PM Career Growth

Transition from task-executor to high-impact product leader by mastering influence, ownership, and strategic foresight.

Help the user with pm career growth using insights from 43 guests and posts across Lenny's Podcast and Newsletter.

How to Help

1. Define the roadmap - Help the user treat their career as a product by defining success metrics and a multi-year growth strategy.
2. Identify ownership gaps - Guide the user to find high-impact, neglected problems in their organization that they can take responsibility for.
3. Audit influence skills - Evaluate the user's current relationship-building and communication styles to identify blockers to senior-level trust.
4. Prepare for transitions - Provide tactical advice for navigating promotions, new domain pivots, or moving into executive leadership.

Core Principles

Accept Total Responsibility

Ben Horowitz: "What I was trying to get out in Good Product Manager, Bad Product Manager, was the job is fundamentally a leadership job. And it's a tricky leadership job because nobody is actually reporting to you."

Product leadership is defined by driving results without formal authority. You must accept total responsibility for whether the product works, regardless of team structure.

Prioritize Creative Velocity

Amjad Masad: "Typically, you're bottlenecked where your ideas are not fitting in because they need to be made and they need to be made quickly. Now, you open up that bottleneck. So now actually making things is a lot easier. Actually, you become limited by how fast you can generate ideas."

In the AI era, the bottleneck shifts from technical implementation to how quickly you can generate and refine high-impact ideas and product architectures.

Shift to Proactive Leadership

Ethan Evans 2.0: "So in the newsletter we did together, I wrote about how over time, you go from asking your manager, 'How can I help?' To suggesting to your manager, 'These are some things I see that seem like they need to be done. Would you like me to do them?' To just seeing what needs to be done and sort of keeping your leader in the loop and saying, 'Hey, I noticed that we have this problem. I fixed it. I noticed we have this opportunity. I've started program against it.'"

Advancement requires moving from a reactive executor who asks for assignments to a leader who independently identifies organizational gaps and suggests initiatives.

Write Your Career Spec

Deb Liu: "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?"

Avoid aimless drifting by applying PM disciplines to your own career. Write a formal spec with success metrics and a roadmap for your professional development.

Control the Customer Truth

Laura Schaffer: "And so that means that your superpower is in really pulling those insights in and bringing them to life, staying close to the customer. There's not a single leader or executive that isn't going to be stoked to hear about valuable customer insights that highlight problems they might not be seeing."

Gain outsized organizational influence by becoming the primary source of customer reality, aligning those insights with the company North Star metrics.

Questions to Help Users

• "What is the single most important priority for your product right now, and what is stopping you from owning it?"
• "If you were to write a PRD for your next career move, what would the success metrics look like?"
• "Which of your manager's top three problems are you currently helping to solve?"
• "How would your team describe the experience of working with you in three words?"
• "What neglected organizational gap could you fill that would provide outsized business impact?"
• "How are you using AI to increase your creative velocity and architectural understanding?"

Common Mistakes to Flag

• Waiting for Permission - Proactive problem identification and ownership are what separate senior leaders from individual executors.
• Focusing on Process over Product - Leadership performance is ultimately measured by whether the final product works, not the quality of internal documentation.
• Over-indexing on Technical Syntax - In the AI era, high-level creative direction and architecture are more valuable than manual coding or implementation details.
• Mistaking Authority for Influence - PMs often fail when they try to act like a CEO rather than building the cross-functional trust needed to drive a team.
• Drifting Between Roles - Failing to apply product management discipline to your own career roadmap leads to reactive rather than intentional growth.

Deep Dive

For all 50 sourced insights from 43 guests, see references/guest-insights.md

Related Skills

• Breaking Into Product
• Career Transitions
• Building A Promotion Case
• Negotiating Compensation

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Supporting file: references/artifacts.md

PM Career Growth - Frameworks, Templates & Checklists

357 artifacts extracted from Lenny's Podcast and Newsletter

Frameworks

10X Learner Mindset for Junior PMs (Zevi Arnovitz)

A framework for junior PMs: instead of trying to prove you're the smartest, map each teammate's superpower and use them as specialized mentors to accelerate learning

How it works: Step 1: Accept that no one expects you to know the answers — they expect you to learn fast. Step 2: Assess each team member's unique strength (e.g., product sense, methodology/frameworks, systems thinking). Step 3: Go to the right person for the right learning need. Step 4: Your success becomes the team's success because they're invested as mentors. Example: At Wix, mapped 4 PMs — Neri (product sense), Oya (methodology/frameworks), Yahra (systems thinking/second-order effects).

14 Habits of Highly Effective Product Managers (14 habits of highly effective product managers, The Best of Lenny’s Newsletter—2024 Edition)

A comprehensive framework of 14 habits that distinguish great PMs, each with 3 actionable ways to build the habit. Designed to be used as a self-assessment and development roadmap.

How it works: The 14 habits are: 1) Take pride in clarity and conciseness of communication; 2) Build an aura of 'I've got this' (reliability); 3) Hold the bar high for work quality; 4) Hunt for misalignment and push everyone back into alignment; 5) Always have a point of view, but loosely held; 6) Ruthlessly prioritize the team's work and your own; 7) Endlessly look for blockers to unblock; 8) Build a tight leadership triad with EM and DM; 9) Frequently remind teammates how work connects to the mission; 10) Speak with customers regularly; 11) Anticipate what's around the corner; 12) Make sure everyone has a chance to be heard; 13) Amplify successes and contributions of team members; 14) Bring good vibes to the team. Each habit includes 3 specific action items to build it. Lenny's recommended approach: skim the list, pick one habit, focus on it for two weeks, then pick a new one.

25 Quick Wins for First 90 Days (How to make an impact in your first 90 days)

A comprehensive framework of 25 specific quick wins organized into 5 categories that new hires (or anyone) can use to make an immediate impact at their company

How it works: 5 categories with 25 tactics:

Category 1: Find friction in the funnel (and fix it)

1. Audit the funnel looking for low-hanging fruit
2. Grow a backbone (in your copy)
3. Test a signup flow with a blurred UI in the background
4. Improve the latency of the first few signup steps
5. Test GIPHY for brand visibility
6. Test a new CTA where drop-off is highest

Category 2: Tweak pricing 7. Restart a reverse trial for existing users 8. Adjust prices to match psychological thresholds 9. Revisit feature gating 10. Turn overages into a cash cow 11. Test give-to-get discounts

Category 3: Improve how people work 12. Get rid of meetings 13. Write a weekly update 14. Document how the business works 15. Build trust through feedback

Category 4: Mine the data 16. Grow revenue by slowing signups 17. Redefine success criteria for online ad campaigns 18. Investigate why activated users churn 19. Identify which features drive upgrades 20. Look for performance discrepancies across platforms 21. Identify and investigate power users

Category 5: Talk to customers 22. Ask customers what they wish they could change 23. Try to sell your product yourself 24. Ask about global payment providers 25. Leave no deal behind

5 Dimensions That Separate Junior PMs from Senior PMs (Skills PMs need to build)

A framework showing the five key progression dimensions for PM leveling, with concrete examples of how expectations shift at each level

How it works: 1. INCREASE YOUR SCOPE: Junior PMs focus on a feature, senior PMs focus on multiple products.

• Feature → Multiple Features → Product → Multiple Products → Product Line → Department → Industry
• Feature → Solution → Customer segment → Market Segment
• For specific use cases → For a product → Across products → Across groups

1. GET MORE PROACTIVE: Junior PMs participate in a project given to them. Senior PMs seek out problems and rally people.

   • Actively contributes → Steers team explorations → Facilitates concept explorations
   • Adapts to existing team shipping rhythm → Establishes and drives a consistent shipping cadence → Motivates multiple teams to ship frequently even for complex projects
   • Works with manager to identify what needs to be done → Independently identifies what needs to be done → Consistently challenges team to accomplish more than they think they can
   • Contributes to team's roadmap → Owner of the team's roadmap → The reviewer of teams' roadmaps
   • With coaching, creates a bold vision → Inspires the company by creating bold, game-changing ideas → Demonstrates ability to consistently invent and build multiple innovations across org boundaries

2. DELIVER IMPACT CONSISTENTLY:

   • Can demonstrate meaningful impact → Consistently delivers meaningful impact
   • Demonstrated track record of delivering customer and enterprise value → Step function improvement → Impact the strategic decisions of the company
   • Seeks to understand product area → Responsible for shaping product area strategy → Responsible for shaping the most ambiguous & impactful strategies across teams

3. BUILD TRUST TO BECOME MORE AUTONOMOUS:

   • Requires oversight from a PM II or Senior PM → Requires oversight from a Senior PM → Executes with minimal intervention
   • Requires guidance → Often needs guidance → Without day-to-day management
   • Drives successful launches with moderate involvement from manager → Owns a customer problem and delivery → Owns delivery with irrefutable impact on business

4. MENTOR AND LEAD:

   • Begin mentoring APMs and newer team members → Demonstrated mentorship of other PMs → Mentors PMs, product leaders, and leaders across the company → Helps newer GPMs become better managers → Directors+ are able to learn from you
   • Seeks feedback and reviews from peers → Takes on a mentee → Mentors PMs within the organization
   • Does not directly manage anyone → Optionally serves as APM mentor → Optionally manages a small number of PMs → Usually manages several PMs; influence extends beyond own team

5 Technical Things PMs Should Know (The top 5 things PMs should know about engineering)

A structured framework of the five key technical areas product managers should understand to be more effective, ordered from company-specific to general knowledge

How it works: 1. Your company's tech stack — Know the programming languages, frameworks, and infrastructure your company uses (e.g., React, Next.js, Vercel, NoSQL vs SQL databases). Learn by checking GitHub repos and asking engineers. 2. Sensitive points in the codebase — Know which parts of the codebase are tangled, poorly organized, or hard to test. Learn by talking to fellow PMs about surprisingly slow/fast projects and asking engineers. 3. Your build and deploy process — Know how code gets deployed to users, what's manual vs. automated, how long it takes, cloud vs. on-premise differences. Learn by examining merged PRs, GitHub checks, and asking developers. 4. How to contribute code — Know how to make small code changes (copy, colors, typos) and open a PR. Learn by sitting down with an engineer to walk through: clone repo → run locally → make fix → commit → open PR. 5. Technical basics 101 — Have a conceptual understanding of how apps, data, and infrastructure work beyond your company's specific stack.

6 PM Use Case Categories for AI Chatbot Tools (How to use Perplexity in your PM work)

A framework for organizing how PMs can use AI chatbot tools like Perplexity in their work, broken into 6 distinct workflow categories

How it works: 1. Understanding and crafting growth strategy — Learn growth concepts, study successful growth programs, understand platform mechanics 2. Finding benchmarks — Look up industry-standard metrics, retention rates, satisfaction scores, and survey methodologies 3. Doing market research — Research company GTM strategies, market sizing, usage patterns, and upsell/monetization approaches 4. Learning best practices — Discover PM techniques, study how top companies applied frameworks, learn from product evolution 5. Evaluating popular tools — Compare software tools across features, customers, differentiation, pricing, and reviews 6. Understanding technical jargon — Get clear explanations of technical concepts, protocols, infrastructure, and metrics definitions

7 Key Indicators of PM Job Market Health (2025) (State of the product job market in 2025)

A framework of seven data-backed signals Lenny uses to assess the state of the product job market, useful for anyone trying to time their job search or understand market conditions

How it works: Seven indicators to assess PM job market health:

1. Open PM and engineering roles trending (current: 6,000+ open PM roles, 53.6% above 2023 bottom, up 11% YTD)
2. AI PM roles growth (current: 688 open AI PM roles, explosive growth trajectory)
3. Layoff velocity (current: on track for fewer layoffs than the past 4 years)
4. Capital investment trends (current: +29% YoY, +227% over 5 years in GPUs/data centers)
5. Geographic concentration (current: ~20% of PM roles in Bay Area, ~33% of AI roles in Bay Area)
6. Remote work share (current: 23% remote-friendly, down from 35% peak, settling at ~20% baseline)
7. Hiring company breadth (current: top 20 companies list, lots of roles globally)

Interpretation: When most indicators are positive (as in 2025), it's a good time to be job searching. When indicators are mixed, adjust strategy accordingly.

7-Step Framework for Succeeding as the First PM (Joining as the first product manager)

A synthesized framework covering the key areas a first PM must focus on to succeed at an early-stage startup

How it works: 1. Listen and learn — Spend first month observing, understanding existing processes, sitting down with coworkers, understanding how product development works today and who has been serving as PM. Don't upset the apple cart. 2. Become the expert on the product — Within 3 months, know every nook and cranny of the product better than anyone. Talk to top fans, understand why they use it, screenshot and document competitor flows. 3. Form your own opinions — Internalize the CEO's vision first, then validate assumptions. Regularly step back and ask 'Is this really the product we should be building?' 4. Build trust with the CEO — Start exercising control slowly, communicate constantly. Run jam sessions on vision/strategy/competition. After ~1 month, pitch back the role definition clearly. Hold ground on process. 5. Build trust with the team — Ask about what's worked/not worked, hopes/fears. Drive quick wins and deliver impact consistently. Ship something early, even something small. 6. Align expectations — Understand how founders define PM. Regularly and repeatedly explain what a PM does across the org. Shield engineers from ad hoc roadmap requests. 7. Find balance — Balance desire to ship (quick wins, credibility) with time spent learning. Balance chasing growth with getting overall product stability. Develop a framework for these tradeoffs.

AI Impact on PM Skills Framework (1-5 🤖 Scale) (How AI will impact product management)

A comprehensive framework that rates every day-to-day PM task on a 1-5 scale of how much AI will disrupt that work, organized into three categories: Shape the Product, Ship the Product, and Sync the People.

How it works: Three categories of PM work, each with tasks rated 1-5 🤖s (more = more AI disruption):

1. Shape the Product (🤖🤖🤖 overall)

• Developing product strategy and vision: 🤖🤖🤖🤖 (Significantly impacted)
• Setting goals: 🤖🤖🤖🤖 (Significantly impacted)
• Creating specs: 🤖🤖🤖 (Considerably facilitated)
• Discovery: 🤖🤖🤖 (Considerably facilitated)
• Building a roadmap: 🤖🤖 (Facilitated)
• Giving product/design feedback: 🤖🤖 (Facilitated)

2. Ship the Product (🤖🤖 overall)

• Quality assurance: 🤖🤖🤖🤖 (Significantly impacted)
• Fighting for budget/resources: 🤖🤖 (Facilitated)
• Unblocking blockers: 🤖🤖 (Facilitated)
• GTM: 🤖🤖 (Facilitated)
• Adjusting resources/priorities: 🤖 (Somewhat facilitated)

3. Sync the People (🤖🤖 overall)

• Running meetings: 🤖🤖🤖 (Considerably facilitated)
• Communicating up and down: 🤖🤖 (Facilitated)
• Aligning stakeholders: 🤖🤖 (Facilitated)
• Aligning your team: 🤖 (Facilitated)
• Maintaining team morale: 🤖 (Somewhat facilitated)

AI Prompt Engineering Template for PM Tasks (How close is AI to replacing product managers?)

A formulaic prompt template structure for getting AI to produce high-quality PM deliverables, with role, thinking section, instructions, and example components

How it works: Template structure:

As a {role} you are tasked with {task} for the provided product.

Start by listing assumptions and planning out your answer in a separate bullet point section labeled "Thinking". Then follow the instructions.

Instructions

{instructions}

Follow the structure in the example exactly:

Example

{example}

Key components:

• Role: Set cultural context (e.g., 'product manager for a major tech company similar to Google, Amazon, Microsoft, or Facebook')
• Thinking section: Forces chain-of-thought reasoning before answering
• Instructions: Extracted from analyzing good human examples
• Example: A real-world example (ideally for a fake product to avoid copying) that demonstrates the desired structure and quality

AI as Surface Area Expander (Scott Belsky)

AI's greatest value for product leaders and creatives is expanding the surface area of possibility exploration — not replacing human judgment but giving more options to evaluate and discard

How it works: Hollywood director example: Uses ChatGPT not to write scripts but to get 5 scenarios when developing with a writing partner. Doesn't use any of them directly, but: 1) Expands surface area of possibilities considered. 2) Identifies things he wouldn't want to do (also good data). 3) Gives more creative direction through elimination. Key insight: ChatGPT mines the center (what it would look like if); humans find edges that become the center.

AI as Table Stakes for Knowledge Work (How to use ChatGPT in your PM work)

Lenny's mental model for understanding why PMs need to adopt AI tools now, drawing parallels to other roles that have already been transformed

How it works: Framework: AI tool adoption is becoming table stakes for every knowledge work role, following the same pattern:

• Writers → Grammarly
• Engineers → GitHub Copilot (behind 46% of developers' code on average, 61% in Java)
• Designers → Adobe Firefly, Runway, Midjourney
• Product Managers → ChatGPT/GPT-4

Key insight: PMs won't be displaced by GPT-4/5/6/n, but learning to work alongside AI will quickly become table stakes. The best way to prepare is to 'dive in and get your hands dirty' (quote from Dan Shipper).

AI-Era PM Role Evolution (1,000,000)

How product management roles will change as AI transforms product development

How it works: Predictions:

1. Product teams shrink by 25-50% (primarily fewer engineers needed)
2. PMs gain MORE influence and leverage, not less
3. PMs oversee more scope per person
4. Time allocation shifts: more time in discovery and GTM, less time in design and building
5. The bar for PM skills continues to rise

What companies will need PMs to do:

• Figure out what to build
• Work with AI and humans to build it
• Make sure it's great and correct
• Drive adoption

Resources to stay current:

• A guide to AI prototyping for PMs
• Product manager is an unfair role
• How to become a supermanager with AI
• Five proven prompt engineering techniques
• How to use ChatGPT/Perplexity in PM work

AI-First Company Building (How Perplexity builds product)

A method for bootstrapping company processes by asking AI before doing manual research or asking colleagues

How it works: Approach: 1) For any unfamiliar process (product management, project management, finances, HR, product launch, etc.), start by asking AI 'What is X?' then 'How do we do X properly?' 2) You get a rough step-by-step process — good enough for a startup. 3) It's often not correct on the first try, but neither is a human — iterate from there. 4) This reduces research time from days to five minutes. 5) Encourage all employees to ask AI before bothering colleagues. 6) Use AI for everyday tasks like writing emails, doing data analysis, and generating customer insights. 7) Before reaching out to someone else with a question, first spend one minute asking AI. Limitations noted: AI coding tooling isn't yet good enough for sustainable platform code — it writes templates but can't design new long-lived abstractions.

API Types Comparison (SOAP vs REST vs GraphQL) (Become a more technical product manager)

A classification of the three main API design patterns and when each is used

How it works: Three main types of APIs:

1. SOAP - Legacy design, still used mostly in healthcare and financial services
2. REST - The most popular design pattern, supports GET, POST, and other request types
3. GraphQL - Newer design created at Meta, most commonly used in private APIs within your own application; uses the same request types but in different ways

REST is by far the most popular.

Amjad's Law (Amjad Masad)

A mental model for the compounding value of learning AI-native coding skills.

How it works: The principle that 'the return on investment for learning to code is doubling every six months.' It suggests professionals should skip traditional syntax/Git training and instead focus on app structure, AI prompting, and debugging.

Artifact Reverse-Engineering (Jules Walter)

A method for learning strategy or execution by studying successful internal company documents.

How it works: Collect great examples of strategy docs or exec updates. Break them down to identify the core questions they answer, the data they use (quant/qual), and the structure. Ask the author to walk you through their drafting iterations.

Assumption-Challenging Test for PMs (Shweta Shriva)

A self-assessment heuristic: if you're not experiencing conflict or contention in your role, you're likely not listening well enough or challenging your own assumptions—a warning sign for product leaders.

How it works: Key principle: Proactively challenge your own assumptions. Red flag test: If there's no conflict and no contention in your work, something is missing—you may not be listening well or may be in an echo chamber. Applies to both individual PMs and seasoned product leaders.

Assumptions Framework for AT Interviews (The definitive guide to mastering analytical thinking interviews)

Categories of assumptions to state at the start of an analytical thinking interview to narrow scope without limiting solution space

How it works: Flavors of assumptions to consider:

• Product scope: Which product or feature to focus on (e.g., core music streaming vs. artist tools)
• User/audience scope: Consumer-facing vs. enterprise, specific segments
• Geographic scope: Global vs. specific region (e.g., U.S. market)
• Platform scope: All platforms vs. mobile-only
• Temporal scope: Current state vs. launch state
• Stakeholder scope: Which sides of marketplace to include

Example for Spotify:

• Focus on core music streaming service
• Consumer-facing experience (not artist/label tools)
• Global metrics, not region-specific
• All platforms (mobile, desktop, etc.)

After assumptions, share game plan: 'I want to start by reviewing the product's landscape and reason for existing, then identify key stakeholders and ecosystem health metrics, define a North Star metric with guardrails, and finally set specific team goals. We can discuss tradeoffs along the way. Does that sound like a good plan?'

Behavioral Question Type Distribution (How to pass any first-round interview (even in a terrible talent market))

The frequency breakdown of behavioral question types in tech interviews to help prioritize prep time

How it works: Pure behavioral ('Tell me about a time when...'): ~70% of behavioral questions — prioritize these if short on time Theoretical ('What's your general approach to...'): ~20% of behavioral questions Situational ('Put yourself in this situation...'): ~10% of behavioral questions

Behavioral questions overall make up >60% of all tech interview questions (Erika's estimate).

Tip: If in a time pinch, focus prep on Pure behavioral questions since they represent 70% of all behavioral questions.

C-Suite Readiness Habits (Carilu Dietrich)

Five mental shifts and focus areas required to transition from a functional leader to a C-suite executive.

How it works: 1. Tie your responsibilities directly to revenue. 2. Think and talk in the terms of the CEO and the board (master finance). 3. Understand the whole system via 'tours of duty' in other departments. 4. Build strong cross-functional relationships by helping others. 5. Pick high-momentum companies to accelerate your career trajectory.

CIRCLES Method (Preparing for a PM interview)

A framework for answering product design questions in PM interviews.

How it works: Used for: Product design questions Reference: https://www.productplan.com/glossary/circles-method/

Career S-Curve Model (How to know when to stop)

A model for understanding career progression as a series of stacked S-curves, each with foundation, acceleration, and peak phases, including the concept of office hours vs. mind hours.

How it works: Single S-curve has three phases: (1) Foundation - getting career started, developing skills, individual contributor work; (2) Acceleration - pushing to climb the ladder, managing people and projects of increasing scale/complexity; (3) Peak/Deceleration - managing entire organizations, managing problems that get bigger and more frequent. Two types of work hours: Office Hours (standard butt-in-seat work, increases as career progresses) and Mind Hours (hours your mind/nervous system is preoccupied with work stress - worrying about hiring/firing, projects off rails, CEO rampages; estimated 10-30 additional hours/week on top of 50-60 office hours at executive level). Key insight: Career is actually a series of S-curves stacked on top of each other, not a single curve. Andy had three major S-curves and decided to stop during the third when benefits no longer outweighed costs. Critical question to ask: not CAN you be an executive, but SHOULD you.

Company Selection Framework for PM Career Growth (Which companies accelerate PM careers most)

Lenny's two-part test for choosing where to work as a PM

How it works: When deciding where to work, outside of rolling the dice on the next rocket ship, find the company that:

1. Is best at teaching you the craft of product management
2. Has a track record of creating an inflection in the careers of the PMs who've worked there

Key patterns from the data to guide your decision:

• Fintech companies are disproportionately strong (5 of top 10) — fintech is 'hard mode' that builds versatile leaders
• FAANG companies lag behind mid-stage and specialized companies
• B2B and B2C are equally represented — choose based on interest, not career calculation
• Smaller/newer companies (Plaid, Intercom, Discord, Ramp) can accelerate careers as much as larger ones
• European companies (Revolut, N26) topped the list

Company Size as Sentiment Predictor (How tech workers really feel about work right now)

Framework showing company size as one of the strongest predictors of positive sentiment across 9 of 11 metrics

How it works: Smaller companies outperform larger companies on 9 of 11 sentiment metrics:

1. More optimistic about career ✓
2. More satisfied in role ✓
3. Less negative sentiment change year-over-year ✓
4. Higher job enjoyment ✓
5. Less burned out ✓
6. Less eager to quit ✓
7. Higher manager ratings ✓
8. More engaged ✓
9. Stronger sense of belonging ✓ (strongest correlation)

Notable finding: Dramatic spike in burnout at midsize companies (500-1,000 employees) — large enough for corporate bureaucracy but not large enough for well-developed employee support systems.

Implication: Large companies must foster tight-knit teams and smaller communities, especially beyond 50-100 employees where belonging clearly drops.

Context as Raw Material Mental Model (How to build your PM second brain with ChatGPT)

A mental model positioning context (not features, not code) as the primary raw material PMs think with, and AI as the tool that expands reasoning capacity beyond working memory

How it works: Core idea: Context is the raw material PMs think with. It's how you spot patterns, distinguish noise from signal, and turn vague symptoms into crisp problem statements.

The constraint: Working memory limits you to 5-6 ideas at once. When context lives only in your head, your output is limited by this.

The breakthrough: When context sits outside your head, intact and retrievable, your thinking expands. You see the whole picture instead of just the part you can remember.

Key distinction: You don't just remember more—you reason better.

Important caveat: Using a second brain doesn't dull your role—it sharpens it. Your reasoning, product sense, knowledge, and taste are still doing the real work. You can't outsource judgment or creativity. This isn't AI thinking instead of you—it's you thinking with more clarity because all the mental overhead is gone.

Correlation vs. Linear Regression Decision Framework (How to do linear regression and correlation analysis)

A decision framework for choosing between correlation analysis and linear regression based on the type of question you're trying to answer

How it works: Decision criteria:

1. If you can swap X and Y and get the same result → use correlation. If changing them affects your outcome → use regression.
2. If your analysis aims to answer 'if' there is a relationship between X and Y → use correlation. If you aim to answer 'how' X affects Y or have X 'predict' Y → use regression.
3. Recommended workflow: Always run correlation FIRST to confirm a relationship exists. If no correlation found, regression will likely be inconclusive. Only proceed to regression after confirming correlation.

Correlation analysis: Confirms the RELATIONSHIP and CONNECTION between two variables. Result is between -1.0 (highest negative correlation) and 1.0 (highest positive correlation), 0 = no correlation.

Linear regression: Shows HOW MUCH one variable affects another and how to PREDICT, ESTIMATE, or EXPLAIN its behavior.

Neither implies causation.

Creative vs. Reactive Leadership (Ken Norton)

A mental model for understanding leadership postures. Reactive leadership operates from fear, while creative leadership operates from purpose.

How it works: Identifies three reactive postures: 1) Heart type (complying/pleasing/seeking approval), 2) Head type (protecting ideas/distancing/needing to be right), 3) Autocratic (controlling/dominating/my way or the highway).

Curiosity Loop (Ada Chen Rekhi)

A structured method for gathering contextual advice from a curated group of people without overwhelming them.

How it works: Steps: 1. Formulate a specific, unbiased question that solicits rationale. 2. Curate a list of 5-10 people (mix of subject matter experts and people who know you well). 3. Make the ask lightweight (e.g., 'Here are 9 options, pick your top 2 and tell me why'). 4. Process the feedback and close the loop by thanking them and sharing the outcome.

DIGS Method (Preparing for a PM interview)

A framework for answering behavioral interview questions, created by Lewis C. Lin.

How it works: Used for: Behavioral questions Reference: https://www.lewis-lin.com/blog/2019/9/16/what-is-the-digs-method

Data-Informed Product Loop (John Cutler)

A continuous loop for applying product knowledge and building practical skills.

How it works: Steps: 1. Define a strategy. 2. Develop qualitative models. 3. Add measurement to those models. 4. Prioritize where to focus. 5. Design bets. 6. Measure the impact of bets. 7. Circulate learnings back into the strategy.

Deployment Environments and CI/CD (Become a more technical product manager)

Understanding the three deployment environments and continuous integration/continuous deployment practices

How it works: Three deployment environments:

1. Dev - Servers dedicated for developers to use
2. Staging - A close replica of production for testing and internal use
3. Production - The main environment used by customers every day

Two deployment patterns:

1. Scheduled Deployments - Happen on a recurring cadence (weekly, monthly, quarterly)
2. Continuous Deployment (CD) - Automatically deploys code to environments when merged into a branch

CI/CD:

• Continuous Integration (CI) - Running tests automatically every time new code is added to a branch (unit tests, integration tests, vulnerability assessments)
• Continuous Deployment (CD) - Automatically deploying approved code to environments
• Together they help teams ship quickly and maintain quality

Example: Stripe does 400+ deployments per day with 1.4 million automated tests.

Don't Upset the Apple Cart — First PM Change Management Approach (Joining as the first product manager)

Nate Abbott's framework for how first PMs should approach making changes at a startup that's already working

How it works: Instead of focusing on what isn't going right:

1. Look at what IS working and why
2. Build upon existing processes — make them slightly better/more efficient
3. Expand into something closely related (process or features)
4. Use these initial successes to engender trust from founders and gain context
5. After first 3-6 months, leverage built trust and context to make the bigger changes you want (and likely need) to make

Key principle: Move slower than you think. Resist the instinct to quickly change things to show value.

E-Shaped / F-Shaped Skill Profile (Marc Andreessen)

A career development model evolving from the traditional 'T-shaped' professional.

How it works: Instead of just one deep skill (T-shaped), professionals should aim to be deeply skilled in two or three domains (the downward prongs of an E or F) by leveraging AI to learn and execute tasks outside their original core competency, making them non-fungible.

Embrace Imposter Syndrome (Raaz Herzberg)

A contrarian approach to imposter syndrome: instead of trying to build confidence, accept that you are an imposter in any new role and proceed anyway

How it works: Traditional advice: Build confidence to overcome imposter syndrome. Raaz's approach: 1. Accept you feel like an imposter — everyone does. 2. You ARE an imposter in any new role — you've never done it before. 3. Don't try to feel confident first; just act despite the feeling. 4. Let others decide if you're not good enough — that's their job, not yours. 5. You'll never know your limit if you don't try. Key quote: 'Maybe they will find out you're an imposter, maybe let them find out. It's fine.'

Equanimity as a PM Skill (Upasna Gautam)

Mental calmness and composure in stressful situations, specifically the ability to pause before reacting, used as a core operating principle for product management in chaotic environments

How it works: Definition: Mental calmness, composure, evenness of temper in stressful situations. The ability to remain un-rattled in the highest highs and lowest lows. Core practice: Pause before reacting. Application areas: Stakeholder management, team morale, translating user feedback, product development philosophy. Key insight: Reactivity is the root cause of many workplace woes and PM frustrations. Real power comes from managing your emotional reactions, not trying to control others.

Five Habits of Highly Annoying PMs (Five habits of highly annoying product managers)

A diagnostic framework of the five most common anti-patterns that make PMs frustrating to work with, each paired with warning signs and remedies.

How it works: Anti-pattern 1: Obsessing over frameworks, processes and the 'right way' to do product. Warning signs: No one helps implement, people go through the motions, passive-aggressive jokes about your framework. Fix: Get team buy-in first; process should serve the team, not the other way around.

Anti-pattern 2: Prioritizing impulsively. Warning signs: Teammates frequently ask why something is prioritized; pushback >50% of the time. Fix: (a) Always have a strong 'why this is a problem' argument in PRDs/1-Pagers, (b) Speak with engineers/designers in person for non-trivial projects to explain rationale.

Anti-pattern 3: Expecting everything to be quick. Warning signs: Majority of your asks are framed as taking 'just a few hours.' Fix: Replace 'this should be quick' with 'What would need to be true for this to be doable in the next x days?'

Anti-pattern 4: Avoiding decisions. Warning signs: Endless debate, waiting for 100% consensus. Fix: (a) Ask team 'Would you rather keep hashing this out or should I just make a call?' (b) Use script: 'It seems like we're not going to get to consensus here. I vote we go with X, move forward, see how it goes and change course if necessary. Everyone OK enough with that?'

Anti-pattern 5: Being overly prescriptive. Warning signs: Specs longer than other PMs', designers/engineers don't use your docs, manager feedback about micromanagement. Fix: Prioritize conversation over documentation; use misunderstandings to calibrate what needs writing vs. discussion.

Five Types of Product Ambiguity (Nikhyl Singhal)

A categorization of the different types of challenges a PM can specialize in mastering.

How it works: 1. Craft (building great products), 2. Market (navigating markets to create something new), 3. Organizational (solving inside-the-building problems across complex teams), 4. Domain (e.g., ML, hardware), 5. Team (managing managers and team balance).

Five-Step Failure Pattern: Feature Team PM Acting Empowered (In defense of feature team product managers)

A predictable pattern of what happens when a feature team PM unilaterally tries to behave like an empowered PM without leadership support

How it works: Step 1: Feature team PM decides to stop focusing on outputs and start focusing on outcomes Step 2: The PM starts pushing back on feature requests and refocuses the momentum toward product discovery Step 3: Sales leaders perceive the PM to be slowing down velocity instead of accelerating it. They tell the CEO about the problematic PM Step 4: The PM who 'won't play ball' gradually depletes their social capital within the company and loses the ability to influence leaders, killing any chance of advancing outcome-focused product initiatives Step 5: When performance reviews come around, the PM is dinged for being neither collaborative nor impactful

Key takeaway: Don't attempt this without a strong product leader spearheading the transformation and a stomach for a huge amount of work.

Four Factor Model for Complexity (Cavanagh) (This Week #5: Overcoming impostor syndrome, introducing growth to an org, and how to partner with your data scientist)

A model from Professor Michael Cavanagh (University of Sydney, complexity theory expert) for operating effectively in highly complex roles with VUCA conditions.

How it works: Four factors for thriving in complexity:

1. KEEP YOUR PERSPECTIVE-TAKING CAPACITY (PTC): Look at the big picture more broadly than you normally would. Imagine working at ground level vs. looking from the top of a tall tower. From the tower, you can see all connected parts. If you're leading others, spend most/all of your time at the top and help others see what you see. You can't do this if you're grinding at the coal face.

2. TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR YOUR OWN MINDFULNESS: Start a meditation practice, even 10 minutes/day (e.g., using Headspace). This keeps you calm amid volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA).

3. ENSURE A CLEAR SHARED PURPOSE: Align with those around you on shared purpose. This keeps you aligned when things come undone and prevents thrash. Brings you back to what matters most.

4. STAY IN DIALOGUE: Talk often, talk broadly, listen to people you don't want to listen to. Stay open. Share what you see when you see it. This distributes the burden—you can't do your role alone. A great PM doesn't work things out alone but stays in good, open relationship as things constantly emerge. Be an open system.

Four Pillars for Early-Career PM Success (This Week #11: What should new PMs over-index on, and empowering product in a sales-driven org)

A prioritized framework for what new PMs should over-index on to maximize their chances of landing a senior PM job at a great company

How it works: Four areas to focus on early in your PM career:

1. SHIPPING WINS (Most Important)

• Join a team that ships frequently (more swings at bat, more learning)
• Join a team where wins are more likely (great teammates, untapped problem space)
• Do product discovery, validate ideas early, remove roadblocks
• Practice smart time management — don't let tackling lots of problems or extra responsibilities distract from your main project
• Stay with the team long enough to ship AND measure the win
• Ensure wins show up on your performance review

1. LEARNING BEST PRACTICES

• Work at a company that does product management well (often well-known tech companies)
• Rotational programs are great for seeing best practices across multiple teams (pattern matching)
• If no rotation program, consider switching teams after ~1 year
• If you're the first PM at a company, get a product coach (ask company to pay)

1. GETTING BASELINE CREDENTIALS

• You need enough credentials to pass resume screening: great undergrad degree (Stanford, MIT, etc.) OR 2+ years at a well-known tech company
• Focus on credentials early because places good for your resume overlap with places good for learning
• Don't overdo it — after 2 years, only stay if you want to
• If stuck without credentials and can't get interviews, consider an MBA
• Be wary of advice from people with better safety nets than you

1. BUILDING YOUR NETWORK

• Start early — junior people now become senior contacts later
• Inside your company: identify people you'd want to work with again, build relationships (hallway chats, lunches, staying in touch after departures)
• How you do your job matters for networking: respect teammates, share credit, value opinions, make teamwork fun, ensure product success
• For general networking: reference Jules Walter's 'Networking for Introverts' article

Four-Dimensional PM Career Acceleration Framework (Which companies produce the best product managers)

A framework for evaluating how well a company accelerates PM careers by measuring four distinct dimensions, used to triangulate which companies truly develop the best PMs

How it works: Evaluate any company's PM development quality across four dimensions:

1. Rate of PMs getting promoted WITHIN the company (internal promotion velocity)
2. Rate of alumni PMs getting promoted AFTER leaving (external promotion rate)
3. Average time to promotion after leaving (speed of career advancement)
4. Average time to reach a leadership position (e.g. VP of Product, Head of Product, CPO)

A company is considered exceptional if it ranks in the top 10 on multiple dimensions. Only Intercom ranked top 10 on all four. Companies ranking in 3 dimensions are strong (Revolut, Nubank). Companies ranking in 2 are notable (N26). Companies ranking in 1 deserve special mention.

Git Workflow for PMs (Become a more technical product manager)

Understanding how engineers use Git for version control, including key concepts like repos, commits, branches, pull requests, and merges

How it works: Key Git concepts:

• Repository (repo) - The home for all code, like a Google Drive folder that tracks changes to files
• Commit - Pushing changes from local copy to the copy in GitHub (like saving a version)
• Branch - A copy of the code where engineers make changes in isolation from each other
• Pull Request (PR) - A request to merge changes from an independent branch back into the main branch; reviewed by other engineers who can suggest improvements
• Merge - When an approved pull request combines the independent branch back into the main branch

Two styles:

1. Trunk-based development - Simple branching from main, quick merges back
2. Gitflow (legacy) - Multiple layers of branches (Develop, Release), requires specific approvals to move code up, scheduled releases

Good Product Manager, Bad Product Manager (Ben Horowitz)

A foundational mental model defining the PM role as a leadership position.

How it works: Defines the PM not by tasks (writing specs, talking to press) but by the ultimate outcome: getting a product to market that customers love. The PM is the 'keeper of the vision' who must lead without direct authority.

High Agency (Three Components) (Shreyas Doshi)

A trait framework defining high agency as finding a way to achieve goals without waiting for perfect conditions, composed of three components

How it works: Three components: 1) Ownership mindset - taking full responsibility for outcomes. 2) Creative execution - finding novel ways through challenges rather than being blocked by them. 3) Resilience - persisting through adverse conditions. Term coined by Eric Weinstein. Shreyas found this is the single biggest differentiator between PMs who exceed expectations and those who underperform their potential.

High-Signal Interviewer Question Formulation Process (How to pass any first-round interview (even in a terrible talent market))

A three-step process for creating impressive questions to ask interviewers that demonstrate research and genuine interest

How it works: Step 1: Define the signals you need — bring questions whose answers are actually important to you for deciding if you want the role (not generic listicle questions)

Step 2: Do your research on:

• Industry trends
• Company (website, Yahoo Finance)
• Competitive landscape (G2, Capterra)
• Team/product
• Interviewers (LinkedIn)
• Consulting firm dossiers and VC thought-leadership white papers

Step 3: Formulate questions that highlight your homework and give you the signal you want

Time investment: 1-2 hours. Questions can be reused across later interview rounds for diverse perspectives.

Example (Cruise interview): 'In your three years at Cruise, the privacy world has expanded, with the CCPA and other states discussing more regulations for consumer privacy—how has this impacted the nature of your work, and what do you see as the biggest challenge or area of focus as Cruise continues to expand to new geos?'

Impact / Execution / Optics Framework (Shreyas Doshi Live)

A framework for understanding the three levels at which product work happens, and identifying your preferred operating level to reduce frustration and make better career decisions

How it works: Three levels of product work: 1) Impact level - focusing on outcomes, strategy, and what matters for the business/customer; 2) Execution level - focusing on getting things built and shipped well; 3) Optics level - focusing on perception, presentations, stakeholder management. Each PM leader has a natural 'happy place' level. Frustration comes from spending most time at a non-default level. As you go higher in the corporate ladder, more time is required at the optics level. Career decisions should be made to align with your preferred level rather than following expected progression.

Impact = Environment x Skills (Bangaly Kaba)

A formula to evaluate career growth by scoring environmental factors and assessing skill areas.

How it works: Score 6 environment variables (Manager, Resources, Scope, Team, Compensation, Culture) from 0 to 2 in 0.25 increments. Max score is 12. Assess 4 skills (Communication, Influence, Strategic Thinking, Execution).

J-Curve vs. Stairs (Molly Graham)

A career growth model contrasting safe, incremental promotions with risky, steep-learning-curve roles.

How it works: 1. Stairs: Predictable, boring, title bumps every 2 years. 2. J-Curve: Jumping off a cliff, falling/feeling like an idiot for 6-9 months, then climbing out to a much higher trajectory than the stairs could ever reach.

Ladder vs. Map Career Framework (Jason Shah)

A mental model for making career decisions and evaluating opportunities.

How it works: The 'Ladder' mindset focuses on moving up, gaining influence, power, and higher titles. The 'Map' mindset focuses on exploring interesting experiences, taking risks, and optimizing for a fulfilling life story over a linear trajectory.

Lenny's Best-of-All-Time Organization Framework (11 Jobs-to-be-Done) (The Best of Lenny’s Newsletter 2023)

Lenny's own taxonomy for organizing product management knowledge into 11 distinct jobs-to-be-done.

How it works: Lenny organizes all product management content into 11 jobs-to-be-done: 1. Hone product skills, 2. Grow your product, 3. Kickstart and scale a startup, 4. Manage stress/overwhelm, 5. Accelerate PM career, 6. Learn from best companies, 7. Become a better leader, 8. Find benchmarks, 9. Hiring/interviewing, 10. Get better at pricing, 11. Get better at sales. This taxonomy itself is a useful framework for organizing PM knowledge and identifying skill gaps.

Lenny's Counterintuitive AI Impact Thesis (How AI will impact product management)

Lenny's core thesis that AI's impact on PM skills is the opposite of what most people expect — high-level strategic skills will be most disrupted while soft skills become more valuable.

How it works: Popular belief: AI will mainly replace low-level communication, collaboration, and execution work.

Lenny's thesis (the opposite): AI will have the most profound impact on high-level skills:

• Strategy development
• Vision crafting
• Identifying new opportunities
• Setting goals
• Data analysis

Soft skills that become MORE important:

• Product sense
• Communication
• Creativity
• Being the 'glue' that enables teams
• Empathy
• Influence
• Collaboration

Reasoning: AI is best at taking gigabytes of data, analyzing it, and giving succinct insightful answers (= strategy). People are best at people stuff: aligning opinionated stakeholders, unblocking blockers, pushing teams, creating amazing experiences, getting buy-in, understanding nuance.

Lenny's Newsletter Topic Taxonomy (The Best of Lenny’s Newsletter 2021)

A nine-category taxonomy for organizing product management and startup knowledge, used to classify 150+ newsletter posts by topic area

How it works: Nine categories for organizing PM/startup knowledge: 1. 📈 Growth strategy (acquisition, retention, conversion, virality, referrals, content/SEO, growth loops, hiring for growth) 2. 🤌 Product management, the work (strategy, templates, prioritization, roadmapping, working with engineering, communication frameworks) 3. 🦸‍♀️ Product management, the career (breaking in, advancing, interviewing, self-assessment, first PM hire, career ladders) 4. 🔭 Finding product-market fit (measuring PMF, qualitative signals, timelines, user research) 5. 📣 Marketing and GTM (positioning, wedge selection, launch buzz, GTM motions, distribution, pricing) 6. 🌱 Scaling your startup (fundraising, community, planning, velocity, sales layering) 7. 🎭 Marketplaces (kickstarting, winning, failing, evaluation, take rates, supply growth) 8. 📊 Metrics (retention benchmarks, payback period, north-star metrics, goal setting, subscription metrics, SaaS metrics) 9. 💼 Management and career (negotiation, early career, performance reviews, managing up, time off)

Little Bets Career Strategy (Sanchan Saxena)

A career development approach where you take small experimental bets, try them out, build rapid recovery from failures, and pivot — rather than creating a five-year career plan and working backwards.

How it works: Steps: 1) Find something that gives you energy, 2) Jump in with both feet, 3) Go through the process, 4) Pivot and learn from failures, 5) Repeat. Based on the book 'Little Bets' by Peter Sims. Anti-pattern: analysis paralysis of dotting every i and crossing every t before getting started.

MECE Problem Decomposition (Sri Batchu)

Mutually Exclusive, Collectively Exhaustive framework for systematically decomposing problems and brainstorming comprehensive solutions

How it works: Example with revenue growth slowdown: Layer 1: Revenue per customer down OR number of customers down (MECE). Layer 2 (if customers): Which products? (MECE across product lines). Layer 3: New customer acquisition down OR activation down OR retention down (MECE). At each layer, ensure branches are mutually exclusive (no overlap) and collectively exhaustive (nothing missing). Benefits: catches missed solutions, builds confidence in comprehensiveness.

Maximize Option Value (Asha Sharma)

A life and career decision-making mental model that replaces the 'minimize regret' framework.

How it works: Instead of looking back from age 70 to count regrets, look forward to the number of adventures you can still have by accumulating compounding assets today: skills, health, trust, and relationships.

Measure in Hundreds (Logan Kilpatrick)

A mental model for resilience and compounding effort.

How it works: When trying something new, expect to attempt it hundreds of times. Failing 5 times means you've essentially tried zero times relative to the required scale for success.

Meta-Prompting Technique (How to use ChatGPT in your PM work)

A technique where you ask ChatGPT to help you write better prompts before using it for your actual task

How it works: Pro tip: Before using ChatGPT for your actual task, ask it for advice on how to best phrase your prompt. Steps:

1. Describe what you want to accomplish to ChatGPT
2. Ask: 'How should I best phrase my prompt to get the best results from you?'
3. ChatGPT will suggest improved prompt structures, including specificity tips, context to include, and formatting suggestions
4. Use the improved prompt for your actual task

This is a bootstrapping technique that improves results across all use cases.

Mid-Career U-Shaped Sentiment Pattern (How tech workers really feel about work right now)

A U-shaped pattern showing how career stage affects burnout, enjoyment, quitting intentions, and other sentiment metrics

How it works: Three career stages and their sentiment profiles:

1. Early-career (0-6 years):

• ~62% optimistic
• 47% not/slightly burned out
• 71% enjoying their work
• Higher enthusiasm but less career clarity

1. Mid-career (7-14 years) — THE SLUMP:

• Higher burnout (only 41% not/slightly burned out)
• Higher quitting intentions (only 28% committed to roles)
• Lower job enjoyment (66% enjoying work)
• Early enthusiasm has waned but long-term career resilience hasn't developed

1. Late-career (15+ years):

• Highest job enjoyment (75% enjoying work)
• Lower quitting intentions (34% committed)
• Highest engagement and belonging
• Highest clarity and commitment

Key insight: If you make it through the mid-career slump and find your niche, you become more content than earlier-career workers.

