competitors can't copy | Gaurav Misra (CEO and co-founder of Captions) · Gaurav Misra
“This is a technique that I call the switch lock. It's born out of the observation that your calendar says what you thought you were going to do, but it's really only your trail of work that describes what you actually did. How can we capture that? So I came up with the following idea. What if I just did whatever the heck I wanted?”
Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · Rahul Vohra
“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 think if you spend a full week on trying to reach an outcome, the best way to learn is I want to do this thing and then I want to use AI to do that thing. And you've spent a full week, you are in the top 1% in the global population. And if you surround yourself with friends who have this obsession or they also care a lot about this, then you'd be quickly in the top 0.1%.”
Building Lovable: $10M ARR in 60 days with 15 people | Anton Osika (co-founder and CEO) · Anton Osika
“Write down the things you're tolerating. The things you're putting up with that you know you shouldn't be. That list is your roadmap for transformation.”
How to break out of autopilot and create the life you want | Graham Weaver (Stanford GSB professor, founder of Alpine Investors) · Graham Weaver
“The three questions you should end every meeting with: What did we decide? Who is going to do what by when? And what do we need to communicate to others?”
Scripts for difficult conversations: Giving hard feedback, navigating defensiveness, the three questions you should end every meeting with, more | Alisa Cohn (executive coach) · Alisa Cohn
“Everyone says, 'Oh yeah, work hard and do more hours when you're young, whatever.' I'm like, 'What if you just did more per minute?'”
How Shopify builds a high-intensity culture | Farhan Thawar (VP and Head of Eng) · Farhan Thawar
“We have a Delete Code Club. We can always almost find a million-plus lines of code to delete, which is insane.”
How Shopify builds a high-intensity culture | Farhan Thawar (VP and Head of Eng) · Farhan Thawar
“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
“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
“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
“People are always like, 'What are you training for?' And I'm like, 'I'm training for life.' I have four musties: eat, sleep a long time, and exercise. Those are the things that I need in order to perform.”
Meta’s Head of Product (and 29th employee) on working with Mark Zuckerberg, early growth tactics, why PMs are like conductors, and more | Naomi Gleit · Naomi Gleit
“I'm trying to find blocks in my day that I can spend time thinking and also within those blocks, they don't have to be alone time. They can also be scheduling my chief of staff and my head of data to bounce ideas off of as a sounding board because that is the process that I know best for me in terms of really developing a first party perspective.”
Meta’s Head of Product (and 29th employee) on working with Mark Zuckerberg, early growth tactics, why PMs are like conductors, and more | Naomi Gleit · Naomi Gleit
“The brain is like a college campus that has different departments in it. Most people rely on their history department way too much. If you instead send things to the more experimental, open-minded science department, the more creative art department, you get dramatically better answers.”
Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · Evan LaPointe
“Alpha is quite simply daydreaming. Beta is productivity mode. And then gamma is your brain's intense focus. We generally spend too much time in beta in work.”
Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · Evan LaPointe
“If 25% of your year is spent in gamma and alpha, you're probably a lot better off than the teams who spend less than 25% of their year thinking deep, and being in this more daydreaming mode.”
Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · Evan LaPointe
“People generally think the purpose of a meeting is for three things, discover, discuss, decide. The only thing that's ever supposed to happen in a meeting is the discussion part.”
This will make you a better decision-maker | Annie Duke (author of “Thinking in Bets” and “Quit,” former pro poker player) · Annie Duke
“I communicate to my leaders that my expectation is they bring in the clock speed one click faster. If you think something needs to be done this year, it needs to be done this half.”
Bending the universe in your favor | Claire Vo (LaunchDarkly, Color, Optimizely, ChatPRD) · Claire Vo
“It's not really about productivity, it's not about time management. It's really just about, look, at any given day, we're lucky if we can have one great moment where we have our peak attention and we use it well. The notion with the highlight is imagine it's the end of the day if someone asks you, 'What was the highlight of your day,' what would you say? That's the anchor of everything.”
Making time for what matters | Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky (authors of Sprint and Make Time, co-founders of Character Capital) · Jake Knapp + John Zeratsky
“It's not going to happen every day, but if we have some intention around it, it can happen more often than not.”
Making time for what matters | Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky (authors of Sprint and Make Time, co-founders of Character Capital) · Jake Knapp + John Zeratsky
Cutting Room Floor
Guest insights on this topic that Lenny hasn't (yet) written about in his newsletters. Potential material for future posts.
“It's not just designers who are feeling like, 'Oh yeah, we have to keep up with engineers.' I think even engineers are like, 'How do we keep up with ourselves?'”
Jenny Wen · Jenny Wen
“We live in a bubble in Silicon Valley. A lot of work that runs our entire economy is not open-ended knowledge work — it's repeatable business processes with standard operating procedures.”
Sherwin Wu V2 · Sherwin Wu V2
“Do you want a model that says 'There are definitely 20 more ways to improve this email' or one that's optimizing for your time and just says 'Your email's great, just send it'?”
The 100-person AI lab that became Anthropic and Google's secret weapon | Edwin Chen (Surge AI) · Edwin Chen
“In a world of abundance where labor is almost free, what do jobs even look like?”
Benjamin Mann · Benjamin Mann
“It's like having the world's most reliable employee who costs $200 a month. Do all jobs just become a single prompt?”