Minimum Viable Interview Prep (MVIP) (How to pass any first-round interview (even in a terrible talent market))

A four-part system for preparing for first-round tech interviews efficiently, designed to avoid burnout from over-preparation while maximizing signal to interviewers

How it works: Four parts:

1. Get your (career) story straight — audit digital footprint, craft strategic reasons for wanting the role, map the job description to your experience using mirroring
2. Walk down memory lane — pick 3-5 major recent projects and document every detail (context, stakeholders, challenges, actions, results, learnings)
3. Learn the behavioral frameworks — master Pure (STAR++), Theoretical (outline → detail → example), and Situational (clarify → assume → plan → check → summarize) question types
4. Formulate high-signal questions — define signals needed, research company/industry/interviewers, craft thoughtful questions

Total prep time: 3-4 days at ~4 hours/day, or 1 week at 2-3 hours/day for working professionals.

Mission Statement Quality Test (The definitive guide to mastering product sense interviews)

Criteria for crafting effective mission statements in product sense interviews that serve as a North Star for subsequent decisions

How it works: A good mission statement should be: (1) Specific enough to provide direction and guide meaningful decisions, (2) Broad enough to allow creative exploration and solutions. Anti-patterns: Too vague — 'help users be more productive' or 'to help people take better photos.' Better: 'To empower anyone to capture and preserve meaningful moments through intuitive photography tools.' The mission statement should be referred to as a 'placeholder mission statement' (showing adaptability) and should be connected back to throughout the interview, especially when prioritizing segments, problems, and solutions.

Mock Interview Video Practice Technique (Preparing for a PM interview)

A specific technique for getting maximum value from watching mock PM interview videos.

How it works: Step 1: Start watching a mock interview video Step 2: Pause the video as soon as you hear the question Step 3: Try to answer it yourself in front of a friend Step 4: Watch the answer in the video Step 5: Assess what you could have done better

This technique is particularly useful if you're interviewing at a larger company with a consistent interview process.

Needs vs. Problems Distinction (The definitive guide to mastering product sense interviews)

A mental model for distinguishing user needs (desires) from user problems (obstacles), critical for problem identification in PS interviews

How it works: Needs are desires: 'I want beautiful flowers in my apartment.' Problems are specific obstacles: 'It's challenging to find flowers that thrive in my apartment's limited lighting conditions.' The distinction matters because problems point to specific solutions while needs are too vague. Practice drill: Take 5 product features you use and convert from needs ('I want X') to problems ('I struggle with Y because Z'). Anti-pattern: 'Users need better search' (need/solution) vs. 'Users struggle to find relevant content because the current search doesn't understand domain-specific terminology' (problem).

New Roommate Analogy for New PMs (This Week #1: Must reads on growth, what PMs should focus on when joining a new team, and the value of an MBA)

A mental model for understanding the dynamic when a PM joins a new team — the team is skeptical, unsure about trust, and wondering what you do for a living

How it works: Think of a new PM joining your team much like a new roommate moving in to your apartment — even though they've interviewed you and did extensive reference checks, they're still a little skeptical, not sure they want to trust you with the keys to the house, and wonder what this person actually does for a living. This framing helps new PMs understand they need to earn trust before imposing direction.

Opportunity Set A vs. Set B (Jason Feifer)

A mental model for career growth and taking initiative.

How it works: Opportunity Set A: Everything that is asked of you (your job description, what your boss expects). Opportunity Set B: Everything that is available to you, even though nobody is asking you to do it (starting a podcast, writing a book, taking on new responsibilities). Focusing on Set B is what drives outsized career growth.

PEARL Interview Framework (Jackie Bavaro)

A structure for answering the interview question: 'Tell me about a project you're proud of.'

How it works: P - Problem (what was the problem and why was it worth solving?); E - Epiphany (what was the unique insight you had that no one else saw?); A - Action (what did you actually do and how did you overcome challenges?); R - Result (what was the outcome?); L - Learning (how did you grow from this, especially if it was a failure?).

PM Career Level Gaze Framework (This Week #3: Finding product/market fit, interviewing for a Director of PM role, and structuring discussions with senior leaders)

A model for understanding how time horizon and focus shifts as you progress through PM career levels

How it works: As you progress in your PM career, your gaze rises:

• IC PM: Week-to-week focus, day-to-day execution
• Manager of PMs: Months-out focus
• Director / Manager of Managers of PMs: Years-out focus — laying groundwork, anticipating challenges, working towards long-term vision. Focus shifts from execution to vision, strategy, and people.

Key insight: You become increasingly distant from the actual product. More and more your impact comes from the work of other people.

PM Career Milestones and Timeline (Becoming a senior Product Manager)

A mapping of the three key PM career milestones with median time estimates for each transition.

How it works: Three PM career milestones:

1. Become a 'senior' IC PM — Median ~3 years (longest phase)
2. Become a manager of PMs (Group PM or Product Lead) — Median 1-2 years
3. Become a manager of PM managers (Director) — Median 2-3 years

Key insight: Accelerating the first milestone (entry-level to senior PM) has the most impact on accelerating your overall PM career.

PM Code Contribution Scope Guidelines (The top 5 things PMs should know about engineering)

Guidelines for what types of code changes PMs should and should not make

How it works: DO contribute:

• Copy updates and typo fixes
• Color changes
• Border radius fixes
• Other small, self-contained frontend changes
• Low-risk markdown file edits (can be done directly in GitHub)

DON'T:

• Bite off more than you can chew
• Get too deep into the codebase
• Step on your engineers' toes with larger changes

Principle: Keep the code you contribute to smaller copy- or design-related tweaks — this will win you points with engineers.

PM Course Career-Level Mapping (My favorite PM courses)

A framework for matching PM courses to career stage, splitting recommendations into senior PM track and up-and-coming PM track

How it works: Senior PM track focuses on: Career management and advancement, Product strategy (both foundational and workshop-style), Continuous customer discovery, Product leadership and people management.

Up-and-coming PM track focuses on: PM fundamentals and foundations, Data-driven decision making, Assumption testing and idea validation, Growth strategy, Product principles and psychology.

The key distinction: Senior PMs should invest in strategy, leadership, and career acceleration. Up-and-coming PMs should invest in foundations, analytical skills, and growth knowledge.

PM Course Selection Criteria (My favorite PM courses)

Lenny's four criteria for evaluating and recommending PM courses

How it works: Lenny recommends filtering PM courses by four criteria: (1) Live — not pre-recorded or purely self-paced, (2) Cohort-based — you learn alongside a group of peers, (3) Has run a couple of cohorts — proven and iterated upon, (4) Plans to run many more — sustainable and actively maintained. Exception: Include self-paced courses only if they have overwhelming community recommendation (e.g., GoPractice simulator).

PM Definition Framework (Three-Part) (What is product management)

A three-part definition of the product manager role that serves as a baseline for understanding the job. Useful for onboarding, interviews, and aligning teams on PM expectations.

How it works: Your job as a PM is to deliver business impact by marshaling the resources of your team to identify and solve the most impactful customer problems.

Three parts:

1. Deliver business impact — You are responsible for delivering business impact. If your team drives positive impact (hitting important goals, reducing costs, shipping an important project), you're doing your job.
2. Marshaling the resources of your team — Your job isn't to do the building yourself but to increase the leverage of your cross-functional teammates (designers, engineers, data scientists, researchers) to deliver impact. A PM's output = the output of their team (paraphrasing Andy Grove).
3. Identify and solve the most impactful customer problems — Business impact comes from solving customer problems. It's your job to lead your team to correctly identify, prioritize, and solve the most impactful customer problems.

PM Extra Time Stack: Execution → Strategy → Vision (This Week #0: Advice on growth, product, and leadership)

A three-level framework for PMs to decide what to work on when the team is humming along, working upward from execution to strategy to vision

How it works: Work your way up this stack, finding ways to refine and optimize each step:

Level 1 — Execution:

• Does everyone know what they'll be doing next?
• Are there any blockers slowing down the team, now or approaching?
• Are there any processes that could be improved?
• Are you on track to hit your goals? What are 3 things you could do to increase those odds?

Level 2 — Strategy:

• Do you have a clear plan for how your team will achieve its mission?
• Is the strategy easy to understand and find? If you ask anyone on your team what your strategy is, would they be able to explain it?
• If you had to be more bold, what would you change?

Level 3 — Vision:

• Is it clear to you what long-term success for your team and product concretely looks like? Is there a North Star for your team?
• Is this also clear to your team?
• Does achieving your vision matter? Remind people why.

Always-on activities:

• Communicate: Is there any additional communication you can do, within your team and to key stakeholders?
• Listen: What challenges is your team having that you haven't yet recognized?
• Have fun

PM Habit Development Approach (14 habits of highly effective product managers)

Lenny's recommended method for adopting the 14 habits incrementally rather than all at once

How it works: Step 1: Skim through the full list of 14 habits. Step 2: Pick ONE habit you want to work on. Step 3: Focus on that single habit for the next two weeks. Step 4: If you want more time, stick with it. Otherwise, pick a new habit. Step 5: Take it easy, but keep at it. Bonus: Start your own list—watch the best PMs around you and jot down what they're doing well. Inspired by James Clear's quote: 'Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become.'

PM Influence Spectrum (A comprehensive survey of Product Management)

A framework for assessing PM influence relative to other functions at a company, including the bias gap between PM self-assessment and non-PM assessment

How it works: PM influence is measured on a spectrum: 'PMs run the show' → 'A lot more influence' → 'Slightly more influence' → 'About the same' → 'Slightly less' → 'A lot less'. Key findings: PMs report having more influence at ~80% of companies. Non-PMs report PMs having more influence at ~70% of companies. The gap is mostly in 'PMs run the show' category (13% PM view vs. 6% non-PM view). ~65% of companies have PMs with slightly or a lot more influence in both views.

PM Job Market Health Dashboard — Key Metrics to Track (State of the product job market, part 2)

A set of key metrics Lenny uses to assess the health and direction of the PM job market, useful for anyone doing ongoing market monitoring

How it works: Key metrics tracked: (1) Total open PM roles globally (current: 5,752), (2) PM roles by seniority level (Entry/Mid, Senior, Lead/Senior++, VP/C-level), (3) Down-leveling rate (hires who went down a level), (4) % of remote vs. in-office PM roles, (5) Geographic distribution of PM roles by city, (6) Share of roles in top metro (SF Bay Area: 20%+), (7) Most mentioned hard skills in PM job descriptions, (8) Layoff events and people impacted in tech, (9) Top companies by open PM roles, (10) Growth/decline rates of adjacent tech roles (ML, data eng, design, etc.)

PM Leadership Spectrum (Coordinator ↔ Dictator) (The most common pitfalls of new product managers)

A spectrum model showing the two extremes of PM leadership style — too passive (Coordinator) vs. too controlling (Dictator) — with the ideal being in the middle

How it works: One end: The Coordinator — defers to everyone, no POV, just coordinates. Other end: The Dictator — micro-manages everything, treats team as executors. Ideal middle: Team captain who has a strong point of view, pushes the team in the right direction, but leads through trust, collaboration, and influence. Optimizes for impact and good decisions while giving teammates space to contribute.

PM Leveling Framework (P1-E9) (How much product managers make in the U.S., Europe, and Canada)

A standardized 12-level framework mapping PM seniority from entry-level IC through CPO, showing where IC and manager tracks overlap

How it works: IC Track: P1 → Entry, P2 → Mid (Associate PM), P3 → Mid (PM), P4 → Senior (Senior PM), P5 → Senior (Staff PM), P6 → Senior (Principal PM). Manager Track: M3 → Manager (PM Manager / Group PM), M4 → Manager (Senior PM Manager / Senior Group PM), M5 → Director (Director of Product), M6 → Director (Senior Director of Product). Executive Track: E7 → VP (VP of Product), E8 → VP (SVP of Product), E9 → CPO. IC and Manager tracks overlap at P4-P6 and M3-M6 levels, meaning a Senior PM (P4) is at the same level as a PM Manager (M3).

PM Manager Output Formula (adapted from Andy Grove) (Moving from IC product manager to manager of product managers)

A mental model for understanding what a PM manager's output actually is, adapted from Andy Grove's High Output Management

How it works: A PM manager's output = the output of their team + the output of the neighboring teams under their influence. This reframes the PM manager role as one of leverage rather than direct execution.

PM Owns the Why (Yuhki Yamashata)

Philosophy that the PM's unique responsibility is owning the 'why' behind product decisions, not the 'what' or 'how,' enabling scaled decision-making across the team

How it works: The what and how are shared across the team. The PM uniquely owns the why. When everyone understands the why, they can make great local decisions without the PM present. Extended version: Apply five whys to customer requests—1) Customer asks for a feature, 2) Why are they asking for it? (back up to the problem), 3) Why do they have that problem in the first place? (find the underlying condition). Fixing the underlying condition creates bigger product impact.

PM Role Definition (How AI will impact product management, How to know if you're doing a good job as a product manager)

Lenny's one-sentence definition of the product manager's job, used as a foundation for understanding AI's impact.

How it works: The job of a product manager is to 'deliver business impact by marshaling the resources of your team to identify and solve the most impactful customer problems.' Essentially, to be the conductor/quarterback/glue of the team who pulls all the disparate pieces together to create great products and drive the business forward. This becomes even more true when AI is one of your resources.

PM Role Variation Matrix (Two Axes) (What is product management)

A framework for evaluating how the PM role differs across companies along two key axes, useful for career decisions and interview preparation.

How it works: Axis 1: Skills — Which skills matter most varies widely by company. Companies emphasize different PM skills (e.g., technical depth, product sense, communication, strategy) at different intensities. A heat map across well-known companies shows darker colors for more important skills.

Axis 2: Influence — How much influence a PM has within the org varies on a spectrum:

• One end: Mini-CEO (very much in charge, e.g., Zynga)
• Other end: Project manager (responsible for execution but with no real say over what gets built, e.g., Apple)

Action items:

• If already at a company: Ask your manager what 'amazing' in the role would look like.
• If exploring PM roles: Ask companies (1) what skills they care about most and (2) how much say a PM has compared to other functions.
• If just curious: Find a few PMs and ask them about their job.

PM Second Brain Setup Framework (3-Step Process) (How to build your PM second brain with ChatGPT)

A three-step framework for building a persistent AI thought partner for product management work using ChatGPT Projects (or Claude/Gemini equivalents)

How it works: Step 1: Create its personality — Open a ChatGPT Project and define custom instructions that shape how the AI thinks, challenges, and collaborates with you. Use ChatGPT itself to draft the instructions by describing your role, what you want the AI to do, and the personality traits you need (sharp, challenging, creative, product-savvy).

Step 2: Feed it information — Upload all relevant context as files (PDFs, CSVs, docs). Everything is text: PRDs, decks (export to PDF), Slack channels (export or copy-paste into doc, save as PDF), website/docs pages (Cmd+P > Save as PDF), research transcripts, interview notes, survey data, dashboards. Each file adds depth. As you create new artifacts (PRDs, strategy docs), download and feed them back in to keep it current.

Step 3: Let it cook — Use the context-rich Project for any PM task: drafting sign-up forms, generating prototypes (via Lovable prompts), writing tailored communications for different stakeholders, forming hypotheses, running analyses, and getting recommendations. Open new threads as needed—each one inherits the full context.

PM Skills Automation Framework (How close is AI to replacing product managers?)

Comprehensive categorization of PM skills used to track what percentage of the PM role is currently automatable by AI

How it works: Three categories with 15 sub-tasks:

1. Shape the product: a. Developing a product strategy and vision b. Setting goals c. Creating specs d. Discovery e. Building a roadmap f. Giving product/design feedback

2. Ship the product: a. Quality assurance b. Fighting for budget/resources c. Unblocking blockers d. GTM e. Adjusting resources/priorities when things come up

3. Sync the people: a. Running meetings b. Communicating important information up and down the ladder c. Aligning stakeholders d. Aligning your team e. Maintaining team morale

PM Skills Importance Ranking (A comprehensive survey of Product Management)

A ranked list of the most and least valued skills when hiring PMs, based on survey data from ~1,000 respondents across 600+ companies

How it works: Most frequently valued PM skills (in order): 1. Communication, 2. Execution, 3. Product sense. Additional skills measured: Strategic thinking, Collaboration, Data acumen, Technical background, Raw intelligence, Empathy, Design/UX. Least frequently valued: Design/UX, Empathy, Raw intelligence.

PM Skills Triangle (Hari Srinivasan)

A mental model for categorizing product management strengths and guiding career development.

How it works: Three points of the triangle: 1) Creator (visionary/builder), 2) Data Science (seeing patterns/future), 3) General Management (budget/leadership). Great PMs rarely sit in the center; they live on the edges by spiking in two of these three areas.

PM Skillset Decomposition (This Week #6: Cultivating good relationships with distributed co-workers, building trust to accelerate growth, and leveling up as a PM when you have extra time)

A high-level breakdown of the core product management skillset into three components, useful for identifying development areas

How it works: Product management as a skillset is a combination of three components:

1. Leadership
2. Business thinking
3. Product design

Each can be developed through experiential learning outside of traditional PM work. This decomposition can be used to identify which skills to focus on during professional development.

PM as Four-Circle Collaborator Model (Vikrama Dhiman)

A visual mental model where PM is the encircling discipline that uniquely pairs with all four core disciplines: strategy, technology, design, and data

How it works: Draw four circles: Strategy, Technology, Design, Data. Draw a larger PM circle that encompasses all four. The PM is the only discipline that co-collaborates with every other discipline, giving them a unique cross-functional insight no one else has. The role doesn't require being called 'PM' — anyone can play it — but if you are the PM, your addition to the team should increase the team's overall contribution, energy, and output.

PM as Orchestra Conductor Analogy (One team, one roadmap - Issue 30)

A mental model for understanding the PM's role and the importance of a unified roadmap across cross-functional teams.

How it works: PM = Conductor of an orchestra. They lead a cross-functional team to create something beautiful. Roadmap = Musical score. It tells everyone on the team:

• Who's responsible for what
• When they need to start and finish
• How all the parts come together to create something great

Anti-pattern: An orchestra where the violins have one plan and the tubas have another — it does not end well. Same with design having one roadmap and engineering having another.

PMs Own the 'Why' (How Figma builds product)

Figma's philosophy that PMs are responsible for making the 'why' crystal clear — why this problem, why now, why over everything else — empowering teams to make great decisions.

How it works: Core belief: PMs are responsible for the 'why.' Ideas (the 'what') come from anywhere including the community. The 'how' comes from design and engineering. PMs must make it crystal clear: (1) WHY we're solving this particular problem, and (2) WHY it's important over anything else we could do. If the 'why' is clear, everyone on the team is empowered to make great decisions because they understand the underlying motivation. When the 'why' isn't clear, PMs should invest in internal storytelling to build that clarity.

PPS (Problem, People, System) (Austin Hay)

A mental model for approaching technical requests and operational challenges without jumping straight to software solutions.

How it works: Step 1: Define the Problem (What is the discrete issue?). Step 2: Identify the People (Who needs permission, who needs training, who is impacted?). Step 3: Design the System (Only after steps 1 and 2 are clear, design the tool/automation to solve it).

PSHE Career Growth Framework (EOY Review)

A model for evaluating employee seniority based on how they handle ambiguity, rather than just scope.

How it works: P = Problem, S = Solution, H = How, E = Execution. Junior level: Handed P, S, H; expected to do E. Mid level: Handed P, S; expected to figure out H. Senior level: Handed P; expected to figure out S. Pinnacle level: Expected to identify the P.

Ping Pong Conversation Model (Sam Lessin)

Think of conversations as a ping pong game where you hit the ball back and forth rather than monologuing or interrogating

How it works: Rules: 1) Don't give a 4-minute startup spiel, 2) Ask questions but not 6+ in a row, 3) Always give something in return — a story, an idea, a spark, 4) Match vocabulary to the audience, 5) Have 2-3 ready stories for conversational volleys, 6) Leave them wanting more, 7) Recognize signs when conversation should end

Pretend Learning vs. Actual Learning (Essential reading for product builders—part 1)

Andy Masley's distinction between performative learning (which feels good but yields no retention) and genuine learning (which often feels uncomfortable).

How it works: Key distinctions:

• Pretending to learn feels good. Actual learning often feels bad.
• Many people 'memorize passwords' (rote surface learning) when they think they're learning.
• Reading whole books just for the feeling of being the type of person who reads them, with no retention, is pretend learning.
• People's learning is often limited by insecurities and need for social status reinforcement.
• People are drawn to activities that make them feel high status and repelled from activities that make them feel low status.
• Avoiding playing pretend during valuable learning time is important and psychologically difficult.

Problem, Cause, Solution (Patrick Campbell)

A first-principles thinking model adapted from debate to solve complex business issues.

How it works: 1. Identify the symptom/problem. 2. Brainstorm and list all causes of the problem. 3. Rank the causes in terms of magnitude. 4. Align specific solutions to the highest-magnitude causes.

Product Management Career Ladders (The Best of Lenny’s Newsletter 2023)

A breakdown of the different levels and roles in a PM career, from entry-level to senior leadership.

How it works: A framework mapping the PM career progression and the distinct jobs at each level. Covers what's expected at each rung of the PM career ladder and how roles differ. Listed under the 'Getting promoted' subsection alongside related guides on becoming senior PM and getting promoted.

Product Rationale Framework (The definitive guide to mastering analytical thinking interviews)

Three-part structure for articulating why a product matters before diving into metrics

How it works: Three key areas to cover:

1. Product Context:

   • Describe the product and its maturity level
   • Identify the business model and revenue streams
   • Explain the core problem it solves for users
   • Articulate why this problem matters to the market and the company
   • Explain how the product creates and captures value

2. Market Positioning:

   • Review the competitive landscape
   • Highlight the company's unique advantages relative to peers
   • Show awareness of relevant market trends

3. Company and Product Alignment:

   • Create a concise mission statement capturing the product's core purpose
   • For products within a larger company, establish a clear throughline from company mission to product mission
   • Connect the product's purpose to the parent company's broader vision

Tip: Spend ~1 minute organizing thoughts before sharing. Aim for ~2 minutes of verbal delivery.

Product Sense Interview Framework (5-Step) (The definitive guide to mastering product sense interviews)

A comprehensive five-step framework for structuring a 35-minute product sense interview response, with time allocations for each step

How it works: Step 1: Clear Communication (3-5 min) — Set 2-4 assumptions (role/context, geographic focus, platform/constraints), articulate game plan, check in with interviewer. Step 2: Product Motivation (3-5 min) — Describe product value connected to human needs, provide strategic/competitive context, craft mission statement. Step 3: Segmentation (8-10 min) — Identify ecosystem players, create 3 mutually exclusive segments using behavioral/motivational criteria, prioritize using reach vs. underserved 2x2, develop persona. Step 4: Problem Identification (8-10 min) — Map user journey for persona, identify 3 pain points (distinguishing needs from problems), prioritize using frequency vs. severity 2x2. Step 5: Solution Development (8-10 min) — Brainstorm 3 diverse solutions, prioritize using impact vs. effort 2x2, define v1 scope, identify risks and mitigations. Throughout: Use waypointing (verbal signposts), take thinking pauses before each section, connect decisions back to mission statement.

REST API Request Anatomy (Become a more technical product manager)

Breakdown of the components of a REST API request for both GET and POST types

How it works: GET Request Components:

1. Base URL - The 'home' for all API endpoints (e.g., https://api.airbnb.com)
2. Endpoint - The specific resource you want to access (e.g., /listings)
3. Query Parameter - Additional data passed with the request (e.g., ?location=Toronto)

Example: GET https://api.airbnb.com/listings?location=Toronto

POST Request Components:

1. Base URL + Endpoint (same as GET)
2. Body - Contains data to be processed by the server, typically in JSON format

Example: POST https://api.openai.com/v1/images/generations Body: {"model": "dall-e-3", "prompt": "A cute baby sea otter", "n": 1, "size": "1024x1024"}

Ravi Mehta's Product Competency Framework ('What's Your Shape?') (SEO keywords, career ladders, backlog tools, copywriting, OnlyFans, AMA with Pete Kazanjy and much more)

A framework for assessing and developing PM skills with a rubric for skill levels at each seniority stage.

How it works: Framework helps PMs understand their skill 'shape' — areas of strength and areas for growth. Includes a rubric mapping competency levels to seniority levels (junior through senior/director). Full guide available at ravi-mehta.com/product-manager-roles/. Used for self-assessment, growth planning, and team development.

Role Growth Trajectory Pattern Recognition (New data on the product job market)

Lenny's mental model for interpreting hiring data patterns — identifying overhiring bubbles, corrections, resurgences, steady growth, and structural decline

How it works: Five patterns identified: (1) Overhire-then-correct-then-rebound (UXR): massive hiring spike → reckoning/layoffs → companies realize they over-corrected → rehiring begins. (2) Hypergrowth-then-plateau (PM, Engineering): multi-year growth acceleration → steady state where hires ≈ fires each month. Healthy signal. (3) Steady organic growth (Product Owner): no big spikes, no slowdown. Driven by non-tech companies expanding product investments. (4) Structural decline (Scrum Master): net negative hiring, potentially being absorbed into other roles (e.g. product owner). (5) Accelerating growth outpacing adjacent roles (Growth): growing faster than sales and marketing, potentially signaling industry shift toward product-led growth and capital efficiency.

STAR Method (Preparing for a PM interview)

A framework for structuring answers to behavioral interview questions.

How it works: Used for: Behavioral questions Structure: Situation, Task, Action, Result Reference: https://www.thebalancecareers.com/what-is-the-star-interview-response-technique-2061629

STAR++ Framework (How to pass any first-round interview (even in a terrible talent market))

An enhanced version of the classic STAR method for answering pure behavioral interview questions, adding learnings and future improvements to demonstrate growth mindset

How it works: S — Situation: What was happening at the time (context — strategic, business, project) T — Tasks: What you were responsible for A — Action: What you did to solve the problem and deliver outcomes R — Result: The impact of your actions (quantified, short-term and longer-term strategic)

• (Learnings): What you learned from the experience, including mistakes or blind spots
• (Future Improvements): How you adapted your approach in a subsequent situation based on those learnings

Used for Pure behavioral questions ('Tell me about a time when...') which make up ~70% of all behavioral interview questions.

Seven Core PM Skills (Ranked by Importance) (How to get into product management)

The seven most crucial skills for PMs to build early in their career, ranked in order of importance, with development recommendations for each

How it works: 1. Strategic Thinking — Take any problem and develop a strategy to resolve it. A strategy paired with clear vision is your route from problem to solution. 2. Execution — Getting shit done. Building roadmaps, setting/hitting deadlines, ruthlessly unblocking blockers. A PM good at nothing else but execution is still valuable. 3. Communication — Everything you do is through writing, speaking, and meetings. Communication IS the job. Five channels: emails, docs, meetings, presentations, storytelling. 4. Leadership through Influence — All responsibility without authority. Build trust, make decisions while giving everyone a voice, keep morale up. 5. Data-Informed Decision Making — Make dozens of daily decisions using clear principles and hard data (quantitative and qualitative). Be the hedge against indecision. 6. Building Great Products / Taste — Build instinct for what makes a product great. Balance art and science. Work effectively with other disciplines. 7. Always Being Prepared — The 'I got this' aura. Detail oriented, more prepared than anyone, higher bar than those around you.

Bonus skills to build over time:

• Vision — Determine north star, articulate it, get buy-in
• Business sense — Understand business drivers, build right things in right order
• Obsession with impact — Connect everything to business and customer impact
• Growth mindset — See yourself and others as ever-evolving

Situational Question Response Framework (How to pass any first-round interview (even in a terrible talent market))

A five-step structure for answering hypothetical situational interview questions that test judgment and problem-solving

How it works: Step 1: Ask clarifying questions — gather enough information to create an action plan (e.g., stage of completion, timeline, people affected, scope) Step 2: State your assumptions — explicitly call out what you're assuming (e.g., open dialogue with leadership, data available, team not being disbanded) Step 3: Outline a plan then expand — provide 3-5 major considerations with specific sub-steps for each Step 4: Check back with the interviewer — 'Did I miss any key steps from your perspective, or is there any area you'd like to dive deeper into?' Step 5: Summarize — restate the question prompt and key items from your answer

Used for ~10% of behavioral questions.

Six PM Interview Skill Set Categories (Preparing for a PM interview)

The six skill sets that companies typically evaluate in PM interviews, useful for identifying what a specific company cares about most.

How it works: 1. Product design/sense 2. Execution 3. Strategy 4. Leadership/behavioral 5. Analytical skills 6. Technical skills

Usage: When reviewing common interview questions on Glassdoor/Exponent/PMExercises, categorize questions into these buckets to identify which skill sets the company seems to care most about, then focus your preparation accordingly.

Soft Skills vs. Hard Skills AI Vulnerability Framework (Why PMs are best positioned to thrive in an AI world)

A mental model for assessing which roles and skills are most/least vulnerable to AI replacement based on the soft-hard skill spectrum

How it works: HARD SKILLS (AI is very good at these → more vulnerable):

• Writing code
• Creating designs
• Analyzing data
• Extracting insights from research

SOFT SKILLS (AI will have the toughest time replacing → less vulnerable):

• Communication
• Collaboration
• Coordination
• Influence
• Taste
• Vision
• People management / 'glue' work

Role vulnerability spectrum (most to least vulnerable):

• Pure engineers → highly impacted (math/hard skills)
• Pure designers → significantly impacted (execution vulnerable, taste/empathy protected)
• Product-minded engineers → less impacted (PM skills protect them; over time they look more like PMs)
• PM-like designers → less impacted (taste + business sense)
• Product managers → least impacted (primarily soft skills)
• Founders → same as PMs

Peter Thiel's insight: AI is bad news for people with strong math skills and good for people with strong soft skills.

Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) for PMs (Become a more technical product manager)

The six-phase lifecycle of software development with PM-relevant questions at each stage

How it works: Six phases of SDLC:

1. Plan - What outcome are you trying to achieve? What solution(s) will get you there? What customer problems align to business goals? How will customers know you offer the solution?
2. Design - What will you build? How will it work?
3. Implement - Engineers write the code (using Git, branches, pull requests)
4. Test - Does the code match specifications? Do systems work together as intended? Can customers use the feature to accomplish their goal?
5. Deploy - Move code from local through dev, staging, and production
6. Maintain - Resolve bugs, handle customer support

Phases 3-5 are where PMs typically have the least understanding but the most to gain.

Standard PM Title Sequence Framework (Product management career ladders)

The most common title progressions for PM IC, PM Manager, and single-track paths, derived from analyzing 20+ companies

How it works: Three standard title sequences:

IC Track:

• L3: Associate Product Manager (APM)
• L4-L5: Product Manager
• L6: Senior Product Manager
• L7: Principal Product Manager

Manager Track (branches at L6/Sr. PM):

• L7: Group Product Manager (GPM)
• L8: Director of Product Management
• L9: Senior Director of Product Management
• L10: VP of Product

Single Track (no IC/manager split):

• L3: Associate Product Manager
• L4: Product Manager
• L5: Senior Product Manager
• L6: Group Product Manager
• L7: Director of Product Management
• L8: Senior Director of Product Management
• L9: VP of Product

Key stats: Two-thirds of companies have both IC and manager tracks. When there's a manager track, the switch point is typically at L6 (Sr. PM).

Stocks and Flows (Systems Thinking) (Will Larson)

A mental model for analyzing complex problems by identifying stocks (things that accumulate) and flows (movement between stocks), then comparing the model to reality to find gaps and learning opportunities.

How it works: Steps: 1) Identify stocks (e.g., fish in a lake, candidates in pipeline, people fishing). 2) Identify flows between stocks (e.g., fishing rate, reproduction rate, conversion rates). 3) Model how stocks change over time based on flows. 4) Compare model to real data. 5) Find where model and reality diverge. 6) Investigate and learn from the gaps. 7) Stop modeling and act when model is close enough.

Strategic Reasons for Wanting a Role (How to pass any first-round interview (even in a terrible talent market))

A framework for articulating why you want a specific role in a way that's compelling to employers

How it works: Avoid:

• Work hygiene/professional conveniences (compensation, short commute, remote work)
• Complaints about current/past employer ('better company', 'smarter colleagues', 'kinder boss', 'escaping toxic culture')

Stick to reasons that:

1. Convey what you bring to the role (compelling for the employer)
2. Explain how this role will accelerate your career (strategic reasons)

You don't need 10 reasons. One single, decisive reason will do.

Example: 'I've spent eight years building large-scale, distributed systems for products used by about 100 million users. An exciting and progressive step for me would be to build similar technologies for the billion-user scale.'

Technical PM Skills Pyramid (Getting more technical)

A three-tier pyramid showing the progression for non-technical PMs to become more technical. Start at the bottom and work your way up. Each tier builds on the previous one.

How it works: Tier 1 (Base): Learn the basics — Invest a few hours learning basic terms, technologies, and concepts. Can be done alone or with a buddy.

Tier 2 (Middle): Ask questions — Leverage engineers you work with. Ask them to explain architecture, workflows, and bottlenecks using whiteboard sessions.

Tier 3 (Top/Pinnacle): Build something yourself — Learn to code and build something. This is the pinnacle but optional for most PMs.

Key insight: You don't have to learn to code to see most of the benefits. The majority of ROI comes from tiers 1 and 2.

Ten Truths of Web3 Product Management (A product manager’s guide to web3)

Ten principles that define how product management works differently in web3, serving as a mental model for web3 PMs

How it works: 1. Prioritize execution over vision/strategy — 95/5 execution/vision, not 70/30. Building, marketing, iterating > planning, managing, measuring. 2. Do user research, BD, and marketing yourself — roles are rebundled. You are the user researcher (Discord), data scientist (Dune Analytics), designer, BD manager, PMM, and social media manager in one. 3. Focus on perfecting details rather than expanding features — quality of artwork, ease of setup, liquidity availability matters more than feature count. UX is often a commodity due to open source. 4. Understand users without email addresses, tracking tools, or A/B tests — rely on qualitative feedback, network-wide info (TVL, floor prices), pseudonymous wallet data. Airdrop farming makes measuring utility unclear. 5. Design around L1/L2 blockchain trade-offs — chain selection impacts user adoption, dev time, scalability. E.g., Ethereum L1 gas >$100 vs. Solana/Polygon lower costs. 6. Be extremely careful about smart contract deployment — code is immutable, bugs can't be quickly patched, security vulnerabilities lead to irreversible financial loss. Plan around audits. 7. Cannot rely on proprietary code, trade secrets, or data moats — everything is open source and composable. Anyone can fork your product. Must compete on better products, stronger communities, continuous value. 8. Cannot make all product decisions unilaterally — DAOs govern most protocols. Community votes on roadmap decisions (e.g., Uniswap deploying to Polygon required community vote). 9. Must prioritize user security — every transaction involves funds at stake via web3 wallets. Security may be prioritized over UX. Users cannot audit every smart contract. 10. Regulatory concerns are heightened — fragmented legal environment across IRS, SEC, CFTC. PM must liaise with counsel directly, unlike web2 where legal is more secondary.

The 'No Big Deal' Strength Test (Jules Walter)

A mental model for identifying true strengths and their shadow sides.

How it works: Ask: 'What is something people say you're good at, but you think is not a big deal?' Once identified, map out the 'shadow side' (how this strength acts as a weakness in certain contexts).

The 'Why' Framework for Evaluating Advice (Bret Taylor)

A method for extracting the true value from mentor advice.

How it works: When given a rule or advice, repeatedly ask 'why'. Understand that the advice is likely based on a single past failure or success. By asking why, you extract the underlying context and build a first-principles framework rather than blindly following a rigid rule.

The 10% Strategy Rule for New PMs (The most common pitfalls of new product managers)

A guideline for how much time new PMs should spend on strategy vs. execution

How it works: New PMs should spend no more than 10% of their time on strategy or vision work. The remaining 90%+ should be focused on helping the team execute: shipping, hitting dates, ensuring everyone knows what to work on next. The validation test: ask your teammates where they'd rather you spend time. If they say execution, you're over-indexing on strategy.

The 15% Rule (Carole Robin)

A model for safely stepping outside your comfort zone to build relationships and learn without triggering panic.

How it works: Visualize three concentric circles: Comfort Zone (center), Learning Zone (middle), Danger Zone (outer). Step 15% outside your comfort zone into the learning zone to experiment with disclosure or feedback. Assess the response, establish a new comfort zone, and repeat.

The A-Side and B-Side Career Model (Gina Gotthilf)

A mental model for understanding professional trajectories, contrasting the public highlights with the hidden failures.

How it works: Can be used as a storytelling template. A-side: impressive milestones, funding, scale, meeting presidents. B-side: depression, firings, visa losses, failed experiments, and aimlessness.

The Five PM Pitfalls Framework (The most common pitfalls of new product managers)

A diagnostic framework identifying the five most common anti-patterns new product managers fall into, each with a memorable archetype name, warning signs, and remedies

How it works: Five archetypes on a spectrum:

1. The Coordinator (too passive) — Acts as project manager, not product manager. No point of view, optimizes for team happiness over impact.

   • Signs: Rarely has strong opinions, worries about expressing POV, optimizes for team happiness, doesn't maintain high bar.
   • Fix: Force yourself to always have a point of view on every product decision.

2. The Dictator (too controlling) — Embraces 'mini-CEO' role, micro-manages everything, treats team as executors.

   • Signs: Overly detailed specs with no room for discussion, presents fully baked plans without genuine interest in feedback, frustrated by disagreement, rarely lets others get their way.
   • Fix: Lead through trust, collaboration, and influence. Think team captain, not CEO. Leave space for feedback and contribution.

3. The Dreamer (too strategic) — Spends most time on strategy/vision at the expense of execution.

   • Signs: Frequent misalignment, team doesn't know what to work on next, vague specs that block design/engineering, spending >10% of time on strategy/vision.
   • Fix: Ask teammates where they'd rather you spend time. Prioritize execution first; earn the right to do strategy.

4. The Feature Factory (too output-focused) — Equates shipping volume with success, lacks strategic direction.

   • Signs: Translates every customer request into a feature, no written public product strategy, team doesn't know the strategy, obsessed with deadlines, KPIs about features shipped not business metrics.
   • Fix: Articulate a strategy, get buy-in, ensure all projects support it. Success = (1) meaningful business impact + (2) high ROI vs. alternatives + (3) moves closer to strategy.

5. The Busted Umbrella (too permeable) — Fails to shield team from distractions, ad hoc requests, exec whims.

   • Signs: Teammates pinged directly by other PMs/managers/leaders, doesn't filter requests, doesn't push back on asks, teammates don't see value in having a PM.
   • Fix: Route external questions through you, handle things yourself when possible, help both sides see you as a valuable filter.

The Magic Loop (Ethan Evans 2.0, The Best of Lenny’s Newsletter—2024 Edition)

A 5-step process for career growth by aligning your help with your manager's needs and your own goals.

How it works: Referenced as a framework for rapid career growth. A recurring loop where you: 1) Do great work, 2) Build a reputation, 3) Get more opportunities, 4) Gain more skills, which feeds back into doing great work at a higher level.

The PM Learning Loop (Fareed Mosavat)

A four-step loop for career acceleration and skill development.

How it works: 1. Execute (solve known problems with known solutions). 2. Generalize (extract mental models and hypotheses applicable to other products). 3. Communicate (share learnings to build trust). 4. Scale (take on bigger unknowns and broader scope).

The PMwheel (Petra Wille)

An assessment framework to evaluate a product manager's skills across different competencies.

How it works: Divides PM skills into 8 buckets: understand underlying problems, find solutions, planning, get it done, listen and learn, team, personal growth, and agile. Each bucket contains at least 15 framing questions for self and manager assessment.

The Rise of the IC Career Path (How much do U.S. product managers really make?)

A thesis that senior IC roles are increasingly valued and compensated competitively with management, supported by data on salary, layoff trends, and organizational flattening

How it works: Key data points supporting this thesis:

1. Senior ICs earn median $187,500 vs. managers at $162,500 — a $26,920 premium for staying IC
2. Recent layoffs disproportionately affected middle managers, flattening organizations
3. Mark Zuckerberg (2023): employees need to 'get back to making things' — many companies followed suit
4. Senior ICs at private companies (Series C+) earn in 75th percentile or higher
5. Minimal difference between private (33.44%) and public (36%) companies in senior ICs earning higher wages
6. The salary gap is explained by companies increasingly recognizing ICs who drive substantial impact

Implications for ICs: You don't need to move into management to increase compensation. Leverage your domain expertise. Advocate for differentiated senior IC titles at your company.

Implications for employers: Offer competitive salaries and clear growth paths for ICs to attract and retain top talent.

The Shit Umbrella Concept (The most common pitfalls of new product managers)

A mental model for the PM's role as a protective filter between the team and external distractions

How it works: The PM acts as a 'shit umbrella' for their team, shielding makers (engineers, designers) from:

• Time-sucking questions from other teams
• Unnecessary drama
• Whims of executives
• Ad hoc asks and 'quick' questions that break flow

Implementation:

1. Encourage people outside the team to contact you with questions before going to the team directly
2. Encourage teammates to direct incoming questions to you
3. Help both sides see you can get them what they want if they work through you
4. When you can handle something yourself vs. bothering your team, handle it
5. Balance: protect, but don't withhold information

Key insight: 'The more shit you handle, the more valuable you become to your team.'

The Show Up Framework (Inspiration for the year ahead)

A progressive framework for success that compounds simple behaviors into outsized outcomes. Shared by Christian Idiodi from his father's advice.

How it works: Step 1: Show up → You're ahead of 80% of people. Step 2: Show up on time → You're ahead of 85% of people. Step 3: Show up on time with a plan → You're ahead of 90% of people. Step 4: Put the plan into action with a smile → You probably will have a great chance of success. Repeat this across every aspect of your life for compounding results.

The Super-IC PM Model (Product manager is an unfair role. So work unfairly.)

Lenny's framing of the future of product management as individual contributor PMs who leverage AI tools and productivity systems for outsized impact.

How it works: Core thesis: In the 'great flattening' of tech, rising expectations mean fewer ICs own larger swaths of the product. PMs who thrive will be those who:

1. Build their own systems, methodologies, and tools
2. Make the job work for them, not the other way around
3. Leverage AI tools for writing and productivity
4. Stay IC by choice but achieve impact beyond what many believe ICs can achieve
5. Discover their own 'hacks' by questioning their team's workday norms

Key insight: The 'unfairness' of the PM role—immense responsibility and radical adaptability—is actually a feature, not a bug. It's why the role is best positioned to thrive in an AI world.

The Three Es of Career Growth (Paige Costello)

A mental model for intentional career development beyond just formal education.

How it works: 1. Experience: Doing the thing firsthand. 2. Exposure: Being in the room and observing how leaders handle situations. 3. Education: Reading, training, or getting direct advice/coaching.

Theoretical Question Response Framework (How to pass any first-round interview (even in a terrible talent market))

A three-part structure for answering theoretical behavioral questions that ask about your general approach to a core job function

How it works: Step 1: Outline your general approach (3-5 elements) — give the interviewer a roadmap Step 2: Describe your approach for each element in detail — include specific tactics and sub-steps Step 3: End with an example using STAR that exemplifies your use of this framework

Used for ~20% of behavioral questions. Example format shown with 'How do you give feedback as a manager?' question using Behavior/Messaging/Alignment framework with STAR example.

Three Core Differences of Web3 PM vs Web2 PM (A product manager’s guide to web3)

A framework defining how the PM role fundamentally changes in web3 across three dimensions

How it works: Web3 PM is different in three primary ways:

1. MORE VERSATILE: PMs also own incentives, partnerships, and community to find product-market fit. Requires flexible skill set and ability to learn quickly.
2. MORE ART THAN SCIENCE: Very little user data and A/B testing given web3 values and small user bases. Requires more intuition and ability to make decisions in high-ambiguity environments.
3. MORE PUBLIC: Discussions about decisions happen in Discord, Crypto Twitter, and public Snapshot proposals. Requires effectiveness at community engagement rather than purely analytical and influential behind closed doors.

Three Core Jobs of a Product Manager (What is product management)

A framework breaking the PM role into three day-to-day responsibilities, all serving the ultimate goal of delivering impact.

How it works: 1. Shape the product — Harness insights from customers, stakeholders, and data to prioritize and build a product that will have the most impact on the business. 2. Ship the product — Ship high-quality product on time and free of surprises. 3. Synchronize the people — Align all stakeholders around one vision, strategy, goal, roadmap, and timeline to avoid wasted time and effort.

All three are a means to delivering impact.

Three Criteria for Successful Shipping (The most common pitfalls of new product managers)

A simple three-part test for whether shipped work actually constitutes success, used to counter 'feature factory' thinking

How it works: Shipping is only successful if the work:

1. Has meaningful impact on the business (not just output)
2. Has high ROI relative to other opportunities (opportunity cost considered)
3. Moves you closer to achieving your strategy (strategically aligned)

If any of the three is missing, you may be running a feature factory.

Three Differentiators of Senior PMs (Becoming a senior Product Manager)

A framework identifying the three most important skills that differentiate senior PMs from regular PMs, used to focus career development efforts.

How it works: The three differentiators are:

1. Strategy — A senior PM is responsible for developing and evangelizing a strategy that leads to meaningful customer and business success. They paint an inspiring future and figure out the best path to get there. They prioritize work based on long-term vision rather than incremental value.
2. Autonomy — Senior PMs are able to run a team independently. They can work with stakeholders, resolve conflicts, and ship successful products without needing their manager to guide them. They know when to question direction rather than treating it as fixed.
3. Nuance — Senior PMs recognize decisions where the right answer is 'it depends' and reason through them in a structured way. They grapple with complex tradeoffs, understand goals and constraints across departments, and can defend recommendations without becoming defensive.

Three Jobs of Product Management (How AI will impact product management)

Lenny's structural framework dividing the PM role into three core jobs, each containing specific tasks and skills.

How it works: The PM role consists of three jobs:

1. Shape the product — Determine/influence what your team builds. This is where PM is most different from project manager or product owner, and where you bring the most value.
2. Ship the product — Help your team and org ship high-quality products on time and free of surprises.
3. Sync the people — Keep stakeholders aligned around a vision, strategy, goal, roadmap, and timelines. Involves lots of soft skills.

Three Jobs of a Product Manager (When to hire your first product manager, When they hired their first PM)

A framework defining the three core responsibilities that must be fulfilled by someone on every product team, whether or not a dedicated PM exists

How it works: 1. Shape the product: Harness insights from customers, stakeholders, and data to prioritize and build a product that will have optimal impact on the business. 2. Ship the product: Ship high-quality product on time and free of surprises. 3. Synchronize the people: Align all stakeholders around one vision, strategy, goal, roadmap, and timeline to avoid wasted time and effort.

Three Mindset Traps That Stall PM Careers (Vikrama Dhiman)

Three mindset shifts that commonly impede mid-to-senior PM career growth, with diagnostic questions and remedies

How it works: Trap 1 - Focus on uncontrollables: As PMs grow, they shift from 'what can I do/learn' to 'why isn't the org doing this for me?' Fix: Return focus to three W's and eight skill axes. Trap 2 - Slowing rate of change: Early career has rapid skill acquisition; mid-career PMs avoid new challenges. Fix: Benchmark against industry best (not just internal peers) — your self-assessed 4/5 becomes 2/5, reigniting hunger to improve. Consider new teams or companies as last resort. Trap 3 - Limiting identity stories: Labels like 'high agency PM' or 'collaborative PM' become anti-signals excusing weaknesses (brashness, indecisiveness). Fix: Identify and correct these stories; adopt 'learner' as an enabling identity. Vikrama shifted from 'high agency' to 'mindful agency.'

Three Questions to Evaluate IC PM Performance (How to know if you're doing a good job as a product manager)

A prioritized three-question framework for product managers to self-assess whether they're doing a good job, usable for day-to-day self-evaluation or manager evaluation

How it works: Three questions in priority order:

1. Is your team delivering business impact?

   • Accelerating the company's growth
   • Making internal teams more efficient
   • Helping the sales team close more deals
   • Making important customers happier
   • Launching an important product

2. Are YOU personally contributing to the team's success?

   • Informed the product strategy and vision
   • Contributed great ideas
   • Uncovered unique customer insights
   • Enabled the team to operate like a well-oiled machine
   • Pushed the company and team to prioritize the correct work

3. Do stakeholders regard you highly?

   • Are you seen as a leader?
   • Do engineers want to be on your team?
   • Do people want to give you more scope?
   • Target: ~80% love you, 5-10% feel uneasy, occasionally a few people are like WTF

Three Types of PM Work (Should I become a product manager)

A framework that categorizes all product manager activities into three buckets: Shaping the Product, Shipping the Product, and Synchronizing the People. Useful for understanding the PM role or structuring how you allocate your time.

How it works: 1. Shaping the Product: a. Talking to customers, understanding their needs and pain points b. Talking to internal stakeholders, understanding what's important to them c. Reviewing the latest data and user research, crafting new questions to answer through data and research d. Running brainstorms to capture new ideas e. Doing competitive analysis f. Giving design/UX feedback g. Developing a strategy and vision for your product h. Writing and reviewing 1-Pagers/PRDs

1. Shipping the Product: a. Helping estimate timelines and set deadlines b. Aligning the team around timelines c. Checking-in with team members to understand what's behind, and ahead of, schedule d. Helping make tradeoff decisions, when planning and later when behind schedule e. Unblocking your team members by helping decisions get made, getting everyone the resources they need, and making sure each team member is clear on their priorities f. Doing quality assurance, catching and reporting bugs g. Coordinating a launch plan

2. Synchronizing the People: a. Aligning your team around a single set of priorities b. Aligning your team around a clear strategy and vision c. Aligning your team around goals and KPIs d. Getting (and maintaining) buy-in on your priorities, strategy, and vision from external stakeholders e. Communicating project status to your team, to external stakeholders, and to the company at large f. Building relationships with team members and stakeholders g. Organizing reviews, check-ins, and all-hands

Three W's Career Growth Framework (Vikrama Dhiman)

A PM career growth framework with three dimensions: What you produce (outputs → outcomes → direction), What you bring to the table (impact on impact through artifacts), and What your operating model is (communication, collaboration, organizational skills, community)

How it works: W1 - What you produce: Start with outputs (shipping, analyzing, contributing), progress to outcomes (owning product goals), then direction (strategy/leadership). Never abandon outputs even at senior levels. W2 - What you bring to the table: Quality of PRDs, product notes, strategy docs, design briefs, experiment designs, JIRA stories, sprint planning docs. Demonstrates skill across four pillars: data/metrics, design/research, technology, strategy. W3 - What's your operating model: Communication, collaboration, organizational skills, community. Three tenets: (1) Raise difficult issues without being difficult to work with, (2) Bring out important topics without drawing importance to yourself, (3) Get decisions made without making all decisions yourself.

Three-Part PM Interview Preparation Process (Preparing for a PM interview)

Lenny's overarching framework for preparing for a PM interview, organized into three sequential phases: Research, Practice, and Study — with Practice deliberately placed before Study.

How it works: Phase 1: Research

• Use the product and form opinions on improvements, priorities, and future direction
• Research the company: mission, vision, recent launches, competitors, future direction
• Find someone at the company for insider insight
• Review common interview questions on Glassdoor, Exponent, PMExercises
• Identify skill sets the company values: Product design/sense, Execution, Strategy, Leadership/behavioral, Analytical skills, Technical skills

Phase 2: Practice (do this BEFORE deep studying)

• Find PMs for mock interviews (friends or via Exponent, PMExercises, IGotAnOffer, Lewis C. Lin's community)
• Watch mock interview videos on YouTube (Exponent, Product Alliance, RocketBlocks, Diego Granados)
• Technique: Pause video at the question, answer yourself, then watch the answer
• Consider getting an interview coach (IGotAnOffer, Exponent, RocketBlocks, Product Alliance, PMExercises)

Phase 3: Study

• Learn frameworks (CIRCLES, STAR, DIGS, AARM, RICE, Broad then deep)
• Read PM interview books (Cracking the PM Interview, Decode and Conquer)
• Read up on core PM skills (prioritization, strategy, product sense)
• Prepare stories for common behavioral questions

Three-Step Problem-Solving Framework (A Three-Step Framework For Solving Problems 👌)

A three-step framework for ensuring product teams solve the right problem, from initial crystallization through ongoing alignment during execution.

How it works: Step 1: Crystallize the problem you are solving

• Answer six questions: Description, Problem, Why, Success, Audience, What
• Use the 1-Pager template
• Single person takes first pass (usually PM)

Step 2: Align on the problem with your team and stakeholders

1. Take a crack at Step 1
2. Share draft with entire team involved in the project; ask for feedback (comments, email, or in person); integrate feedback and re-share
3. If feedback is converging, great. If not, pull everyone together to discuss disagreements in person
4. Once team is aligned, share with stakeholders — critical that team and judges of success are aligned before deep design/eng work
5. Hold in-person kickoff: review problem statement, answer questions, ensure team has what they need

Step 3: Keep coming back to the problem

1. In every design review, start by reviewing the problem statement. If unclear, ask 'What problem are we trying to solve?'
2. In every progress update to stakeholders, review the problem statement to maintain alignment
3. Before finalizing designs, ask: 'Am I confident this will solve the problem we set out to solve?'

Three-Tier Application Architecture (Become a more technical product manager)

The foundational model for understanding how almost every software product is built, consisting of three parts that communicate through APIs

How it works: Every software product is built with three parts:

1. Client - Your website or app used by the end user
2. Server - Processes requests from the client
3. Database - Permanent storage of data

The client communicates with the server through an API (Application Programming Interface). The flow is: Client sends request → Server processes request → Database returns data → Server returns response to Client.

Top 1% PM Attributes (Ian McAllister)

A comprehensive list of skills that separate average product managers from the top 1%.

How it works: Attributes include: Think big, communicate, simplify, prioritize, forecast and measure, execute, understand technical trade-offs, understand good design, write effective copy, earn trust, dig for data, push back effectively, adapt to change, and driven by impact.

Top 10 Jobs of a Product Manager (Ranked by Frequency) (Skills PMs need to build)

A ranked list of the 10 most important PM skills based on analysis of 20+ company career ladders, with percentage of companies that highlight each skill

How it works: 1. Leadership (85% of companies) - Inspiring teams, servant leadership, motivating engineers, spreading best practices, mentoring PMs 2. Execution (75%) - Team alignment on vision/goals, high-quality delivery, clear priorities/trade-offs, ownership of failures, creative scoping 3. Strategy (75%) - Organizing ambiguous product spaces, connecting dots across pillars/industries/trends, setting strategies, focusing teams on important problems 4. Communication (60%+) - Verbal and written skills, choosing right venue/formality, communicating to executives, structuring storylines across media 5. Deliver Impact - Hitting aggressive goals that move metrics, shipping projects with quantifiable impact on KPIs, step function improvements 6. Leverage Customer Insights and Data (~50%) - Talking to customers, deriving insights from data, anchoring decisions in data, comprehensive research plans 7. Planning and Goal Setting (~50%) - Business planning, OKRs and roadmap definition, release goals, engaging design/engineering as stakeholders, measurable goals 8. Collaboration (~40%) - Harmonizing differences of opinion, handling conflict with maturity, negotiating ambiguous situations, identifying dependencies 9. Vision (~40%) - Crafting broad long-term vision, 1-2 year vision and strategy, aligning vision with company goals 10. Ownership (~25%) - No excuses, accountable and positive in all conditions, taking responsibility for outcomes

Other attributes mentioned <25% of the time: technical depth, decision-making and decisiveness, culture and values, mindset, hiring, problem-solving, empathy, velocity accelerant, influence, organizational design, competitive insight

Updated PM Role Definition (Why PMs are best positioned to thrive in an AI world)

Lenny's evolved definition of the product manager role that explicitly includes AI as a resource to marshal alongside human team members

How it works: Old definition: 'Your job as a PM is to deliver business impact by marshaling the resources of your team to identify and solve the most impactful customer problems.'

Updated definition: 'Your job as a PM is to deliver business impact by marshaling the resources of your team (both human and AI) to identify and solve the most impactful customer problems.'

Key shift: The most valued skill set will increasingly shift from building to (1) knowing what to build, (2) giving clear instructions for what to build, and (3) having the taste to know if what you've created is great.

Users Are Lazy / Thermodynamic Adoption Model (Sam Schillace)

Product adoption follows physics-like rules: adoption speed is proportional to value added, and total user effort (discovery + learning + habit-building + friction) must be dramatically less than the resulting life improvement — ideally 10X better.

How it works: Principles: 1) Users only care about making their life easier — not your logo, friendliness, or technical elegance. 2) A little value = slow adoption; a lot of value = explosive adoption (ChatGPT vs. mediocre AI tools). 3) Total effort calculation includes: hearing about it, remembering it, learning it, building the habit, plus any onboarding friction. 4) Value delivered must exceed total effort by at least 2X, ideally 10X. 5) Convenience always wins. Application: Minimize friction everywhere, especially onboarding. You have 15-30 seconds to show value.

Virtue From Error (Sam Schillace)

Sam's personal motto for creative work and career: expect to make mistakes constantly, then find ways to turn those mistakes into virtues or unexpected discoveries.

How it works: Core principle: You're going to fail and make mistakes constantly. The skill is turning errors into discoveries or virtues. Application: In product building, failed experiments often reveal interesting patterns (e.g., collaboration in Google Docs was discovered accidentally). In career: being wrong about something can reveal new directions. Physical example: Sam's handmade instrument has 'cat eyes' that are actually knot holes he had to carve out — error became design feature.

Web3 PM Definition (A product manager’s guide to web3)

One-line universal definition of the web3 PM role

How it works: Web3 PMs are responsible for the success of communities rather than increasing acquisition, engagement, or revenue. 'Hearts over charts.' If the community (NFT creators, liquidity providers, software developers) is not successful, you are NGMI. Community first.

Web3 PM Skill Shift Matrix (A product manager’s guide to web3)

Comparison of which PM skills matter more vs less in web3 compared to web2

How it works: SKILLS THAT MATTER LESS IN WEB3:

• Communication and influence (core to web2 PM career progression)
• Persuasion and coordination behind closed doors
• Setting long-term vision documents
• Writing good emails
• A/B testing and data analysis
• Career ladder navigation and performance reviews

SKILLS THAT MATTER MORE IN WEB3:

• Execution speed (95/5 execution/vision)
• Community engagement on Discord and Crypto Twitter
• Making viral memes
• On-chain data analysis (Dune Analytics)
• Understanding tokenomics and cryptoeconomics
• Business development and partnership building
• User security thinking
• Regulatory awareness
• Public communication (tweeting, posting)
• Qualitative intuition with minimal data
• Understanding blockchain infrastructure trade-offs

Wide Frame of Reference Perspective Check (How a traumatic brain injury made me a better PM—and person)

A bi-directional perspective-taking tool for assessing progress during setbacks

How it works: Core question (from therapist): 'How wide is your frame of reference?'

When hitting a wall on a project, career goal, or personal improvement:

Step 1: Notice that you may be defaulting to a narrow view (days or weeks) Step 2: Zoom out to a wider frame — months or years Step 3: Assess the overall trend line

Two possible outcomes: A) The wider view reveals you ARE progressing despite recent setbacks → Stay the course, the trend line is positive B) The wider view reveals you're truly stuck and not progressing → Wake-up call to take stronger actions and make a difficult change

Visual mental model: Success is a squiggly chaotic line, not a straight line. The path goes all over the place before eventually heading up and to the right.

Templates

30-Day 'Collaborate with AI' Program (How to become a supermanager with AI)

A hands-on, daily micro-assignment program designed to teach effective AI collaboration in just a few minutes each day while building habits of iterative prompting.

How it works: Full program available as a Google Sheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1zJ4rbi9YcQuGqGxc6-AQD0-44oT9l4Eyono0AdpgJbA/edit?gid=0#gid=0. Three example micro-assignments included: (1) Get better outputs by providing context — 6-step vacation planning exercise that teaches context-giving, using adjective feedback ('too generic, expensive, touristy'), and the '100x more specific' technique. (2) Provide colleagues with the best answer — 5-step exercise using an engineer's latency question, teaching how to break down questions, arrive at answers, improve them, fact-check, and anticipate objections. (3) Create a growth plan for yourself — 5-step exercise to create an actionable personalized growth plan with specific deliverables and manager feedback questions.

AI-Assisted Personal Growth Plan Creator (How to become a supermanager with AI)

A 5-step prompt sequence for creating an actionable, personalized growth plan with specific deliverables.

How it works: Step 1: Prompt 'I am a [product manager] focused on [domain]. I would like to improve my [strategic thinking] over the next three months. What specific skills or behaviors will help me do this while making a tangible impact in my role?' Step 2: Prompt 'Suggest 3 specific deliverables I could work on over the next month to practice these skills in a way that adds value to [my company].' Step 3: Prompt 'Make this 100x more specific.' Step 4: Choose one deliverable and prompt 'Is there a more lightweight way to approach [idea] so it doesn't become a big project that distracts me from short-term execution?' Step 5: Prompt 'Can you suggest questions I could ask my manager to get feedback on my progress along the way?'

Analytical Thinking Interview Template (Google Spreadsheet) (The definitive guide to mastering analytical thinking interviews)

A copyable spreadsheet template to work through practice AT interview questions using the five-step framework

How it works: Google Spreadsheet template available at: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/13rY2E48My2ze8NMzdDRPqVF4T7UFfNz61SZT05cKex8/edit?gid=217460033#gid=217460033

Structured with sections for:

1. Assumptions and game plan
2. Product rationale (product context, market positioning, company-product alignment)
3. Metric framework (ecosystem players, value propositions, key actions, metrics with time frames, NSM, guardrails)
4. Goal-setting (ecosystem player selection, user journey, opportunity scoring on impact and ability to influence)
5. Tradeoff evaluation (options, pros/cons, decision, rationale, conditions for changing mind)

Answer Engineering Exercise for Colleague Questions (How to become a supermanager with AI)

A 5-step prompt sequence for using AI to break down a question, arrive at the best answer, improve it, fact-check it, and anticipate objections.

How it works: Step 1: Prompt 'I am a product manager who just received this question from an engineer and I want to ensure I come up with the best possible answer in the next 3 minutes. Provide a step-by-step guide for how I should determine the answer: [paste question].' Example question: 'What's the acceptable latency threshold for [feature], and what's our plan if latency increases during peak usage times?' Step 2: Prompt 'Can you suggest an initial target based on similar features or benchmarks? Show your work so I can validate it.' Step 3: Prompt 'Give me a better answer, and explain why it's better.' Step 4: Prompt 'I want to confirm that everything here is accurate on my own. How can I do that?' Step 5: Prompt 'Imagine you are the engineer who sent me this question. What pushback might you have to this response?'

Career Ladder Templates Collection (Product management career ladders)

A set of career ladder templates that can be used as starting points for building your own PM career ladder

How it works: Google Sheet URL: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1fEY8JnLhvjci1F-twKOFK7gh8Z0SwXCdMxOxXrXZEhw/edit#gid=1925149295 — Provides fillable templates for structuring PM career ladders.

Career Spec (Deb Liu)

A document used to plan your career with the same rigor as a product roadmap.

How it works: Includes defining a 5-year destination, specific milestones, skills to acquire, 'features' of the career you want, and clear metrics for success.

Chain-of-Thought Prompt Template (Five proven prompt engineering techniques (and a few more-advanced tactics))

A template for prompting AI to break down complex problems into step-by-step reasoning

How it works: Template: "Think this through step-by-step: [describe problem]."

Example: "Think this through step-by-step: We need to decide whether to prioritize feature A (advanced reporting) or feature B (integration with a popular third-party tool) for our next sprint. Consider development time, potential user impact, strategic alignment with our product roadmap, and revenue potential for each feature."

Note: Mike recommends separating planning as its own step so you can vet the plan before proceeding, even though models like o1-preview have this built in.

Source paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.11903

Cognitive Reframes for Asking for Help (On asking for help (even when you really don’t want to))

Four before/after narrative shifts to move from fear-based to possibility-oriented thinking about asking for help.

How it works: Use these reframes when fear is blocking you:

1. 'Asking for help makes me a burden' → 'People really appreciate being asked and valued for their expertise.'
2. 'Asking for help makes me look weak or incompetent' → 'Demonstrating that I know what I don't know is a key leadership competence.'
3. 'People will think less of me if I ask for help' → 'People respect and appreciate my vulnerability, and expressing my needs will allow them to do the same.'
4. 'My boss will be annoyed that I can't do it alone' → 'Leaders want my work to succeed and need to know when that's at risk.'

Context-Giving Exercise for Better AI Outputs (How to become a supermanager with AI)

A 6-step prompt sequence that teaches how providing detailed context dramatically improves AI output quality.

How it works: Step 1: Prompt 'Help me plan an upcoming vacation. What information can I give you that would be the most helpful?' Step 2: Answer the AI's follow-up questions and observe the answers. Step 3: Prompt 'Let me tell you about some of the best vacations I've ever had.' Add specific context like hotel/restaurant names. Step 4: Prompt 'Your suggestions are too _____, make them more _____.' Use adjectives: too generic, expensive, touristy, predictable, etc. Notice how output changes. Step 5: Prompt 'Let's go with [destination]. Ask me three questions that will allow you to build the perfect itinerary for me.' Step 6: Prompt 'Make this 100x more specific.' Notice how output changes.

Few-Shot Learning Prompt Template (Five proven prompt engineering techniques (and a few more-advanced tactics))

A template for providing examples of desired output before asking AI to generate similar content

How it works: Template: "Here are some examples of [task]. Generate a [task] for [new context]."

Example: "Here are some examples of user stories from our backlog:

• As a user, I want to reset my password so that I can regain access to my account if I forget it.
• As an admin, I want to view user activity logs so that I can monitor for suspicious behavior. Generate a user story for adding a new 'dark mode' feature to our mobile app."

Source paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.14165

Growth-Aligned Help Request Scripts (The Magic Loop)

Two scripts for requesting work that advances your career goals — one for simple goals, one for complex goals like promotion

How it works: For simple goals (learning a skill or technology): 'Is there a way I could help you out while working with [piece of technology or specific skill] so that I can learn and improve?'

For complex goals (promotion, major career change): Do NOT ask: 'Is there a way I can help so that I can be promoted?' Instead ask: 'One day I'd like to be promoted. Could I help out in a way that you think would develop me toward that goal?'

Key difference: Complex goals require framing as a long-term development journey rather than a single transactional request.

Interviewer Check-In Script After Ecosystem Player Selection (The definitive guide to mastering product sense interviews)

A specific phrase to use after selecting an ecosystem player, before diving into segmentation

How it works: Script: 'I'd like to focus on [chosen ecosystem player] for these reasons [brief rationale]. Before I dive into defining segments within this group, I want to pause to make sure this line of thinking is making sense?'

Job Description Mirroring Table (How to pass any first-round interview (even in a terrible talent market))

A two-column spreadsheet template for mapping job description keywords to your own experience, enabling you to use the employer's language in interviews

How it works: Google Sheets template available at: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/16rMkstp5LsN99TEGALCBE4_bM7KqxpOW35swrIRzyD8/copy

Process:

1. Paste the job description into a doc
2. Highlight keywords and concepts
3. Create a table with one row per keyword/concept
4. Left column: keyword/concept from JD (e.g., 'on-call', 'multi-datacenter system', 'automation', 'resolved major technical issues')
5. Right column: your matching experience (e.g., 'I maintained a production service...', 'Our service was deployed in 3 data centers...', 'I wrote scripts to...', 'I diagnosed and fixed a critical...')
6. Read before interview and use their language when describing your experience

Lenny's Favorite Product Management Templates (The Best of Lenny’s Newsletter 2023)

A curated collection of PM templates that is one of the most popular posts of all time.

How it works: A comprehensive collection of Lenny's favorite product management templates, marked as one of the top 15 most popular posts of all time (🎖️). Covers templates for PRDs, roadmaps, OKRs, strategy documents, and other core PM artifacts. Full template collection available in the linked post.

Major Project Memory Document (How to pass any first-round interview (even in a terrible talent market))

A structured template for documenting 3-5 major career projects in deep detail for interview recall

How it works: For each of 3-5 projects, document:

• Project name and timeframe
• Business/strategic context
• Your role and responsibilities
• Team size and composition
• Key stakeholders
• Challenges and obstacles
• Specific actions you took
• Quantified results (short-term and long-term)
• What you learned
• How you applied learnings later

Selection criteria:

• Large in scope: important to business, strategic, involves lots of stakeholders, significant revenue or user impact
• Complex: in terms of stakeholders, core team, tech, timeline, resources
• Recent: ideally past 2-4 years (memories experience 'neural bit rot' and recent projects are likely larger/more significant)

First-time documentation: 1-2 hours. Refresh for additional interviews: 30 minutes.

My Favorite Product Management Templates (The Best of Lenny’s Newsletter—2024 Edition)

A curated collection of templates for common PM work

How it works: A collection of Lenny's favorite PM templates covering common product management documents and workflows. Referenced as a dedicated post with multiple downloadable/reusable templates.

New Role Documentation Pair (How to make an impact in your first 90 days)

Two documents to create immediately after joining a new company to accelerate learning and alignment

How it works: Document 1: Domain Mind Map

• Map the inputs and outputs of the business equation
• Purpose: Helps you learn the space by dissecting it, gives documentation win to the team
• Usage: Pin existing projects to this map and plan for the future

Document 2: Team Priorities Document

• Clear document about the highest priorities for the team
• Forces you to understand the space, pull information from people's heads, and synthesize well
• Purpose: Align the team, verify your understanding, clarify thinking, ensure everyone is rowing in the same direction
• Key insight: Often people are too busy to write such a document, making it a valuable contribution

Outcome-Focused Resume Bullet (Melissa Perri)

A before-and-after template for rewriting process-heavy Product Owner resume bullets into outcome-focused Product Manager bullets.

How it works: BAD: 'I prioritized the backlog, worked with developers to break down work, and wrote user stories.' GOOD: 'I led the work around the login API to enhance security. I interviewed users, worked with compliance, and successfully met regulatory requirements, saving the bank millions without disrupting service for 4 million customers.'

PM Career Ladder Comparison Spreadsheet (Product management career ladders)

A Google Sheets document compiling PM career ladders from 20+ large companies, showing titles at each level, attributes/competencies evaluated, and IC vs. manager track structures

How it works: Google Sheet URL: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1F1Y3YtjsvAJUZMqS-rK0LGQGg7eHYubq9KqedPwLCDE/edit — Contains columns for company name, level numbers, IC titles, manager titles, competencies/attributes evaluated, and where IC/manager tracks diverge. Covers 20+ large tech companies.

Paths to Power Development Plan (Jeffrey Pfeffer)

A self-reflection and goal-setting assignment used in the Stanford GSB class.

How it works: 1. Define what success looks like at the end of 10 weeks. 2. Rate yourself on the 7 attributes of power (energy, focus, tolerating conflict, etc.). 3. Identify strengths and weaknesses. 4. Create a specific plan to build weak skills. 5. Write and refine a personal brand statement.

Personal OS / README (Donna Lichaw)

A document or communication method used to share your work styles, processing habits, and how best to collaborate with you.

How it works: Includes sections for: How I process information (e.g., needing a few hours to think), my communication style, great ways to work with me, and how I prefer to work with you.

Personal Operating Manual (Alisa Cohn)

A document to share individual working styles with team members.

How it works: Questions to answer: 1. What communication style do you like best? 2. How do you like to work (blocks vs meetings)? 3. Best way to reach you for emergencies? 4. What are your pet peeves? 5. How can I get a gold star with you? 6. What's your delegation style?

Post-It Motto Practice for the New Year (Inspiration for the year ahead)

A simple ritual Lenny recommends for applying the mottos in this newsletter to daily work life.

How it works: Step 1: Read through the collection of 19 mottos. Step 2: Pick one that strikes a chord with you personally. Step 3: Write it on a post-it note. Step 4: Place the post-it on your monitor (or somewhere you'll see it daily, like Katie Dill's jewelry box). Step 5: The next time you find yourself in a place of stress or indecision, come back to it. Step 6: If the post-it falls off, rewrite it (as Paul Adams does). Result: 'If you do this one thing today, your 2024 will already be brighter.'

Product Sense Interview Game Plan Script (The definitive guide to mastering product sense interviews)

An exact script candidates should use to open any product sense interview, adaptable to any question type

How it works: Script: 'Before I dive in, I'd like to walk you through my plan for our time together: (1) I'll start by describing the product/experience and why it matters. (2) Then I'll break down the target audience and define a segment to focus on. (3) From there, I'll identify key problems for that segment and prioritize one. (4) I'll then brainstorm solutions and pick one. (5) If we have time, I'd love to describe a v1 implementation of that solution. Does this plan sound good to you?'

Role-Playing Prompt Template (Five proven prompt engineering techniques (and a few more-advanced tactics))

A fill-in-the-blank template for instructing AI to assume an expert persona for domain-specific tasks

How it works: Template: "You are an expert in [field] known for [key adjective]. Help me [task]."

Example: "You are an expert software architect known for bridging the gap between product vision and technical implementation. Help me prepare talking points for a meeting with our engineering team about the technical feasibility of our new AI-powered recommendation engine."

Source paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.16367

Second Brain Personality Prompt Template (How to build your PM second brain with ChatGPT)

A sample prompt to generate custom instructions for your ChatGPT Project's personality, designed to create a sharp PM thought partner

How it works: Prompt to use in a new ChatGPT chat (not the Project itself):

"I'm a [Your Role] working on [Your Focus Area]. I'm building a ChatGPT Project to be my thought partner, something that'll work with me on my initiatives, something that'll know how to challenge me in all the right places, push back on areas that feel weak, and creatively think of alternatives with me. This Project's 'personality' has to be sharp, smart, fun, and not always agreeing with everything I come up with. It also needs to be a pro at product management—this includes product sense and product execution, with a strong sense for product taste and delight. Can you help me write the instructions for this project? :) Cheers!"

Then copy the output into your Project's instructions section. Tweak as needed for your specific domain, working style, and preferences.

Stop Saying Sorry — Language Swap Guide (Getting buy-in)

Specific phrase replacements to stop undermining your presence by over-apologizing in professional settings.

How it works: Replace apologetic language with confident alternatives:

🙈 Instead of: 'Sorry to bother you' 💪 Say: 'Do you have a minute?'

🙈 Instead of: 'Sorry, I messed up' 💪 Say: 'I'll fix that now'

🙈 Instead of: 'Sorry, I didn't realize' 💪 Say: 'Thanks for pointing that out'

🙈 Instead of: 'Sorry, I didn't understand' 💪 Say: 'Can you help me understand?'

Also eliminate qualifiers that minimize you:

• 'Just' (e.g., 'I just think that…') — demeans what you have to say, shrinks your power and influence.
• 'Actually' (e.g., 'I actually have an idea') — communicates surprise that you have something to contribute.
• 'Quickly' (e.g., 'I have a quick question') — assumes by default you're imposing on others.

Style Unbundling Prompt Template (2-step) (Five proven prompt engineering techniques (and a few more-advanced tactics))

A two-step prompt template that first extracts style elements from an expert/brand, then applies those elements to a new task

How it works: Step 1 Template: "Describe the key elements of [expert]'s style/skill in bullet points."

Step 2 Template: "Do [task] in the following style: [paste bullet points from step 1]."

Example Step 1: "Describe the key elements of Apple's product announcement style in bullet points. Focus on how they communicate new features and benefits to users."

Example Step 2: "Write a product announcement for our new project management software feature in the following style:

• Simplicity: Clear messaging without technical jargon
• Storytelling: Narratives highlighting user benefits
• Visuals: High-quality demos and graphics
• Live demos: Showcasing features in real time
• Customer focus: Emphasizing personal benefits
• Key features: Highlighting important advancements
• User testimonials: Reinforcing value through experiences
• Comparative context: Showing improvements over past models
• Emotional appeal: Connecting technology to lifestyle
• Call to action: Encouraging audience engagement"

Source: https://bakztfuture.substack.com/p/dall-e-2-unbundling

Thorny Problem Resume Format (Chip Conley)

An alternative resume structure for experienced professionals that highlights problem-solving over chronological job titles.

How it works: Instead of bullet points of roles, write a paragraph detailing: 1. A thorny problem you faced. 2. The specific skills you used to accomplish it. 3. The result of that action.

Weekly Self-Review Meeting Agenda (14 habits of highly effective product managers)

A 30-minute weekly planning session with yourself to anticipate and prepare for the week ahead

How it works: Scheduled for Monday morning or Friday afternoon, 30 minutes. Agenda: (1) Review your upcoming week's calendar; (2) Note meetings you need to prepare for; (3) Identify deliverables that are due or coming up; (4) Flag anything you need to get ahead of; (5) Consider upstream strategy or priority changes and their impact on your team; (6) If things are going smoothly, ask: 'How could I help my team move even faster?'

Checklists

1-2-5 Year Learning Backcast (Drew Houston)

A systematic exercise to keep personal growth ahead of company growth.

How it works: Ask yourself: 'In 1 year, 2 years, and 5 years from now, what will I wish I had been learning today?' Use the answers to build a proactive learning curriculum.

1-Week AI Mastery Challenge (Anton Osika)

A method to reach the top 1% of AI users globally.

How it works: 1. Identify a specific problem or outcome you want to achieve. 2. Spend a full week using AI tools to build the solution end-to-end. 3. Use the AI's chat mode to ask questions and learn how the domain works when stuck. 4. Surround yourself with obsessed peers to reach the top 0.1%.

10 Attributes of Successful Product Managers (What is product management)

A list of 10 common attributes distilled from analyzing dozens of PM career ladders across companies big and small, with recommended prioritization for junior PMs.

How it works: 10 attributes (derived from career ladder analysis):

1. Communication
2. Collaboration
3. Execution
4. Customer insights
5. Strategy 6-10. (Referenced in linked career ladders post but not fully enumerated in this newsletter; the visual shows 10 attributes)

For junior/new PMs, Lenny recommends focusing first on these five:

1. Communication
2. Collaboration
3. Execution
4. Customer insights
5. Strategy

These attributes are what separate junior from senior PMs.

10 Core PM Skills That Matter Most in an AI World (Why PMs are best positioned to thrive in an AI world)

A prioritized list of the PM competencies that will be most valuable as AI handles more execution work, doubling as a self-assessment and development guide

How it works: 1. Identifying what to build (and being right) 2. Distilling and communicating requirements 3. Prioritizing everyone's ideas to the highest-ROI opportunities 4. Coordinating stakeholders, inputs, and conflicting needs 5. Giving feedback on designs to improve the product's impact 6. Developing a GTM strategy and driving adoption 7. Understanding business strategy 8. Crystallizing and getting buy-in for a vision 9. Influencing 10. Writing

These are the skills AI will have the toughest time replacing because they are soft skills—people stuff, glue stuff.

10 Traits of Great Product Managers (Noah Weiss)

A list of core competencies and behaviors that define successful product management.

How it works: Includes: 1) Live in the future and work backwards. 2) Amplify your team / facilitate ideas. 3) Facilitate the pace and quality of decision making. 4) Execute impeccably (say what you'll do, do it, or explain why). 5) Focus on impact. 6) Write well. 7) Optimize for the pace of learning. 8) Data fluency. 9) Product taste.

10-Step Technical Foundations Lesson Plan for PMs (Getting more technical)

A curated, ordered list of 10 topics with specific video/article links that a non-technical PM should study to build foundational technical knowledge. Designed to be completed in a few hours.

How it works: 1. How programming works (YouTube video) 2. The difference between front-end and back-end (Codecademy blog) 3. How software systems are architected (YouTube playlist) 4. How websites work (YouTube video) 5. How web apps work (Technically newsletter post) 6. How databases and SQL work (YouTube video) + learn basics of SQL (Codecademy course) 7. How APIs work (YouTube video) + How Webhooks work (YouTube video) 8. What libraries and frameworks are (YouTube video) 9. How GitHub works (YouTube video) + How pull requests (PRs) work (YouTube video) 10. What AWS is (YouTube video)

Instruction: Set a few hours aside next week and go through this list. Most are short fun videos with large ROI on your time.

12 Ways to Use ChatGPT in PM Work (How to use ChatGPT in your PM work)

A comprehensive checklist of 12 distinct use cases for integrating ChatGPT into product management workflows, each with specific sub-applications

How it works: 1. Collect and summarize user feedback and usage data

• Synthesize survey results
• Find feature ideas and bugs from app store reviews
• Extract insights from raw usage metrics
• Do sensitivity analysis

1. Come up with product name suggestions
2. Strengthen your argument
   • Come up with critical questions your audience may ask
   • Identify gaps and hidden assumptions in your thinking
   • Highlight edge cases and counterarguments
3. Inspire roadmap ideas
   • Assist with roadmap ideation
   • Develop frameworks
   • Propose strategy
4. Come up with customer interview questions
5. Inspire PRDs and user stories
   • Create a v1 PRD or Jira ticket
   • Identify drag metrics
   • Write user stories
6. Improve your writing
7. Do market research
8. Ask technical questions
   • SQL queries
   • Programming specifics
   • Explain a broad concept
   • Write the code for you
9. Create a v1 landing page
10. Create a v1 pitch deck
11. Help you say no

27 Perplexity Prompts for Product Managers (How to use Perplexity in your PM work)

A comprehensive list of 27 ready-to-use Perplexity prompts organized into 6 categories that PMs can copy and use immediately in their daily work

How it works: Category a. Understanding and crafting growth strategy:

1. Explain growth accounting to a product manager
2. Walk through the evolution of Dropbox's referral program. Why did it work?
3. How are the app store top charts calculated?
4. Give me examples of a reverse trial that led to an increase in conversion rate
5. Incrementality test designs for advertising campaigns
6. Google Play and Apple App Store optimization techniques

Category b. Finding benchmarks: 7. What is the average open rate for push notifications on Android and iOS? 8. Using Lenny's Newsletter research, what is good retention for a consumer product? 9. What is CSAT and how is it calculated? Include CSAT scores from top technology companies. 10. What is Net Promoter Score and how is it calculated? Include NPS scores from top technology companies. 11. Explain the product-market-fit survey by Rahul Vohra

Category c. Doing market research: 12. Notion's AI go-to-market strategy 13. Provide a detailed overview of Deel's go-to-market strategy 14. How many rides does the average ridesharing user take per month? 15. How does Airtable upsell users to an Enterprise plan?

Category d. Learning best practices: 16. List of brainstorming techniques for product managers 17. How did Spotify use the Jobs to Be Done framework? 18. Walk through the evolution of Slack's personalized user onboarding experience

Category e. Evaluating popular tools: 19. Compare and contrast product analytics tools: Amplitude, Mixpanel, and Posthog. Include key features, existing customers, differentiation points, and user reviews. 20. Compare and contrast Zendesk, Drift, and Intercom. Include key features, existing customers, differentiation points, and user reviews. 21. What is the difference between Segment and Freshpaint? 22. Weather APIs by developer preference 23. Most popular tools for in-app localization

Category f. Understanding technical jargon: 24. Explain what DAU/MAU means 25. What is Kubernetes? 26. What is the difference between GraphQL and REST? 27. What is the difference between follow and no follow backlinks?

3 Sacred PM Access Points (Marty Cagan)

The three relationships a PM must maintain direct, unencumbered access to in order to do their job effectively.

How it works: 1) Unencumbered access to users and customers, 2) Unencumbered access to engineers, 3) Unencumbered access to stakeholders.

3 Strategies to Build Technical Literacy (The top 5 things PMs should know about engineering)

Three practical approaches for non-engineers to build technical knowledge

How it works: 1. Read engineering blogs — They're sometimes surprisingly easy to understand and get you used to engineering terminology. Recommended blogs: Segment (segment.com/blog/engineering), Slack (slack.engineering), Netflix (netflixtechblog.com), Stitch Fix (multithreaded.stitchfix.com). Teams write these for recruiting but they contain useful base knowledge about how software is used in practice.

1. Look up everything you don't know — Technical knowledge is built on layers of concepts; start from the bottom. Search for every term you don't understand rather than glossing over them. Example of a good explainer: Duo Security's guide to SAML. With a discerning eye, you'll find writing styles you like.

2. Find a developer friend on the outside — Buy a developer friend coffee. Come with questions prepared. Don't have them dump knowledge on you; instead prepare pointed questions around a particular topic. Do your research beforehand to ensure you have good questions. Example: grab 30 minutes to discuss a specific topic you're trying to understand.

30 Days of GPT (Hilary Gridley)

A daily habit-building checklist for AI adoption.

How it works: A list of 30 simple, low-friction, non-work-related tasks (e.g., planning a vacation, generating talking points) designed to take 1-2 minutes daily to build an AI usage habit.

4 Areas of PM Expertise (Marty Cagan)

The foundational knowledge a PM must build to contribute effectively to an empowered team.

How it works: 1) Users and customers (visit at least 30 to become an expert), 2) Data (understand user analytics and sales data), 3) Business/Stakeholders (understand marketing, sales, compliance, privacy, and monetization), 4) Competitive landscape and industry trends.

4 Areas of PM Knowledge (EOY Review)

The four domains a product manager must master to be valuable to an empowered product team.

How it works: 1. Deep knowledge of users and customers. 2. Expertise in data (product usage, sales analytics). 3. Understanding of the business (marketing, sales, monetization, compliance, security). 4. Knowledge of the competitive landscape and industry trends.

4-Step Plan to Thrive as a PM in an AI World (Why PMs are best positioned to thrive in an AI world)

Actionable steps for PMs to prepare for and capitalize on the AI transformation of tech roles

How it works: 1. GET YOUR HANDS DIRTY

• Stop reading about AI and use it
• Experiment with ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude in your day-to-day work

1. WATCH AND LEARN

   • Follow Dan Shipper's journey building AI products and interviewing AI users
   • Follow Claire Vo's journey building ChatPRD (side project generating six figures)
   • Watch Andrej Karpathy's videos explaining how LLMs work
   • Take Andrew Ng's online courses on machine learning and AI for everyone

2. READ ABOUT WHERE THINGS ARE HEADING

   • Subscribe to: The Rundown, Superhuman AI, and/or Ben's Bites newsletters
   • Listen to: No Priors podcast with Sarah Guo and Elad Gil
   • Read: Eric Schmidt's AI prophecy interview on Exponential View

3. STRENGTHEN CORE PM SKILLS

   • Focus on the 10 core PM skills listed (identifying what to build, communicating requirements, prioritizing, coordinating stakeholders, giving design feedback, GTM strategy, business strategy, vision, influencing, writing)

5 Questions to Ask Your Engineers (Getting more technical)

A ready-to-use list of questions a non-technical PM should ask their engineering partners during whiteboarding sessions to understand their product's technical landscape.

How it works: 1. Can you draw me a rough diagram of how our system is architected? 2. Say we were to add feature x—what would be involved in making it happen, from idea to launch? 3. What slows your work down the most, in general? 4. Can you show me what it takes for you to update copy in our product? 5. What would you recommend I study in order to level up my technical skills?

TL;DR approach: Put together a list of questions, grab an engineer, find a whiteboard, and ask them questions until you start to understand WTF is going on.

5-Step Process for Creating PM Task Prompts (How close is AI to replacing product managers?)

Step-by-step process for engineering prompts that can match or beat human PM work

How it works: 1. Find a real-world example of a human doing the task (e.g., on Exponent interview prep site) 2. Copy and paste the task into ChatGPT (convert to markdown first using word2md.com) 3. Prompt ChatGPT iteratively: a. 'Make up a version of this but for a fake product, using the exact same structure.' b. 'Make it sound more authentic,' to avoid AI speak. c. 'Write brief instructions for someone who hasn't seen this example to replicate its structure and style. Do not number your instructions. Only return the instructions.' 4. Add the instructions and the example plus a role ('As a product manager...') to create the prompt template 5. Generate the results and match the formatting to the human answer (save markdown in VSCode and copy/paste the preview)

9 Common PM Interview Questions to Prepare For (Preparing for a PM interview)

A list of the most common PM interview questions that candidates should have prepared stories and answers for.

How it works: 1. Walk me through your resume. 2. Why are you excited about this role? 3. What's your biggest weakness? 4. What's your favorite product and why? 5. What's a project you led that drove significant impact? 6. Tell me about a time you had a disagreement with an engineer. How did you get past it? 7. Tell me about a time you had a conflict with someone. How did you resolve it and what did you learn? 8. Tell me about a time you made a mistake. 9. Tell me about a time you went against what the data told you, and relied on instinct or some other insight.

AI PM Skill-Building Roadmap (Summary: AI and product management | Marily Nika (Meta, Google))

Resources and approaches for PMs to build AI competency

How it works: 1. Take structured courses: Marily's AI PM Bootcamp or AI PM 101/Advanced on Maven, Coursera's Intro to AI, CareerFoundry, General Assembly, Coding Dojo. 2. Learn to code: Even though ChatGPT can help code, learning gives you a different mindset and confidence about how things work. 3. Read research papers: Follow Arxiv (arxiv.org/list/cs.AI/recent) for the latest AI research. 4. Read curated insights: Tyler Cowen's Marginal Revolution blog for research paper insights (recommended by Lenny). 5. Talk to internal AI teams: If your company already has AI projects, talk to people on those teams. 6. Follow experts on Twitter and subscribe to tech newsletters like MIT Technology Review. 7. Key qualities to develop: Good understanding of AI, ability to work with data scientists, excellent communication skills.

AT Interview Key Signals Checklist (The definitive guide to mastering analytical thinking interviews)

Four elements interviewers should consistently see throughout your analytical thinking interview

How it works: Consistently communicate these key elements throughout the interview:

1. ✅ A compelling product mission that guides all subsequent decisions
2. ✅ Ecosystem-first thinking that tracks value creation for all stakeholders
3. ✅ Decisive recommendations with clear rationale rather than hedging
4. ✅ Clear connection between team goals and North Star metric

Alternatives to an MBA for PM Career Acceleration (This Week #1: Must reads on growth, what PMs should focus on when joining a new team, and the value of an MBA)

A prioritized list of alternatives to an MBA for product managers looking to level up their careers, sequenced by recommended order

How it works: Sorted by recommended sequence:

1. Talk to your manager — work together on a plan to level you up
2. Find a PM mentor (or two) and meet monthly — ask hard questions
3. Work on a variety of products and teams — spend time doing growth, building foundational tools, creating infra, etc.
4. Switch to a different (stronger) team within your org — or to a different company
5. Subscribe to and read everything from PMHQ (productmanagerhq.com) and Mind The Product (mindtheproduct.com)

Caveats When Using Company PM Outcome Data (Which companies produce the best product managers)

Important limitations to keep in mind when using this data to make career decisions

How it works: 1. Sample size limitation: Only companies with enough PM alumni data are included. Your startup may be producing the best PMs ever, but there isn't enough data to know yet. 2. Selection bias / confounding variable: Companies that hire only amazing senior PMs will naturally have alumni who go on to do amazing things — that doesn't mean the company made these PMs great. However, getting hired at one of these companies puts you on a good track either way. 3. Time frame matters: Results can differ significantly when looking at the past 10 years vs. a company's entire history. This analysis zeroed in on just the past 10 years. 4. Traditional metrics can miss alternative career paths: Stripe PMs don't rank high on promotion or founder metrics, but they get recruited as star PMs at rocketship companies — a third valuable career path that conventional metrics miss.

ChatGPT Use Cases for PMs (Summary: AI and product management | Marily Nika (Meta, Google))

Three specific ways PMs can use ChatGPT in their daily work with example prompts

How it works: 1. Writing mission statements: Use prompt 'Rewrite this mission statement for me' — ChatGPT orients words so all stakeholders (not just PMs) can understand, even on first try. 2. Creating user personas: Frame prompts around your product constraint, e.g. 'Who would be interested in a fitness band that doesn't have a screen?' — ChatGPT provides user segments you might not think of, along with motivations and pain points. 3. Providing AI-enhanced ideas: When you already have an issue in hand, ask ChatGPT to improve it with many ideas. Don't make it do your job — use it as an idea enhancer.

Context Sources to Feed Your Second Brain (How to build your PM second brain with ChatGPT)

A comprehensive list of context sources PMs should export and upload to their AI second brain

How it works: Types of content to upload (all exported as PDFs or text files):

1. PRDs and product documents
2. Strategy decks and presentations (export to PDF)
3. Slack channel exports (export or copy-paste full channel contents into a doc, save as PDF)
4. Notion pages and wiki content
5. Monday/project boards
6. Google Docs
7. Product documentation / support site pages (Cmd+P > Save as PDF)
8. Research data: user interview transcripts, survey results
9. CSV files: Reddit threads, competitive analysis data, analytics exports
10. Dashboard screenshots or exports
11. Figma screenshots (for prototype generation)
12. Market research reports
13. Feedback threads

Key principle: Everything is essentially text. If it contains text, it can be exported to PDF and uploaded.

Growth loop: As you create new artifacts from the Project (PRDs, overview docs, strategy decks), download them and feed them back in. Each new thread will be up to date.

Core PM Skills Reading List for Interview Prep (Preparing for a PM interview)

Curated articles covering the essential PM skills that interviewers evaluate.

How it works: 1. Ruthless prioritization by Brandon Chu (https://blackboxofpm.com/ruthless-prioritization-e4256e3520a9) 2. Prioritizing by Lenny Rachitsky (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/prioritizing) 3. WTF is strategy? by Vince Law (https://hackernoon.com/wtf-is-a-strategy-bcaa3fda9a31) 4. Getting better at product strategy by Lenny Rachitsky (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/getting-better-at-product-strategy) 5. How to become a strategic leader by Julie Zhuo (https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/how-to-become-a-strategic-leader/) 6. How am I going to move my product forward today? by Sachin Rekhi (https://www.sachinrekhi.com/how-am-i-going-to-move-my-product-forward-today) 7. What is product management by Lenny Rachitsky (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/what-is-product-management) 8. How to develop product sense by Jules Walter (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/product-sense) 9. Building products by Julie Zhuo (https://medium.com/the-year-of-the-looking-glass/building-products-91aa93bea4bb)

Core PM Skills for the AI Era (1,000,000)

Six skills that matter increasingly as AI changes product development, relevant for PMs and non-PMs alike

How it works: 1. Figuring out what to build 2. Prioritizing the highest-ROI opportunities among endless ideas 3. Getting buy-in 4. Clearly and succinctly articulating requirements 5. Having the taste and experience to know if what you've built is good 6. Driving adoption, growth, and retention

Cross-Platform Second Brain Setup Guide (How to build your PM second brain with ChatGPT)

How to set up the same second brain in ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini

How it works: ChatGPT:

• Feature name: Projects
• Location: Left sidebar > 'New project'
• Instructions: Built-in instructions section in the Project
• Files: 'Add files' button within the Project

Gemini:

• Feature name: Gems
• Location: Left-hand panel
• Instructions: Custom instructions field when creating a new Gem
• Files: Upload within the Gem

Claude:

• Feature name: Projects
• Location: Left-hand panel
• Setup: Click 'New project', name it, add description
• Instructions: Right-hand 'Instructions' component within the Project
• Files: Upload within the Project

All three follow the same workflow: (1) define personality/instructions, (2) upload context files, (3) open threads and work with it.