I’ve run 75+ businesses. Here’s why you’re probably chasing the wrong idea. | Andrew Wilkinson (co‑founder of Tiny) · Andrew Wilkinson
“Studies have shown that using bad prompts can get you down to 0% on a problem, and good prompts can boost you up to 90%. People will always be saying, 'It's dead,' or, 'It's going to be dead with the next model version,' but then it comes out and it's not.”
AI prompt engineering in 2025: What works and what doesn’t | Sander Schulhoff (Learn Prompting, HackAPrompt) · Sander Schulhoff
“My best advice on how to improve your prompting skills is actually just trial and error. But if there were one technique that I could recommend, it is few-shot prompting, which is just giving the AI examples of what you want it to do.”
AI prompt engineering in 2025: What works and what doesn’t | Sander Schulhoff (Learn Prompting, HackAPrompt) · Sander Schulhoff
“Role prompting does not work. On those older models, maybe it worked. On the more modern ones, it doesn't help at all for accuracy-based tasks. But giving a role really helps for expressive tasks, writing tasks, summarizing tasks.”
AI prompt engineering in 2025: What works and what doesn’t | Sander Schulhoff (Learn Prompting, HackAPrompt) · Sander Schulhoff
“Decomposition is another really effective technique. You say, 'Hey, don't answer this. Before answering it, tell me what are some subproblems that would need to be solved first?' And then you ask it to solve each of those subproblems one by one.”
AI prompt engineering in 2025: What works and what doesn’t | Sander Schulhoff (Learn Prompting, HackAPrompt) · Sander Schulhoff
“I've very explicitly been using AI as a life coach. One prompt was, 'What's an outdated mindset that I'm holding onto that's not still serving me?' It came back with a very polite response about being wedded to the idea of control. It suggested: try to focus on choreography over control.”
35 years of product design wisdom from Apple, Disney, Pinterest, and beyond | Bob Baxley · Bob Baxley
“When we get too fixed on the proper way to do things, we're setting ourselves up for attachment and therefore suffering. Stay attached to the growth and hold mindset a little loosely.”
How have I been complicit in creating the conditions I say I don’t want? | Jerry Colonna (CEO of Reboot, executive coach, former VC) · Jerry Colonna
“As you move up the triangle of the content hierarchy of BS, there's less and less room for BS. In a cohort-based course where your students are right there with you, if you're saying something that doesn't really make sense, there could be a whole conversation happening in Zoom chat.”
Become a better communicator: Specific frameworks to improve your clarity, influence, and impact | Wes Kao (coach, entrepreneur, advisor) · Wes Kao
“The idea behind the state change method is that you should punctuate your monologues with state changes. State changes are anything that shakes your audience awake and adds variety. Every three to five minutes, go ahead and put in a state change.”
Become a better communicator: Specific frameworks to improve your clarity, influence, and impact | Wes Kao (coach, entrepreneur, advisor) · Wes Kao
“This is a technique that I call the switch lock. It's born out of the observation that your calendar says what you thought you were going to do, but it's really only your trail of work that describes what you actually did. How can we capture that? So I came up with the following idea. What if I just did whatever the heck I wanted?”
Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · Rahul Vohra
“I think if you spend a full week on trying to reach an outcome, the best way to learn is I want to do this thing and then I want to use AI to do that thing. And you've spent a full week, you are in the top 1% in the global population. And if you surround yourself with friends who have this obsession or they also care a lot about this, then you'd be quickly in the top 0.1%.”
Building Lovable: $10M ARR in 60 days with 15 people | Anton Osika (co-founder and CEO) · Anton Osika
“Write down the things you're tolerating. The things you're putting up with that you know you shouldn't be. That list is your roadmap for transformation.”
How to break out of autopilot and create the life you want | Graham Weaver (Stanford GSB professor, founder of Alpine Investors) · Graham Weaver
“The three questions you should end every meeting with: What did we decide? Who is going to do what by when? And what do we need to communicate to others?”
Scripts for difficult conversations: Giving hard feedback, navigating defensiveness, the three questions you should end every meeting with, more | Alisa Cohn (executive coach) · Alisa Cohn
“Everyone says, 'Oh yeah, work hard and do more hours when you're young, whatever.' I'm like, 'What if you just did more per minute?'”
How Shopify builds a high-intensity culture | Farhan Thawar (VP and Head of Eng) · Farhan Thawar
“We have a Delete Code Club. We can always almost find a million-plus lines of code to delete, which is insane.”
How Shopify builds a high-intensity culture | Farhan Thawar (VP and Head of Eng) · Farhan Thawar
“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
“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
“The brain is like a college campus that has different departments in it. Most people rely on their history department way too much. If you instead send things to the more experimental, open-minded science department, the more creative art department, you get dramatically better answers.”
Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · Evan LaPointe
“If 25% of your year is spent in gamma and alpha, you're probably a lot better off than the teams who spend less than 25% of their year thinking deep, and being in this more daydreaming mode.”
Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · Evan LaPointe
“People generally think the purpose of a meeting is for three things, discover, discuss, decide. The only thing that's ever supposed to happen in a meeting is the discussion part.”
This will make you a better decision-maker | Annie Duke (author of “Thinking in Bets” and “Quit,” former pro poker player) · Annie Duke
“It's not going to happen every day, but if we have some intention around it, it can happen more often than not.”
Making time for what matters | Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky (authors of Sprint and Make Time, co-founders of Character Capital) · Jake Knapp + John Zeratsky