Curated PM Course List by Career Level (My favorite PM courses)

A categorized list of recommended PM courses organized by seniority level with course names, instructors, and platforms

How it works: Senior PMs (5 courses):

1. Managing your PM career in 2023 & beyond — Shreyas Doshi (Maven) — PM career management
2. Product Strategy — Casey Winters & Fareed Mosavat (Reforge) — foundational product strategy
3. Product Strategy Workshop — Gibson Biddle (Maven) — product strategy, cohort-based
4. Continuous Interviewing — Teresa Torres (Product Talk) — customer discovery
5. Product Leadership — Ravi Mehta (Reforge) — for budding PM managers

Up-and-coming PMs (5 courses):

1. Product Management Foundations — Reforge — best course for new PMs
2. Simulator for Learning Data-Driven Product Management — Sean Ellis & Oleg Ya (GoPractice) — self-paced, simulation-based, data-driven PM
3. Assumption Testing — Teresa Torres (Product Talk) — idea validation
4. The Growth Series — Reforge — growth fundamentals
5. The Product Principles Sprint — Section4 & Prof. Adam Alter — product principles

Honorable Mentions:

• Reforge: Mastering Product Management, Experimentation + Testing, Retention + Engagement
• Maven: Break into AI Product Management (Marily Nika), Launch Your Product Management Career (Peter Yang), Building B2B Marketing (Emily Kramer), Product Psychology Bootcamp (Nir Eyal), Influence Without Authority (Satish Mummareddy)
• SVPG: INSPIRED workshop (in-person)
• Stanford: Design Thinking Bootcamp (in-person), Product Management certificate (online)
• LinkedIn Learning: Becoming a Product Manager (Cole Mercer & Evan Kimbrell, self-paced)
• India-based: Insurjo (The Product Folks), Upraised

Daily PM Habits (Gibson Biddle)

A set of daily practices for individual contributor PMs to stay effective.

How it works: 1) Begin day with intent (3-5 goals). 2) Minimize meetings. 3) Spend time with customers (focus groups, usability, surveys, data, A/B tests). 4) Balance doing vs. thinking. 5) Self-manage to do important but unenjoyable tasks.

Debugging Question Approach (The definitive guide to mastering analytical thinking interviews)

Step-by-step method for answering root cause analysis / debugging questions in PM interviews

How it works: Steps:

1. Clarify the observed issue: Restate the scenario to ensure understanding, including magnitude and time frame
2. Break down key dimensions: Geos/markets, platforms, user segments — to identify where anomalous behavior originated and for which users
3. Generate hypotheses across categories:
   • Technical issues
   • Product changes
   • User behavior shifts
   • External factors
   • Data issues
4. Explicitly state each hypothesis before explaining how you'd test it
5. Avoid common pitfall: Don't fixate on a single hypothesis. Don't explore complex theories if simpler causes can explain the issue.

Developing Data-Driven Decision-Making as a PM (Startup PM vs. big company PM)

Steps for improving your ability to use data and experimentation for product decisions

How it works: 1. Study how successful companies make decisions through experimentation (Airbnb, Uber, Netflix, Pinterest) and find a way to launch an experiment or two at your own company. 2. Watch successful leaders at your organization making decisions — how quickly do they decide, what do they ask about before deciding, how do they communicate their reasoning? 3. Always have a perspective on a decision (your own POV), but be ready to change your mind given new information. 4. Understand the difference between Type-1 (irreversible, high-stakes) and Type-2 (reversible, lower-stakes) decisions (Jeff Bezos framework). 5. Establish a clear set of principles to guide decisions and reduce reliance on opinions.

Developing the 'I Got This' Aura (How to get into product management)

Tactical checklist for building the PM trait of exceptional reliability and preparedness

How it works: 1. NEVER come to a meeting without spending at least a few minutes preparing and collecting your thoughts 2. Keep a high bar for everything you do — re-read and polish all communications 3. Build your 'spidey sense' — look ahead and around corners. What could go wrong? Plan for contingencies. 4. Find people around you that are very well organized and learn from them. Ask them concretely what they do to stay on top of things. 5. Say what you'll do, and then do what you say. Impeccable follow-through. 6. Don't let details slip. 7. Regularly ask yourself: 'How am I going to move my product forward today?'

Disclaimers / Limitations When Using PM Career Data (Which companies accelerate PM careers most)

Important caveats to consider when interpreting which companies accelerate PM careers

How it works: 1. Not every company in the world was analyzed — only ~50 companies with enough history and data to reduce noise 2. Only PMs who left the company were tracked — if a company retains its best PMs, that won't show up in the data 3. Historical data only — past performance is not a guarantee of future results; long-tenured companies reflect their entire history 4. Cannot 100% isolate the contributing variable — could be mentorship, hiring bar, or simply the company logo on a resume creating opportunities 5. Sample sizes are not huge — a few standout PMs can skew a company's numbers; fancy titles at lower-quality companies inflate the numbers of the company they left

Dress Code Rules for Founders (Sam Lessin)

Simple rules for dressing appropriately in professional/investor settings

How it works: 1) Dress one level up from expected (not two or three), 2) Fit matters infinitely more than brand — a $20 well-fitting shirt beats a $500 misfitting one, 3) Don't wear a Rolex or flashy brands as a startup founder, 4) If unsure about dress code, just ask — it shows confidence and humility, 5) Don't be memorable for your dress in either direction, 6) You can always de-escalate (remove jacket), 7) Find someone who dresses well and ask for help

Essential Reading List for Product Builders (Essential reading for product builders—part 1)

Lenny's curated list of 14 timeless essays and resources that every product leader should read, split into 'likely new to you' and 'probably already know about' tiers.

How it works: Tier 1 — Deep cuts (likely new to most readers):

1. 'Who's Got the Monkey?' by William Oncken, Jr., and Donald L. Wass — Management delegation and ownership
2. 'On Agency' by Henrik Karlsson — Autonomy + efficacy framework
3. 'On Building Good Taste' by Ira Glass (video) — The taste-skill gap
4. 'Strategies for Learning' by Andy Masley — Pretend learning vs. actual learning
5. 'If Your Product Is Great, It Doesn't Need to Be Good' by Paul Buchheit — Three core features framework
6. 'The Only Thing That Matters' by Marc Andreessen — Market > team > product
7. 'The Cook and the Chef: Musk's Secret Sauce' by Tim Urban — First principles thinking

Tier 2 — Well-known essentials:

1. 'How to Do Great Work' by Paul Graham
2. 'Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule' by Paul Graham
3. 'Good Product Manager/Bad Product Manager' by Ben Horowitz
4. 'Product vs. Feature Teams' by Marty Cagan
5. 'Aggregation Theory' by Ben Thompson
6. 'Status as a Service' by Eugene Wei
7. '1,000 True Fans' by Kevin Kelly

First 90-Day Context Building Plan (Jiaona Zhang)

A tactical approach to gathering information and building trust as a new product leader.

How it works: 1. Schedule 40-50 meetings across functions and levels (include ICs like tenured engineers, not just peers/leaders). 2. Identify strategic gaps (e.g., engineering hiring). 3. Assign research for unknowns. 4. Build trust in the 'piggy bank' before enacting change.

First PM Month-One Discovery Questions (Joining as the first product manager)

Key questions to answer in your first month as first PM, from Evan Goldin

How it works: Sit down with as many coworkers as you can and understand:

1. How does the product development process work today, and how can it be improved?
2. Who has been serving as the PM to date? Was it solely the CEO, or has an engineer or salesperson been calling some of the shots without a PM in place? Additionally from Karan Ahuja:
3. What's worked and what hasn't worked?
4. What are people's hopes and fears?

First PM Onboarding Quick Wins Strategy (When they hired their first PM)

Approach for helping your first PM prove value quickly before setting up long-term processes

How it works: 1. Have the first PM identify and lead quick, easy wins to prove their value immediately 2. Do this BEFORE setting up a longer-term product roadmap 3. Switch to a scrappy mindset if coming from a larger company 4. Prioritize low-cost, high-impact experiments in first months 5. Show the company how you can help unlock the next stage of growth 6. This builds trust with engineers who are understandably nervous about adding a PM

First PM Recommended Reading List (Joining as the first product manager)

Curated articles and resources for first PMs and those hiring their first PM

How it works: 1. Lenny's Twitter thread on first PM advice (twitter.com/lennysan/status/1250870043216232448) 2. 'When and How to Make Your First Product Hire' by Jonathan Golden (Medium) 3. 'Product Manager Zero' by Ken Norton (kennorton.com) 4. 'Our 6 Must Reads If You're Hiring a Product Manager' by First Round Review 5. 'Why Founders Fail: The Product CEO Paradox' by a16z 6. 'When should you hire a Product Manager?' by Ellen Chisa (Medium) 7. 'Seeking Captain America & Not Captain Crap: Hiring Your First Product Manager' by Hunter Walk (LinkedIn) 8. 'Hiring your first Product Manager' by Gokul Rajaram (Medium)

Five Dimensions of Individual PM Contribution (How to know if you're doing a good job as a product manager)

A checklist of ways a PM can individually contribute to their team's success beyond coordination

How it works: 1. Informed the product strategy and vision 2. Contributed great ideas 3. Uncovered unique customer insights 4. Enabled the team to operate like a well-oiled machine 5. Pushed the company and team to prioritize the correct work

Key principle: Contribute to WHAT is built, not just HOW it's built. Your company is expecting more from you than simply coordinating, note-taking, and communicating.

Five Forms of Business Impact for PM Teams (How to know if you're doing a good job as a product manager)

A checklist of the ways a PM team can deliver business impact, useful for prioritization and self-assessment

How it works: 1. Accelerating the company's growth 2. Making internal teams more efficient 3. Helping the sales team close more deals 4. Making important customers happier 5. Launching an important product

Five Proven Prompt Engineering Techniques (The Best of Lenny’s Newsletter—2024 Edition)

Techniques for writing better AI prompts, plus advanced tactics

How it works: Five proven prompt engineering techniques for getting better results from AI tools like ChatGPT, plus additional advanced tactics. Designed specifically for PM use cases.

Five Strategies for Navigating Your Early Career (Navigating your early career)

Lenny's five core strategies for making smart career decisions in your 20s

How it works: 1. Don't over-optimize for the resume — Stop chasing checkboxes. You can do what you want sooner than you think. 2. Follow your interests — but not in a vacuum — Find the intersection of what you enjoy, what you're good at, and what creates value for others. Do more of what gives you energy. 3. When you're comfy for too long, shake things up — If you feel too comfortable, make a change (switch teams, roles, or companies). Pivotal moments come from these transitions. 4. Work with great people — Spend as much time evaluating future colleagues and culture as the job itself. Ask: Does this company attract the kind of people I want to become? 5. Never stop learning — Follow your interests and learn for learning's sake. Good things happen when you invest in building new skills.

Five Traits for Director-Level PM Interviews (This Week #3: Finding product/market fit, interviewing for a Director of PM role, and structuring discussions with senior leaders)

The five most important traits to demonstrate when interviewing for (or hiring) a Director of PM, with specific expectations for each

How it works: 1. Long-term strategic thinking: Expect to be asked about times you've defined strategies for problems in the past. Expect complex business problems to tackle at home or in-person. Focus on your approach to breaking down the problem and your strategy for addressing it, not on having the perfect solution.

1. People leadership: Expect questions about your leadership style, how you've navigated people challenges, and what your reports and peers would say about working with you. Remember: 'the output of a manager is the output of the organizational units under his or her supervision or influence' (Andy Grove).

2. Stakeholder management: Expect questions about times you pushed back on stakeholders, when you went along with something you disagreed with, and how you've set things up for success when presenting to execs.

3. Impact: Expect questions about how you've prioritized for impact, how you align your team behind the most impactful work, how you set goals, and how you think ahead to ensure you're always working on the highest impact opportunities.

4. Communication: Expect questions about concrete tactics for communicating with your team and stakeholders, how you keep everyone up to date, and how you communicate bad news. Also be aware that how you communicate during the interview itself is an important signal.

Five Ways to Level Up as a PM During Time Off (This Week #6: Cultivating good relationships with distributed co-workers, building trust to accelerate growth, and leveling up as a PM when you have extra time)

A structured approach to professional development during extended time away from work, tailored to product managers

How it works: 1. Follow your energy: Identify what you've been yearning to do or learn while employed but couldn't because of time or energy constraints (e.g., learning to design, code, or get better with data). Do the thing you're most pulled towards, even if it's not directly beneficial to your job today.

1. Read, with a goal: Determine 2-3 skills you most want to develop (strategy? execution? leadership?). Pick a curated set of books and articles that speak to these skills and work through them. Be careful adding too many items or items you aren't excited about — you'll quickly get bored or overwhelmed and lose motivation.

2. Read, without a goal: Make time to read things you're super excited about even if only tangentially related. Biographies, history books, and documentaries are great for this. Example: Walt Disney's biography changed Airbnb's strategy.

3. Write: Writing helps you learn. Reflect on what you've learned over your time as a PM and on the reading you're doing. Can be as simple as a bullet list of PM learnings or as in-depth as a Medium article.

4. Take experiential classes: PM skills = leadership + business thinking + product design. Find local classes that build these skills in different contexts. Leadership → teach an adventure sport. Business thinking → class on running a local business. Product design → pottery class. Look beyond the digital world.

Founder/PM Reading List (Lenny’s Newsletter Holiday Gift Guide 2022)

Curated book recommendations specifically relevant to founders, PMs, and tech professionals

How it works: 1) The Great CEO Within by Matt Mochary - Tactical guide to company building, must-read for any founder or want-to-be founder. 2) The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel - Timeless lessons on wealth, greed, and happiness, especially relevant during market downturns. 3) Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed (10th Anniversary Edition) - One of the most powerful books Lenny has ever read, life advice. 4) The Carbon Almanac by Seth Godin - Clear facts about fighting climate change. 5) The Overstory by Richard Powers - Will change your relationship with nature. 6) Our America by Ken Burns - Photographic history, just released.

Four Key Takeaways for PMs in the AI Era (How AI will impact product management)

Lenny's summary of how PMs should adapt to the AI future.

How it works: 1. The PM role isn't going away, and it will become even more important. 2. Soft skills — like influence, communication, product sense, creativity, and empathy — will become ever more valuable. Lean into building these skills. 3. Some of the most high-value skills — like strategy, vision, discovery, data fluency (and even engineering) — will be significantly impacted by AI. Learn how to work with AI tools (e.g. asking great questions) to build leverage in these areas. 4. Broadly, PMs will continue to be the 'glue' or 'conductor' who ties everything together, helping your company's most important assets (both people and AI) drive the most possible impact in the shortest amount of time.

Four Pieces of Advice for Feature Team PMs (In defense of feature team product managers)

Ben Erez's actionable advice for PMs currently operating on feature teams

How it works: 1. Think critically about advice from thought leaders. Don't put people on a pedestal if they say there's one right way to be a product manager (including Ben, Lenny, and Marty). 2. Don't let anyone tell you that you're a project manager—you're a product manager. Remember that many celebrated empowered-product-culture companies have dedicated program managers and project managers to handle 'the details.' 3. Don't beat yourself up if your environment makes empowered PM behavior impossible or risky. There's no shame in being a great feature team PM. However, if you have the opportunity to join an empowered team, it's worth exploring. 4. In interviews, no hiring manager will explicitly say the role is on a feature team. You'll need to make your own assessment using targeted questions about how success is measured, how projects originate, and how PMs are evaluated and rewarded.

Further Reading List for New PMs (The most common pitfalls of new product managers)

Lenny's curated reading list for new PMs to go deeper on avoiding common mistakes

How it works: 1. 'The Top 12 Product Management Mistakes' by Marty Cagan (SVPG) 2. 'Good Product Manager/Bad Product Manager' by Ben Horowitz (a16z) 3. 'Good Product Managers, Great Product Managers' by Shreyas Doshi (Twitter thread) 4. '14 Habits of Highly Effective Product Managers' by Lenny Rachitsky (Lenny's Newsletter) 5. 'Getting Better at Product Strategy' by Lenny Rachitsky (Lenny's Newsletter) 6. 'Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule' by Paul Graham

Further Study Resources for AI in PM (How to use ChatGPT in your PM work)

Curated list of additional resources for PMs wanting to go deeper on ChatGPT usage

How it works: 1. Native Mac app for ChatGPT: https://github.com/vincelwt/chatgpt-mac 2. Write My PRD tool: https://writemyprd.com/ 3. Article: 'How to use ChatGPT in product management' (UX Design Bootcamp): https://bootcamp.uxdesign.cc/how-to-use-chatgpt-in-product-management-f96d8ac5ee6f 4. Article: '45 ChatGPT Use Cases for Product Managers' by Aatir Abdul Rauf: https://aatir.substack.com/p/45-chatgpt-use-cases-for-product 5. Dan Shipper's guest post on building the Lenny Chatbot using GPT

Further Study Resources for Technical PMs (Getting more technical)

Additional resources for PMs who want to go deeper after completing the basics lesson plan.

How it works: 1. Subscribe to Technically (newsletter by Justin Gage) — technically.dev 2. Learn SQL using Mode's SQL tutorial and start running your own queries 3. Explore more videos by freeCodeCamp.org on YouTube 4. Explore more videos by Codecademy on YouTube 5. Get the Technical Product Manager Certification by PMHQ (oneweekpm.com)

Further Study Resources on AI for PMs (How AI will impact product management)

Lenny's curated reading list for PMs wanting to go deeper on AI's impact.

How it works: 1. How to use ChatGPT in your PM work (Lenny's Newsletter) 2. You should be playing with GPTs at work (Lenny's Newsletter) 3. How Do You Use ChatGPT? by Dan Shipper (YouTube playlist) 4. The Art of Product Management in the Fog of AI by Tom Tunguz 5. Aaron Levie's thread on why AI won't take your job soon (Twitter)

Growth Learning Curriculum — Curated Reading List (This Week #1: Must reads on growth, what PMs should focus on when joining a new team, and the value of an MBA)

A comprehensive, prioritized list of resources for learning about growth, organized by format (online reads, books, videos, people to follow)

How it works: FAVORITE ONLINE READS:

1. Growth Marketing by Julian Shapiro (julian.com/guide/growth/intro)
2. Everything by Brian Balfour, start with 'Growth Machine' (brianbalfour.com/essays)
3. Everything on Reforge's website, and sign up for their classes (reforge.com/blog/)
4. Everything Andrew Chen has written, start with 'What's Next in Growth' (andrewchen.co/list-of-essays/)
5. Everything Casey Winters has written, start with 'What Are Growth Teams For' (caseyaccidental.com/tag/growth/)
6. Everything Sean Ellis has written, start with 'The Growth Pyramid Revisited' (seanellis.me/blog.html)
7. Growth Design by Lex Roman (growthdesigners.co/resources)

FAVORITE BOOKS:

1. High Growth Handbook
2. Hacking Growth: How Today's Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success
3. Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth
4. Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies
5. How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business

FAVORITE VIDEOS:

1. How to Improve Conversion Rates
2. Indispensable Growth Frameworks from My Years at Facebook, Twitter and Wealthfront
3. HubSpot, Brian Balfour 'Growth Is Good, But Retention Is 4+Ever'
4. Y Combinator videos

PEOPLE TO FOLLOW: @andrewchen, @angelsteger, @bbalfour, @briannekimmel, @calexity, @dahartattack, @frost, @HilaQu, @JeffChang30, @merci, @nateliason, @npilosof, @onecaseman, @SeanEllis

Growth PM Hands-On Practice Checklist (Breaking into growth)

A list of 7 practical activities to build real growth experience and demonstrate growth PM capabilities

How it works: 1. Design and run a handful of experiments (use the experiment template linked below) 2. Identify your company's primary growth engine (using the Reforge racecar growth framework) 3. Run a Facebook ad (via Facebook Business Ads) 4. Run an AdWords ad (via Google Ads) 5. Analyze your company's SEO health (using Ahrefs Site Audit) 6. Ask your existing growth PMs if there's anything you can help them with, in an effort to learn 7. Find a gig that lets you do growth immediately

Growth PM Learning Plan (7-Topic Curriculum) (Breaking into growth)

A structured self-study curriculum covering 7 core growth PM disciplines, designed to be tackled one topic per week with a study buddy

How it works: Topic 1: EXPERIMENTATION

• Learn the basics of A/B testing (Netflix Tech Blog)
• Learn about p-values, power, and significance (Netflix Tech Blog)
• Learn about fostering a culture of experimentation (Lenny's Newsletter)
• Learn about the benefits and pitfalls of building with data (Julie Zhuo)
• Take the Reforge Experimentation + Testing course

Topic 2: GROWTH STRATEGY

• Learn about the history of the growth role (Brian Balfour)
• Learn about ways to drive growth (Andrew Chen)
• Learn about principles, processes, teams, and tactics (Brian Balfour)
• Learn the racecar growth framework (Reforge)
• Learn about funnels (Ahrefs)
• Learn about loops (Reforge)
• Take the Reforge Growth Series

Topic 3: SEO

• Learn the basics of SEO (Ahrefs)
• Learn how to do SEO (Ahrefs)
• Learn how to run SEO experiments (Lenny's Newsletter)
• Learn about content-driven growth and winning at SEO (Lenny's Newsletter)

Topic 4: PERFORMANCE MARKETING (PAID GROWTH)

• Learn the basics of performance marketing (Khosla Ventures)
• Learn how to make and run an online ad (Julian Shapiro)
• Learn about CAC (Andrew Chen)
• Learn how product can automate ads (Lyft Engineering)
• Learn about the downsides of paid growth (Andrew Chen)

Topic 5: VIRALITY

• Learn about the types of virality (Greylock)
• Learn about viral loops (Andrew Chen)
• Learn about ways to increase virality (Lenny's Newsletter)

Topic 6: CONVERSION OPTIMIZATION

• Learn the basics of funnel conversion optimization (Amplitude)
• Learn tactics to improve conversion (Lenny's Newsletter)
• Set up analytics and track conversion within your funnels (Segment)

Topic 7: DATA AND SQL

• Learn SQL in a course (Codecademy) or online (Mode), and start running queries
• Take a class on statistics (Stanford Online) and experimental design (Coursera)

Habit-Building Action Items for PMs (14 habits of highly effective product managers)

42 specific, actionable tactics (3 per habit) for building each of the 14 PM habits

How it works: Habit 1 (Communication clarity): (a) Ask manager and trusted peer for brutally honest feedback on docs, meetings, presentations; (b) Use the Minto Pyramid and SCR framework when crafting arguments; (c) Start a 'swipe file' of well-executed documents, emails, presentations for inspiration. Habit 2 (Reliability): (a) Be very selective with what you take on—say no; (b) When asked to do something new, determine its priority and communicate where it sits in your list; (c) Keep a Waiting For list to avoid losing open threads. Habit 3 (High bar): (a) Push back on subpar performance with specific feedback; (b) Before sharing a PRD/one-pager, ask 'What's one thing I could do to make this more succinct?'; (c) Review every major document, meeting, and presentation your team outputs. Habit 4 (Alignment): (a) When reviewing designs, bring people back to 'What problem are we solving?'; (b) When you sense misalignment, say 'We may be misaligned on this. What's your understanding of X?'; (c) Create and maintain a source-of-truth document with goal, problem, key assumptions, and key decisions. Habit 5 (POV): (a) Keep asking yourself 'If someone asked my opinion right now, what would I say?'; (b) When uncertain, create a simple pros and cons list; (c) When you change your POV, share it publicly. Habit 6 (Prioritization): (a) Say no or 'not yet'; (b) Use the phrase 'ruthless prioritization' when prioritizing or saying no; (c) Align on a single prioritized source-of-truth roadmap—all changes updated there. Habit 7 (Unblocking): (a) Always prioritize tasks that unblock team members; (b) Ask team members often 'What's slowing you down?'; (c) Look around corners for looming blockers. Habit 8 (Leadership triad): (a) Sit next to your EM and DM; (b) Weekly meeting to align on priorities, share info, unblock; (c) Spend time outside work to connect as humans. Habit 9 (Mission connection): (a) Include mission/vision in every strategy document; (b) In kickoffs, remind the team how the project connects to the mission; (c) Put team vision/mission at top of roadmap documents. Habit 10 (Customer contact): (a) Create regular customer interaction systems—weekly lunch, monthly CX rotation, quarterly visit; (b) For features taking >X weeks, first talk to 5 potential users; (c) Build 1-on-1 relationships with larger customers. Habit 11 (Anticipation): (a) Schedule 30-min Monday or Friday meeting with yourself to review upcoming week; (b) When upstream strategy changes, ask 'How could this impact our team?'; (c) When things are smooth, ask 'How could I help the team move faster?' Habit 12 (Inclusivity): (a) Check in with quiet people at end of meetings; (b) Before finalizing strategy/roadmap/spec, give team a chance for async feedback; (c) Organize brainstorms and ideation sessions. Habit 13 (Amplification): (a) Forward examples of great work to teammates' managers; (b) Highlight achievements in team meetings and email updates; (c) Start a #team-huzzah Slack channel for celebrating wins. Habit 14 (Good vibes): (a) Start every meeting with energy and positivity; (b) Organize regular fun activities—weekly happy hour, monthly team-building; (c) Bring surprise and delight to events—team band at all-hands, goats on Zoom, birthday surprises at standup.

Hands-On API Practice Exercise (OpenAI DALL-E) (Become a more technical product manager)

Step-by-step guide to make your first API call and generate images using OpenAI's DALL-E API

How it works: Steps to generate images using DALL-E via API:

1. Sign up for an API account at https://platform.openai.com/signup
2. Navigate to API Keys. Verify your account and create your first API key. Copy it!
3. Using Postman or a web-based API request tool, make a POST request to https://api.openai.com/v1/images/generations
4. Add the following Headers:
   • Authorization: Bearer [your-api-key]
   • Content-Type: application/json
5. Add the following body in JSON: { "model": "dall-e-3", "prompt": "A cute baby sea otter", "n": 1, "size": "1024x1024" }
6. Send your request!

High Bar Checklist for Work Output (What Seven Years at Airbnb Taught Me About Building a Business)

A checklist for maintaining quality across five categories of work output: emails, docs, meetings, presentations, and hiring.

How it works: Emails: Review at least once before sending. Always something to cut or clarify. Use military-precision email style (reference: https://hbr.org/2016/11/how-to-write-email-with-military-precision). Shared docs: Get feedback from at least one person before sharing widely. Focus on clean, consistent formatting. Close out comments before sharing with execs. Make it easy to scan. Keep pushing to write better. Meetings: Include primary goal in the calendar invite, ideally with an agenda. Call out unproductive meetings. Invite as few people as possible. Leave with clear action items. Follow up over email with action items and owners. Presentations: Ask if a presentation is needed vs. just an email. Make sure audience knows the goal: decision, general feedback, or information sharing. Get feedback; fresh eyes catch glaring issues. Keep it short — no one ever wished a presentation was longer. Hiring: Only hire people you feel 'hell yes' about. If it's a maybe, it's a no. Reference: https://sivers.org/hellyeah

How to Investigate Your Build and Deploy Process (The top 5 things PMs should know about engineering)

Steps for PMs to understand deployment before asking engineers

How it works: 1. Navigate to your team's GitHub repository 2. Click on the 'Pull Requests' tab 3. Look at merged PRs and examine GitHub checks that run for builds 4. Identify what deployment tools are being used (e.g., Vercel bot commenting with deploy preview links) 5. Research those deployment tools to understand speed and process (e.g., Vercel deploys are usually sub-5 minutes) 6. For on-premise customers, find out: Do customers get updates automatically? How often does the team recommend updating? How far behind cloud are they? How difficult are one-off builds? 7. Ask your developers to confirm and fill gaps

How to Learn Your Company's Tech Stack (The top 5 things PMs should know about engineering)

Step-by-step process for PMs to discover what technologies their company uses

How it works: 1. Look at your company's GitHub repositories 2. Check what programming languages are listed (GitHub shows language breakdown on the right side of a repo) 3. Look at file structure for framework indicators (e.g., .next files = Next.js, 'import { useState } from React' = React) 4. Read through a few code files for grounding (don't spend too long) 5. After doing your snooping work, ask one of your developers to fill in the gaps

Example: Technically.dev is built with React and Next.js, deployed on Vercel, written in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

How to Make Your First Code Contribution as a PM (The top 5 things PMs should know about engineering)

Steps for PMs to start contributing small code changes

How it works: 1. Sit down with your favorite engineer and ask them to walk you through how to contribute code 2. The process generally looks like: Clone your app's repository locally → Run it locally → Make a fix and commit your changes → Open a PR in GitHub 3. For very low-risk changes (like markdown files), you can edit code directly in GitHub's web interface 4. Keep contributions limited to: copy changes, typo fixes, color changes, border radius fixes, and other small frontend tweaks 5. If learning to code: Focus on your team's primary programming language → Set a reasonable goal with a developer (e.g., updating website copy)

Note: The hardest part tends to not be the code itself but the process around the code, like handling version control and CI (continuous integration).

How to Receive Help (3 Scenarios) (On asking for help (even when you really don’t want to))

Guidance for how to respond after receiving help in three different outcomes, with example responses.

How it works: Scenario 1: When it helps

• Express authentic appreciation
• Follow up and share the impact of the help (positively reinforces the behavior)
• Offer reciprocity
• Example: '🙏🙏🙏 Your backup with prioritization stuff helped me regain my sanity and actually figure out what work to do with my team. I feel a million times better, thank you for that! Anything you need help with so I can return the favor?'

Scenario 2: When 'help' doesn't help

• Find an iota of what IS helpful in what's been offered
• Politely redirect back toward your original ask or eject early
• Avoid giving real-time feedback about how unhelpful they were
• Example: 'The bigger org context is helpful. I'm specifically looking for your help on which of these three priorities I should drop this week or if you have other ideas for how I can tackle all three simultaneously.'

Scenario 3: When they can't or won't help

• Don't take it personally (often about their circumstances, not you)
• Keep the door open
• Seek alternative support
• Example: 'Not an issue, I get it. Anyone else you would recommend I ask?'

Interview Questions to Detect Feature Team Roles (In defense of feature team product managers)

Three questions to ask in PM interviews to assess whether the role is on a feature team or empowered team, since no hiring manager will explicitly disclose feature-team culture

How it works: 1. Can you tell me about a recent feature or product you shipped and how you measured success post-launch? Why'd you choose to work on it in the first place? (Reveals: Whether success is measured by shipping or by outcomes; whether the team chose the work or was told what to build)

1. Which project is most exciting to you on the current roadmap? What's the origin story of this project, and what's its intended outcome? (Reveals: Whether projects originate from discovery/strategy or from top-down directives; whether intended outcomes are defined)

2. How do you evaluate and reward PMs? (Reveals: Whether PMs are rewarded for outputs/shipping or for outcomes/impact)

Job Titles Included in Each Product Role Category (New data on the product job market)

Reference list of specific job titles mapped to 10 product role categories, useful for calibrating job searches and understanding role taxonomy

How it works: 1. Product management: Product Manager, Senior Product Manager, Director of Product Management, Associate Product Manager, Principal Product Manager, Technical Product Manager, Lead Product Manager, Group Product Manager. 2. Engineer: Software Engineer, Senior Software Engineer, Data Engineer, Staff Software Engineer, Software Engineer II, Associate Software Engineer, DevOps Engineer. 3. Design: Product Designer, UX Designer, Senior Designer, Lead Product Designer. 4. Growth: Head of Growth, Chief Growth Officer, Growth Manager, Director of Growth, Growth, Growth Marketer, Growth Lead, Growth Specialist, VP of Growth. 5. User research: UX Researcher, User Experience Researcher, Senior UX Researcher, User Researcher, Lead UX Researcher, UX Research Lead. 6. Data science: Data Analyst, Data Scientist, Senior Data Scientist, Lead Data Scientist, Business Data Analyst, Data Science Manager, Principal Data Scientist, Junior Data Analyst, Data Scientist II. 7. Sales: Account Executive, Sales Associate, Sales Manager, Sales Representative, Sales Development Representative, Senior Account Executive, Regional Sales Manager, Sales Consultant, Enterprise Account Executive. 8. Marketing: Marketing Manager, Marketing Director, Marketing Coordinator, Marketing Specialist, Digital Marketing Manager, Chief Marketing Officer, Head of Marketing, Director of Marketing, Product Marketing Manager. 9. Product owner: Product Owner, Senior Product Owner, Technical Product Owner, Digital Product Owner, Lead Product Owner, Associate Product Owner, Agile Product Owner, Principal Product Owner, Senior Technical Product Owner, Junior Product Owner. 10. Scrum master: Scrum Master, Project Manager/Scrum Master, Agile Scrum Master, Lead Scrum Master, Scrum Master II, Scrum Master/Agile Coach, Certified Scrum Master.

Learn-to-Code Resource List for PMs (Getting more technical)

Five recommended platforms for PMs who want to take the step of actually learning to code, ranging from free to paid.

How it works: 1. CS50: Introduction to Computer Science — Harvard (free) 2. freeCodeCamp (free) 3. Codecademy (free) 4. Udemy — Web Development courses (paid) 5. Coursera — Information Technology courses (paid)

Lenny's PM Template Master List (My favorite product management templates)

A categorized checklist of all essential PM templates organized by function: PRDs (9), Strategy (6), Vision (5), GTM (3), Operations (3), and Frameworks (8)

How it works: Categories and counts: 1-pagers/PRDs (9 templates) — personal 1-pager, Kevin Yien PRD, Asana project brief, Intercom story template, Product Hunt PRD, Adam Waxman PRD, Steve Morin 1-pager, Figma PRD, Adam Thomas initiative. Strategy (6) — business strategy, team strategy, Ramp product strategy, V2MOM, Amazon working backwards PR, Gibson Biddle DHM. Vision (5) — Product Vision Board, Moore's positioning, Ladder of Needs, Google shared vision, Cagan Vision FAQ. GTM (3) — launch strategy, marketing plan, GTM plan. Other templates (3) — roadmap, performance review, planning timeline. Additional frameworks (8) — SPADE, Coinbase decisions, Pyramid Principle, JTBD, Eigenquestions, We Don't Sell Saddles Here, business strategy concepts, founders library.

Lenny's Recommended Book List for Product & Creative Professionals (Lenny’s holiday gift guide)

A curated reading list spanning product strategy, creativity, science, philosophy, and life

How it works: 1. Am I Overthinking This? + Maybe This Will Help by Michelle Rial — chart-based humor books (both for under $30) 2. The Cold Start Problem by Andrew Chen — how to start and scale network effects (for founders and growth teams) 3. A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson — 'learned more about the world per-page than from any other book' (for the curious) 4. The War of Art by Steven Pressfield — overcoming creative resistance (for creative workers) 5. Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed — advice on love and life (for people going through tough times) 6. Ready Player One by Ernest Cline — understanding the metaverse 7. Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse — 'changed the way I looked at life' (mind-bending and short) 8. Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives by David Eagleman — short, hilarious, infinitely creative

Lennybot Starter Prompts (Taking the week off)

A curated list of 8 high-value questions to ask Lennybot, representing the most common jobs-to-be-done for Lenny's audience of PMs, founders, and leaders.

How it works: 1. How do I find an idea for a new product? 2. How do I write a strategy doc? 3. What can I do to get promoted faster? 4. How do I know if I should be a founder? 5. What are some great interview questions for product managers? 6. How do I help my team move faster? 7. How do I get better at managing up? 8. Burnout. What can I do about it?

New PM 30/60/90 Day Plan (This Week #1: Must reads on growth, what PMs should focus on when joining a new team, and the value of an MBA)

A structured plan for product managers joining a new team, organized into three phases focused on building trust, improving execution, and developing strategy

How it works: FIRST 30 DAYS — Focus on building trust:

1. Ask lots of questions. Learn about the team, the business, and the product. Make it clear you aren't coming in to tell everyone what to do, particularly before you have context.
2. Talk to customers. Get on-the-ground truth from your users. Even though this will just be anecdotal evidence, it'll start to build up your product knowledge, and will give you a tangible idea of who you're building for.
3. Find 2-3 quick wins that make the lives of the team better. This can be unblocking a blocker, resolving a lingering decision, or improving an annoying process.

FIRST 60 DAYS — Focus on improving execution and driving tangible impact:

1. Does everyone know what they should be doing at all times?
2. Are there unnecessary meetings that waste people's time?
3. Are blockers being addressed quickly?
4. Is everyone on the same page about upcoming deadlines?
5. What can your team do to drive more impact?

FIRST 90 DAYS — Focus on developing your point of view on strategy and vision:

1. As you learn about the business and product, figure out for yourself what you believe the next step for the team should be. Begin to form a long-term strategy.
2. Building off of that thinking, work with your team to develop a 6-12 month roadmap and rally everyone around it.
3. While you work with your team on this, in parallel tee up your thinking with stakeholders (e.g. your manager, their manager). Make sure they are bought in early so that you don't present a plan that flops.

AFTER 90 DAYS: Keep doing all of the above continuously.

New PM Pitfall Self-Assessment Checklist (The most common pitfalls of new product managers)

A set of diagnostic questions/signs for each pitfall that a new PM can use to assess which anti-patterns they're falling into

How it works: For each pitfall, check if these signs apply to you:

The Coordinator: ☐ I rarely have strong opinions about product decisions ☐ I worry about expressing my point of view ☐ I often optimize for team happiness over impact ☐ I don't maintain a high bar for the work my team takes on

The Dictator: ☐ My specs are incredibly detailed with no room for discussion ☐ I present fully baked roadmaps/strategies/visions without genuine interest in feedback ☐ I get frustrated when anyone disagrees with my conclusions ☐ I rarely let someone get their way if they disagree with me

The Dreamer: ☐ There's frequent misalignment within my team and among stakeholders ☐ Team members often don't know what they should work on next ☐ Project specs are vague and block team members from designing/building ☐ I spend more than 10% of my time on strategy or vision work

The Feature Factory: ☐ I translate every customer request into a feature ☐ I don't have a written-out public product strategy ☐ Most people on my team don't know what our strategy is ☐ I'm obsessed with deadlines ☐ My KPIs are all about features shipped, not business metrics

The Busted Umbrella: ☐ My teammates are often pinged by other PMs, managers, and leaders ☐ I don't spend time filtering requests of my team ☐ I don't push back on asks of my team ☐ My teammates don't know why they need a PM

Outcome-Driven Skill Acquisition Loop (Jules Walter)

A step-by-step process for learning a new PM skill quickly.

How it works: 1. Define a concrete outcome to drive. 2. Formulate specific questions. 3. Find and ask experts. 4. Execute and test. 5. Report back to the experts with results.

PM Artifact Quality Self-Assessment (Vikrama Dhiman)

A set of diagnostic questions to assess whether a PM's artifacts demonstrate sufficient quality and completeness

How it works: Ask yourself: Can you show your last PRD? Can you show the last product note you sent? Can you show your product strategy doc? Can you show the brief you sent to design with ranked problems? Are your pre-sprint/pre-iteration planning docs complete? Are your JIRA stories filled out beyond just a title? Are your go-to-market notes usable by marketing teams? If any are missing or low quality, that's a gap in 'what you bring to the table.'

PM Communication Best Practices by Channel (How to get into product management)

Tactical communication advice organized by the five key PM communication channels

How it works: EMAILS:

• Force yourself to re-read every email at least once before sending
• There's always something you can cut or clarify
• Use military-precision email strategy (HBR)
• Know that it's very difficult to over-communicate

DOCS:

• Always ask for feedback from at least one person before sharing widely
• Focus on clean and consistent formatting
• Close out comments before sharing with execs
• Make it easy to scan
• Keep pushing yourself to learn to write better

MEETINGS:

• Include the primary goal of the meeting in your invite
• Ideally include an agenda in the invite
• If a meeting doesn't feel productive, point it out
• Invite as few people as possible
• Leave with clear action items
• Follow up over email with action items and owners

PRESENTATIONS:

• First ask: Are you sure you need a presentation versus an email?
• Make sure audience knows the goal: decision, feedback, or information sharing
• Get feedback on your presentation — fresh eyes catch glaring issues
• Keep it short — no one ever wished a presentation went longer

STORYTELLING:

• Meta-skill that makes you better at all of the above
• Use the McKinsey SCR (Situation-Complication-Resolution) framework for laying out your pitch

PM Communication Sub-Skills Checklist (Startup PM vs. big company PM)

A five-part checklist for improving each dimension of PM communication

How it works: 1. Emails: Review every email at least once before sending. Always find something to cut or clarify. Use military-precision email strategy (bottom-line-up-front). 2. Docs: Get feedback from at least one person before sharing widely. Focus on clean and consistent formatting. Close out comments before sharing with execs. Make it easy to scan. 3. Meetings: Include the goal of the meeting in the invite along with an agenda. Call out unproductive meetings. Invite as few people as possible. Leave with clear action items. Follow up over email with action items and owners. 4. Presentations: Make sure audience knows the goal (decision, feedback, or information sharing). Get feedback from fresh eyes. Keep it short. Ask yourself: do you need a presentation or would an email suffice? 5. Storytelling: A meta-skill that makes you better at all of the above. Use the McKinsey Situation-Complication-Resolution (SCR) framework for laying out your pitch.

PM Execution Behaviors Checklist (Skills PMs need to build)

Specific behavioral descriptions of excellent PM execution compiled from top tech company career ladders

How it works: Strong PM execution behaviors (cited by 75% of companies): □ Keeps the team aligned on vision, goals, and strategy over 6-month periods □ Runs teams that operate seamlessly with minimal blockage, minimal noise, and rapid delivery □ Priorities for a team are clear and trade-offs are well understood □ Delivers almost always on goals and strategy, covering 12-month long product initiatives □ When execution failures happen, takes ownership, explains what was learned, and rapidly remedies the problem □ Identifies issues that will keep the product from delivering on time and communicates to leadership with alternatives □ Works fluidly to creatively scope projects to get more out of teams than they thought possible □ Consistently makes the complex simple

PM Fundamentals Skill Development Areas (🚨 Applications now open for my live course—Product Management Fundamentals)

A checklist of core competency areas that new PMs should develop, as covered in Lenny's course curriculum

How it works: 1. Strategic thinking and vision 2. Written and verbal communication 3. Collaborating and influencing peers effectively 4. Shipping on time while keeping your team happy 5. Gaining confidence as a PM 6. Leveraging user research, metrics, and stakeholders to prioritize 7. Delivering better presentations 8. Understanding what separates good PMs from great PMs

PM Leadership Behaviors Checklist (Skills PMs need to build)

Specific behavioral descriptions of excellent PM leadership compiled from top tech company career ladders

How it works: Strong PM leadership behaviors (cited by 85% of companies): □ Inspires teams to achieve great outcomes □ Pushes team when they need to be pushed, and supports teams when they need support □ Role models servant-leadership □ Effectively motivates a large team of engineers □ Can successfully start and direct self-sustaining teams □ Routinely lobbies for and wins resources □ Spreads best practices across the product team to make everyone better □ Demonstrated mentorship and development of other product managers □ Consistently and actively assists others in expanding and developing skills and knowledge

PM Role Understanding Action Items (What is product management)

Three specific actions based on your situation for understanding what the PM role means at a given company.

How it works: 1. If you're already at a company and looking to understand the role better: Ask your manager what 'amazing' in the role would look like. 2. If you're exploring getting into PM: Ask the companies you talk to (a) what skills they care about most and (b) how much say a PM has compared to other functions. 3. If you're just curious about the PM role: Find a few PMs and ask them about their job.

PM Self-Awareness Warning Signs Checklist (Five habits of highly annoying product managers)

A set of observable signals that indicate you are exhibiting each annoying PM habit, useful as a periodic self-assessment.

How it works: For each anti-pattern, check if the following warning signs apply:

1. Framework obsession:

   • No one on the team is making an effort to learn the framework/process you're pushing
   • Team members go through the motions without genuine engagement
   • People make passive-aggressive jokes about your favorite framework or process

2. Impulsive prioritization:

   • Teammates frequently ask 'why is this being prioritized?'
   • You get pushback on priorities more than 50% of the time
   • Prioritization decisions feel based on anecdotal data to others

3. Expecting everything to be quick:

   • The majority of your asks are framed as taking 'just a few hours'
   • Team members have been burned by scope underestimates
   • You use the word 'just' or 'quick' frequently in requests

4. Avoiding decisions:

   • Discussions go in circles without resolution
   • You consistently wait for 100% consensus before acting
   • Team members express frustration about indecision

5. Being overly prescriptive:

   • Your specs are significantly longer than other PMs' specs
   • Designers and engineers don't really use your documents
   • Your manager has mentioned your team feels micromanaged

PM Skill Development Priority Selection (Vikrama Dhiman)

A decision process for choosing which PM skill to develop first based on background, for maximum career leverage

How it works: Step 1: If something is deeply negative/floundering, fix that first (highest leverage). Step 2: Pick complementary skills — if from design/research background, pick data OR tech first; if from data/tech background, pick design/research first. Step 3: Once you've demonstrated competence in 2 of 3 hard skills (data, tech, design/research), then focus on strategy. Step 4: Soft skills (communication, collaboration, organizational, community) are lifelong development — work on continuously. Rule: Don't try to improve data, design, strategy, and technology all at the same time — that overwhelms.

Parental Leave Coverage Plan Socialization Timeline (How to create an exceptional coverage plan for your parental leave)

A month-by-month timeline for when to share your coverage plan and with whom, starting 4 months before the due date

How it works: T-minus 4 months: Share the news with your manager (suggestion: after the 20-week anatomy scan). Meet with skip-level manager and tell them directly.

T-minus 3 months: Share a first draft of coverage plan with your manager in the early third trimester. Iterate as things evolve.

T-minus 2 months: Socialize the plan more broadly. Share news and revised draft with team, peers, and others. Meet 1:1 with every person listed as a DRI to get buy-in and commitment.

T-minus 1 month: Finalize the plan and send to wide distribution list of key stakeholders. Plan to be fully 'done' 3-4 weeks before due date. Can make final tweaks.

Due date: Set up auto-response on email and Slack with a link to the plan.

Peak Experience Superpower Extraction (Donna Lichaw)

A three-step storytelling exercise to identify a person's unique strengths.

How it works: 1. Identify a peak experience from childhood that lit you up. 2. Identify a peak project/experience from the last 10 years. 3. Look at the meandering path of how you got into your current line of work. Lay these three stories on top of each other to find the recurring themes/superpowers.

Practice Questions by Behavioral Type (How to pass any first-round interview (even in a terrible talent market))

Practice questions organized by the three behavioral question types for self-study

How it works: Pure (use STAR++):

• 'Tell me about a time when you failed.'
• 'Walk me through an experience where you had to give difficult feedback.'
• 'Share an example of an excellent team culture that you were part of.'
• 'Tell me about a time you had to work quickly to deliver a result.'

Theoretical (outline → detail → STAR example):

• 'What's your general approach to building respectful, delightful products?'
• 'How do you go about building team culture?'
• 'How do you give feedback?'

Situational (clarify → assume → plan → check → summarize):

• 'You just started on a new team. Tell me your approach to ramping up.'
• 'You just found out the project you are leading is being canceled. What do you do?'
• 'You get a report that your product is crashing. What do you do?'

Practice Routine for Analytical Thinking Interviews (The definitive guide to mastering analytical thinking interviews)

Step-by-step practice exercises for each section of the AT interview framework, designed to build both written and verbal skills

How it works: Product Rationale Practice:

1. Write down the rationale for 3 of your favorite products
2. Touch on: what it does, who it's for, how it makes money, competitive differentiation, mission
3. Grab time with a friend, verbally walk through each in ~2 minutes
4. Ask them to read back what they remember. If they got the key points, you're on track.

Metrics Framework Practice (10 min per product):

1. Identify ecosystem players
2. Map value they get and actions they take
3. Create specific metrics with time frames
4. Define NSM that can grow indefinitely
5. Pair with guardrail metrics addressing biggest ways NSM could mislead you
6. Walk a friend through it; ask if they understand who benefits, how success is measured, and why you chose your NSM

Goal-Setting Practice (10 min per product):

1. Identify which ecosystem player to focus on
2. Map that player's user journey working backward from the NSM event
3. Identify 3 opportunities along the journey
4. Score each as low/medium/high on 'ability to influence' and 'impact on NSM'
5. Pick highest-impact, highest-influence opportunity and articulate why
6. Walk a friend through it; ask if they understand how the goal moves NSM and why it's achievable in 3-6 months

Tradeoff Practice (per product):

1. Generate a tradeoff scenario from the five types
2. Identify the fundamental tension
3. Frame pros and cons of each option
4. Make a decision connected to mission and metrics framework
5. Ask yourself: Do both options align with mission/NSM equally? Would either trigger guardrails?
6. Walk a friend through it; ask if they understand options, your decision, and what would change your mind

Pre-Management Practice Checklist (Julie Zhuo)

A list of activities an individual contributor can do to build and demonstrate management skills.

How it works: 1. Communicate management aspirations to your current manager. 2. Mentor a summer intern. 3. Act as an onboarding buddy for new hires. 4. Volunteer to improve team documentation or meeting processes.

Seven Reasons PMs Stay on Feature Teams (In defense of feature team product managers)

A diagnostic checklist for PMs to understand why they remain on feature teams despite preferring empowered teams, bridging the stated-preference vs. revealed-behavior gap

How it works: 1. PM has never been on an empowered team and doesn't know what they're missing 2. PM might not know how to find and land a PM role on an empowered team 3. PM might have unintentionally joined a feature team and needs to stay to avoid a short resume stint 4. PM might need to optimize for compensation, and their high-paying role is on a feature team 5. PM might depend on their current employer for work visa sponsorship 6. PM gets to do just enough of the 'fun' work to stay engaged 7. PM believes that success as part of a feature team earns the right to be empowered

Should I Stay or Should I Go Diagnostic (The Magic Loop)

A set of diagnostic questions to determine whether your company and manager can support your advancement

How it works: Ask yourself these questions:

1. Is the company getting bigger each year?
2. Are they hiring new employees from outside?
3. Are other people getting promoted?
4. Have you checked with others (not just your manager) on how advancement occurs at your company?
5. Have you looked at the rate of growth?
6. Have you tried the Magic Loop and gotten no collaboration in return?
7. Is your manager paranoid or exploitative (all requests, no rewards)?

If answers to 1-3 are yes → promotion is possible, go back to Step 1 of the Magic Loop. If the company is stagnant, low-growth, or shrinking → move on. If you've tried the Magic Loop with no reciprocation → move on to a place that rewards investment and achievement.

Common mistakes:

• Mistake 1: Blaming the manager without truly examining your own performance first
• Mistake 2: Complaining about the manager but staying in the job for years without doing anything about it

Signs You're at a Non-Product-Empowered Org (This Week #11: What should new PMs over-index on, and empowering product in a sales-driven org)

Red flags that indicate product is not empowered at your company, derived from the reader's question

How it works: Red flags that product is a second-class citizen:

• Little to no engagement between product and sales
• Expectation that projects should be fully scoped before starting (waterfall approach)
• Expectation that projects are fully executed exactly as scoped (no iteration)
• No design resourcing
• PMs expected to do design themselves
• Default approach is to copy competitors
• Feels like working in an old-school project management org

Lenny's verdict: If multiple of these are true, this isn't a fixable situation — consider leaving for a product-led company.

Signs a Product Framework is Failing (Kayvon Beykpour)

Criteria to determine if your team is over-relying on a framework (like OKRs or JTBD) to the detriment of the product.

How it works: 1. Subjectively bad or customer-hostile decisions are being made consistently. 2. The organization is disincentivized to make ambitious, speculative bets successful because they hurt short-term core metrics.

The 3-Step Asking Process (Kenneth Berger)

A simple iterative loop for getting what you want in life and work.

How it works: Step 1: Articulate what you want. Step 2: Ask for what you want intentionally. Step 3: Accept the response (and try again).

Three Critical Product Management Mistakes (Seth Godin)

Three common mistakes product managers make that Seth identifies from his experience.

How it works: 1. Lacking empathy: Empathy is not optional or about kindness—it's recognizing you're making something for other people. If you're telling users to RTFM, YOU made the mistake, not them. 2. Running out of time or money: When you run out of either, the project is over. Professionals don't ask for extensions because unexpected problems are part of the deal. 3. Not building network effects: If your product doesn't work better when users tell others about it, no one will hear about it. You cannot hope Apple will promote you.

Three Things to Start Today to Become a Senior PM (Becoming a senior Product Manager)

An immediate action checklist for PMs who want to start leveling up toward senior PM right now.

How it works: Start these three things today:

1. Block off the time on your calendar to focus on strategy (block off half a day — pretend you're attending a Zoom wedding if needed)
2. Use the autonomy template ('challenge → how I handled it → any thoughts?') in your next meeting with your manager
3. Look for the 'it depends' answer to practice nuanced decision-making

Tips to Make AI Output Less Detectable (How close is AI to replacing product managers?)

Specific techniques used to make AI-generated PM work harder to distinguish from human work

How it works: 1. Reduce verbosity — AI's comprehensiveness is the #1 giveaway 2. Add obscure or niche references that show breadth of diverse ideas 3. Instruct the AI to make minor grammatical mistakes 'due to being busy' 4. Be colloquial while maintaining professionalism 5. Don't label bullet points with category words followed by colons 6. Don't include summaries at the end (a common AI pattern) 7. Use arrows (->) to show reasoning chains instead of formal structure 8. Don't use jargon or corporate speak unless prevalent in Silicon Valley culture 9. Use custom system prompts via OpenAI Playground instead of ChatGPT's default system prompt 10. Match formatting exactly to what a human would produce (save markdown in VSCode, copy preview) 11. Provide real examples in the prompt so AI picks up on human nuances 12. Ask it to 'make it sound more authentic' in iteration

Top 10 PM Competencies to Evaluate (Product management career ladders)

The most commonly used attributes/competencies/skills for evaluating PMs across 20+ large companies, ranked by frequency

How it works: Ranked list of PM competencies by how commonly they appear in career ladders:

1. Leadership
2. Impact
3. Scope
4. Execution
5. Communication
6. Vision
7. Strategy
8. Collaboration
9. Planning
10. Technical skills

Top Hard Skills for PM Job Descriptions (2024) (State of the product job market, part 2)

Ranked list of the most commonly mentioned hard skills, tools, and technologies in PM job postings — useful as a skills gap checklist

How it works: Most mentioned skills in PM job descriptions (ranked): 1. SQL (most mentioned, though declining over time), 2. Jira (staying strong, slight recent decline), 3. LLMs (fastest-growing mention), 4. AWS/Azure/Google Cloud, 5. Python, 6. Tableau, 7. Salesforce. Declining: Blockchain (was huge in 2022, now fading — web3/crypto companies down 40% YoY). Recommended actions: Take SQL courses (Lenny links to recommendations), get hands-on with LLM tools (Lenny links to his LLM advice).

Top PM Hiring Skills (What is product management)

The most important skills companies look for when hiring PMs, based on a survey of ~1,000 PMs across hundreds of companies.

How it works: Top skills companies look for when hiring PMs:

1. Communication
2. Execution
3. Strategic thinking
4. Collaboration
5. Product sense

For developing product sense specifically, Lenny recommends Julie Zhuo's post on product thinking (a16z).

Top Pitfalls for Each Interview Dimension (The definitive guide to mastering product sense interviews)

Common mistakes candidates make at each step of the product sense interview, organized by dimension

How it works: Clear Communication Pitfalls: (1) Thinking out loud without structure, (2) Asking the interviewer for direction ('What would you like me to do next?'), (3) Premature narrowing of assumptions. Product Motivation Pitfalls: (1) Focusing only on features without articulating why it matters, (2) Ineffective mission statements (too vague or too narrow), (3) Strategic misalignment with company strengths. Segmentation Pitfalls: (1) Shallow demographic-only segmentation, (2) Skipping ecosystem analysis, (3) Non-mutually-exclusive segments. Problem Identification Pitfalls: (1) Confusing needs ('need better search') with problems ('users struggle to find relevant content because...'), (2) Shallow generic journey mapping (pre/during/post), (3) Problem-solution conflation ('users need a better algorithm' vs. 'users struggle to discover...'). Solution Development Pitfalls: (1) Solution jumping to first idea, (2) Feature obsession without connecting to user problems, (3) Platform mismatch — not leveraging company strengths.

Video Call Etiquette (Sam Lessin)

Rules for appearing professional on Zoom/video calls

How it works: 1) Camera on (always), 2) Dress appropriately, 3) Have an appropriate background, 4) If your bed is visible, make it, 5) Close your closet, 6) Avoid virtual backgrounds — they hide context that builds trust, 7) Show your actual environment, just make it presentable

Waypointing Transition Phrases (The definitive guide to mastering product sense interviews)

Specific verbal signposts candidates should use to guide the interviewer through their structured response

How it works: Use explicit verbal signposts throughout: 'Now that I've established assumptions, I'll outline my plan for our time together.' / 'Before I think through the product motivation, does this game plan sound good?' / Between sections, check in: 'I'd like to focus on [chosen ecosystem player] for these reasons [brief rationale]. Before I dive into defining segments within this group, I want to pause to make sure this line of thinking is making sense?' / Before each section: take a 1-2 minute thinking pause, then walk interviewer through your response, then check in before proceeding.

Examples

AI Anxiety Quotes from Tech Workers (How tech workers really feel about work right now)

Real quotes from ~1,750 tech workers sharing existential and practical concerns about AI's impact on their careers

How it works: Theme 1 — Existential anxiety and hype vs reality:

• 'What's the endgame? Many articles have a fear-mongering message that every tech role is replaceable by AI...Is the future just a handful of founders with AI agents for every existing role?...the craft of product management is falling by the wayside.'
• 'Work is also now all about how many AI agents you can use and deploy. What will happen to people's thinking skills?...What will highly optimized, efficient LLMs and agents do to our brains?'
• 'It generates pessimism to see how little many tech leaders understand AI—when we're largely still dealing with ML and LLMs, and where LLMs are largely still chatbots.'

Theme 2 — Career transformations:

• 'Most often I find myself wondering not about whether I have a path for growth in product but if I want to stay in product in the first place, and what I might pivot to if not. I have zero ideas where to start.'
• 'I've been in a multi-year cycle of re-orgs, manager changes, and empty promises of promotions that never happen.'
• 'I'm very positive because I quit the company I was working for the last 10 years to build my own product. Create a path for yourself.'

AI PM Role Landscape (2024) (State of the product job market, part 2)

Breakdown of AI-related PM opportunities across AI-first and non-AI companies

How it works: Total AI PM openings: 456. Breakdown: 178 at AI-first companies, 278 at non-AI-focused tech companies with dedicated AI PM roles. Total AI company job openings: 16,935 (mostly engineering and data science, then business ops, then sales). Emerging role to watch: Prompt Engineer — still rare, with example openings at Amazon (Sr. Prompt Engineer), TikTok (AI Ops with Prompt Engineering Specialization), and Klarity (GenAI Automation Prompt Engineer).

AI Tools Already Replacing Hard Skills Across Verticals (Why PMs are best positioned to thrive in an AI world)

Real examples of AI tools shifting creation from doing to directing across music, movies, engineering, and design—evidence that the PM-like 'director' role is becoming universal

How it works: MUSIC:

• Suno (fastest-growing AI product in the world): Describe in words what music you want, it creates it
• Example: Lenny created a sea shanty about PMs thriving in AI with a text prompt

MOVIES:

• Pika, Runway, Sora: Describe what movie you want, it creates it; refine and iterate

ENGINEERING:

• Devin (Cognition): AI software engineer that takes instructions and builds products
• GitHub Copilot Workspace: AI-assisted coding
• Magic: AI engineering assistant
• Cursor AI: Coding tool with mind-bending demos, including an 8-year-old building a chatbot in 45 minutes
• Jensen Huang (CEO Nvidia) quote: 'It is our job to create computing technology such that nobody has to program. That the programming language is human. Everybody in the world is now a programmer.'

DESIGN:

• Figma AI: Auto-generates product designs based on text descriptions
• Uizard: Goes even further in AI-generated design

Pattern: In every vertical, the value is shifting from execution to direction—knowing what to create, describing it clearly, and iterating until it's great. This is exactly what PMs do.

AI vs Human Blind Test Results on PM Tasks (How close is AI to replacing product managers?)

Results from three blind A/B tests comparing AI (GPT-4o with prompt engineering) vs human PM answers, voted on via X and LinkedIn

How it works: Task 1 - Product Strategy (YouTube Music):

• AI won: 55% preferred AI answer (including ties)
• 77% correctly identified the AI answer
• AI was criticized as a feature list rather than true strategy
• Adjusting prompt for v2 (adding obscure references, minor grammatical mistakes) improved AI score from 38% to 59% on LinkedIn

Task 2 - Defining KPIs (DoorDash):

• AI won decisively: 68% preferred AI answer (86% including ties)
• 70% correctly identified the AI answer
• AI's comprehensiveness was both a giveaway and an advantage
• This was AI's biggest win across all three tasks

Task 3 - Estimating ROI (Meta Jobs feature):

• Human won narrowly: 58% preferred human answer
• Only 65% correctly identified the AI answer
• Very close race with many marginal preferences
• The human answer was enhanced by Mike adding numbers (original had none)

Overall: AI won 2 out of 3 tasks. 70-80% of people could identify the AI answer but many still preferred it.

Airbnb API Example (Become a more technical product manager)

Illustrative example of how Airbnb might use API calls to fetch listings, demonstrating client-server-database communication

How it works: Airbnb Listings Search Flow:

1. Client sends GET request to api.airbnb.com/listings?location=Toronto
2. Server gets the listings in Toronto from the database
3. Database returns listings to the server
4. Server returns listings to the client

Airbnb API endpoints might include: /listings, /users, /bookings, /prices — these are called endpoints or resources.

Andy Johns' 17-Year Career Earnings vs. Cost of Living (How to know when to stop)

Detailed real data showing Andy's actual earnings trajectory, cost of living, and financial independence strategy across a 17-year tech career at Facebook, Twitter, Quora, and Wealthfront.

How it works: Career trajectory: 15 years climbing the startup ladder through Facebook, Twitter, Quora, Wealthfront. Promoted to president at Wealthfront. Key financial strategy: (1) Increase earnings via promotions, (2) Keep lifestyle costs as low as possible relative to earnings, (3) Aggressively invest savings. Specific decisions: Did NOT buy a home in the Bay Area (avoided $1M+ jumbo loan), keeping him from needing more years of high-stress work. Assumed all startup equity would be worth $0 (conservative assumption). Three acceleration phases with two 6+ month breaks: left Quora at year 8 (panic attacks, depression, OCD), left Wealthfront at year 14 (heart issues). Year 17: declared financial independence - could live a simple life off savings without working hard. In 2020, moved to a small blue-collar community with lower cost of living; purchased home outright with what would have been a Bay Area down payment (same home costs 4x more in Bay Area). Current need: only $35K/year post-tax to not dip into savings. Walked away from ~$1M/year potential earnings. Could have earned ~$10M cumulative over 25-year career (70% in last 8 years). Within 30 days of lifestyle changes: blood cortisol dropped 30%.

Career Differentiator Sabbatical Story (On taking time off)

Example of using sabbatical experience as a competitive advantage in job interviews

How it works: An interviewee (Paul) who was a consultant was able to break away from the 'boring consultant' stereotype in job interviews by talking about traveling to countries on the US State Department's 'do not travel' list during his sabbatical. Key reframe for job seekers: if an employer looks down on you for taking time off to do something important to you, would you really want to work for them?

Career outcomes from structured PM fundamentals training (🚨 Applications now open for my live course—Product Management Fundamentals)

Real student outcomes demonstrating the career impact of investing in PM fundamentals within the first 2 years

How it works: Example 1: Within 3 months of completing the course, a student was promoted to lead both Product AND Design for a brand new product. Example 2: A student got promoted from APM to PM, crediting the course with developing their skill set and pushing them to try new tactics. Example 3: A student highlighted that PM fundamentals are 'not normally well served by workshops' and that the combination of context, quality, Slack community, coaches, and expert guests were 'big differentiators.'

Claude Projects Product Sense Worked Example (The definitive guide to mastering product sense interviews)

A fully worked product sense interview response for the question 'Tell me about a product you love and how you would improve it' using Claude Projects

How it works: Assumptions: PM for Claude Projects at Anthropic, U.S. market, individual Pro users not API. Mission: 'To empower users to create AI assistants with specialized knowledge and capabilities tailored to their unique needs, making AI more personally relevant and useful in their daily lives and work.' Ecosystem players: Individual Pro users, IT decision-makers, Anthropic product team, Content creators → Focus on Individual Pro users. Segments: (1) Knowledge Specialists — domain experts using Claude for specialized research, (2) Workflow Automators — professionals streamlining repetitive processes, (3) Casual Learners — individuals exploring topics of interest. Prioritized: Knowledge Specialists (highest underserved degree). Persona: James, 37, medical researcher specializing in rare genetic disorders. Journey: Discovery/setup → Document collection → Project creation → Knowledge testing → Regular usage → Maintenance. Prioritized problem: Context Fragmentation (high frequency, high severity). Solutions: (1) Smart Document Synthesis (high impact, moderate effort — CHOSEN), (2) Interactive Knowledge Graph (high impact, high effort), (3) Guided Project Templates (moderate impact, low effort). V1: When users upload multiple documents, Claude auto-creates: brief summary of themes, text outlines of concept connections, list of knowledge gaps. Start with medical research papers, expand later. Risks: incorrect relationships (mitigation: human review step), computational expense (mitigation: document limits + background processing).

Company-Level PM Skill Emphasis Heat Map (What is product management)

A visual comparison showing which PM skills well-known companies emphasize most, using a heat map format with darker colors indicating higher importance.

How it works: A heat map showing skill emphasis across well-known companies. Companies referenced include those on the mini-CEO to project manager spectrum (Zynga on one end, Apple on the other). The skills mapped include communication, execution, strategic thinking, collaboration, product sense, and others. The visual demonstrates that while companies look for the same broad set of skills, the relative importance varies widely.

Company-Specific PM Influence Levels (A comprehensive survey of Product Management)

A spectrum of specific companies ranked by PM influence, from most to least

How it works: Companies where PMs have a lot more influence: Zynga (PMs run the show), YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter, Uber, Robinhood, Lyft, Coinbase, Asana, Airbnb. Companies where PMs have relatively less influence: Apple, Oracle, Stripe, Tesla.

Company-Specific PM Skill Profiles (A comprehensive survey of Product Management)

A mapping of specific companies to the PM skills they most value, useful for interview preparation or cultural fit assessment

How it works: Communication spikes: HubSpot, Salesforce. Execution spikes: Salesforce, Tesla, VMware. Product sense spikes: Asana, Flipkart, Intercom, Netflix, ServiceNow, WhatsApp. Strategic thinking spikes: Coinbase, Stripe, Zillow. Collaboration spikes: Atlassian, Box, ServiceNow, Spotify, Twitter. Data acumen spikes: Quora, Reddit, Zynga. Technical background spikes: Oracle, Stripe. Raw intelligence spikes: Coinbase, Robinhood. Empathy spikes: HubSpot, Intercom. Design/UX spikes: WhatsApp.

Essential Reading List for Product Builders (Part 2) (Essential reading for product builders—part 2)

Lenny's curated list of 10 timeless essays plus 5 honorary mentions covering growth, leadership, communication, and entrepreneurship for product leaders.

How it works: Core 10:

1. 'Building Products' by Julie Zhuo (problem definition)
2. 'Communication Is the Job' by Andrew Bosworth (leadership communication)
3. 'Executive Communication' by Barbara Minto via Michael Dearing (SCQA framework)
4. 'Distribution' by Ben Horowitz (sales channels)
5. 'The Market Curve' by Mike Vernal (market sizing)
6. 'The Four Fits' by Brian Balfour (growth framework)
7. 'Startup = Growth' by Paul Graham (startup definition)
8. 'Give Away Your Legos' by Molly Graham (scaling teams)
9. 'We Don't Sell Saddles Here' by Stewart Butterfield (product positioning)
10. 'Schlep Blindness' by Paul Graham (finding ambitious ideas)

Honorary Mentions:

• 'Eigenquestions: The Art of Framing Problems' by Shishir Mehrotra & Matt Hudson
• 'What Makes a Strong Product Culture?' by Ken Norton
• 'How to Work with Designers' by Julie Zhuo
• 'The Next Feature Fallacy' by Andrew Chen
• 'Product Management Mental Models for Everyone' by Brandon Chu

Ethan Evans' Career Trajectory Using the Magic Loop (The Magic Loop)

Concrete examples of how Ethan used the Magic Loop throughout his career at multiple companies and Amazon

How it works: First job: Went from just leaving graduate school to managing a team of 10 in only two years by seeing unmet needs and asking his manager about filling them. Quality control example: Was told by an engineering manager that he was disrupting the team by pestering engineers about problems. Learned to prioritize problems and channel them through a process — demonstrating the importance of Step 1 (verify you're doing your job well). Second job: Hired as a director, given more responsibility through an acquisition. Third job: Promoted to VP before turning 30. Amazon: Grew from an initial team of 6 to more than 800. Helped create Prime Video, Kindle, Alexa, Twitch, and Prime Gaming. Holds 70+ patents. Helped draft Amazon's 'Ownership' Leadership Principle. Direct report example: A Software Engineer II who came to Ethan in 2005 at Amazon went on to become VP of Engineering at Google and recently joined a new company as Executive Vice President — using the Magic Loop. Key caveat: 'I would not have gotten to vice president at 43 and retired at 50 without Amazon's 100x growth while I was there.'

Fired from Slack 3 Times (Kenneth Berger)

A case study of what happens when a first PM fails to articulate and ask for what they want.

How it works: Kenneth was fired 3 times in one year at Slack. Phase 1: Overconfident, didn't ask for expectations. Phase 2: People-pleasing out of fear, didn't ask for what he needed. Phase 3: Blamed the CEO instead of accepting the 'no's.

High-Signal Interviewer Question Example (Cruise) (How to pass any first-round interview (even in a terrible talent market))

A real example of a thoughtful question a coaching client formulated for a Cruise interview

How it works: Question: 'In your three years at Cruise, the privacy world has expanded, with the CCPA and other states discussing more regulations for consumer privacy—how has this impacted the nature of your work, and what do you see as the biggest challenge or area of focus as Cruise continues to expand to new geos?'

Why it works: References interviewer's specific tenure, demonstrates industry research (CCPA regulations), connects to company strategy (geo expansion), and asks for personal perspective.

Julia Child - First Principles Applied to Cooking (First-principles thinking)

Julia Child's approach to mastering cooking by breaking every dish into its smallest individual steps

How it works: Learning at the Cordon Bleu meant breaking down every dish into its smallest individual steps and doing each laborious and exhausting procedure by hand. She could bone a duck while leaving the skin intact, extract guts of a chicken through a neck hole, make ham mousse by pounding with mortar and pestle.

Key outcome: She could understand for the first time the principles governing how and why a recipe worked as it did. Success required brains, considerable physical strength, and vast determination.

Jury Duty to PM Analogies (What jury duty taught me about product management)

Humorous but insightful list of additional parallels between jury duty and product management

How it works: 1. Getting a jury summons letter in the mail = Getting an invite to a meeting you didn't want to be in 2. The amount of resources spent on small crime = This meeting should have been an email 3. The judge setting expectations that she wants the jury deliberation by end of the week = Great example of timeboxing 4. Getting dismissed = An upcoming meeting getting canceled 5. Proving something beyond a reasonable doubt = Statistical significance 6. Hoping they don't call your name when they're calling out potential jurors = Hoping they don't call on you in a big meeting 7. Random jurors deciding your fate = An uninformed exec making the call on your project's future 8. Decision by consensus = 😵‍💫

Lenny's Airbnb Growth Transition Story (Breaking into growth)

Personal example of transitioning from a generalist PM to a growth PM at Airbnb

How it works: Four years into his PM career, Lenny moved from a generalist role to a growth role driving Airbnb's supply growth. He had a feeling that growth work would be interesting and that deepening those skills would pay off. His approach: he told his manager it was important to him. About six months later, when an opportunity arose, his manager helped him grab it. He credits the 'Ask' step as the primary reason he got the chance.

Lenny's Career Path as a Case Study in Unplanned Progression (Navigating your early career)

Lenny's personal career journey illustrating how following interests leads to an unpredictable but coherent path

How it works: Career progression:

1. High school — Read every computer programming book, took MCSE certification at 16
2. Odd jobs — Fixing, teaching, and programming computers
3. College — Studied computer science
4. First job — Engineer at a startup (stayed 9 years — too long)
5. Started own company
6. Second job — Joined Airbnb (stayed 7 years — too long)
7. Current — Writing Lenny's Newsletter

Key insight: 'Looking back, each step was an important building block. Looking forward, never in a million years would I have imagined I'd be spending my time writing a newsletter.'

Meta Gardening Product Sense Worked Example (The definitive guide to mastering product sense interviews)

A fully worked product sense interview response for 'You're a PM at Meta. Design a product for gardening.'

How it works: Assumptions: PM for new zero-to-one gardening product at Meta, U.S. market, within Meta's family of apps, personal/home gardening. Mission: 'To empower people to connect and thrive through the shared experience of gardening, creating communities that grow together both online and in their gardens.' Ecosystem: Home gardeners, Plant nurseries, Content creators/experts, Product manufacturers, Local communities → Focus on Home gardeners. Segments: (1) Novice Urban Gardeners — limited space/experience, high enthusiasm, (2) Dedicated Hobbyists — experienced, invest significant time, (3) Social Garden Enthusiasts — garden primarily for community connection. Prioritized: Novice Urban Gardeners (high reach, high underserved). Persona: Casey, 29, marketing professional, city apartment with small balcony. Journey: Inspiration → Research → Planning → Purchasing → Setup → Care → Troubleshooting → Harvest. Prioritized problem: Knowledge Matching Gap (high frequency, high severity) — occurs at critical early stage. Solutions: (1) Plant Match AI Assistant (high impact, moderate effort — CHOSEN), (2) Community Mentor Matching (high impact, high effort), (3) Visual Plant Care Timeline (moderate impact, low effort). V1: Simple questionnaire within Instagram/Facebook asking about location/space, light/time, experience/preferences. AI recommends 3-5 plants with care instructions, growth timelines, photos. Save to wishlist, share with friends. Start with 50 most common plants. Risks: inaccurate recommendations (mitigation: expert verification + feedback system), low discovery (mitigation: leverage feed algorithms).

Natalie at Salesforce — Stop Saying Sorry (Getting buy-in)

A real example of a senior engineer who improved her perceived influence within a week by stopping her habit of saying 'sorry' as a default.

How it works: Natalie, a senior engineer at Salesforce, realized she said 'sorry' all the time during the Arise Leadership Accelerator. She practiced not saying it as her default response. Within one week, her team commented that she presented more compelling ideas and showed up stronger. Demonstrates that a seemingly simple language change can have a powerful impact on perceived influence.

Netflix Podcast Product Sense Worked Example (The definitive guide to mastering product sense interviews)

A fully worked product sense interview response for 'Build a podcast product for Netflix.'

How it works: Assumptions: PM for new zero-to-one podcast product at Netflix, U.S. market, within Netflix's platform, audio-focused, existing subscribers only. Mission: 'To enrich people's entertainment experience beyond the screen by delivering captivating audio content that can be enjoyed wherever they go.' Ecosystem: Listeners, Content creators, Advertisers, Netflix internal teams, Competing platforms → Focus on Listeners. Segments: (1) Educational-Content Extenders — want to go deeper on documentary topics, (2) Narrative Immersion Seekers — crave serialized stories beyond screen, (3) Fandom Community Members — want behind-the-scenes content. Prioritized: Educational-Content Extenders (high underserved, significant reach). Persona: Alex, watches Netflix documentaries about science/tech/history, researches topics after watching, listens to educational podcasts during commutes. Journey: Discovery → Evaluation → Consumption → Retention → Application → Connection. Prioritized problem: Learning Continuity Gap (high frequency, high severity). Solutions: (1) Documentary Audio Extensions (high impact, moderate effort — CHOSEN), (2) AI-Curated Learning Paths (high impact, high effort), (3) Expert Commentary Tracks (moderate impact, low effort). V1: Select 5-10 most popular documentaries, create 3-5 episodes (30 min each) per documentary featuring original directors/experts. Available on established podcast platforms with Netflix branding, discoverable via in-app promotions and post-viewing recommendations. Risks: quality standards (mitigation: involve original teams, establish guidelines), cross-platform tracking (mitigation: custom links, exclusive bonus content requiring Netflix auth).

OpenAI API Endpoints Example (Become a more technical product manager)

Real-world example of OpenAI's API structure showing how endpoints are organized into groups

How it works: OpenAI API endpoints organized by group:

• Images: /images/generations (create images), /images/edits
• Chat: /chat/completions
• Audio: /audio/speech (text-to-speech), /audio/transcriptions

Example POST to /audio/speech: { "model": "tts-1", "input": "Your text here", "voice": "alloy" } Response: MP3 file with AI-generated speech

PM AI Agent Use Cases Table (Make product management fun again with AI agents)

A comprehensive table of real use cases where product managers have gotten value from AI agents, organized by PM task category.

How it works: The newsletter references a detailed table/image of use cases where PMs have gotten value from AI agents. Categories referenced include tasks across the PM workflow: monitoring competitors, processing customer feedback, writing status updates, prepping for meetings, triaging support tickets, syncing sources of truth, and similar repetitive-but-necessary PM tasks. Specific examples mentioned in the text:

• Customer call prep (research external meeting participants daily)
• NPS survey response review (scan Slack channel, decide if technical issue warrants Zendesk ticket)
• Weekly status updates (auto-generate from project management board data)
• Competitor website monitoring (start with one, expand)
• Support thread analysis (classify root cause without summarizing)
• Feature request scanning (identify requests in Slack from specific teams)

PM AI Chatbot Adoption Statistics (2024) (How to use Perplexity in your PM work)

Poll data from Lenny's X and LinkedIn audience showing how frequently PMs use AI chatbot tools

How it works: - Over 50% of PMs who responded use a chatbot daily

• 85% use a chatbot weekly
• Perplexity was the second most mentioned chatbot behind ChatGPT
• Survey of 300+ PM respondents plus 30 follow-up calls informed the use cases
• Robert Bye (PM at Figma) shared common sentiment about daily chatbot usage

PM Job Market Key Benchmarks (2025) (State of the product job market in 2025)

Specific data points that serve as benchmarks for understanding the current PM job market

How it works: Key benchmarks as of mid-2025:

• 6,000+ open PM roles globally (53.6% above 2023 bottom, 11% up since Jan 2025, highest in 2+ years)
• 688 open AI PM roles (explosive growth)
• ~23% of PM roles are remote-friendly (down from 35% peak in late 2022, settling toward ~20% baseline)
• ~20% of PM roles are Bay Area-based
• ~17% of engineering roles are Bay Area-based (share increasing)
• ~33% of AI roles are Bay Area-based
• Capital investment up 29% YoY, 227% over 5 years
• 415 open Product Engineer roles (emerging trend)
• Layoffs on track to be lowest in 4 years

PM Seniority Level Distribution and Trends (2024) (State of the product job market, part 2)

Data on how PM hiring is distributed across seniority levels and how that's shifting over time

How it works: Current distribution: Entry/Mid-level PMs make up over 1/3 of open roles. Senior and Lead/Senior++ roles are growing as a share fastest since early 2023. Lead/Senior++ roles are growing their percentage fastest. Entry/Mid-level share has decreased the most since early 2023 but is still recovering in absolute numbers at a rate similar to Senior roles. Down-leveling (people taking a lower title at a new job) spiked in early 2022 but is now near the lowest levels since 2019.

Product Owner Role Analysis (2024) (State of the product job market, part 2)

Data on the product owner role's relevance across tech vs. non-tech companies

How it works: Product Owner roles at tech companies: only 230 open roles, zero at FAANG. PO roles ARE growing at non-tech companies: banks, telecoms, packaged-goods companies. Where POs come from (previous roles): Business Analysts, Project Managers, and Product Managers. Key insight: PO is the third-fastest-growing role across ALL companies but essentially irrelevant at tech companies specifically.

Public PM Career Ladders Collection (8 Companies) (Skills PMs need to build)

A curated list of publicly available PM career ladders from real tech companies that can be used as benchmarks or inspiration

How it works: 1. Intercom - PDF job ladder: https://blog.intercomassets.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Intercom-PM-job-ladder-Logo.pdf 2. Optimizely - PDF levels & profiles: https://www.dropbox.com/s/8ogtpjvgptix3is/Optimizely%20PM%20Levels%20%26%20Profiles%20-%20FY19.pdf?dl=0 3. Wise (TransferWise) - Online career map: https://www.transferwise.jobs/product-management-career-map/ 4. OpenTable - PDF careers document: https://www.dropbox.com/s/5egjhdeo9ls3ugs/OpenTable%20-%20Product%20Management%20Careers%20at%20OpenTable%20v2.pdf?dl=0 5. XO Group - Medium article with deep breakdown by seniority: https://medium.com/agileinsider/product-manager-skills-by-seniority-level-a-deep-breakdown-cd0690f76d10 6. Oscar - LinkedIn article with deep dive on leveling: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/deep-dive-product-management-leveling-oscar-sara-wajnberg/ 7. Gusto - Engineering blog framework: https://engineering.gusto.com/a-framework-to-help-product-managers-achieve-their-potential-2/ 8. GitLab - Handbook PM role page: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/product/product-manager-role/

Additional companies whose ladders Lenny analyzed but are not public: Uber, Slack, Airbnb, Amazon, Asana, Instacart, Mixpanel, and others (20+ total)

Public PM Career Ladders from Top Tech Companies (This Week #4: Motivating engineers to hit deadlines, PM career ladders, and aligning with execs)

Five real PM career ladders used at actual tech companies, curated as Lenny's favorites from BestPracticer's collection

How it works: 1. Intercom — PDF career ladder: https://blog.intercomassets.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Intercom-PM-job-ladder-Logo.pdf 2. Oscar — Deep dive on PM leveling by Sara Wajnberg: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/deep-dive-product-management-leveling-oscar-sara-wajnberg/ 3. Gusto — Framework to help PMs achieve their potential: https://engineering.gusto.com/a-framework-to-help-product-managers-achieve-their-potential-2/ 4. XO Group — PM skills by seniority level breakdown: https://medium.com/pminsider/product-manager-skills-by-seniority-level-a-deep-breakdown-cd0690f76d10 5. GitLab — Product management career development framework: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/product/#product-management-career-development-framework

Source collection: https://bestpracticer.com/skill/product-career

Real Companies' First PM Experiences (Joining as the first product manager)

Named examples of first PMs at notable companies and their key lessons

How it works: - Superhuman — Ketki Duvvuru: Prioritized observing, listening, and deeply knowing the customer

• Lyft — Evan Goldin: Biggest mistake was not pushing earlier to identify the need for a pivot (Zimride to Lyft); took founder-level vision to identify it. Lesson: regularly ask 'Is this the right product?'
• Airbnb — Jonathan Golden: First PM should balance chasing growth vs. getting overall product stable; develop a framework for resource tradeoff decisions
• Front — Nate Abbott: Don't upset the apple cart; build on what's working, earn trust, then make bigger changes after 3-6 months
• Patreon — Tim Wood: Timing of first PM hire depends on founder's product experience
• Tally — Karan Ahuja: Had to wear many hats (QA, user research, API docs, marketing, BD); jam sessions with founders were key to alignment
• Abstract — Ben Erez: Tremendous ambiguity; founders still extremely hands-on; job is to bring clarity and focus while staying flexible
• Frank & Oak / Sonder — Isaac Souweine: Biggest learning was balancing desire to ship quick wins with time spent learning

STAR++ Worked Example: Compensation Band Rollout (How to pass any first-round interview (even in a terrible talent market))

A complete worked example of the STAR++ framework applied to a 'time you had to work quickly' question

How it works: Question: 'Tell me about a time you had to work quickly to deliver a result.'

S (Situation): Pre-IPO company, eng leadership role. Needed to update compensation bands and ensure all 250 engineers were paid fairly. Complex because comp is charged and only had 6 weeks.

T (Tasks): HR drove the project and proposed new bands. My job was to test new bands against current comp for every engineer, ensuring bands were equitable and attractive.

A (Actions): As HR pushed draft bands, I: analyzed them against career ladder to detect issues, verified no employee would have comp regression, identified and corrected errors, messaged changes to 250-person eng team.

R (Results): Rolled out on time. Engineers happy (no regressions, most got increases). Finance could forecast headcount spending. Comp ready for IPO.

• (Learnings): Uncaught error in Sr. Mgr bands resulted in above-market comp for some. Project goal only set minimum, no maximum. Learned to ask for success criteria as a range, not just the target.

• (Future Improvements): Recently ran project to reduce platform web page load times. Initially exec sponsor set success criteria as <1 second. Inquired about range and set clearer target: 0.3 to 1 second. Saved from major misalignment that would have doubled dev efforts and led to exorbitant server costs.

Script: Asking a Peer PM via Slack (On asking for help (even when you really don’t want to))

Example of an informal help request to a peer with an existing strong relationship, sent via Slack.

How it works: "Hey Taylor, quick question [signpost].

I'm trying to prioritize work across my three teams [rationale].

I honestly don't know how you manage to do this [why them].

Looking for a brain buddy on this—I have 3 questions [specific ask].

Are you open to answering inline or finding 15 minutes to chat live by the end of this week [timeline, opt-in]?

I don't want to make an avoidable error in how I'm thinking about this."

Note: With a peer and strong relationship, you can be less formal and concrete.

Senior PM vs. Regular PM: Alarm Clock for the Blind (Becoming a senior Product Manager)

A concrete example illustrating the difference between what a regular PM does and what a senior PM does, using a product design scenario.

How it works: Regular PM: Designs an alarm clock for the blind. They interview customers, test prototypes, and work closely with marketing to successfully launch the new product.

Senior PM: Discovers the market opportunity for more accessible alarm clocks while speaking to customers and partners during their day-to-day work. They create a strategic plan to win the market, analyze which audience to address first, and convince executives to spin up a new team. Then, they interview customers, test prototypes, and work closely with marketing to successfully launch the new product.

Key insight: Teammates of the senior PM might not see any of the strategic planning. If they only look at specs and product choices, they might not understand why that person got the promotion.

Situational Question Worked Example: Project Cancellation (How to pass any first-round interview (even in a terrible talent market))

A complete worked example of the Situational question framework for handling a canceled project

How it works: Question: 'You found out the project you are leading is being canceled. What do you do?'

Step 1 — Clarifying Questions (with interviewer answers): Stage of completion? (end). How long working? (a while). Strategic priority? (team's only work). Team size? (30). Users affected? (no). Internal teams affected? (yes).

Step 2 — Assumptions: Open dialogue with leadership. Data available to confirm decision. Team doesn't know yet. Team not being disbanded.

Step 3 — Plan (3 considerations):

1. Trust but Validate: Meet with exec leaders, ask about assumptions, gather data if disagree, present alternatives or move forward.
2. Team: Make wind-down plan, communication plan (crisp/clear/direct), announce to everyone at once in person, make info available in writing, address individual concerns via managers, develop future strategy for team.
3. Internal Customers: Communication plan, announce in person, written documentation with FAQs, partner to problem-solve.

Step 4 — Check: 'Did I miss any key steps or is there an area you'd like to dive deeper into?'

Step 5 — Summarize: Restate question and walk through key items (validating decision, planning, communicating to team and customers, landing wind-down, ensuring future team direction).

Spotify Analytical Thinking Interview — Full Worked Example (The definitive guide to mastering analytical thinking interviews)

Complete five-step walkthrough of 'How would you measure success for Spotify?' including assumptions, rationale, metrics, goals, and tradeoffs

How it works: Assumptions: Focus on core music streaming, consumer-facing, global metrics, all platforms.

Product Rationale: Spotify is a freemium music/podcast streaming service. Solved music piracy by providing legal, affordable access. Late growth/early maturity stage. Differentiates from Apple Music, Amazon Music, YouTube Music via superior recommendations, social features, broader platform support, and dedicated audio focus. Mission: 'Unlock the potential of human creativity by giving artists the opportunity to live off their art and fans the ability to enjoy and be inspired by it.'

Metric Framework:

• Ecosystem players: Listeners, Creators, Advertisers, Spotify
• NSM: Total streaming hours per week
• Guardrail: Prevents becoming a passive platform

Goal-Setting:

• Focus on listeners as highest-leverage ecosystem player
• Map user journey, evaluate potential goals
• Recommendation: Increase session continuation rate (highest impact + highest ability to influence)

Tradeoff: Breadth vs. depth — chose broader reach with moderate engagement over deep engagement with fewer users, prioritizing growth potential and reducing concentration risk. Would change mind if: growth plateaus and engagement depth becomes the binding constraint.

Theoretical Question Worked Example: Giving Feedback as a Manager (How to pass any first-round interview (even in a terrible talent market))

A complete worked example of the Theoretical question framework for a management feedback question

How it works: Question: 'How do you give feedback (as a manager)?'

Part 1 — Outline (3 elements):

1. Behavior — what specific behavior am I trying to change?
2. Messaging — how to give feedback so it's effectively heard, understood, and actioned?
3. Alignment — how to ensure agreement on need to change, measurement, and check-ins?

Part 2 — Detail:

1. Behavior: What specific behavior needs to change? What are impacts on individual/team/project/product/business? If behavior changes, what improves?
2. Messaging (Direct): What do they need to hear? What words must be said? How will I know they understand? (Empathetic): How to respect vulnerability? What should they NOT hear? What words to avoid?
3. Alignment: Questions to ensure understanding, alignment on problem and change needed, collaboration on success definition, and check-in plan.

Part 3 — STAR Example: Google TPM team, chatty team member distracting colleagues during core hours. Identified specific behavior, planned empathetic messaging framed around project impact and teammate stress, prepared alignment questions. Result: immediate acknowledgment, monthly check-ins, issue resolved in 2 months, team member now a successful TPM leader at Google.

Top 10 PM Career Accelerator Companies (Ranked) (Which companies accelerate PM careers most)

Data-backed ranking of companies whose PM alumni see the greatest career acceleration, with specific strengths noted

How it works: 1. Revolut (London, ~10K employees, $45B valuation) — Top 10 in 6 categories; most impressive all-around stats 2. N26 (Berlin, ~1,500 employees, ~$6B valuation) — #1 in CPO rate AND Head of Product rate; top 10 in 4 other categories 3. eBay (~12K employees, ~$30B market cap) — #1 in most promotions after leaving; top 10 in 4 categories 4. Plaid (~1,200 employees, ~$13B valuation) — Nearly 20% founder rate; impressive for size and age; also 13th at Most Promotions 5. Intercom (~1,000 employees, $1.3B valuation) — One of smallest companies; strength across many attributes 6. Intuit (~20K employees, ~$180B market cap) — Oldest/largest to rank highly; especially good at incubating product leaders; 11th at Founder Rate 7. LinkedIn (~19K employees) — Most founder-friendly big company; beats Uber, Meta, Stripe; 11th at CPO Rate 8. Palantir (~4K employees, ~$150B market cap) — #1 in founder rate by far (~25%); standout at first PM rate 9. Deel (~4K employees, $12B valuation) — Newest company on list (founded 2019); accelerates alumni promotion rate most alongside Discord 10. Discord (~600 employees, $15B valuation) — Smallest company on list; punching well above weight

Notable Mentions:

• Ramp (~800 employees, founded 2019): 3rd founder rate, 5th first PM rate, 10th time-to-next-promotion
• Nubank (~7K employees): 6th Head of Product rate, 7th first PM rate, 8th fastest risers, 9th fastest promotion
• Notion (~500 employees): 2nd first PM rate, 4th CPO rate

Top 10 cities for open PM roles (2025) (State of the product job market in 2025)

Ranked list of cities with the most open PM roles, showing shifts from the previous year

How it works: Top cities for PM roles in 2025 (exact ranking visible in newsletter chart):

• Bay Area leads with nearly 20% of all open PM roles
• New entrants to top 10: Berlin, Austin
• Dropped from top 10: Boston, L.A.
• Other top cities include New York, Seattle, and others shown in the chart

For AI roles specifically: Almost a third (~33%) of all open AI-related roles are in the Bay Area.

Top 20 companies hiring PMs (2025) (State of the product job market in 2025)

Ranked list of the 20 companies with the most open PM roles, plus a separate list for AI PM roles

How it works: Two lists provided in the newsletter (specific company names visible in the charts):

1. Top 20 companies with the most open PM roles overall
2. Top companies hiring for AI PM roles specifically

AI companies mentioned as examples: OpenAI, Anthropic, Scale (AI-native); Cursor, Harvey, Lovable (AI-driven); Figma, Salesforce (AI-specific roles at non-AI companies)

Product Engineer role examples: v0 (Vercel), Amplitude, n8n

Top Cities for PM Roles (2024) (State of the product job market, part 2)

Ranked list of cities/metros with the most open PM roles at tech companies globally

How it works: Rankings: #1 San Francisco Bay Area (20%+ of all open PM roles, up 25% YoY from 15.4%), #2 Seattle (mostly Amazon and Microsoft), #3 Remote, #4 Bengaluru India (most popular non-US location), #5 New York. The Bay Area share is growing while remote is declining (from 35% to 22.5%).

Top Companies Hiring Growth Roles (Recent Months) (New data on the product job market)

Ranked list of companies hiring the most growth people recently, useful for targeting job applications

How it works: In descending order: HubSpot, Salesforce, TikTok, Velera, Amazon, Enpal, Headway, Pocket FM, Uber, Accenture, Atlassian, Compass, MongoDB, AI Digital, Google, CrowdStrike, AECOM, Adobe, Airwallex, Askable, Grab, Media.Monks, Traba, Walmart.

Top Companies Hiring PMs (2024) (State of the product job market, part 2)

A ranked list of tech companies with the most open PM roles, plus data on where their PM hires come from

How it works: Chart shows top companies by open PM roles (specific names in chart image). Bonus data shows top 5 feeder sources for each company's PM hires — e.g., Amazon's #1 source is business schools. Other companies hire heavily from each other and from consulting firms. Useful for targeting applications and understanding competitive dynamics.

Top Companies Hiring Product Managers (Recent Months) (New data on the product job market)

Ranked list of companies hiring the most PMs recently, useful for targeting job applications

How it works: Amazon, Microsoft, Capital One, Google, Meta, ServiceNow, Salesforce, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Adobe, TikTok, Wells Fargo, Masterclass, Solventum, Visa, IBM, American Express, Oracle, Nvidia, AWS, Disney, Walmart, Apple, Medline Industries, GE Vernova, Intuit.

Top Companies That Produce the Best PMs (Overall Ranking) (Which companies produce the best product managers)

Consolidated ranking of companies that produce the best PMs, triangulated across founder success, career acceleration, and leadership attainment data from the past 10 years

How it works: Top tier companies (appearing across multiple analyses): Intercom (dominates career acceleration, top 10 in all 4 dimensions), Palantir (33%+ PMs become founders, strong in leadership), N26 (strong in career acceleration and leadership), Revolut (tied #2 in career acceleration), Notion (10% alumni become founders, top in producing leaders), eBay (top in producing product leaders).

Strong in founder creation: Palantir (#1 raw founders at 33%+), Chime (#1 successful founders at 20%+ raising Series A), Scale (~15% successful founders), Dropbox (#3 raw founders), Intercom (#2 raw founders at 18%+), Plaid (#4 raw founders).

Strong in career acceleration: Intercom (#1, only company in top 10 on all 4 dimensions), Revolut (#2 tied, top 10 in 3 categories), Nubank (#2 tied, top 10 in 3 categories), N26 (#4, top 10 in 2 categories).

Strong in producing leaders: eBay, Intercom, N26, Palantir, Notion (highest rates across the board), Revolut and Intuit (just behind).

Special case - Stripe: PMs don't show traditional advancement because they get recruited as star PMs at rocketship companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Mercury, Adyen, and Scale rather than climbing the ladder or founding companies. They disproportionately join early-stage companies rather than big tech.

U.S. Product Role Market Size Benchmarks (2024) (New data on the product job market)

Concrete data points on the size and hiring velocity of key product roles in the U.S.

How it works: Product Manager: ~450,000 active, 2,500-4,500 hires/month. Growth: ~80,000 active, 1,000-2,000 hires/month. Product Owner: ~65,000 active, steady growth. Scrum Master: ~40,000 active, net negative (shrinking). User Research: ~14,000 active, ~200 hires/month. Engineering and others: charts provided but exact numbers not stated in text.

Why Fintech Accelerates PM Careers (Dennis Yang Explanation) (Which companies accelerate PM careers most)

Two hypotheses for why fintech companies dominate PM career acceleration

How it works: Hypothesis 1: Fintech nurtures strong product leaders because fintech work is on 'hard mode':

• Lots of risk/fraud vectors to manage
• Difficult stakeholders (compliance, regulations)
• Endless complicated tradeoffs

Hypothesis 2: Fintech PMs who leave tend to join other fintech companies or start fintech startups, and since they know the space well, they're more likely to thrive in those roles.

Tools

AI Agent Platform Recommendations (Make product management fun again with AI agents)

List of recommended AI agent platforms for PM automation tasks, categorized as 'AI automations' — the most practical category for PM busywork.

How it works: AI Automation Platforms (recommended for PM agents):

• Zapier Agents (note: separate product from classic 'Zaps') — recommended starting point, especially if company already uses Zapier
• Lindy AI
• Relay App
• Gumloop (has 'Gummie' chatbot guide)
• Cassidy AI
• Relevance AI

For the meta-prompt approach, use:

• OpenAI o3 Deep Research (recommended)
• Perplexity Deep Research (recommended)

For batch tasks (not agents):

• Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT (manual upload)
• Slack AI, Notion AI, Gemini for Workspace, Microsoft Copilot (built-in)
• MCP integrations

Platform selection criteria:

1. What your company already uses and trusts
2. Supports both the integration AND the specific action you need (read vs. write)
3. Achieves your goal in the fewest moving parts

AI Learning and Staying-Current Resource List (Why PMs are best positioned to thrive in an AI world)

Curated list of newsletters, podcasts, courses, and people to follow to stay informed on AI developments as a PM

How it works: NEWSLETTERS:

• The Rundown (therundown.ai) - AI news updates
• Superhuman AI (superhuman.ai) - AI news updates
• Ben's Bites (bensbites.com) - AI news updates

PODCASTS:

• No Priors with Sarah Guo and Elad Gil

COURSES:

• Andrew Ng's online courses on machine learning and AI for everyone (andrewng.org/courses)
• Andrej Karpathy's YouTube videos explaining how LLMs work

PEOPLE TO FOLLOW:

• Dan Shipper (@danshipper) - Building AI products, interviewing people on AI usage
• Claire Vo (@clairevo) - Building ChatPRD, side project generating six figures
• Andrej Karpathy - Technical AI education

KEY READS:

• Eric Schmidt's AI prophecy: 'The next two years will shock you' (Exponential View)

AI TOOLS TO USE DAILY:

• ChatGPT
• Perplexity
• Claude

AI Tools and Resources List (Summary: AI and product management | Marily Nika (Meta, Google))

Specific tools and platforms mentioned for AI product management work

How it works: - ChatGPT: For mission statements, user personas, idea generation

• Google AutoML (cloud.google.com/automl): No-code tool for training custom ML models
• Lensa app (prisma-ai.com/lensa): Transforms photos into fantastical images
• Arxiv (arxiv.org/list/cs.AI/recent): Latest AI research papers
• MIT Technology Review: Tech-focused newsletter for AI news
• Maven (maven.com): Platform hosting Marily's AI PM courses
• Figma: For creating AI product prototypes/demos before building actual AI

AI Tools for PM Work (Categorized by PM Task) (How AI will impact product management)

A comprehensive list of AI tools organized by PM task, recommended by Lenny for augmenting PM work today.

How it works: Strategy & Vision: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity Goal Setting: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity Creating Specs/PRDs: ChatPRD, WriteMyPRD, Uizard, tldraw (for mocks and prototypes) Discovery/User Research: Dovetail, Sprig, Kraftful, Notably, Viable, Maze Roadmapping: Productroadmap.ai Quality Assurance: Rainforest, Katalon, Codium, Sapient, Diffblue GTM/Copy: Copy.ai, Jasper Running Meetings: Gamma, Tome, Fireflies, Otter, Rewatch, Airgram, Avoma Stakeholder Alignment/Presentations: Gamma, Tome, Hume Team Alignment: Gamma, Tome, Hume

AI Voice Mode as a Tutor (Jason Droege)

Using conversational AI to learn new concepts on the go.

How it works: Turn on voice mode in an AI app (like ChatGPT) during a commute to ask questions and learn about new technical concepts or research, acting as a personalized tutor.

AI newsletters and podcasts for staying current (Tamar Yehoshua)

Tamar's recommended sources for keeping up with the rapidly evolving AI landscape.

How it works: Newsletters: Ben's Bites, The Neuron. Podcasts: No Priors (Gil and Sarah Guo), Cognitive Revolution. Tip: Use ChatGPT voice mode to load articles before commute and ask questions about them during the drive.

Advisor Investment Spreadsheet (Luc Levesque)

A spreadsheet used to evaluate potential companies to advise, treating the decision like a venture capital investment.

How it works: Contains a checklist of criteria and questions to assess the likelihood of a successful company exit and liquidity event before committing time.

Angel Investing Platforms and Programs (Lessons from 140+ angel investments)

Recommended platforms, syndicates, and training programs for new angel investors

How it works: Syndicates:

• AngelList Syndicates (https://www.angellist.com/syndicates) — no money up-front, invest small amounts, learn how investors evaluate deals

Training Programs:

• First Round Angel Track (https://angeltrack.firstround.com/)
• Hustle Fund Angel Squad (https://www.hustlefund.vc/angelsquad)
• On Deck Angels (https://www.beondeck.com/angels)

Platforms:

• Stonks (https://stonks.com/)
• AngelList (for syndicates and investing)

Scout Programs:

• SuperScout (https://superscout.co/programs)

Alumni Networks:

• Airbnb Alumni Syndicate (https://airangels.co/)

Aristotle Logical Reasoning GPT (Hilary Gridley)

A custom GPT designed to train product managers in logical reasoning using LSAT-style questions.

How it works: Prompts the user with a PM scenario (e.g., conflicting stakeholder demands), asks a multiple-choice logical reasoning question, and provides immediate feedback on why the selected answer is right or wrong.

Crowdsourced Career Advice Twitter Threads (Navigating your early career)

Two Twitter threads with thousands of pieces of career advice from Lenny's audience

How it works: 1. 'What's the best career advice you got in your 20s?' — twitter.com/lennysan/status/1292260280517287937 2. 'What's the worst advice you got in your 20s?' — twitter.com/abhineezy/status/1292917832527708160

Lenny describes these as containing 'THOUSANDS of pieces of advice' and considers them a supplement to his five strategies.

Engineering Blogs for PM Technical Literacy (The top 5 things PMs should know about engineering)

Curated list of engineering blogs that are accessible to non-engineers and help build technical vocabulary

How it works: 1. Segment Engineering Blog — segment.com/blog/engineering 2. Slack Engineering Blog — slack.engineering 3. Netflix Tech Blog — netflixtechblog.com 4. Stitch Fix Multithreaded Blog — multithreaded.stitchfix.com

These are written for recruiting purposes ('look at all the cool stuff we've built!') but contain useful base knowledge about how software is used in practice.

Further Study Reading List for PM Performance (How to know if you're doing a good job as a product manager)

Curated list of resources for deeper learning on PM role, habits, career growth, and impostor syndrome

How it works: 1. Ten jobs of a product manager (Lenny's Newsletter) 2. 14 habits of highly effective product managers (Lenny's Newsletter) 3. A comprehensive survey of product management (Lenny's Newsletter) 4. Becoming a senior product manager (Lenny's Newsletter) 5. Overcoming impostor syndrome (Lenny's Newsletter) 6. The Power of Product Thinking by Julie Zhou (a16z Future)

Gemini Chart-to-Table Prompt (Jason Cohen)

A specific use case for AI to extract data from images for analysis.

How it works: Upload an image of a data chart to Google Gemini and use the prompt: 'Make this into a table that I can paste into Google Sheets.' It formats the output perfectly for spreadsheet analysis.

Growth PM Resource Library (Breaking into growth)

Curated list of blogs, newsletters, and courses for ongoing growth PM learning

How it works: Further study resources:

1. 'The growing specialization of product management' by Adam Fishman and Keya Patel (Reforge)
2. Reforge blog and courses (all programs)
3. Demand Curve growth course
4. Netflix's blog on experimentation (decision-making at Netflix)
5. Casey Winters's blog (caseyaccidental.com)
6. Growth & User Acquisition newsletter (Indie Hackers)
7. First 1000 newsletter

Key authors/thought leaders referenced throughout:

• Andrew Chen (growth, virality, paid marketing, CAC)
• Brian Balfour (growth strategy, Reforge)
• Julie Zhuo (building with data)
• Julian Shapiro (making ads)
• Netflix Tech Blog (experimentation)

Key Prompts Collection (How to become a supermanager with AI)

Reusable power prompts that appear throughout the strategies for getting better AI outputs.

How it works: Prompt 1 (Specificity booster): 'Be 100x clearer and more specific.' — Used to drill into patterns and get more actionable output. Prompt 2 (Specificity booster): 'Make this 100x more specific.' — Forces AI to replace vague suggestions with concrete, actionable detail. Prompt 3 (Quality improvement): 'Give me a better answer, and explain why it's better.' — Forces AI to self-evaluate and improve. Prompt 4 (Feedback adjustment): 'Your suggestions are too _____, make them more _____.' — Uses adjective pairs to steer output direction. Prompt 5 (Perspective-taking): 'Imagine you are [role]. What pushback might you have to this response?' — Tests robustness of answers. Prompt 6 (GPT ideation): 'I'd like to focus on [x domain]. Read this document and then give me 10 new creative ideas for GPTs I could create to help my team upskill in this area.' Prompt 7 (Self-discovery): 'I want to create a custom GPT that helps my team upskill in an area where I am uniquely strong. What are some examples of skills or areas where [product] leaders might have unique expertise they could teach an AI?'

Lenny's Recommended Reading List (Memorial Day 2024) (Taking the week off)

A curated set of four resources Lenny recommends for product managers and leaders looking for high-signal professional development reading

How it works: 1. Podcast: 'Frameworks for growing your career' with Bangaly Kaba (Lenny's Podcast) — career growth frameworks for product/growth professionals. 2. Essay: 'Who's Got the Monkey?' (HBR, 1999) — classic management essay on delegation and ownership of tasks. Recommended by Gokul Rajaram. 3. Blog post + Newsletter: '101 Additional Advices' and 'Recomendo' newsletter by Kevin Kelly — life and work advice. 4. Essay: 'How to do great work' by Paul Graham — essay on the principles of doing exceptional work.

PM Career Development Reading List (How to get into product management)

Comprehensive curated reading list organized by PM skill area, featuring articles and books from top product leaders

How it works: STRATEGY:

• Good Strategy, Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt (book)
• WTF is Strategy? by Vince Law
• How to Become a Strategic Leader by Julie Zhuo
• Applying Leverage as a Product Manager by Brandon Chu
• A Three-Step Framework For Solving Problems by Lenny
• Amazon's Working Backwards strategy

EXECUTION:

• Measure What Matters by John Doerr (book — OKRs)
• Building Products by Julie Zhuo
• A Product Manager's Job by Josh Elman
• Sheryl Sandberg's Career Advice

COMMUNICATION:

• How to Write Email with Military Precision (HBR)
• How to Run a Quarterly Product Strategy Meeting by Gibson Biddle
• McKinsey SCR storytelling framework

LEADERSHIP:

• The Most Underrated Product Management Skill: Influence Without Authority by Sachin Rekhi
• 10 Traits of Great PMs by Noah Weiss
• What Makes a Great Product Manager by Lawrence Ripsher
• What distinguishes the Top 1% of PMs from the Top 10%? by Ian McAllister
• Product Management skills NO ONE talks about by Taruna Manchanda
• The Job of Leadership by Ev Williams

DECISION MAKING:

• Making Good Decisions as a Product Manager by Brandon Chu
• The Art of Decision Making as a Product Manager by Sachin Rekhi
• The Agony and Ecstasy of Building with Data by Julie Zhuo
• Your Job is Not to Make Every Possible Customer Happy by Steve Blank
• Product strategy means saying no by Des Traynor
• Type-1 and Type-2 decisions by Jeff Bezos

PRODUCT SENSE:

• Training your product intuition by Merci Victoria Grace
• How to Master The Discipline of Product Management by Eric Jorgenson
• Top 11 Frameworks Every Product Manager Should Know by Abhishek Shah
• How to Work with Designers by Julie Zhuo
• How to Work with Engineers by Julie Zhuo
• Design Thinking (IDEO U)

PREPAREDNESS:

• The Score Takes Care of Itself by Bill Walsh (book)
• Top Hacks from a PM Behind Two of Tech's Hottest Products (First Round)
• Time Management: Tips for Product Managers by John Cutler

PM Communication and Leadership Reading List (Startup PM vs. big company PM)

A curated reading list of articles and resources for developing PM skills in communication, influence, and data-driven decision-making

How it works: Communication:

• 'Communication is the Job' by Boz (Andrew Bosworth)
• 'How to Write Email with Military Precision' (HBR)
• 'How to Run a Quarterly Product Strategy Meeting' by Gibson Biddle
• 'How to Tell a Business Story Using the McKinsey SCR Framework' (Speaking Sherpa)
• 'The Irresistible Power of Storytelling as a Strategic Business Tool' (HBR)
• '5 Ways Charity Water Uses Storytelling to Inspire More Giving' (Fast Company)

Influence:

• '10 Traits of Great PMs' by Noah Weiss
• 'What Distinguishes the Top 1% of Product Managers from the Top 10%?' by Ian McAllister (Quora)
• 'The Job of Leadership' by Ev Williams
• 'The Most Underrated Product Management Skill: Influence Without Authority' by Sachin Rekhi
• 'What Makes a Great Product Manager' by Lawrence Ripsher
• 'Product Management Skills NO ONE Talks About' by Taruna Manchanda

Data & Decision-Making:

• 'Type-1 and Type-2 Decisions' (Jeff Bezos / Inc.)
• 'The Agony and Ecstasy of Building with Data' by Julie Zhuo
• 'Making Good Decisions as a Product Manager' by Brandon Chu
• 'The Art of Decision Making as a Product Manager' by Sachin Rekhi
• 'Your Job is Not to Make Every Possible Customer Happy' by Steve Blank
• 'Product Strategy Means Saying No' by Des Traynor
• Amazon's decision-making principles

PM Further Study Reading List (What is product management)

A curated list of Lenny's own posts for deeper study on PM topics including career ladders, surveys, career decisions, and skill development.

How it works: 1. Product management career ladders — lennysnewsletter.com/p/jobs-of-product-manager 2. A comprehensive survey of Product Management — lennysnewsletter.com/p/product-management-survey 3. Should I become a product manager — lennysnewsletter.com/p/become-a-product-manager 4. How to get into product management — lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-get-into-product-management 5. Startup PM vs. big-company PM — lennysnewsletter.com/p/product-management-startup-big-company 6. Getting better at product strategy — lennysnewsletter.com/p/getting-better-at-product-strategy 7. The Minto Pyramid Principle and the SCR Framework — lennysnewsletter.com/p/minto-pyramid-principle-scr

External resource: Julie Zhuo's post on product thinking — future.a16z.com/product-thinking/

PM Interview Question Research Platforms (Preparing for a PM interview)

Platforms where candidates can find real PM interview questions organized by company.

How it works: 1. Glassdoor (https://www.glassdoor.com/Interview/index.htm) - Real interview questions from candidates 2. Exponent (https://www.tryexponent.com/questions?page=1&role=pm) - PM-specific question bank 3. PMExercises (https://www.productmanagementexercises.com/interview-questions) - PM interview question database

PM Mock Interview Practice Resources (Preparing for a PM interview)

Platforms and communities for finding mock interview partners and coaches for PM interviews.

How it works: Mock Interview Peer Groups:

• Exponent (https://www.tryexponent.com/practice)
• PMExercises (https://www.productmanagementexercises.com/practice)
• IGotAnOffer (https://igotanoffer.com/pages/technical-mock-interviews)
• Lewis C. Lin's Interview Community (https://launchpass.com/pminterview)

Mock Interview YouTube Channels:

• Exponent (https://www.youtube.com/c/ExponentTV)
• Product Alliance (https://www.youtube.com/c/ProductAlliance/videos)
• RocketBlocks (https://www.youtube.com/c/rocketblocks)
• Diego Granados (https://www.youtube.com/c/PMDiegoGranados)

Interview Coaching Services:

• IGotAnOffer (https://app.igotanoffer.com/coaching/tech/)
• Exponent (https://www.tryexponent.com/coaching)
• RocketBlocks (https://www.rocketblocks.me/#pricing)
• Product Alliance (https://www.productalliance.com/coaching)
• PMExercises (https://www.productmanagementexercises.com/coaching)

Recommended Inspiration Resources (Navigating your early career)

Three pieces of content recommended for career inspiration

How it works: 1. Watch: Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford commencement speech (YouTube) 2. Listen: 'How to get rich' by Naval Ravikant (nav.al/rich) 3. Read: 'The Shortness of Life: Seneca on Busyness and the Art of Living Wide Rather Than Living Long' (Brain Pickings)

Recommended Reading List for Career Navigation (Navigating your early career)

Five books recommended by Lenny for people navigating their early career

How it works: 1. 'So Good They Can't Ignore You' by Cal Newport — Why skills trump passion in the quest for work you love 2. 'How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big' by Scott Adams 3. 'The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck' by Mark Manson — A counterintuitive approach to living a good life 4. 'Great at Work: The Hidden Habits of Top Performers' by Morten T. Hansen 5. 'The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People' by Stephen R. Covey

Recommended Reading List for Problem-Solving Skills (A Three-Step Framework For Solving Problems 👌)

Five books Lenny recommends for improving problem-solving skills as a product leader.

How it works: 1. Deep Work by Cal Newport 2. The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson 3. Good Strategy, Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt 4. Measure What Matters by John Doerr 5. Lean Analytics by Alistair Croll and Benjamin Yoskovitz

Reforge Course Catalog for Product Professionals (What COVID taught me about product management)

A curated list of Reforge courses recommended by Lenny for upleveling across product, growth, data, and leadership disciplines.

How it works: Recommended Reforge courses: 1) Product Management Foundations, 2) Product Strategy, 3) Product Leadership, 4) Data for Product Managers, 5) Experimentation + Testing, 6) Advanced Growth Strategy, 7) Marketing Strategy, 8) Engineering Management, 9) Growth Marketing, and more. Lenny describes all as 'top-notch' with 'something for everyone.'

Reforge Course Catalog for Product, Growth, Marketing, and Engineering Professionals (Reforge applications open (and taking a sick day))

A comprehensive list of Reforge's cohort-based courses organized by discipline, useful for choosing professional development aligned to your career goals.

How it works: Product Management Courses (6):

1. Product Management Foundations – Foundational understanding of the PM role, tools, and strategies to succeed.
2. Mastering Product Management – Level up by mastering critical PM tools; identify and execute on high-leverage work generating disproportionate returns.
3. Product Strategy – Build, communicate, and execute a cohesive product strategy across feature, growth, scaling, and innovation product work.
4. Product Leadership – Methods for building high-performance product teams, managing up/down/across, and creating cross-functional influence.
5. Data for Product Managers (New!) – Drive impact for the metrics that matter most by learning data skills.
6. User Insights for Product Decisions – Make key product decisions based on a deeper understanding of customers.

Growth Courses (5):

1. Growth Series
2. Advanced Growth Strategy
3. Retention & Engagement
4. Monetization & Pricing
5. Experimentation & Testing

Marketing Courses (2):

1. Marketing Strategy (updated)
2. Growth Marketing (new)

Engineering Courses (3):

1. Scaling Product Delivery
2. Technical Strategy
3. Engineering Management (new)

Pricing Model: One flat yearly fee includes participation in any 3 courses per year, plus year-round content access, ongoing workshops, and deep-dive sessions led by Reforge partners.

Spring 2022 Timeline: Apply by March 11; cohort onboarding starts March 21; first come, first served.

Research Sources for Interviewer Questions (How to pass any first-round interview (even in a terrible talent market))

List of resources for researching companies and industries to formulate high-signal interviewer questions

How it works: Sources to research:

• Consulting firm dossiers (industry analysis)
• VC thought-leadership white papers (trends)
• Company's website (product, mission, strategy)
• Yahoo Finance (financial performance, earnings)
• G2 (competitive landscape, reviews)
• Capterra (competitive landscape, software comparisons)
• LinkedIn (interviewer backgrounds, tenure, posts)
• Industry news and trends

Resume Templates and Review Services (How to be prepared for layoffs)

Curated collection of resume templates and professional review services for job seekers

How it works: Resume templates:

• Google Docs Template 1 (linked in newsletter)
• Google Docs Template 2 (linked in newsletter)
• Canva's '10 Resume Templates to Help You Get Your Next Job'
• Custom resume designs from Etsy (etsy.com/market/resume_template)

Resume review service: Exponent (tryexponent.com/resume)

Accomplishment documentation templates:

• Julia Evans' Brag Document (jvns.ca/blog/brag-documents/#template)
• Upasna Gautam's guide (Twitter)
• Lauren Holliday's achievement tracking template (Medium)

Speech-to-Text Tools for PMs (Product manager is an unfair role. So work unfairly.)

Recommended speech-to-text dictation tools that use OpenAI's Whisper model for dramatically improved accuracy.

How it works: - BetterDictation (https://betterdictation.com/) — lightweight tool that invokes Whisper anywhere you're typing

• Superwhisper (https://superwhisper.com/) — lightweight tool that invokes Whisper anywhere you're typing
• ChatGPT native desktop and mobile apps — have built-in speech-to-text
• Mac OS and Windows built-in dictation — have also improved dramatically

Benefit: Write more in less time (and less wrist strain), transfer context to LLMs naturally as you would to teammates, and your writing sounds better in your natural speaking flow.

Swipe File (14 habits of highly effective product managers)

A personal collection of well-executed documents, emails, presentations, and other artifacts saved for later inspiration

How it works: A practice borrowed from copywriting. PMs should save examples of well-executed documents, emails, presentations, etc. into a dedicated file/folder that they can come back to for inspiration when creating their own. Helps build pattern recognition for high-quality PM communication.

Web3 Hands-On Experience Checklist (A product manager’s guide to web3)

Specific platforms and activities to use for gaining firsthand web3 experience

How it works: BUY CRYPTO: Coinbase, FTX, Binance WALLETS: Metamask (Ethereum/BSC), Phantom (Solana) STAKING: Staked.us SWAPPING: Uniswap YIELD FARMING: Compound NFT MARKETPLACES: OpenSea, Rarible, Foundation, LooksRare NFT COLLECTIONS TO EXPLORE: World of Women, Crypto Coven, Zed Run CROSS-CHAIN BRIDGES: Synapse, Wormhole L2 NETWORKS: Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism DAO PARTICIPATION: Developer DAO, Friends with Benefits BUILDING: Buildspace projects, Etherscan contract reading, Mint an NFT

Web3 PM Learning Curriculum (A product manager’s guide to web3)

Comprehensive list of resources organized by type for PMs learning about web3

How it works: WHITEPAPERS: Bitcoin whitepaper (bitcoin.org), Ethereum whitepaper (ethereum.org)

COURSES/GUIDES: a16z Crypto School, Web3 University (web3.university), Preethi Kasireddy's guide, Linda Xie's essays (alias.co/linda/essays)

PODCASTS: Bankless, The Defiant, Unchained

BOOKS: The Sovereign Individual (philosophy), The Infinite Machine (Ethereum history), Crypto Assets (investing framework)

SCI-FI (culture): Snow Crash, Ready Player One, Dune

VIDEOS: Chris Dixon 'The Potential of Crypto,' EthCC4 conference, Vitalik talk at EthCC4, Tim Ferriss with Naval/Vitalik (March 2021), Tim Ferriss with Nick Szabo (Aug 2017), Chris Dixon/Naval 'Wonders of Web3' (Oct 2021), Balaji (Nov 2021), Hosseeb with Solana/Avalanche/NEAR founders, Brian Armstrong on Bankless (Nov 2021)

CRYPTO TWITTER LISTS: Multiple curated lists linked for following insightful people

BUILDING: Buildspace (buildspace.so), Etherscan for reading contracts, Developer DAO, Friends with Benefits

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Supporting file: references/guest-insights.md

PM Career Growth - All Guest Insights

99 sources, 313 insights

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Ada Chen Rekhi

Insight:

Source: How to make better decisions and build a joyful career | Ada Chen Rekhi (Notejoy, LinkedIn, SurveyMonkey) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N64vIY2nJQo) @ 00:42:42

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Adriel Frederick

Insight:

Source: Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4avaVEAa64Y) @ 00:58:00

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Alexander Embiricos

Insight: As AI masters the mechanics of writing code, engineers must transition their focus toward high-level ideation, planning, and system validation.

Tactical advice:

• Shift your focus from syntax and typing speed to architectural planning and maintenance.
• Practice 'pairing' with AI agents to iterate on code rather than expecting a single perfect prompt.
• Develop skills in overseeing and validating the work of AI 'interns' to ensure production readiness.

Source: The power user’s guide to Codex: parallelizing workflows, planning techniques, advanced context engineering tips, automating code reviews, and more | Alexander Embiricos (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeZDHGjG5zM) @ 01:06:11

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Ami Vora

Insight:

Source: Making an impact through authenticity and curiosity | Ami Vora (CPO at Faire, ex-WhatsApp, FB, IG) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UHAop9fhNU) @ 00:48:07

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Amjad Masad

"Typically, you're bottlenecked where your ideas are not fitting in because they need to be made and they need to be made quickly. Now, you open up that bottleneck. So now actually making things is a lot easier. Actually, you become limited by how fast you can generate ideas."

Insight: In the AI era, the primary professional bottleneck shifts from technical implementation to the creative velocity of generating and refining high-impact ideas.

Tactical advice:

• Prioritize learning high-level product architecture and PRD writing over low-level coding syntax.
• Focus on increasing your velocity of idea generation as the cost of technical implementation drops toward zero.
• Shift your workflow from performing the work to orchestrating and reviewing the work performed by AI agents.

Source: Behind the product: Replit | Amjad Masad (co-founder and CEO) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bp_h674oIhw) @ 00:44:04

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Anneka Gupta

"What I've found is that understanding the details of the business and asking questions and understanding to the utmost extent you can, what's working, what's not, what are the financial goals of the business? Are we on track to get there? How are we making decisions? Getting into that level of depth is super important, and then you can decide as a leader, what do you want to do with that information?"

Insight: Mastering business details allows product leaders to identify precisely where targeted course corrections are needed without micromanaging every decision.

Tactical advice:

• Collect exhaustive information about organizational performance and decisions without feeling obligated to intervene immediately.
• Ask teams to present strategies early so you can offer suggestions through questioning rather than rewriting their work.
• Balance depth with empowerment by selectively choosing where to perform deep course corrections versus where to allow team autonomy.

Source: Becoming more strategic, navigating difficult colleagues, harnessing founder mode, and more | Anneka Gupta (Chief Product Officer at Rubrik) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3dUveqt9Bw) @ 00:14:32

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Insight: Receiving hard feedback effectively requires detaching your ego from the critique to objectively evaluate how the information can benefit the company.

Tactical advice:

• Give yourself dedicated time to process the emotional reaction to negative feedback before formulating a response.
• Write down the feedback to help you view the information as an objective data point rather than a personal attack.
• Evaluate the validity of the feedback based on whether addressing it will improve the final product or company outcomes.

Source: Becoming more strategic, navigating difficult colleagues, harnessing founder mode, and more | Anneka Gupta (Chief Product Officer at Rubrik) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3dUveqt9Bw) @ 00:42:07

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Anton Osika

"Currently, if you're technically inclined, you get much further, but over time, naturally the way to build software is by just talking to an AI."

Insight: The core skill for future builders is mastering the ability to translate product intent into high-quality software through precise communication with AI agents.

Tactical advice:

• Practice detailed prompting to bridge the gap between abstract ideas and functional code.
• Use AI tools to ship real web applications to users or clients rather than just static designs.
• Combine your existing technical inclination with AI tools to accelerate the pace at which you can iterate on SaaS ideas.

Source: Building Lovable: $10M ARR in 60 days with 15 people | Anton Osika (co-founder and CEO) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZtGxNs9AVg) @ 01:06:06

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Aparna Chennapragada

"I have a cheesy Chrome extension. Literally whenever I open a new tab, it just says, how can you use AI to do what you're going to do right now?"

Insight: Overcoming past biases about AI requires creating personal triggers that force you to reflexively apply the technology to every daily task.

Tactical advice:

• Set up environmental reminders, like browser extension prompts, to evaluate AI's role in every new task.
• Operationalize the habit of 'living one year in the future' by using advanced agents even when they have rough edges.
• Transition from using AI for fine-motor assistance to delegating high-level autonomous goals.

Source: Microsoft CPO: If you aren’t prototyping with AI, you’re doing it wrong | Aparna Chennapragada (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbbfXAWcuUo) @ 00:31:17

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Ben Horowitz

"What I was trying to get out in Good Product Manager, Bad Product Manager, was the job is fundamentally a leadership job. And it's a tricky leadership job because nobody is actually reporting to you."

Insight: Product leadership is a pure test of influence, as PMs must drive the organization to deliver a working product without formal authority over the team.

Tactical advice:

• Focus your performance metrics on whether the final product works, rather than the quality of internal documentation.
• Accept total responsibility for the product's outcome, mirroring the role of a 'mini CEO.'
• Master the art of cross-functional leadership to guide teams that do not report to you.

Source: $46B of hard truths from Ben Horowitz: Why founders fail and why you need to run toward fear (a16z co-founder) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPxTekxQjzc) @ 00:42:56

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Benjamin Mann

Insight: Future-proofing your career in the AI era requires acknowledging that total job replacement is likely and focusing on navigating the transition toward an economy of abundance.

Tactical advice:

• Adopt a "bullshit detector" to recognize and ignore false narratives about AI progress slowing down.
• Use the "Economic Turing Test" as a metric to determine when a job role is ready for full automation.
• Prepare for an era of "transformative AI" where world GDP and societal institutions change rapidly.

Source: Benjamin Mann @ 00:12:56

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Boz

"Nobody even asked me to do the anti-spam, anti-scraping stuff. I just thought it was a problem, and I went and did that, and that was the solution I come with. If I was a better engineer, maybe I'd have solved a better problem."

Insight: Career-defining impact comes from taking ownership of critical, neglected problems rather than just waiting for formal project assignments.

Tactical advice:

• Identify high-impact problems that represent a genuine risk but currently have no clear owner.
• Develop and implement solutions for critical gaps independently without waiting for formal permission.
• Continuously evaluate if your chosen independent project is the highest-value problem available to the company.

Source: Making Meta | Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth (CTO) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XqDB2Upr3s) @ 00:37:43

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Brandon Chu

"But I think ultimately to have the highest trajectory and what certainly was a tailwind for my career was you guys have to lean into those founder skills. And so things like being a great storyteller, how to get the most out of people around you, foster creative and motivated teams and know how to make really, really hard high conviction decisions that actually can't be solved. You got to take a leap of faith and how to do that and bring teams through that type of ambiguity and then how to lead by example and have accountability when you make those choices."

Insight: Product managers reach senior leadership by moving beyond standard execution skills to embrace a founder mentality centered on high-conviction decision-making and compelling storytelling.

Tactical advice:

• Lean into founder skills like storytelling to foster creative and motivated teams.
• Develop the ability to make high-conviction decisions in ambiguous situations where data cannot provide a clear answer.
• Lead by example and maintain personal accountability for the outcomes of difficult strategic choices.

Source: 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 @ 07:26

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Insight: Building a product from scratch as a founder or through side-project moonlighting provides a holistic foundation of technical and business empathy that accelerates career development.

Tactical advice:

• Bootstrap a side project or startup to gain end-to-end experience across design, engineering, and product roles.
• Use hands-on building to increase technical fluency and build deep empathy for cross-functional partners.
• Harden early entrepreneurial experience by joining a growth-stage company that uses structured, process-oriented product frameworks.

Source: 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 @ 47:13

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Bret Taylor

Insight: Mentors and advisors provide a high volume of advice, but the founder's job is to filter that noise through the lens of their unique vision and company context.

Tactical advice:

• Categorize advice into actionable feedback versus interesting perspective to manage information overload.
• Trust your internal builder instincts when external advice conflicts with the native strengths of your platform.
• Use mentor feedback as a tool for de-risking assumptions rather than as a strict roadmap for product development.

Source: He saved OpenAI, invented the “Like” button, and built Google Maps: Bret Taylor on the future of careers, coding, agents, and more (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qImgGtnNbx0) @ 00:28:26

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Cam Adams

"I run everyone through the culture of Canva. One of those sections is on giving away your Lego, finding joy in the other things of building a team, passing on your experience, helping other people do great writing or great product building or great engineering."

Insight: Scaling effectively requires leaders to find personal fulfillment in empowering and mentoring their teams rather than maintaining direct control over individual tasks.

Tactical advice:

• Embrace the concept of 'giving away your Lego' as a necessary stage of leadership growth.
• Focus on passing on your experience to help others excel in their specific disciplines.
• Shift your focus from personal output to the higher-leverage activity of building a high-performing team.

Source: Inside Canva: Coaches not managers, giving away your Legos, and running profitably | Cameron Adams (co-founder and CPO) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgrJNHlYUA8) @ 00:16:31

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Camille Fournier

"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."

Insight: Product managers should proactively share credit and presentation duties to foster a respectful and collaborative relationship with their engineering teams.

Tactical advice:

• Encourage engineers to present their own technical work and contributions to customers or executives.
• Share project 'glory' by acknowledging the hard work and technical lift of the entire engineering team.
• Step back from the front-facing role to ensure the technical team feels included in the project's success.

Source: The things engineers are desperate for PMs to understand | Camille Fournier (author of “The Manager’s Path,” ex-CTO at Rent the Runway) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZSh0rs20uI) @ 00:02:25

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Carilu Dietrich

Insight: Advancing to the C-suite requires moving beyond your specific expertise to understand how the entire business system functions cross-functionally.

Tactical advice:

• Take on 'tours of duty' in other departments to understand their specific challenges and opportunities.
• Learn to think and talk in terms of finance, the CEO, and the board.
• Volunteer for responsibilities in the 'white space' that are outside your official job description.

Source: How to achieve hypergrowth in your business and career | Carilu Dietrich (Atlassian, Miro, Segment, 1Password) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pm7QSWDIEUc) @ 00:04:35

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Insight: Evaluate a startup's long-term career potential by looking for high net dollar retention and market leadership, as these indicate a self-sustaining growth engine.

Tactical advice:

• Check if the company has top-tier investors and review the momentum of their most recent funding rounds.
• Analyze Net Promoter Scores or customer satisfaction to ensure users truly love the product.
• Assess cultural health by reviewing Glassdoor ratings and employee happiness metrics.

Source: How to achieve hypergrowth in your business and career | Carilu Dietrich (Atlassian, Miro, Segment, 1Password) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pm7QSWDIEUc) @ 00:11:16

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Insight: In an economic downturn, focus on variables within your direct control to turn anxiety into strategic urgency.

Tactical advice:

• Identify the specific actions and career goals you can control despite market volatility.
• Use periods of economic pressure to intensify your self-discipline and professional learning.

Source: How to achieve hypergrowth in your business and career | Carilu Dietrich (Atlassian, Miro, Segment, 1Password) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pm7QSWDIEUc) @ 00:16:32

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Carole Robin

Insight: Interpersonal competence is a learned skill set that allows you to move relationships along a continuum from mere contact to functional, robust, and eventually exceptional connections.

Tactical advice:

• Recognize that relationships exist on a continuum from contact/dysfunction to exceptional.
• Focus on gaining the fundamental skills needed to move relationships into a functional and robust state.
• Intentionally choose which specific relationships are worth the effort and investment to take all the way to "exceptional."

Source: How to build deeper, more robust relationships | Carole Robin (Stanford GSB professor, “Touchy Feely”) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cew9-GlC_yk) @ 00:06:05

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"Questions that start with what, when, where, how. Stay away from why."

Insight: Using open-ended inquiry rather than "why" questions fosters curiosity and significantly reduces the likelihood of a defensive response.

Tactical advice:

• Structure inquiries using "what" or "how" to encourage the other person to share more information.
• Eliminate "why" questions to avoid making the recipient feel interrogated or judged.
• Balance asking questions with making personal disclosures to build a more reciprocal and less one-sided connection.

Source: How to build deeper, more robust relationships | Carole Robin (Stanford GSB professor, “Touchy Feely”) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cew9-GlC_yk) @ 00:59:06

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Casey Winters

"Something I commonly say is that executive communication is actually executives communication. You're communicating with individual executives that all have different styles and different concerns about the business or about the particular problem you're working on. And you want to anticipate that, and if you don't have enough experience say presenting to the CFO or the CEO, I as the chief product officer do, so I can impersonate them and help you understand what they're going to care most about."

Insight: Succeeding at the executive level requires recognizing that leadership is fundamentally about managing cross-functional trade-offs and the diverse communication styles of other stakeholders.

Tactical advice:

• Escalate issues early so that leadership can help change the circumstances or evaluate results with proper context.
• Tailor your presentation to the specific style and concerns of individual executives, such as the CEO or CFO.
• Be explicit about the trade-offs being made so that leadership can communicate them correctly across the company.

Source: How to sell your ideas and rise within your company | Casey Winters, Eventbrite @ 00:35:32

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Chip Conley

Insight: To stay relevant in tech as you age, you must embrace the role of both mentor and intern, offering wisdom while remaining humble enough to learn new technical environments.

Tactical advice:

• Adopt a 'mentern' approach by mentoring on leadership while being an 'intern' regarding technical lingo.
• Position yourself as the voice of the customer or host to add unique value the product team might miss.
• Be comfortable being the 'dumbest person in the room' to accelerate your learning in a new industry.

Source: Brian Chesky's secret mentor who died 9 times, started the Burning Man board, and built the world's first midlife wisdom school | Chip Conley (founder of MEA) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5_ypwiRIyo) @ 00:31:28

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Christina Wodtke

Insight: Developing business acumen allows product managers to align their team's output with the company's long-term strategy and bottom-line success.

Tactical advice:

• Focus on understanding the revenue generation and business model that supports the product.
• Translate user-centric outcomes into business impacts, such as improved retention or healthier customer outcomes.
• Audit your time weekly to ensure focus is placed on the most significant 'big rocks' that drive business growth.

Source: The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvkL18Ue0dE) @ 01:00:22

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Christopher Miller

"I used to spend a lot of time sitting on the sales floor, just going into the other buildings and talking to other folks, working on different parts of the business, and that's part of maybe the serendipity that I miss about being in person, which is that you might just discover something from having a casual conversation with someone at the water cooler. You're like, 'Oh, that's an interesting problem. I think my team can help with that,' so you absorb a bunch of context around how pieces of the business are connected and you can start to really widen your aperture in terms of the size of opportunities that might be in front of you that maybe you would've missed if you would've been so heads down on execution work."

Insight: Broadening your perspective by engaging with different departments like sales helps you identify high-impact strategic opportunities that execution-focused roles might miss.

Tactical advice:

• Shadow sales and support teams to understand the full customer journey and business connections.
• Ask questions until you have an uncompromising understanding of how different business units function.
• Widen your aperture by looking at problems a few steps above your immediate team's focus.

Source: Relentless curiosity, radical accountability, and HubSpot’s winning growth formula | Christopher Miller (VP of Product, Growth and AI) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzKKJwuRFZI) @ 00:22:27

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Claire Hughes Johnson

Insight: Documenting your personal operating principles in a "Working with Me" guide acts as an efficient user manual for your team, accelerating trust and clarifying work preferences.

Tactical advice:

• Create a "Working with [Name]" document that details your management style, core values, and work preferences.
• Include specific frameworks, templates, and examples to make your personal operating principles actionable for others.
• Share your manual with team members to help them navigate your expectations and avoid common miscommunications.

Source: Lessons from scaling Stripe | Claire Hughes Johnson (former COO of Stripe) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mv0o9o4MRh0) @ 00:27:02

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Claire Vo

"And I sat for about a half a day and I thought, I think I can help here, drew out an org chart, put my name on the top, walked into my boss's office and said, 'This is one potential solve of your marketing organization question, is we'll bring product and marketing growth together. I can be in this position.'"

Insight: Instead of waiting for a promotion, design a new organizational structure that solves a high-level business problem and places you in a strategic leadership role.

Tactical advice:

• Identify leadership gaps or missing functions within your company's current structure.
• Draft a proposed org chart and job description that clarifies exactly how the new role provides leverage.
• Pitch the solution to your manager by focusing on how it resolves their specific organizational challenges.

Source: Bending the universe in your favor | Claire Vo (LaunchDarkly, Color, Optimizely, ChatPRD) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXGo1o_baBo) @ 00:05:33

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Daniel Lereya

Insight: Scaling as a leader necessitates moving from being the primary decision-maker to empowering the entire organization with the information needed to solve challenges.

Tactical advice:

• Transition your role from a centralized problem-solver to a provider of organizational context and transparency.
• Audit your current skill set to identify early-stage habits that may be hindering your ability to lead at a larger scale.
• Empower teams to be relentless until they validate that their work has achieved the intended business impact.

Source: Inside monday.com’s transformation: radical transparency, impact over output, and their path to $1B ARR | Daniel Lereya (Chief Product and Technology Officer) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9qqwV8_rvY) @ 01:00:00

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David Singleton

Insight: Engineering leaders maintain their edge and empathy by staying hands-on with the product through building demos and exploring new technical details.

Tactical advice:

• Set aside time to personally build product demos to stay connected to the developer experience.
• Cultivate a deep curiosity for how complex, underlying systems work to better guide team technical decisions.
• Encourage a culture where learning context and detail is rewarded at all levels of management.

Source: Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0_IKKY3HCk) @ 00:45:44

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Deb Liu

"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?"

Insight: Applying product management disciplines—like success metrics and strategic roadmaps—to your own career prevents aimless drifting and ensures intentional growth.

Tactical advice:

• Write a formal spec for your career that outlines your definition of success and your roadmap to achieve it.
• Avoid drifting between roles by being intentional about whether your next move prioritizes learning or impact.
• Treat your career path as a non-linear experience, laddering between different functions to build a diverse skill set.

Source: How to own your career growth and become a powerful product leader | Deb Liu, Ancestry (ex-Facebook, PayPal) @ 00:24:05

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Insight: Professional resilience is built by viewing failures and negative feedback as essential data points for future growth rather than as career endings.

Tactical advice:

• When you receive hard feedback, immediately identify what you need to do differently to come back stronger.
• View product failures as opportunities to extract lessons that make the entire company more resilient.
• When denied a desired role, focus on transforming your current responsibilities into a high-impact success.

Source: How to own your career growth and become a powerful product leader | Deb Liu, Ancestry (ex-Facebook, PayPal) @ 00:11:40

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Donna Lichaw

Insight: Internal narratives often misrepresent external reality, so you must validate or debunk them with actual feedback from your team.

Tactical advice:

• Gather feedback from your team to see how they actually experience your leadership versus how you perceive yourself.
• Identify limiting "horror stories" you tell yourself, such as being "too nice" or not being taken seriously.
• Use external data to reframe limiting beliefs into positive, purposeful leadership traits.

Source: How to discover your superpowers, own your story, and unlock personal growth | Donna Lichaw (author of The Leader’s Journey) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fA8DMMUNPI) @ 00:16:45

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"Pull your superpowers out of your stories from your past, your present, and then eventually figure out how to apply them and transpose them to your future."

Insight: True superpowers are identified by analyzing the narrative arc of your life and your unique response to past challenges.

Tactical advice:

• Mine your personal "origin stories" for recurring instances where you had a significant positive impact.
• Look at the specific obstacles you have overcome to identify the strengths that helped you succeed.
• Map out your "peak experiences" to find the common thread of your natural abilities rather than relying on standardized tests.

Source: How to discover your superpowers, own your story, and unlock personal growth | Donna Lichaw (author of The Leader’s Journey) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fA8DMMUNPI) @ 00:36:41

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Insight: Applying lean product principles to your own behavior allows you to iterate on your leadership style through low-risk, data-driven experiments.

Tactical advice:

• Identify one specific leadership behavior you want to change or adopt.
• Run a one-week experiment to test the impact of this new behavior on your team's motivation or output.
• Gather candid feedback and iterate on the approach before making the behavior a permanent part of your routine.

Source: How to discover your superpowers, own your story, and unlock personal growth | Donna Lichaw (author of The Leader’s Journey) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fA8DMMUNPI) @ 01:02:23

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Insight: Defining a clear future vision allows you to reverse-engineer the skills and milestones needed to reach your ultimate leadership destination.

Tactical advice:

• Visualize your ideal career state five years from now and write down what your daily life looks like.
• Identify the specific gaps between your current leadership capabilities and that future vision.
• Work backward from that end state to set immediate quarterly goals for your professional development.

Source: How to discover your superpowers, own your story, and unlock personal growth | Donna Lichaw (author of The Leader’s Journey) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fA8DMMUNPI) @ 01:12:41

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Drew Houston

Insight: Scaling as a leader involves transitioning from hands-on execution (paddling alone) to managing the massive organizational 'tidal wave' that your product creates.

Tactical advice:

• Systematically move from 'coding and talking to customers' to expanding your circle of responsibility as the company grows.
• Seek out 'side doors' or hooks—like viral videos or specific community platforms—to gain high-leverage attention early on.
• Prioritize finding a co-founder who complements your technical skills to satisfy the requirements of elite startup programs and investors.

Source: Behind the founder: Drew Houston (Dropbox) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egdYKLBswgk) @ 01:34:55

---

Dylan Field

Insight: The core definition of the product manager role and its interactions with design and engineering are not detailed in this section of the discussion.

Tactical advice:

• Refer to subsequent parts of the conversation for insights on how AI is shifting the PM role toward craft and quality.
• Look for Dylan's broader frameworks on PM responsibilities in later segments of the podcast.

Source: Dylan Field live at Config: Intuition, simplicity, and the future of design (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJQYBjto41s) @ 00:16:38

---

EOY Review

Insight:

Source: EOY Review @ 00:50:13

---

Elena Verna 3.0

"Very few growth people actually stay in the job for over a year or two years. There's a lot of constant churn and constant rehiring. ... growth teams are becoming one of those departments that has a higher head of growth firing rate than even CMOs because people are coming in, there's a bunch of expectations, 'Hey, you're ahead of growth... you're supposed to drive growth.'"

Insight: Growth leaders suffer from high turnover rates because they are often hired into companies with unrealistic expectations or fundamental product issues they cannot fix.

Tactical advice:

• Vet potential employers for strong retention and product-market fit before accepting a growth leadership role.
• Clarify that a growth team's role is optimization and innovation, not fixing a broken core product.
• Expect short tenures (1-2 years) in growth roles and plan career progression around these volatility patterns.

Source: Elena Verna on how B2B growth is changing, product-led growth, product-led sales, why you should go freemium not trial, what features to make free, and much more @ 01:19:08

---

Ethan Evans 2.0

Insight: Take ownership of your career growth by forming a partnership where you solve your manager's problems in exchange for opportunities that align with your goals.

Tactical advice:

• Confirm you are performing your current core responsibilities at a solid level before seeking advancement.
• Ask your manager 'What can I do to help you?' to build a relationship based on mutual success.
• Negotiate for specific projects that solve a business need while helping you learn a target skill.

Source: Taking control of your career | Ethan Evans (Amazon) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GB0P0_nFPTA) @ 00:04:30

---

"So in the newsletter we did together, I wrote about how over time, you go from asking your manager, 'How can I help?' To suggesting to your manager, 'These are some things I see that seem like they need to be done. Would you like me to do them?' To just seeing what needs to be done and sort of keeping your leader in the loop and saying, 'Hey, I noticed that we have this problem. I fixed it. I noticed we have this opportunity. I've started program against it.'"

Insight: Advancing to executive roles requires shifting from a reactive task-executor to a proactive leader who independently identifies gaps and initiates solutions.

Tactical advice:

• Transition from asking for assignments to suggesting specific initiatives based on organizational needs.
• Move toward 'advanced mode' by solving problems independently and keeping leadership informed after the fact.
• Focus on building deep trust and rapport so your manager feels comfortable with your increased autonomy.

Source: Taking control of your career | Ethan Evans (Amazon) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GB0P0_nFPTA) @ 00:23:09

---

Insight:

Source: Taking control of your career | Ethan Evans (Amazon) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GB0P0_nFPTA) @ 00:36:06

---

Evan LaPointe

"It's critical to ask what kind of experience am I? Not how good am I at my job, how much do I know, how critical am I to this process, but am I a miserable experience? If the answer is yes, don't worry too much about the other pieces yet. You got to fix that first."

Insight: The subjective quality of working with you is a biological prerequisite for effective team collaboration that is more fundamental than your technical skill.

Tactical advice:

• Regularly ask yourself the diagnostic question: "Am I a miserable experience for my teammates?"
• Focus on resolving interpersonal friction before attempting to optimize job performance or technical expertise.

Source: Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GECtyEj9UPA) @ 01:21:53

---

Failure

Insight: Major professional setbacks and public failures are survivable learning experiences that rarely have the long-term catastrophic impact they seem to have in the moment.

Tactical advice:

• Maintain perspective by recognizing that most professional 'nightmares' are temporary and survivable.
• Adopt an adaptive mindset to move forward quickly after a project failure or embarrassing performance.
• Treat every significant career setback as a 'live and learn' opportunity to inform your future leadership.

Source: Failure (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9euy9gC48lc) @ 00:44:53

---

"I went through all the usual stages of grief when one hears feedback, which is just immediate want to respond to be like, "Oh, well there was a good reason for that." And, "That's not how it actually was," and, "This is why I did that." But luckily I had, thank goodness, I had the sense to just listen and not respond in that way."

Insight: Effective leadership requires the emotional maturity to set aside defensiveness and earn a team's trust through active listening during difficult feedback sessions.

Tactical advice:

• Listen silently to critical feedback without offering immediate justifications or defenses.
• Identify the core emotional or structural issues, such as a lack of earned trust, that lie beneath specific complaints.
• Bring the team along with changes by hearing out their motivations rather than imposing shifts from above.

Source: Failure (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9euy9gC48lc) @ 00:03:42

---

Insight:

Source: Failure (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9euy9gC48lc) @ 00:39:13

---

Fareed Mosavat

"You can't do homework. You can't do exercises. You can't do fake stuff. You have to work on real products at real companies with real customers, with real data to get better at product management."

Insight: True mastery in product management is achieved through repetitive execution on real-world problems with actual users rather than theoretical study or simulations.

Tactical advice:

• Prioritize working on real products with actual customers and data to gain meaningful experience.
• Focus on increasing the number of 'reps' you get in the product delivery loop to accelerate growth.
• Treat mentorship and reading as secondary layers that supplement hands-on execution.

Source: How to build trust and grow as a product leader | Fareed Mosavat (Reforge, Slack, Instacart, Zynga, Pixar) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oo0jSep7pzc) @ 00:14:28

---

Gibson Biddle

Insight:

Source: 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 @ 00:48:20

---

Insight:

Source: 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 @ 00:52:40

---

Insight:

Source: 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 @ 00:54:40

---

Guillermo Rauch

"A lot of the programming jobs to be done that used to be specializations, I think, are going away, in a way. They're translation tasks, but knowing how things work under the hood is going to be very important for you because you're going to be able to influence the model and make it follow your intention a lot better."

Insight: While AI automates the 'translation' of ideas into code, deep technical understanding is still required to effectively direct and influence the model's output.

Tactical advice:

• Focus on learning how systems work 'under the hood' rather than just memorizing syntax.
• Use AI to become 'full stack' by bridging gaps in your secondary skills like design or engineering.
• Practice describing technical intent clearly to ensure models follow your direction accurately.

Source: 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) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QsTmu2CqhA) @ 00:19:21

---

Hari Srinivasan

Insight: Successfully managing a complex product ecosystem requires aligning all teams with a singular, clearly understood mission to guide interconnected decision-making.

Tactical advice:

• Map out how individual product features drive flywheels across the platform, such as how feed engagement can trigger job recommendations.
• Establish a shared framework for decision-making based on a central vision to ensure consistency in a connected ecosystem.
• Use regular member surveys to identify the core needs, like knowledge and advice, that serve as the connective tissue between disparate products.

Source: LinkedIn’s product evolution and the art of building complex systems | Hari Srinivasan (LinkedIn) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUwkTs_QWqg) @ 00:35:55

---

Heidi Helfand

Insight:

Source: The art and wisdom of changing teams | Heidi Helfand (author of Dynamic Reteaming) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wN5wSImUdY) @ 00:59:07

---

Hilary Gridley

"If they come to me and they're upset, I try to focus them less around how you litigate another person's impression of you and more on what is the action that you can take to counter program the narrative that you are afraid that this other person has of you. What are you going to do next to demonstrate that you are the person that you know yourself to be?"

Insight: Instead of trying to argue against a negative perception after a setback, take a small, proactive action that demonstrates the opposite quality.

Tactical advice:

• Identify the specific negative narrative you fear others have formed about you.
• Ask yourself: 'What is one small thing I can do to demonstrate the opposite of this perception?'
• Execute that action quickly—often in just 5 to 10 minutes—to move past the 'trough of despair' and reclaim your professional identity.

Source: 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) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xm5QAzAlqEY) @ 00:08:05

---

Ian McAllister

Insight: Early career success in product management is built on the mastery of the foundational trifecta: clear communication, ruthless prioritization, and reliable execution.

Tactical advice:

• Master the core building blocks of communication, prioritization, and execution before moving to advanced skill sets.
• Build product instincts by forecasting outcomes, executing the plan, and measuring the results against your validation.
• Learn to write effective customer-facing copy yourself rather than subbing it out to other departments.

Source: What it takes to become a top 1% PM | Ian McAllister (Uber, Amazon, Airbnb) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gaPPrAd7nc) @ 00:11:28

---

Insight: Growing into leadership requires shifting from basic output to building organizational trust and seeking outsized business impact over personal accolades.

Tactical advice:

• Prioritize daily business impact over office politics or the pursuit of promotion.
• Develop the art of pushing back effectively to avoid the trap of saying yes to every request.
• Focus on "thinking big" and hunting for larger impact to differentiate yourself as a 1% product leader.

Source: What it takes to become a top 1% PM | Ian McAllister (Uber, Amazon, Airbnb) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gaPPrAd7nc) @ 00:23:17

---

Jackie Bavaro

Insight: Success in PM interviews comes from understanding the underlying intent of a question—such as identifying customer needs—rather than just listing features.

Tactical advice:

• Start every design or product question by identifying the specific customer and their goals.
• Avoid sounding polished but hollow by ensuring your 'three points' contain substantial, user-centric ideas.
• Treat interview questions as an opportunity to demonstrate your mental model for solving complex problems.

Source: 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 @ 46:26

---

Jason Feifer

Insight: Successful professionals often build multi-hyphenate careers by diversifying their roles as advisors, authors, and speakers alongside their core positions.

Tactical advice:

• Explore opportunities like podcasting or newsletter writing to build authority in your field.
• Leverage your core expertise to advise startups or speak at industry events.
• Maintain a diverse professional portfolio to stay resilient and visible in a shifting job market.

Source: How to get press for your product | Jason Feifer (editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZLdoAq3R7Y) @ 01:36:57

---

Jason Shah

Insight: High-tier leadership involves hiring intrinsically motivated individuals and keeping them centered on customer-focused progress to endure difficult periods.

Tactical advice:

• Hire individuals who are motivated by the mission and the work rather than just external rewards.
• Maintain a consistent focus on the product and the customer experience.
• Demonstrate progress through frequent shipping to keep the team highly effective.

Source: Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMsA5VeLoOM) @ 00:29:18

---

Jeffrey Pfeffer

"Well, it's important because a guy named Gerald Ferris developed a scale of political skill. And he and a bunch of his colleagues over the years did a lot of empirical research that demonstrates that political skill is associated with a lot of positive outcomes, salary, getting promoted, being happy in your career, being happy in your job, being less stressed."

Insight: Developing political skill is a research-backed path to higher salary, career advancement, and reduced workplace stress.

Tactical advice:

• Accept that power is a neutral tool for achieving positive career outcomes.
• Master political skill to increase your compensation and influence.
• Study organizational behavior to understand the real-world mechanics of promotions.

Source: The paths to power: How to grow your influence and advance your career | Jeffrey Pfeffer (author of 7 Rules of Power, professor at Stanford GSB) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etVCBDRXUH8) @ 00:03:02

---

Jenny Wen

Insight: To lead effectively in the AI era, design managers must maintain hands-on proficiency with rapidly evolving coding and prototyping tools.

Tactical advice:

• Stay current with engineering-led tools like Claude Code and v0 to understand the new speed of implementation.
• Engage directly in the 'last mile' of design work, including implementing polish and functional code in prototypes.

Source: Jenny Wen @ 00:35:49

---

Jeremy Henrickson

"It's very, very tempting to float up here as a leader and say, "Hey, you take that hill over there. You guys do this over here." When in fact, where you really learn where the challenges are, or the problems or the successes is by just being there with the people in the trenches on one of the things, whichever one seems hardest or most complicated."

Insight: True understanding of complex challenges comes from leaders 'diving deep' into the trenches alongside teams on their most difficult problems.

Tactical advice:

• Regularly identify the hardest or most complicated current project and join the team in the details.
• Perform detailed exercises with the team to uncover ground-level challenges that are invisible from high-level reporting.
• Set work in the context of long-term learning to help teams manage the stress of difficult technical builds.

Source: Moving fast and navigating uncertainty | Jeremy Henrickson (Rippling, Coinbase) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsruQYKISYI) @ 00:32:27

---

Jiaona Zhang

"One of the first things I teach is you're not a CEO, you're, you're not here... You actually have very little true authority because you don't actually manage anyone. A lot of it is all through influence, and so that is also a piece where you have to kind of untrain that thinking."

Insight: New product leaders must prioritize building influence and understanding organizational context over asserting authority.

Tactical advice:

• Approach the role with the mindset of an influencer rather than a CEO.
• Spend the early phase understanding user problems and organizational opportunities.
• Focus on building trust with cross-functional stakeholders before calling the shots.

Source: Building minimum lovable products, stories from WeWork and Airbnb, and thriving as a PM | Jiaona Zhang (Webflow, WeWork, Airbnb, Dropbox) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLFZNzeylCc) @ 00:43:55

---

"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."

Insight: Accelerating your career depends on developing a recognizable 'superpower' that makes you the go-to person for specific, high-impact challenges.

Tactical advice:

• Identify a specific niche, such as complex launches or technical problems, to master.
• Focus on delivering excellence in your chosen area to build a professional reputation.
• Use your reputation for excellence to attract more significant responsibilities.

Source: Building minimum lovable products, stories from WeWork and Airbnb, and thriving as a PM | Jiaona Zhang (Webflow, WeWork, Airbnb, Dropbox) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLFZNzeylCc) @ 00:28:18

---

John Cutler

Insight: Mastering practical product management skills requires moving beyond passive content consumption to a continuous cycle of testing, iterating, and real-world application.

Tactical advice:

• Treat frameworks and playbooks as evolving products that must be tested and refined through repeated use.
• Prioritize 'putting into motion' new concepts immediately on live projects rather than studying them in isolation.
• Evolve your practical skills by documenting iterations and expansions of the frameworks you apply to different product challenges.

Source: What differentiates the highest-performing product teams | John Cutler (Amplitude, The Beautiful Mess) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4PdUItyXUk) @ 01:08:04

---

John Mark Nickels

Insight: Establishing a life 'objective function' through the perspective of your future self helps you prioritize long-term values over temporary work pressures.

Tactical advice:

• Visualize your life 5–10 years in the future to determine which of today's concerns will actually matter.
• Define a clear objective function for your life that places core relationships and long-term impact above minor professional achievements.
• Take full responsibility for your influence in the world by questioning inherited belief systems and biases.

Source: Becoming a conscious leader: Leading without fear, finding your life’s objective function, and getting better at vision and strategy | John Mark Nickels (Uber, Waymo, DoorDash) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7o40qcYHlM) @ 01:00:05

---

Jonathan Lowenhar

Insight: Founding a company and leading it as a CEO are two distinct disciplines; longevity in the role depends on mastering the operational craft of management.

Tactical advice:

• Distinguish between the founder mindset of grit and the CEO craft of operational management.
• Shift focus in 'Phase Two' from product creation to building a sustainable company infrastructure.
• Calibrate between 'founder mode' (granular involvement) and 'manager mode' (systematic oversight) based on the business's needs.

Source: How a great founder becomes a great CEO | Jonathan Lowenhar (co-founder of Enjoy The Work) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0jn7eE33nk) @ 00:09:34

---

Jules Walter

Insight: When entering an unfamiliar domain, combine a rigorous learning mindset with expert mentorship to rapidly bridge the gap between current abilities and job requirements.

Tactical advice:

• Accept roles in unfamiliar domains if the company provides a high-growth environment.
• Identify mentors who have already mastered the specific frameworks you need to learn.
• Apply new frameworks immediately to your work to turn theoretical knowledge into practical results.

Source: Leveraging mentors to uplevel your career | Jules Walter (YouTube, Slack) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zn2JNbZwf00) @ 00:30:24

---

"My experience was I got in, didn't know much about growth, and then through mentorship, in particular, one mentor, Bangaly Kaba, sort of learned how to apply growth frameworks to my work. And then when I did that within six months, I was able to ship changes in the new user experience, especially on mobile."

Insight: Targeted mentorship from domain experts can drastically shorten the learning curve when pivoting into specialized product fields like growth or monetization.

Tactical advice:

• Find a mentor who has specific experience in the exact frameworks relevant to your current projects.
• Focus on learning the 'practice' and frameworks of a discipline rather than just general advice.
• Demonstrate the value of the mentorship by shipping measurable improvements based on their guidance within your first six months.

Source: Leveraging mentors to uplevel your career | Jules Walter (YouTube, Slack) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zn2JNbZwf00) @ 00:55:35

---

"The other skill that I'll also call out, which nobody talks about for some reason, is interview skills, because so much of what gives you a chance to become better as a PM is working at a great company. How you get that job beyond networking is actually becoming good at interviewing."

Insight: Mastering the interview process is a foundational career skill because it acts as the gateway to high-growth environments where you can most effectively develop other product competencies.

Tactical advice:

• Treat interviewing as a specific skill set to be studied independently of daily product work.
• Focus on getting good enough at interviewing to unlock roles at trajectory-changing companies.
• Prioritize interview preparation as much as networking when seeking new opportunities.

Source: Leveraging mentors to uplevel your career | Jules Walter (YouTube, Slack) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zn2JNbZwf00) @ 00:14:51

---

"In terms of skills, I think of it in terms of two buckets. One are IQ skills, intellectual skills, like what sometimes people call hard skills. And then the other things are the EQ skills, oftentimes called soft skills. What I've seen in my career is that early on, I leaned more into the hard skills, the IQ stuff."

Insight: Professional development often follows a sequence where technical 'IQ' skills provide the foundation for early-career success, while 'EQ' skills become the primary drivers of advancement as you grow.

Tactical advice:

• Categorize your current skills into 'IQ' (intellectual) and 'EQ' (emotional) buckets to identify areas for growth.
• Focus early-career energy on mastering execution, product sense, and strategy.
• Tackle skill development one competency at a time to avoid becoming overwhelmed by the broad range of PM requirements.

Source: Leveraging mentors to uplevel your career | Jules Walter (YouTube, Slack) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zn2JNbZwf00) @ 00:51:28

---

Karina Nguyen

Insight: As AI masters technical tasks, human value shifts toward high-level creative direction and aesthetic discernment.

Tactical advice:

• Prioritize creative thinking and idea generation over manual execution or basic front-end coding.
• Focus on developing aesthetic and visual design skills that remain difficult for models to replicate.
• Develop the ability to rapidly filter through a high volume of AI-generated ideas to identify the most creative direction.

Source: OpenAI researcher on why soft skills are the future of work | Karina Nguyen (Research at OpenAI, ex-Anthropic) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DeskgjrLxxs) @ 00:42:42

---

Ken Norton

Insight: Scaling into senior leadership requires a fundamental shift from external skill acquisition to internal personal transformation.

Tactical advice:

• Prioritize deep introspection and internal work over collecting more management frameworks.
• Recognize that reaching the next level of leadership involves transforming who you are as much as what you do.
• Identify career crossroads as moments to evolve your mindset rather than just your tactical execution.

Source: How to unlock your product leadership skills | Ken Norton, Ex-Google @ 00:16:24

---

Insight: A successful coaching relationship is a creative partnership where the client, not the coach, defines the objectives and the meaning of success.

Tactical advice:

• Select a coach who treats the engagement as a creative partnership rather than a mentorship for specific advice.
• Ensure that you, the client, set the agenda and define what success looks like for your sessions.
• Look for coaches who prioritize listening, curiosity, and intuition to help you connect your own dots.

Source: How to unlock your product leadership skills | Ken Norton, Ex-Google @ 00:39:06

---

Kenneth Berger

Insight: Asking for what you want is an act of personal integrity that allows you to honor your desires while learning from the world's response.

Tactical advice:

• Articulate your specific desires out loud to significantly increase the likelihood of achieving them.
• Expect and accept 'no' as a natural and informative part of the asking process.
• Treat each ask as an iterative discovery step to gather data and move toward your goals.

Source: Why not asking for what you want is holding you back | Kenneth Berger (exec coach, first PM at Slack) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSCjl_VIdak) @ 00:27:12

---

Krithika Shankarraman

"So what I like to do is try to unpack more of a framework for how do you get to become more of a diagnostician to understand the right strategy or tactic in the first place, rather than saying, 'How do you copy something that led someone else to success?' Because those criteria may not apply to you at all."

Insight: Leadership in marketing involves moving beyond copying generic playbooks to becoming a diagnostician who can identify the right strategy for a company's specific context.

Tactical advice:

• Approach marketing leadership as a system of inputs and variables rather than a set of pre-defined tactics.
• Analyze your company's unique zeitgeist and competitive landscape to build a bespoke strategy instead of mirroring successful peers.

Source: Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QaDsk4iH1aw) @ 00:52:48

---

Lane Shackleton

"A much sharper way is like, "Hey, how many, oh shit moments have you had in the last six months, year, two years, and what are they?" I think if you ask yourself that question and the answer is, "It's been a really long time since I've been stretched in some meaningful way or I've felt like I'm under qualified to be there," then it may be worth digging into."

Insight: Meaningful career growth is found in high-discomfort "oh shit" moments where you feel underqualified for your current challenge.

Tactical advice:

• Ask yourself or team members, "How many 'oh shit' moments have you had in the last six months, and what were they?"
• Actively seek out projects or situations where you feel slightly underqualified to be in the room.
• Dig into your career trajectory if you find you haven't been meaningfully stretched or challenged for a long period of time.

Source: What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmgetFMgQZ0) @ 00:00:00

---

Laura Schaffer

"And so that means that your superpower is in really pulling those insights in and bringing them to life, staying close to the customer. There's not a single leader or executive that isn't going to be stoked to hear about valuable customer insights that highlight problems they might not be seeing."

Insight: You can take control of your career trajectory by becoming the primary source of customer truth within the organization.

Tactical advice:

• Distribute a regular 'voice of the customer' digest to senior leadership.
• Align customer insights with company North Star metrics to increase their impact.
• Host recurring feedback sessions for product teams to share what you have learned from users.

Source: Career frameworks, A/B testing mistakes, counterintuitive onboarding tips, selling to developers | Laura Schaffer (VP of Growth at Amplitude) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMAmj1bciww) @ 00:06:11

---

Lauren Ipsen

Insight:

Source: Lessons from one of the world’s top executive recruiters | Lauren Ipsen (Daversa Partners, General Catalyst) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3pofqabzhs) @ 00:37:51

---

Lenny Rachitsky

"I was a very mediocre PM at first—I wouldn’t have hired me. But I did learn fast, mostly by watching how the best PMs operated. How they ran meetings, how they organized documents, how they made decisions—and then modeling these behaviors and habits."

Insight: Excellence in product management is a learned skill developed by observing and modeling the specific behaviors of top performers.

Tactical advice:

• Observe the best PMs in your organization and take notes on how they operate.
• Pick one specific habit you want to work on and focus on it exclusively for two weeks.
• Start your own list of essential behaviors to synthesize what you observe from effective leaders.

Source: 14 habits of highly effective product managers (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/14-habits-of-highly-effective-product-managers)

---

"From this perspective, we find that PMs have more influence than other functions at only 70% of companies (vs. 80% above). Clearly, PMs believe they have more influence than their teammates think they do."

Insight: Product managers generally have more influence than engineering or design, though they often overestimate their own level of authority compared to how their teammates perceive them.

Tactical advice:

• Validate your actual level of influence by seeking candid feedback from non-PM colleagues like engineering and design.
• Assess a company's functional power balance before joining, noting that influence varies from 'running the show' to having relatively less sway.
• Benchmarket your agency by determining if PMs at your company have 'slightly more' or 'a lot more' influence than other departments.

Source: A comprehensive survey of Product Management (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/a-comprehensive-survey-of-product-management)

---

"Web3 PM emphasizes building, marketing, and iterating rather than planning, managing, and measuring. Given the pace in web3, this prioritization of execution with the right principles has led to greater success."

Insight: Success in web3 is driven by rapid execution and the ability for a single PM to handle 'unbundled' tasks like BD, marketing, and research simultaneously.

Tactical advice:

• Focus 95% of your time on execution—hammering out specs and launching—rather than long-term strategy documents.
• Perform your own user research and community engagement directly on Discord and Crypto Twitter.
• Perfect critical details like security, yields, and artwork quality instead of constantly expanding the feature set.

Source: A product manager’s guide to web3 (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/a-product-managers-guide-to-web3)

---

Insight: High-level professional development events are most effective when they maintain a strict seniority threshold to ensure peer-level relevance and tactical depth.

Tactical advice:

• Compare your current job title against the event’s specific target list to ensure the curriculum aligns with your experience level.
• Seek out events that combine tactical talks with organized peer roundtables to facilitate both learning and high-quality networking.
• Check if the event organizers explicitly filter for seniority to ensure you will be surrounded by a curated group of peers.

Source: Announcing the Lenny & Friends Summit 🙌 (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/announcing-the-lenny--friends-summit)

---

Insight: Mastering PM fundamentals requires a structured approach to core competencies like strategic thinking, communication, and prioritization within the first two years of the role.

Tactical advice:

• Level up your strategic thinking and vision through structured assignments.
• Strengthen written and verbal communication to influence peers effectively.
• Master the art of shipping on time while keeping your team happy.

Source: 🚨 Applications now open for my live course—Product Management Fundamentals (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/applications-now-open-for-my-live-course-product-management-fundamentals)

---

"As an early-career PM, it can be hard to understand what it takes to become a “senior” PM, and how to get there. That’s because senior PMs don’t actually need to be much better than a regular PM at the kind of work a regular PM does. The biggest differences are behind the scenes."

Insight: Progressing to a senior level is less about perfecting execution and more about mastering strategy, autonomy, and the ability to handle nuance.

Tactical advice:

• Master strategy, autonomy, and nuance as your primary growth levers.
• Prioritize work based on long-term vision rather than simple incremental value.
• Build a track record of successful launches to earn the trust required for independent work.

Source: Becoming a senior Product Manager (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/becoming-a-senior-product-manager)

---

"A technical background is a superpower for product managers, as I’ve said before. You’ll make better decisions, understand trade-offs, make more accurate estimates, and communicate with engineers with more confidence, while also creating more career opportunities for yourself."

Insight: Technical literacy is a superpower that bridges the gap between business goals and engineering execution, leading to better decision-making and stronger professional relationships.

Tactical advice:

• Learn the three fundamental parts of software architecture: the client, the server, and the database.
• Understand how web APIs act as the 'front door' to your server for data access and event triggers.
• Familiarize yourself with the full software development lifecycle (SDLC), specifically the implementation and testing phases.

Source: Become a more technical product manager (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/become-a-more-technical-product-manager)

---

Insight: Understanding common API patterns like REST allows product managers to interpret technical documentation and independently verify how data moves between systems.

Tactical advice:

• Distinguish between GET requests (retrieving information) and POST requests (submitting new data to a server).
• Identify the three core components of an API request: the base URL, the specific endpoint, and query parameters.
• Use tools like Postman to practice making API calls to public services to understand real-world data responses.

Source: Become a more technical product manager (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/become-a-more-technical-product-manager)

---

"Building a strong foundation of technical skills improves your ability to bridge technical and business domains, uncover implementation issues before they’re in production, and improve your working relationships with your technical counterparts."

Insight: By understanding the internal engineering workflow—from version control to tiered testing—PMs can better identify potential risks and ship higher-quality features.

Tactical advice:

• Learn how engineers use version control (Git) to manage code changes through repositories, commits, and branches.
• Familiarize yourself with different testing tiers, including unit tests, integration tests, and user acceptance tests (UAT).
• Understand the deployment pipeline where code moves from a local environment through staging and into production.

Source: Become a more technical product manager (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/become-a-more-technical-product-manager)

---

Insight: High-quality professional development comes from prioritizing timeless principles and immediate news over ephemeral trends and recent noise.

Tactical advice:

• Barbell your inputs by focusing on real-time information or decades-old timeless wisdom.
• Filter out content created in the 'middle period' of the last 10 years that hasn't proven its longevity.
• Identify and curate resources you find yourself returning to and sharing repeatedly over time.

Source: Essential reading for product builders—part 1 (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/essential-reading-for-product-builders-part-1)

---

Insight: Curation of high-signal, timeless content is a powerful antidote to low-quality information overload for product leaders.

Tactical advice:

• Identify timeless essays that cover a wide spectrum of product building disciplines.
• Seek out high-signal content to serve as an antidote to information 'slop.'
• Prioritize curated reading over reactive feed consumption for long-term development.

Source: Essential reading for product builders—part 2 (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/essential-reading-for-product-builders-part-2)

---

"PMs often shoot themselves in the foot (and thus make all PMs look bad) by being, as you suggested, annoying. Especially new PMs who need to learn how to deliver results, without any real authority, under pressure."

Insight: Building trust as a new product manager requires identifying and eliminating common behavioral anti-patterns that alienate engineering and design partners.

Tactical advice:

• Stop describing engineering tasks as being "quick" to avoid devaluing the work.
• Make clear decisions instead of stalling progress in search of a perfect consensus.
• Focus on team buy-in over implementing the "perfect" process found in external frameworks.

Source: Five habits of highly annoying product managers (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/five-habits-of-highly-annoying-product-managers)

---

"Much like how becoming a better communicator leads to better results from the people you work with, writing better prompts improves the responses you can get from AI. We already know that people can’t read our minds. But neither can AI, so you have to tell it what you want, as specifically as possible."

Insight: Prompt engineering is essentially high-fidelity communication; the more specific guidance you provide, the better the output will be.

Tactical advice:

• Tell the AI exactly what you want as specifically as possible to avoid generic responses.
• Use role-playing to instruct the AI to assume the persona of a specific expert or character.
• Provide 2-3 examples of the desired format or style through few-shot learning.

Source: Five proven prompt engineering techniques (and a few more-advanced tactics) (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/five-proven-prompt-engineering-techniques-and-a-few-more-advanced-tactics)

---

"First-principles thinking, or thinking from first principles, sounds a lot more complicated than it is. It’s simply a technique for approaching problems with a beginner’s mind. Instead of working within assumptions and what people around you “know” to be true, you do the hard work of figuring out what’s actually true and, thus, what’s truly possible."

Insight: First-principles thinking allows you to uncover breakthrough solutions by stripping away assumptions and rebuilding from fundamental truths.

Tactical advice:

• Approach problems with a beginner's mind rather than relying on existing models.
• Challenge common assumptions by asking questions that others might ignore.
• Investigate facts directly at the source to determine what is actually true.

Source: First-principles thinking (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/first-principles-thinking)

---

"You don’t have to learn to code to see most of the benefits. Frankly, I wouldn’t spend any time there (unless you really want to). Instead, I’d start by learning a few basic concepts and then asking your engineering partners a ton of questions."

Insight: Non-technical PMs can gain the most valuable technical leverage by understanding core concepts and system architecture rather than mastering syntax.

Tactical advice:

• Set aside a few hours to learn basic terms like APIs, databases, and front-end vs. back-end.
• Ask engineering partners specific questions about system architecture and development bottlenecks.
• Work your way up a learning pyramid from basics to asking questions before attempting to build something.

Source: Getting more technical (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/getting-more-technical)

---

"Instead, I believe that AI will have the most profound impact on the high-level (and historically most valued) skills of product management: developing a strategy, crafting a vision, identifying new opportunities, and setting goals. Furthermore, soft skills like product sense, communication, creativity, and being the glue that enables a team to operate at their very best will become even more important (and a differentiator among companies)."

Insight: AI will automate data-intensive strategic tasks, shifting the PM's primary value toward soft skills and human-centric alignment.

Tactical advice:

• Analyze your current PM workflow to identify which skills are data-driven versus human-centric.
• Double down on strengthening soft skills like communication, collaboration, and product sense.
• Learn to use AI as a resource for creating leverage in hard skills like vision and strategy.

Source: How AI will impact product management (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-ai-will-impact-product-management)

---

"I’m saying you should double down on strengthening your soft skills (e.g. communication, collaboration, product sense, influence) and learn how to work with AI on creating more leverage in your hard skills (strategy, vision, data, setting goals)."

Insight: The most effective AI-era PMs will combine high-leverage hard skills (augmented by AI) with world-class human-centric soft skills.

Tactical advice:

• Set a deliberate plan to strengthen your communication, collaboration, and influence skills.
• Experiment with new AI tools to automate the data-heavy portions of strategy and vision work.
• Identify customer problems that require high empathy and product sense to solve uniquely.

Source: How AI will impact product management (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-ai-will-impact-product-management)

---

"Thus, to realistically measure how close AI models are to replacing the work of a human—in our case, a product manager—we need to collect real-world examples of difficult PM tasks that AI tools seem to struggle with, use the best current model, and apply prompt engineering principles to give the models the best chance possible."

Insight: Systematic benchmarking of AI performance requires comparing expert-prompted outputs against high-quality human work through rigorous blind evaluations.

Tactical advice:

• Collect real-world examples of difficult PM tasks that current AI models struggle to complete.
• Use the most recent and capable AI models to establish a true performance ceiling.
• Apply expert prompt engineering principles to ensure the AI is given the best possible chance to succeed.

Source: How close is AI to replacing product managers? (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-close-is-ai-to-replacing-product-managers)

---

Insight: Most perceived professional limitations of AI are actually failures of basic prompting or the use of outdated models rather than inherent flaws in the technology.

Tactical advice:

• Use the OpenAI Playground to set custom system prompts that bypass default instruction limitations.
• Incorporate few-shot prompting by including multiple examples of a task being done correctly within the prompt.
• Iterate on prompts with small changes, as minor adjustments can yield significantly better results.

Source: How close is AI to replacing product managers? (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-close-is-ai-to-replacing-product-managers)

---

"But one surprising twist is that senior ICs often out-earn managers, challenging the assumption that management roles always pay more. This trend suggests that the value of ICs is rising, a shift further reinforced by recent layoffs disproportionately affecting middle managers, thus “flattening” organizations."

Insight: The individual contributor path is no longer a financial compromise, as senior domain experts often command higher median salaries than entry-level people managers.

Tactical advice:

• Evaluate the IC track if you prefer direct product work, as senior ICs can earn nearly $80,000 more than entry-level peers.
• Consider that the median salary for a senior IC ($187,500) significantly exceeds that of a manager ($162,500).
• Recognize that senior IC compensation most closely aligns with the senior manager level.

Source: How much do U.S. product managers really make? (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-much-do-us-product-managers-really-make)

---

"When you feed in all of that context that you’ve been trying to juggle yourself, your ChatGPT Project becomes a second brain that can store the information and synthesize it for you. That means that it can know and retrieve the right piece of data for the right problem—like an instantaneous librarian—and even use what it knows to run analyses and generate recommendations, like an associate PM."

Insight: Using a persistent AI workspace as a "second brain" allows PMs to offload cognitive overhead and focus on high-level strategy and creative problem-solving.

Tactical advice:

• Create a 'ChatGPT Project' specifically for a product initiative to maintain a persistent workspace that stores all relevant files and decisions.
• Define a specific 'personality' for the project in the instructions section, prompting the AI to challenge your ideas and act as a smart thought partner.
• Regularly 'feed' the brain by uploading new artifacts like PRDs, strategy decks, and meeting notes as they are created.

Source: How to build your PM second brain with ChatGPT (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-build-your-pm-second-brain-with-chatgpt)

---

Insight: A successful product strategy serves as a credible and coherent map that guides a team from a complex problem to a tangible solution.

Tactical advice:

• Break large problems into solvable chunks using structured frameworks.
• Practice the Amazon "working backwards" strategy to align solutions with clear objectives.
• Ask experienced PMs to walk you through the vision and strategy of their recent initiatives.

Source: How to get into product management (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-get-into-product-management)

---

"A PM that is good at nothing else but execution is valuable to a team, while a team with a PM that can’t execute is better off without that PM. Tactically this includes things like building a roadmap that everyone on your team is aligned behind, setting and hitting deadlines, and ruthlessly unblocking blockers."

Insight: Mastering execution is the most essential skill for early-career PMs, as it allows them to maintain team momentum and ship valuable products.

Tactical advice:

• Build a roadmap that ensures everyone on your team is aligned on priorities.
• Ruthlessly unblock blockers to keep the ship sailing smoothly and hit deadlines.
• Regularly ask yourself how you are going to move the product forward today.

Source: How to get into product management (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-get-into-product-management)

---

Insight: Product leadership is the art of marshaling team resources and guiding individuals toward business value through influence rather than formal authority.

Tactical advice:

• Lead your team through influence and trust rather than relying on authority or titles.
• Focus on solving your team's problems to earn their respect as a leader.
• Marshal the team's resources toward driving measurable business value.

Source: How to get into product management (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-get-into-product-management)

---

Insight: High achievers must reconcile their professional ambitions with their biological limitations to avoid pushing themselves to a permanent breaking point.

Tactical advice:

• Assess whether a promotion's added stress fits within your current range of tolerance.
• Evaluate if your drive for 'the top' is masking critical physiological warning signs.
• Consider the trade-off between career progression and the ability to sustain a complete life.

Source: How to know when to stop (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-know-when-to-stop)

---

"Your first 90 days at a new job have an outsize impact on your next one to two years at that company. It’s your chance to establish trust, influence, and build a reputation within the org. To do this well, you want to show quick wins: low-effort, high-impact changes that create a sense of “Holy shit, this person is amazing.”"

Insight: Establishing trust and a strong reputation in the first 90 days requires identifying and executing low-effort, high-impact 'quick wins.'

Tactical advice:

• Identify low-hanging fruit in the product or process that the existing team has overlooked.
• Apply a beginner’s mind to uncover missed growth opportunities hidden in plain sight.
• Focus on immediate contributions that create a visible positive impression on colleagues.

Source: How to make an impact in your first 90 days (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-make-an-impact-in-your-first-90-days)

---

"Chatbot tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity are quickly becoming de facto co-pilots for product managers. I ran this poll on X and LinkedIn, and holy shit, over 50% of PMs who responded are now using a chatbot daily."

Insight: AI chatbots are rapidly transitioning from optional tools to essential daily co-pilots that the majority of product managers now rely on.

Tactical advice:

• Carve out dedicated time to experiment with different AI chatbot tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity.
• Integrate chatbots into your daily routine for recurring tasks to build mastery.
• Use shared community prompts to discover high-leverage ways to apply AI to your specific product workflows.

Source: How to use Perplexity in your PM work (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-use-perplexity-in-your-pm-work)

---

"Though I don’t believe PMs will be displaced by GPT-4/5/6/n, I do believe that, as with most knowledge work, learning to work alongside AI will quickly become table stakes."

Insight: Mastering AI collaboration is becoming a fundamental requirement for product managers to remain competitive in their roles.

Tactical advice:

• Sign up for ChatGPT immediately to begin exploration.
• Identify one routine PM task and attempt to complete it using an AI prompt.
• Ask the AI for feedback on how to improve the phrasing of your prompts.

Source: How to use ChatGPT in your PM work (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-use-chatgpt-in-your-pm-work)

---

"I’d like to counter the notion that the only real PMs are those on empowered product teams. I believe that PMs on feature teams are also real product managers."

Insight: Feature team PMs perform critical product work by translating vague stakeholder requests into useful customer experiences, often without the help of dedicated project managers.

Tactical advice:

• Highlight the discovery work required to turn single-sentence feature requests into detailed PRDs and project briefs.
• Frame your role as a cross-functional lead who maps out UX and architectural changes to ensure feature reliability.
• Document how you equip sales and marketing teams with the specific information needed to drive adoption of new capabilities.

Source: In defense of feature team product managers (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/in-defense-of-feature-team-product-managers)

---

"The amount of ambiguity facing a 1st time PM is tremendous. Often the founders/execs are still extremely hands on and aren’t comfortable sharing ownership. So there’s a lot of tension. Your job is to bring clarity and focus (i.e. decrease ambiguity) yet stay extremely flexible to changing things all over again every six months."

Insight: Succeeding as a first PM requires managing the tension of hands-on founders by providing clarity while remaining flexible to rapid changes.

Tactical advice:

• Listen and learn how things are done before attempting to change them.
• Build trust with the CEO through frequent jam sessions and alignment debates.
• Identify quick wins to consistently deliver impact and prove the role's value.

Source: Joining as the first product manager (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/joining-as-the-first-product-manager)

---

Insight: The core of the PM manager role is maximizing team leverage by unblocking obstacles and upholding high quality standards across the organization.

Tactical advice:

• Use your newfound visibility to stop bad initiatives before they gain momentum.
• Focus on teaching and mentoring your team rather than performing tasks for them.
• Invest significant effort into building a strong, united relationship with your peer managers.

Source: Moving from IC product manager to manager of product managers (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/moving-from-ic-product-manager-to-manager-of-product-managers)

---

Insight: Investing in professional education can be career-transforming, but it requires careful selection to avoid wasting resources on low-quality content.

Tactical advice:

• Prioritize courses that are live and cohort-based to ensure higher engagement.
• Evaluate programs based on whether they have successfully run multiple previous cohorts.
• Align your course selection with your current career level and specific learning objectives.

Source: My favorite PM courses (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/my-favorite-pm-courses)

---

Insight: Early career success requires a proactive balance of following personal interests and making strategic, value-driven decisions rather than relying on passion alone.

Tactical advice:

• Identify the intersection between what you enjoy, what you are good at, and what creates value for others.
• Strive to do more of the work that gives you energy and less of what saps it.
• Avoid over-optimizing for resume checkboxes and focus on the work you actually want to do.

Source: Navigating your early career (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/navigating-your-early-career)

---

Insight: Understanding whether your difficulty finding a job is due to market-wide trends or role-specific shifts requires analyzing real-time data on hiring-to-firing ratios across the product ecosystem.

Tactical advice:

• Target growth-oriented roles which are currently the fastest-expanding product-adjacent function.
• Monitor for role title shifts, such as the transition of Scrum Master responsibilities into Product Owner titles.
• Distinguish between high-volume roles like PM and resurgent niche roles like User Research when assessing opportunity density.

Source: New data on the product job market (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/new-data-on-the-product-job-market)

---

Insight: Building a centralized, living library of product management templates creates a consistent operating standard and speeds up the kickoff for new initiatives.

Tactical advice:

• Curate a list of preferred templates for every stage of the product lifecycle into a single reference.
• Incorporate high-quality frameworks shared by industry peers to provide diverse options.
• Maintain the collection as a living document that is updated regularly as the team's needs evolve.

Source: My favorite product management templates (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/my-favorite-product-management-templates)

---

"Every successful person you know became successful because they were skilled at asking for help. What I’ve heard repeatedly from the many leaders I’ve met, and have found to be true in my own career, is that knowing when and how to enlist support is a career unlock."

Insight: Asking for help is a fundamental professional skill and a 'career unlock' that distinguishes successful leaders from those who plateau due to hyper-independence.

Tactical advice:

• View asking for help as an act of high agency and ownership rather than a sign of weakness.
• Practice making requests for help proactively to anticipate roadblocks before they become crises.
• Identify projects that feel ambiguous as primary candidates for enlisting external support.

Source: On asking for help (even when you really don’t want to) (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/on-asking-for-help-even-when-you-really-dont-want-to)

---

"Preparing gives you a big leg up, even if you spend just a few hours. A little prep helps you nail common questions, build frameworks for confronting unexpected questions, and gets your mind into the interviewing game (which is very different from doing the job itself)."

Insight: Interviewing is a distinct skill set from the job of product management, requiring systematic preparation across research, practice, and study to succeed.

Tactical advice:

• Research the company's product, mission, and common interview questions.
• Conduct live mock interviews with peers or coaches to move beyond passive study.
• Learn specific frameworks to structure your answers for unexpected questions.

Source: Preparing for a PM interview (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/preparing-for-a-pm-interview)

---

"In this newer, flatter tech industry, PMs who thrive will be the ones who build their own systems, methodologies, and tools to make the job work for them, not the other way around. They’ll start working “unfairly” today to lead successful teams without sacrificing their own well-being."

Insight: In an era of organizational flattening, the most impactful PMs are those who adopt 'super-IC' systems to achieve management-level impact while remaining hands-on.

Tactical advice:

• Actively build personalized productivity systems to handle larger swaths of product ownership as a high-leverage IC.
• Adopt a 'working unfairly' mindset by implementing boundaries and tools that protect your time and health.
• Master AI and automation tools to increase your impact and navigate the rising expectations of flatter organizations.

Source: Product manager is an unfair role. So work unfairly. (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/product-manager-is-an-unfair-role-so-work-unfairly)

---

Insight: While product management roles vary by organization, ten core competencies—led by leadership, execution, and strategy—form a universal foundation for PM success.

Tactical advice:

• Prioritize development in leadership, execution, and strategy as they are the most cited requirements in industry career ladders.
• Focus on communication as your primary tool, as it is the vehicle through which all other PM tasks are completed.
• Review your own company's leveling framework to align your skill-building with how you are actually evaluated.

Source: Skills PMs need to build (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/skills-pms-need-to-build)

---

"There’s no better way to know what skills matter most in your role than by looking at how your company evaluates your performance. If you’re lucky, your manager has shared what’s called a career ladder (also known as a leveling framework, career map, role guideline, competencies, or attributes list), which lays out the concrete expectations for your role at your level."

Insight: Advancing to a senior PM level requires shifting from managing tasks to managing outcomes, mentoring others, and driving long-term strategic impact.

Tactical advice:

• Shift your focus from shipping individual features to delivering quantifiable metrics and step-function improvements for the business.
• Expand your execution scope from short-term sprints to 6-12 month product initiatives that span multiple teams.
• Practice servant-leadership by modeling best practices and actively developing the skills of more junior product managers.

Source: Skills PMs need to build (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/skills-pms-need-to-build)

---

"On an individual level, as you suggested, reorgs are a great opportunity to take a step forward in your career. Some of the biggest jumps in my own career have come as a result of reorgs. The changing team structures often unlock new opportunities, new leadership roles, and if nothing else give you a chance to take on more responsibility."

Insight: Organizational restructuring acts as a strategic catalyst for career advancement by unlocking leadership roles and increased responsibilities that were previously unavailable.

Tactical advice:

• Deliver impact and results so leaders believe you are capable of succeeding in a bigger role.
• Make your career goals known early and often during planning discussions and 1:1 meetings.
• Anticipate the business direction to develop new strategies or engage with potential new managers ahead of the shift.

Source: Surviving reorgs, tactically and emotionally - Issue 32 (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/surviving-reorgs-tactically-and-emotionally---issue-32)

---

Insight: Mastering product management requires a structured approach to core pillars like communication, influence, and a goal-setting hierarchy.

Tactical advice:

• Map your work through the hierarchy: Mission → Vision → Strategy → Goals → Roadmap → Task.
• Master communication using the Minto Pyramid Principle and the SCR framework.
• Apply prioritization frameworks like DRICE to manage your product roadmap effectively.

Source: The Best of Lenny’s Newsletter 2023 (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-best-of-lennys-newsletter-2023)

---

Insight: Accelerating your product career requires mastering organizational influence and proactively adapting to technological shifts like AI.

Tactical advice:

• Implement the 'Magic Loop' framework to demonstrate rapid value and secure promotions.
• Develop a plan to integrate ChatGPT and emerging AI tools into your daily PM workflows.
• Study established career ladders to understand the skills required to transition to senior levels.

Source: The Best of Lenny’s Newsletter 2023 (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-best-of-lennys-newsletter-2023)

---

"Being a new product manager is a lot like being a new President. You’re thrust into power, entrusted to lead people (many of whom you’ve barely met) to achieve ambitious goals, with limited authority, all the while learning how to do this job, on the job."

Insight: Early career success for product managers depends on avoiding behavioral anti-patterns that range from being overly passive to overly controlling.

Tactical advice:

• Develop a distinct point of view for every product decision.
• Focus on immediate team execution before prioritizing long-term strategy.
• Protect your makers from external distractions and ad hoc requests.

Source: The most common pitfalls of new product managers (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-most-common-pitfalls-of-new-product-managers)

---

Insight: Systematic career growth is achieved by mastering your current role, proactively solving your manager's problems, and then leveraging that trust to secure projects that develop your target skills.

Tactical advice:

• Verify your current performance is in good standing before asking to take on new responsibilities.
• Identify your manager's unmet needs and proactively offer to fill them.
• Explicitly ask for new work that aligns with a specific career goal once you have proven your reliability.

Source: The Magic Loop (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-magic-loop)

---

"Product sense interviews assess your ability to identify user needs, articulate problems, and craft compelling solutions while demonstrating empathy, creativity, and structured thinking."

Insight: Mastering product sense requires balancing user empathy with a highly structured communication framework that signals competence to the interviewer.

Tactical advice:

• Prepare to deliver clear signals across five evaluation dimensions: communication, motivation, segmentation, problem identification, and solution development.
• Aim for a solid, passing score across all dimensions rather than over-indexing on one area.
• Practice responding within a 35-minute core exercise window to mimic real-world interview constraints.

Source: The definitive guide to mastering product sense interviews (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-definitive-guide-to-mastering-product-sense-interviews)

---

"The best candidates approach these interviews as a specific game with clear rules rather than a casual conversation."

Insight: Controlling the interview's structure from the outset prevents wasted time and demonstrates the leadership skills expected of a senior PM.

Tactical advice:

• Use 'waypointing' by taking 1-2 minute thinking pauses before sharing each major section of your answer.
• Establish 2-4 assumptions early regarding role, geography, and platform to narrow the scope to a manageable exercise.
• Explicitly walk the interviewer through your game plan and ask for alignment before diving into the solution.

Source: The definitive guide to mastering product sense interviews (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-definitive-guide-to-mastering-product-sense-interviews)

---

Insight: Articulating a product's purpose and mission early ensures your subsequent design choices are grounded in a strategic 'why' rather than just 'what.'

Tactical advice:

• Define the product's motivation by connecting features to deeper human needs or strategic company goals.
• Craft a concise mission statement at the beginning of the interview to serve as a north star for the exercise.
• Check in with the interviewer after explaining the product motivation to ensure you are on the same page before segmenting users.

Source: The definitive guide to mastering product sense interviews (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-definitive-guide-to-mastering-product-sense-interviews)

---

Insight: Effective segmentation requires breaking down the broad ecosystem into mutually exclusive groups and choosing one target to focus on for deeper problem-solving.

Tactical advice:

• Break down the target audience into distinct user groups that do not overlap.
• Prioritize a target segment based on specific criteria like market reach or how underserved they currently are.
• Develop a vivid persona for your chosen segment to demonstrate empathy and guide problem identification.

Source: The definitive guide to mastering product sense interviews (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-definitive-guide-to-mastering-product-sense-interviews)

---

Insight: Successful problem identification involves mapping the user journey to find severe, frequent pain points that warrant a new solution.

Tactical advice:

• Map out the user journey to identify specific moments of friction for your target persona.
• List at least three distinct pain points rather than focusing on broad, generic needs.
• Prioritize problems by evaluating the frequency of the issue against the severity of the user's pain.

Source: The definitive guide to mastering product sense interviews (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-definitive-guide-to-mastering-product-sense-interviews)

---

Insight: A strong solution phase pairs creative brainstorming with a pragmatic prioritization framework and a clear path to execution.

Tactical advice:

• Brainstorm diverse solution approaches—from safe to moonshot—before selecting a final path.
• Use an impact vs. effort framework to justify why you chose a specific solution to build.
• Describe a concrete v1 implementation and identify potential technical or strategic risks with mitigations.

Source: The definitive guide to mastering product sense interviews (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-definitive-guide-to-mastering-product-sense-interviews)

---

"On the one hand, understanding your developers, their process, and their work is part and parcel of shipping products effectively. On the other hand, you don’t want to step on your engineers’ toes, and getting too deep into the codebase isn’t a great use of your time. One point we can all agree on, though: a strong technical knowledge foundation means a more effective PM."

Insight: A strong technical foundation allows PMs to communicate better with engineers and make more informed trade-offs without overstepping into implementation.

Tactical advice:

• Identify your company's primary programming languages and frameworks.
• Learn the build and deployment process to understand lead times.
• Research technical concepts you don't understand rather than glossing over them.

Source: The top 5 things PMs should know about engineering (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-top-5-things-pms-should-know-about-engineering)

---

"Work your way up this stack, finding ways to refine and optimize each step: Execution —> Strategy —> Vision"

Insight: When day-to-day operations are stable, product managers should reinvest their time into refining strategy and clarifying the long-term vision for the team.

Tactical advice:

• Audit existing processes and identify potential blockers that could slow down the team in the future.
• Ensure the team strategy is easily accessible and that every member can clearly articulate it.
• Define and communicate a 'North Star' that illustrates what concrete long-term success looks like for the product.

Source: This Week #0: Advice on growth, product, and leadership (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/this-week-0-advice-on-growth-product-and-leadership)

---

"Don’t let yourself get overwhelmed. It may seem like the folks you’re reading have it all figured out — but they don’t. They’ve learned a few things, and wrote about them, by going through the same process you’re about to go through. Take a few ideas at a time, discuss them with your team, and try them out in the real world."

Insight: Practical application and peer discussion are more effective for mastering growth than consuming massive amounts of content in isolation.

Tactical advice:

• Curate your reading list around experts like Brian Balfour, Andrew Chen, and Casey Winters.
• Read foundational books like Hacking Growth and High Growth Handbook to build a baseline of terminology and frameworks.
• Implement a few ideas at a time in the real world to learn through doing.

Source: This Week #1: Must reads on growth, what PMs should focus on when joining a new team, and the value of an MBA (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/this-week-1-must-reads-on-growth-what-pms-should-focus-on-when-joining-a-new-tea)

---

"I like to think of a new PM joining your team much like a new roommate moving in to your apartment — even though you’ve interviewed them and did extensive reference checks, you’re still a little skeptical, not sure you want to trust them with the keys to the house, and wonder what this person actually does for a living."

Insight: New PMs should prioritize listening and low-stakes wins to overcome initial skepticism and build the trust necessary for long-term strategic influence.

Tactical advice:

• Ask lots of questions in your first 30 days to build context and signal that you aren't there to dictate without understanding.
• Secure 2-3 quick wins by resolving lingering decisions or improving annoying processes to prove immediate value.
• Wait until your second 90 days to finalize a long-term strategy and 6-12 month roadmap.

Source: This Week #1: Must reads on growth, what PMs should focus on when joining a new team, and the value of an MBA (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/this-week-1-must-reads-on-growth-what-pms-should-focus-on-when-joining-a-new-tea)

---

"In most cases, it’s not worth it. There are better ways to accelerate your career (see below), especially if you already have a PM gig. When I’m looking at PMs for a potential role, nothing beats experience doing the actual job."

Insight: For existing product managers, the career ROI of business school is usually lower than the value gained from two years of additional on-the-job experience.

Tactical advice:

• Prioritize gaining hands-on PM experience over getting a business degree to maximize hiring appeal.
• Consider an MBA only as a pivot tool if you are struggling to break into the field or feel stuck in your career.
• Explore extended education programs like Reforge or PMHQ as more efficient alternatives to an MBA.

Source: This Week #1: Must reads on growth, what PMs should focus on when joining a new team, and the value of an MBA (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/this-week-1-must-reads-on-growth-what-pms-should-focus-on-when-joining-a-new-tea)

---

"Assuming that’s true, early in your PM career it's best to focus on (1) shipping wins, (2) learning best practices, (3) getting baseline credentials and (4) starting your network."

Insight: Early career growth for product managers is maximized by prioritizing tangible successes, established best practices, and the long-term value of a professional network.

Tactical advice:

• Join a team that ships frequently to maximize your 'swings at the bat' and opportunities for iterative learning.
• Seek out well-known companies or rotational programs where you can observe strong PM practices applied across different teams.
• Stay with a team long enough to measure and reflect on a product launch to ensure the 'win' shows up on your performance review.

Source: This Week #11: What should new PMs over-index on, and empowering product in a sales-driven org (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/this-week-11-what-should-new-pms-over-index-on-and-empowering-product-in-a-sales)

---

"As you move up the career ladder as a PM manager you become increasingly distant from the actual product. More and more your impact comes out of the work of other people. As Andy Grove famously shared in High Output Management, “the output of a manager is the output of the organizational units under his or her supervision or influence.”"

Insight: Director-level PM interviews shift focus from execution to long-term strategy, leadership of people, and the ability to drive business-level impact through others.

Tactical advice:

• Focus your interview answers on your approach to breaking down complex strategic problems rather than just the final solution.
• Be prepared to discuss your leadership style and specific examples of navigating people challenges.
• Demonstrate how you have successfully pushed back on or aligned with senior external stakeholders.

Source: This Week #3: Finding product/market fit, interviewing for a Director of PM role, and structuring discussions with senior leaders (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/this-week-3-finding-productmarket-fit-interviewing-for-a-director-of-pm-role-and)

---

"Truthfully, it’s tough to get significantly better at product management without actually doing product management. However, having time to step back, to process, to read deeply, and to build complementary skills is a rare gift and can indeed accelerate your progress once you return to the job."

Insight: While hands-on experience is the best teacher, an extended break provides a unique opportunity to build complementary skills and reflect on past lessons to accelerate future career growth.

Tactical advice:

• Identify 2-3 specific skills you want to develop and work through a curated set of books and articles focused on those goals.
• Reflect on your past work experience by writing a bulleted list of PM learnings or in-depth articles to solidify your knowledge.
• Take experiential classes in non-digital contexts, like teaching a sport or making pottery, to build leadership and design thinking skills.

Source: This Week #6: Cultivating good relationships with distributed co-workers, building trust to accelerate growth, and leveling up as a PM when you have extra time (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/this-week-6-cultivating-good-relationships-with-distributed-co-workers-building)

---

"Your job as a PM is to deliver business impact by marshaling the resources of your team to identify and solve the most impactful customer problems."

Insight: A product manager serves as a high-leverage business tool by coordinating cross-functional teams to solve customer problems that drive measurable results.

Tactical advice:

• Deliver business impact by hitting goals and reducing costs.
• Increase the leverage of cross-functional teammates rather than doing the building yourself.
• Identify and prioritize the most impactful customer problems to solve.

Source: What is product management (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/what-is-product-management)

---

"AI is good at doing what it’s told, but someone needs to be skilled at pointing it in the right direction, iterating until the work is great, shipping it, and driving adoption. That’s literally the job of a product manager."

Insight: Product managers are uniquely prepared to lead in the AI era because their core expertise—directing resources to solve customer problems—mirrors the oversight AI requires.

Tactical advice:

• Point AI resources toward the most impactful customer problems.
• Iterate on AI-generated work until it meets a high standard of quality.
• Focus on driving user adoption and shipping products to deliver business impact.

Source: Why PMs are best positioned to thrive in an AI world (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/why-pms-are-best-positioned-to-thrive-in-an-ai-world)

---

"The most valued skill set will increasingly shift from building to knowing what to build, giving clear instructions for what to build, and having the taste to know if what you’ve created is great."

Insight: As AI automates technical execution, the competitive advantage for PMs shifts toward strategic vision, clear communication, and refined product taste.

Tactical advice:

• Cultivate the taste to recognize great design and product impact.
• Improve your ability to distill and communicate requirements clearly.
• Master prioritization to focus your team's resources on the highest-ROI opportunities.

Source: Why PMs are best positioned to thrive in an AI world (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/why-pms-are-best-positioned-to-thrive-in-an-ai-world)

---

"The newsletter (and podcast) are growing fastest among non-PMs because, with the rise of AI engineers, the skills that matter more and more are PM skills: figuring out what to build, prioritizing the highest-ROI opportunities among endless ideas, getting buy-in, clearly and succinctly articulating requirements, having the taste and experience to know if what you’ve built is good, and driving adoption, growth, and retention."

Insight: As AI automates technical execution, the value of product management shifts toward human-centric strategic discernment, stakeholder influence, and quality judgment.

Tactical advice:

• Focus on developing the "taste" and experience required to judge whether an AI-built product is actually high quality.
• Master the ability to succinctly articulate product requirements for AI-augmented workflows.
• Prioritize high-ROI opportunity identification over basic project coordination.

Source: 1,000,000 (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/1000000-taking-a-moment-to-celebrate-and-reflect-and-then-back-to-work)

---

"Great PMs build an aura of “I’ve got this.” They rarely drop balls, they come prepared, and their colleagues know that when they take on a task, it’ll get done."

Insight: Reliability is built by being extremely selective with your commitments and communicating priority clearly to stakeholders.

Tactical advice:

• Be selective and say no to most things so you can spend more time on the tasks you do accept.
• Communicate where a new request sits in your list of priorities to set accurate expectations.
• Keep a 'Waiting For' list to track open threads and ensure no task is forgotten.

Source: 14 habits of highly effective product managers (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/14-habits-of-highly-effective-product-managers)

---

"Great PMs hold the bar high for the work they, and their teammates, do. They resist the urge to let people settle for good enough. They push their team, and themselves, to make documents clearer, to make meetings more valuable, and to help people do the best work of their lives."

Insight: Highly effective PMs act as quality anchors who refuse to let their team settle for 'good enough' output.

Tactical advice:

• Push back immediately when you encounter subpar performance or confusing strategy documents.
• Review every major document and presentation your team produces to ensure they are A+ quality.
• Ask yourself what one thing you could do to make a document more succinct before sharing it.

Source: 14 habits of highly effective product managers (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/14-habits-of-highly-effective-product-managers)

---

"Great PMs endlessly look for blockers to unblock. They’re always on the hunt for bottlenecks, unmade decisions, and anything that is keeping their team from operating like a well-oiled machine."

Insight: A PM's primary operational role is to act as the team's grease, hunting for and removing bottlenecks and unmade decisions.

Tactical advice:

• Always prioritize your own tasks based on what will unblock a team member first.
• Ask your teammates frequently what is currently slowing them down.
• Look around corners to identify looming blockers before they stop the team's momentum.

Source: 14 habits of highly effective product managers (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/14-habits-of-highly-effective-product-managers)

---

"Great PMs anticipate what’s around the corner so that they can get ahead of it. They know that the most successful PMs are the most prepared PMs, and the best way to be prepared is to have more time to prepare."

Insight: Preparation is a competitive advantage that requires dedicated time to scan for upcoming risks, changes, and opportunities.

Tactical advice:

• Schedule a recurring 30-minute meeting with yourself every week to look ahead and prepare.
• Analyze priority changes happening higher in the organization to determine their eventual impact on your team.
• Ask how you can help the team move even faster during periods when everything is going smoothly.

Source: 14 habits of highly effective product managers (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/14-habits-of-highly-effective-product-managers)

---

Insight: Building confidence in a new PM role is a byproduct of gaining high-quality context and engaging with a supportive peer community.

Tactical advice:

• Join a peer community to realize common challenges and reduce feelings of isolation.
• Learn from expert guest speakers to understand the specific differentiators between good and great PMs.
• Utilize expert-led context and real-world assignments to build self-assurance in decision-making.

Source: 🚨 Applications now open for my live course—Product Management Fundamentals (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/applications-now-open-for-my-live-course-product-management-fundamentals)

---

Insight: Using version control tools firsthand helps non-engineers understand the collaborative 'Google Docs' style logic of code development and review.

Tactical advice:

• Practice creating a 'branch' to understand how engineers isolate their changes from the main codebase.
• Learn the 'pull request' process where code changes are reviewed by peers before being merged into the main branch.
• Understand that a repository (repo) serves as the central folder tracking every historical change to a project's files.

Source: Become a more technical product manager (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/become-a-more-technical-product-manager)

---

"Learn about SQL in a course or online, and start running queries. Take a class on statistics and experimental design."

Insight: PMs who master SQL and statistics achieve higher velocity by self-serving their own data analysis and designing statistically valid experiments.

Tactical advice:

• Complete an online SQL course to begin running your own data queries and reduce reliance on analysts.
• Study experimental design and basic statistics to ensure your growth tests produce reliable, actionable insights.
• Use raw data to track conversion rates and identify growth opportunities within your product funnels.

Source: Breaking into growth (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/breaking-into-growth)

---

"Agency, as I see it, is an amalgamation of two skills, or mental dispositions: autonomy and efficacy. Agency requires the capacity to formulate autonomous goals in life—the capacity to dig inside and figure out what wants to happen through you, no matter how strange or wrong it seems to others."

Insight: True agency is the combination of knowing what you want to achieve independently and possessing the drive to navigate reality effectively to solve problems.

Tactical advice:

• Formulate autonomous goals based on internal values rather than external social expectations.
• Develop efficacy by treating reality as it is and viewing obstacles as solvable puzzles.
• Seek a 'gentle' path of agency through attunement to reality rather than aggressive type-A force.

Source: Essential reading for product builders—part 1 (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/essential-reading-for-product-builders-part-1)

---

"Pretending to learn feels good. Actual learning often feels bad. A lot of people are just pretending to learn (memorizing passwords) when they think they’re learning."

Insight: Genuine learning requires pushing past the psychological discomfort of feeling incompetent to actually retain and apply new information.

Tactical advice:

• Distinguish between activities that provide social status and those that actually improve understanding.
• Lean into the unpleasant feelings that typically accompany actual skill acquisition.
• Prioritize information retention over the performance of being 'the type of person who reads.'

Source: Essential reading for product builders—part 1 (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/essential-reading-for-product-builders-part-1)

---

Insight: Mastering a complex process requires deconstructing it into its smallest components to understand the underlying principles of why it works.

Tactical advice:

• Deconstruct a process or product into its smallest individual steps.
• Perform procedures manually to gain a deep understanding of each component.
• Identify the specific levers within a problem that prevent you from reaching the desired outcome.

Source: First-principles thinking (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/first-principles-thinking)

---

"Broadly, the best way to get better at developing strategy: 1. Spend time understanding your market (including your competition) 2. Spend time understanding your customers and their needs 3. Spend time crafting and executing strategies — and learn from those experiences 4. Study colleagues who are great strategic thinkers 5. Read about strategy"

Insight: Mastering strategy is a skill developed through deep market immersion, customer empathy, and the active study of established strategic frameworks.

Tactical advice:

• Identify colleagues who are recognized for strategic thinking and study their logic and decision-making.
• Invest time in reading foundational strategy texts like "Good Strategy Bad Strategy" or "7 Powers."
• Spend dedicated time specifically analyzing your competition and shifting market dynamics.

Source: Getting better at product strategy (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/getting-better-at-product-strategy)

---

"If you’re ever feeling not technical enough, put together a list of questions, grab an engineer, find a whiteboard, and ask them questions until you start to understand WTF is going on."

Insight: Leveraging the expertise of engineering colleagues through structured, curious questioning is the fastest way for a PM to understand complex systems.

Tactical advice:

• Ask an engineer to draw a rough diagram of how the current system is architected.
• Inquire about the specific steps and dependencies involved in moving a feature from idea to launch.
• Ask engineers what factors or processes slow down their work most frequently to understand technical debt.

Source: Getting more technical (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/getting-more-technical)

---

"Finally, if you want to reach the pinnacle of being a technical PM, you need to learn to code and then build something yourself. Learning to code is a serious endeavor, and I won’t truly do it justice in one post."

Insight: While not strictly necessary for most PM roles, building a project from scratch provides the deepest possible understanding of technical constraints and trade-offs.

Tactical advice:

• Enroll in structured introductory courses like Harvard's CS50, freeCodeCamp, or Codecademy.
• Learn SQL to run independent queries and understand how the product's data is structured.
• Dedicate significant time to building a personal project to experience the full development lifecycle first-hand.

Source: Getting more technical (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/getting-more-technical)

---

"Tooling will likely become incredibly good at catching unexpected behaviors. Feed it your PRD/1-pagers, and AI will tell you where it got stuck."

Insight: AI-powered quality assurance can proactively identify bugs and confusing user flows by analyzing your product specifications before launch.

Tactical advice:

• Feed your PRDs and 1-pagers into AI testing tools to discover potential bugs or friction points.
• Utilize AI battle-testing to find confusing copy or unexpected behaviors in the product UI.
• Explore QA tools like Rainforest, Katalon, or Codium to automate the testing process.

Source: How AI will impact product management (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-ai-will-impact-product-management)

---

"The PM’s role here will shift to becoming very good at knowing what data to feed it and asking the right questions. And to be clear, I’m not saying you should quit building your strategic-thinking muscle—I’m just saying that AI will give you huge leverage here eventually."

Insight: PM leverage in the AI era comes from mastering the interface between human strategy and AI data-processing capabilities.

Tactical advice:

• Practice curating high-quality data sets to provide better context to AI models.
• Master advanced prompting techniques to ask more insightful questions of your AI tools.
• Strengthen your editorial eye to critique and improve suggestions made by super-intelligent systems.

Source: How AI will impact product management (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-ai-will-impact-product-management)

---

Insight: Blind evaluations are essential to eliminate brand bias and objectively assess if AI work quality meets professional human standards.

Tactical advice:

• Present results to evaluators in an unmarked format to prevent bias toward human or AI labels.
• Source human benchmark responses from high-quality sources like professional databases or interview prep platforms.
• Ask evaluators to provide qualitative reasoning for their preferences to identify specific strengths and weaknesses in AI output.

Source: How close is AI to replacing product managers? (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-close-is-ai-to-replacing-product-managers)

---

"AI is still a long way from working independently as a product manager. But it’s important to remember that right now is the worst AI will ever be at any task—these models may continue to get twice as good every six months."

Insight: Product management skills follow an automation timeline where tactical execution is delegated first, while strategic reasoning remains a human differentiator for longer.

Tactical advice:

• Map current PM tasks against AI capabilities to identify which areas are most likely to be delegated first.
• Monitor the performance of the latest models every six months to track the pace of PM task automation.
• Focus career development on non-obvious strategic reasoning, which is currently the hardest skill for AI to replicate.

Source: How close is AI to replacing product managers? (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-close-is-ai-to-replacing-product-managers)

---

"To make your work more noticeably human and less replaceable by AI, incorporating your niche interests and passions into your work seems like it would be a good strategy."

Insight: Incorporating personal passions and non-obvious connections into your work creates a 'human fingerprint' that differentiates it from average AI-generated output.

Tactical advice:

• Include unexpected connections or niche interests in your work to make it more noticeably human.
• Avoid 'highest-probability' answers that AI defaults to by introducing surprising or delightful conceptual links.
• Prioritize high-level strategic reasoning over list-making to demonstrate value that current AI struggle to provide.

Source: How close is AI to replacing product managers? (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-close-is-ai-to-replacing-product-managers)

---

"It’s my belief that PMs are responsible for the “why.” Ideas of what we build come from anywhere (including our community!), and the “how” often comes from design and engineering. But I’m pretty insistent that PMs make it crystal clear why we’re solving a particular problem and why it’s important over anything else we could do."

Insight: The primary duty of a PM is to provide radical clarity on the 'why,' which empowers the rest of the team to make autonomous and effective decisions on the 'how.'

Tactical advice:

• Own the 'why' of every project to ensure the team understands the underlying motivation.
• Invest in internal storytelling when the importance of a problem isn't immediately obvious.
• Encourage the team to source 'what' to build from community feedback and technical constraints.

Source: How Figma builds product (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-figma-builds-product)

---

"New managers make less than senior ICs. The median new manager makes $265,000 in total comp per year—equivalent to an L4 IC PM. You have to hit M5 to make more than the most senior median IC PM."

Insight: The transition to management often involves a temporary 'compensation plateau' where senior individual contributors earn more than early-stage managers.

Tactical advice:

• Review the total comp of L5/L6 IC roles against M3/M4 manager roles to understand the immediate financial impact of a track change.
• Recognize that you typically need to reach the Director level (M5) before management compensation consistently exceeds the senior IC ceiling.
• Factor in long-term equity upside when deciding between tracks, as management roles often have higher potential at executive levels.

Source: How much product managers make in the U.S., Europe, and Canada (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-much-product-managers-make-in-the-us-europe-and-canada)

---

"Many companies now recognize and value experienced ICs who can drive substantial impact. One senior IC, Tal Raviv, who appeared on a recent podcast with Lenny, offered this advice: “There’s a really good analogy here in engineering: … You shouldn’t have to rise into management in order to increase your compensation.”"

Insight: Establishing a high-level IC ladder allows organizations to retain deep domain expertise while providing clear career and financial progression without management overhead.

Tactical advice:

• Create a clear hierarchy of IC titles, such as senior IC and domain expert, with associated salary bands.
• Map IC compensation milestones to align with senior manager and director-level quartiles.
• Define impact-based rubrics that allow ICs to reach the $175k-$200k salary band without taking on direct reports.

Source: How much do U.S. product managers really make? (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-much-do-us-product-managers-really-make)

---

Insight: While pay increases generally boost satisfaction, the relationship is only moderate, meaning total compensation is rarely the sole driver of job fulfillment.

Tactical advice:

• Expect satisfaction to rise with pay, but realize it won't solve all issues of job unhappiness.
• Avoid relying on salary negotiation alone to improve your work sentiment, as it has no significant impact on overall satisfaction.
• Evaluate roles based on culture and role impact alongside compensation to ensure a more holistic career fit.

Source: How much do U.S. product managers really make? (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-much-do-us-product-managers-really-make)

---

Insight: Mid-career professionals face a unique 'U-shaped' sentiment trough where burnout peaks and future optimism hits its lowest point.

Tactical advice:

• Acknowledge the mid-career slump as a common industry pattern rather than a personal failure.
• Proactively seek career development clarity to combat the uncertainty often felt after 7–14 years in the industry.
• Assess whether your current organizational size or manager quality is compounding your mid-career burnout.

Source: How tech workers really feel about work right now (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-tech-workers-really-feel-about-work-right-now)

---

Insight: The lack of clear professional development paths is a primary source of anxiety and declining optimism for modern tech workers.

Tactical advice:

• Define the specific skills and experiences you need to acquire to feel optimistic about your career's future.
• Request structured career pathing from your manager to bridge the gap between your current role and long-term goals.
• Research how AI disruption specifically affects your job function to regain a sense of career control.

Source: How tech workers really feel about work right now (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-tech-workers-really-feel-about-work-right-now)

---

Insight: Externalizing product context into an AI system prevents cognitive overload and frees up mental bandwidth for synthesis and decision-making.

Tactical advice:

• Dump all fragmented context—Slack messages, Notion docs, and Excel sheets—into a single AI Project to avoid mental blocks and memory fatigue.
• Convert non-text sources like dashboards or support sites into PDFs using 'Command + P' to make them digestible for the AI.
• Use the AI as an 'instantaneous librarian' to retrieve specific data points across multiple scattered documents instantly.

Source: How to build your PM second brain with ChatGPT (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-build-your-pm-second-brain-with-chatgpt)

---

"Similarly, if you’ve often been right before (e.g. have hit your goals, shipped great stuff, made the right calls), people are more likely to trust that you know what you’re doing, and go along with your suggestions. As it should be. This is why more-senior PMs can get things done more easily a lot of times—they’ve shown success many times."

Insight: Consistent execution and a track record of hitting goals create a virtuous cycle where past success fuels future influence.

Tactical advice:

• Focus on hitting your team's goals consistently to build your personal credibility.
• Make small commitments and deliver on them reliably to demonstrate you can be trusted with larger asks.
• Highlight your team’s wins to ensure your successes are visible to the organization.

Source: How to get better at influence (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-get-better-at-influence)

---

"The job of a product manager is to deliver business impact by marshaling the resources of their team to identify and solve the most impactful customer problems."

Insight: A product team's success is ultimately measured by its ability to move the needle on business-critical goals like growth, efficiency, and customer satisfaction.

Tactical advice:

• Identify and solve the most impactful customer problems.
• Look for ways to accelerate company growth or make internal teams more efficient.
• Measure success by business outcomes delivered rather than just shipping features.

Source: How to know if you're doing a good job as a product manager (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-know-if-youre-doing-a-good-job-as-a-product-manager)

---

"Contribute to what is built, not just how it’s built. Your company is expecting more from you than simply coordinating, note-taking, and communicating."

Insight: To grow as a PM, you must move beyond administrative execution and start influencing the product strategy and vision.

Tactical advice:

• Focus on informing the product strategy and vision rather than just coordinating tasks.
• Uncover unique customer insights that can lead to new product ideas.
• Push the team to prioritize the most impactful work rather than just following a list.

Source: How to know if you're doing a good job as a product manager (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-know-if-youre-doing-a-good-job-as-a-product-manager)

---

Insight: Candidates succeed when they prioritize raw honesty about their failures over polished accounts of their achievements, demonstrating growth and deep self-reflection.

Tactical advice:

• Prepare specific examples of 'flops' where you can explain the failure and your subsequent actions with brutal honesty.
• Practice articulating the 'why' behind your success to show you didn't just get lucky, but have a repeatable framework.
• Develop a unique perspective on your domain that bets against conventional wisdom to prove you are a first-principles thinker.

Source: How to learn the most about a candidate from a single interview question (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-learn-the-most-about-a-candidate-from-a-single-interview-question)

---

"A mind map of the domain: Inputs and outputs of the business equation. This helps the individual learn the space by dissecting it, but also gives a win to the team in terms of documentation. You can then easily pin existing projects to this map and plan for the future."

Insight: Creating business mind maps and priority roadmaps accelerates your own learning while providing immediate documentation value to the team.

Tactical advice:

• Dissect the business equation into a mind map of inputs and outputs to master the domain quickly.
• Write a clear document defining the team's highest priorities to ensure organization-wide alignment.
• Pin current and future projects to your domain map to identify gaps and strategic opportunities.

Source: How to make an impact in your first 90 days (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-make-an-impact-in-your-first-90-days)

---

"Use mirroring in your interview process. How? Use their language when describing your experiences."

Insight: Subconsciously reinforcing your fit for a role is achieved by adopting the employer’s specific terminology and concepts.

Tactical advice:

• Highlight keywords and concepts within the job description in a mapping table.
• Create a mapping table between job requirements and your past experiences.
• Verbally repeat the employer's specific terminology during the interview.

Source: How to pass any first-round interview (even in a terrible talent market) (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-pass-any-first-round-interview-even-in-a-terrible-talent-market)

---

"To avoid burnout and get better results, I instead coach candidates to pick three to five recent major projects in their careers, and then remember every single detail they can recall about those projects"

Insight: Deeply indexing a small number of complex, recent projects prevents mental "blackouts" and ensures high-resolution answers.

Tactical advice:

• Select projects that are large in scope and involve complex stakeholder management.
• Document every possible detail of key projects to ensure high-resolution recall.
• Prioritize projects from the last two to four years to ensure memory stability.

Source: How to pass any first-round interview (even in a terrible talent market) (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-pass-any-first-round-interview-even-in-a-terrible-talent-market)

---

Insight: AI acts as a real-time mentor that can surface new brainstorming techniques and analyze how industry leaders applied product frameworks.

Tactical advice:

• Generate lists of brainstorming techniques tailored specifically for product managers and their teams.
• Prompt the AI to explain how successful companies like Spotify applied frameworks like Jobs to Be Done.
• Study the historical evolution of onboarding experiences at companies like Slack to identify repeatable success patterns.

Source: How to use Perplexity in your PM work (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-use-perplexity-in-your-pm-work)

---

Insight: AI tools serve as an effective translation layer for product managers to quickly grasp complex engineering concepts and improve technical communication.

Tactical advice:

• Ask for simple explanations of core technical metrics like DAU/MAU and how they are calculated.
• Use AI to clarify the functional differences between similar technical standards like GraphQL and REST.
• Query foundational overviews of complex infrastructure technologies like Kubernetes to better support your engineering team.

Source: How to use Perplexity in your PM work (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-use-perplexity-in-your-pm-work)

---

Insight: Use AI as a 'red team' to stress-test your product proposals and identify logical vulnerabilities before presenting to stakeholders.

Tactical advice:

• Ask ChatGPT to generate the toughest questions a stakeholder might ask about your plan.
• Prompt the AI to identify hidden assumptions in your logic.
• Request a list of edge cases and potential counterarguments to your proposal.

Source: How to use ChatGPT in your PM work (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-use-chatgpt-in-your-pm-work)

---

Insight: Product managers can bridge technical gaps by using AI to write data queries and explain complex engineering concepts.

Tactical advice:

• Prompt ChatGPT to write or debug SQL queries for your data analysis.
• Ask for simple explanations of broad technical concepts to better understand constraints.
• Use the AI to generate basic code snippets for automation or prototyping.

Source: How to use ChatGPT in your PM work (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-use-chatgpt-in-your-pm-work)

---

"Also, a pro tip: You can ask ChatGPT for advice on how to best phrase your prompt. It’s very meta and very cool."

Insight: The most effective way to master prompt engineering is to treat the AI as a coach for its own instructions.

Tactical advice:

• Ask ChatGPT to rewrite your draft prompt to achieve more specific results.
• Iterate by asking the AI what additional context it needs to provide a better answer.
• Use the AI to discover the best structure and tone for your queries.

Source: How to use ChatGPT in your PM work (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-use-chatgpt-in-your-pm-work)

---

"My main thing I tell people is ‘Slow down.’ I think what I’ve found has been happening is, we’re so convinced that speed is the way you’re going to find the right answer that I just don’t think we slow down to develop meaningful mental models of the things we’re doing. By ‘mental model,’ I just mean if you’re running a marketplace, what is your model of what people care about? What makes people stay versus leave?"

Insight: Investing time to build structural mental models of your product mechanics is more effective for long-term success than prioritizing raw execution speed.

Tactical advice:

• Resist the urge to rush into execution and instead prioritize developing a clear mental model of how your system works.
• Explicitly define what drives your core metrics—such as why users stay or leave—before drafting your roadmap.
• Treat 'slowing down' as a virtue that enables deeper thinking and more accurate structural planning.

Source: Inspiration for the year ahead (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/inspiration-for-the-year-ahead)

---

"Roll up your sleeves, be a team player. I had to wear many hats – QA, user research, API documentation, marketing, BD – to move the team fwd. While in other companies, you have someone in each role, you have to do it all at early stage."

Insight: Expect the first PM role to be a high-ambiguity generalist position that requires performing tasks across QA, marketing, and research to keep the team moving.

Tactical advice:

• Prepare to handle cross-functional duties that aren't strictly product management.
• Accept that founders may remain extremely hands-on and hesitant to share ownership initially.
• Focus on reducing ambiguity for the team in critical areas while allowing flexibility in others.

Source: Joining as the first product manager (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/joining-as-the-first-product-manager)

---

"Regularly, and repeatedly, explain what a PM does and how this will be better, not worse, for your new teammates — many of whom will be used to going straight to engineers and getting them to build things. Your role is to start shielding engineers from the product roadmap being controlled by whoever made the most recent engineering ask, and you need to repeatedly make your new coworkers believe this is a good thing."

Insight: When defining the PM role for the first time, you must educate the team on how structured product management protects engineering focus and improves outcomes.

Tactical advice:

• Define your responsibilities clearly and 'pitch back' the role to the CEO after one month.
• Shield the engineering team from ad-hoc roadmap requests from other departments.
• Ensure alignment with founders on how they specifically define the value of product management.

Source: Joining as the first product manager (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/joining-as-the-first-product-manager)

---

"First, take time to observe, listen, learn how & why things are done. You have but a short time to just be there before you need to do things. Make the most of it!"

Insight: A successful PM ramp-up prioritizes listening and learning the existing context to avoid making premature mistakes that could damage founder trust.

Tactical advice:

• Spend the first month interviewing coworkers to understand current processes and empathy gaps.
• Become the company's leading expert on the product's nooks and crannies within 90 days.
• Move slower than your instincts suggest to build the context necessary for bigger changes.

Source: Joining as the first product manager (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/joining-as-the-first-product-manager)

---

Insight: Position professional subscriptions as a high-ROI investment for the company by highlighting the inclusion of multiple expensive software tools.

Tactical advice:

• Request reimbursement from your company’s learning and development budget to cover the cost of the subscription.
• Utilize provided email templates to clearly communicate the career and product benefits to your manager.

Source: Lenny's Product Pass: 20+ free premium products, available exclusively for paid annual subscribers (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/lennys-product-pass-20-free-premium-products-available-exclusively-for-paid-annu)

---

Insight: Strategic career management involves learning how to position yourself and navigate advancement complexities beyond day-to-day execution.

Tactical advice:

• Invest in courses specifically focused on PM career management and positioning.
• Look for mentorship-style courses from leaders who have navigated high-growth environments.
• Utilize year-end L&D budgets to lock down career-focused training before they expire.

Source: My favorite PM courses (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/my-favorite-pm-courses)

---

"What people often miss when following their passions/interests is creating value for others. Without that, it’s just a hobby or a dead-end. You won’t always know what you enjoy or what you’re good at until you try it, but I try to make this my north star."

Insight: A viable career path is found at the intersection of your interests and your ability to solve problems that others value.

Tactical advice:

• Use a Venn diagram to visualize where your interests, skills, and market value intersect.
• Test different roles to discover what you enjoy and where you can be most valuable.
• Focus on becoming valuable to the world so that passion naturally follows your success.

Source: Navigating your early career (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/navigating-your-early-career)

---

Insight: Investing in continuous, self-directed learning creates essential building blocks that enable unexpected career advancements.

Tactical advice:

• Pursue certifications or niche technical training to validate your expertise and open doors.
• Treat even 'lame' entry-level jobs as necessary stepping stones for your next career move.
• Commit to reading and learning outside of your core job requirements to discover new opportunities.

Source: Navigating your early career (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/navigating-your-early-career)

---

Insight: Focusing your job search on companies with proven, high-volume hiring momentum across multiple product roles increases your chances of finding an active opening.

Tactical advice:

• Target established tech giants like Amazon, Salesforce, and Google that consistently hire across PM, Engineering, and Growth functions.
• Look for opportunities in non-traditional tech sectors like finance (JPMorgan, Capital One) and retail (Walmart) that are expanding their digital product teams.
• Prioritize companies showing a recent 'upward inflection' in hiring rather than those in a steady state or decline.

Source: New data on the product job market (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/new-data-on-the-product-job-market)

---

Insight: Calibrate your career expectations by comparing the absolute size of a role's workforce against its monthly hiring velocity to understand the true level of competition.

Tactical advice:

• Focus on Product Management for the highest absolute volume of monthly opportunities in the U.S. market.
• Evaluate the risk of niche roles like User Research, which may have high growth rates but very low absolute hiring numbers (roughly 200 per month).
• Factor in the stability of Product Owner roles, which maintain a large active workforce of 65,000 with steady, non-volatile growth.

Source: New data on the product job market (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/new-data-on-the-product-job-market)

---

"But the starting point for learning this skill is not running to your boss with your arms flailing. It’s befriending your fear enough that you can begin by making any ask at all—usually first to a friend or peer."

Insight: The most effective help-seeking strategy begins with selecting low-stakes confidants, such as peers or friends, before escalating complex requests to leadership.

Tactical advice:

• Start by asking a trusted peer for help to lower the initial barrier of vulnerability.
• Avoid 'arms flailing' requests to managers by processing the request with a peer first.
• Target potential help-givers based on their specific expertise and demonstrated capacity to support you.

Source: On asking for help (even when you really don’t want to) (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/on-asking-for-help-even-when-you-really-dont-want-to)

---

"Start by doing your homework on the product, the company, and its interview process. Use the product. Form an opinion about what could be improved, what you’d prioritize if you were in charge, and where the product might go in the future."

Insight: Thorough research involves more than reading—it requires active engagement with the product to form your own strategic hypotheses and prioritized improvement ideas.

Tactical advice:

• Use the product to identify current weaknesses and future opportunities.
• Investigate the company's mission, recent launches, and primary competitors.
• Identify which skill sets, such as analytical skills or product sense, the specific company prioritizes in its process.

Source: Preparing for a PM interview (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/preparing-for-a-pm-interview)

---

"Nothing will better help you prepare for an interview than actually doing interviews. Instead of reading about interviewing, start practicing with real people. I put this section above “Study” because too many people spend their time studying and not doing."

Insight: Actual mock interviews are superior to passive reading because they force you to articulate your thoughts and synthesize frameworks under pressure.

Tactical advice:

• Find PM partners for live mock sessions through communities like Exponent or PMExercises.
• Watch recorded mock interviews and pause the video to answer the questions yourself before hearing the candidate's response.
• Consider hiring an interview coach for personalized feedback on your delivery and structure.

Source: Preparing for a PM interview (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/preparing-for-a-pm-interview)

---

"Preparing gives you a big leg up, even if you spend just a few hours. A little prep helps you nail common questions, build frameworks for confronting unexpected questions, and gets your mind into the interviewing game (which is very different from doing the job itself)."

Insight: Mastering specific, named frameworks provides a mental scaffolding that ensures your interview answers are structured, comprehensive, and easy for the interviewer to follow.

Tactical advice:

• Master the CIRCLES method for product design and STAR or DIGS for behavioral questions.
• Use AARM for metric-related questions and RICE for prioritization tasks.
• Practice the 'broad then deep' framework to approach general or ambiguous questions effectively.

Source: Preparing for a PM interview (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/preparing-for-a-pm-interview)

---

Insight: Successful interviewing requires reinforcing the foundational PM skills—like strategy, prioritization, and product sense—that the questions are designed to test.

Tactical advice:

• Read foundational books like Cracking the PM Interview and Decode and Conquer.
• Review seminal articles on ruthless prioritization and strategic leadership.
• Study expert resources on developing product sense and moving products forward.

Source: Preparing for a PM interview (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/preparing-for-a-pm-interview)

---

Insight: Cohort-based learning provides a level of career acceleration and structural growth that passive information consumption cannot achieve.

Tactical advice:

• Prioritize live cohort-based programs over books or blogs when seeking a significant career step-function.
• Select specialized tracks like Product Strategy or Technical Strategy to master high-leverage skills specific to your discipline.
• Invest in a yearly membership to access a variety of courses and ongoing workshops for continuous professional development.

Source: Reforge applications open (and taking a sick day) (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/reforge-applications-open-and-taking-a-sick-day)

---

"There’s no better way to know what skills matter most in your role than by looking at how your company evaluates your performance."

Insight: Benchmarking your performance against public industry standards allows you to identify skill gaps that may not be explicitly highlighted by your current employer.

Tactical advice:

• Compare your current responsibilities against the 'top 10' industry skills to see if you are over-indexing on execution while neglecting strategy or vision.
• Audit your communication style against senior-level descriptions, such as the ability to structure storylines across various media for executives.
• Assess whether your current impact is 'quantifiable' and 'dramatically important' compared to senior PM benchmarks at top-tier firms.

Source: Skills PMs need to build (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/skills-pms-need-to-build)

---

"SQL is (and continues to be) the most mentioned hard skill in PM job descriptions. Although it’s declining over time, it’s still far above any other term. The fastest-growing term in PM job descriptions is, unsurprisingly, LLMs."

Insight: Traditional technical proficiency like SQL remains the baseline requirement for PMs, but experience with LLMs is the most critical emerging differentiator.

Tactical advice:

• Master SQL to satisfy the single most frequent technical requirement in PM job descriptions.
• Build hands-on experience with LLM tools and AI integrations to align with the fastest-growing hiring demand.
• Maintain proficiency in Jira and major cloud platforms like AWS or Azure to meet standard tooling expectations.

Source: State of the product job market, part 2 (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/state-of-the-product-job-market-part-2)

---

Insight: Keeping up with AI requires a habit of following curated expert sources and established tech publications, as most tech reporting is becoming AI-centric by default.

Tactical advice:

• Follow AI experts on Twitter.
• Subscribe to established tech newsletters like the MIT Technology Review.
• Distinguish between overhyped consumer features and under-hyped technical advancements like lie detection.

Source: Summary: AI and product management | Marily Nika (Meta, Google) (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/summary-ai-and-product-management--marily-nika-meta-google)

---

"Marily uses ChatGPT with a prompt of “Rewrite this mission statement for me,” and it produces something much better even on the first try, because it helps orient the words such that even kids and all stakeholders can understand and not just other PMs."

Insight: Use ChatGPT as a clarity-enhancing editor to ensure your product vision is understandable to both kids and non-technical stakeholders.

Tactical advice:

• Prompt ChatGPT to rewrite technical mission statements for broader stakeholder groups.
• Use AI to identify non-obvious user personas and their specific pain points.
• Ask AI for specific ideas to improve an existing problem rather than delegating the entire job to it.

Source: Summary: AI and product management | Marily Nika (Meta, Google) (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/summary-ai-and-product-management--marily-nika-meta-google)

---

Insight: Examining the internal processes of top-tier companies provides a library of diverse and successful product-building playbooks.

Tactical advice:

• Study the specific operating principles of companies like Linear and Stripe.
• Compare different product development cultures to identify patterns that fit your own organization.

Source: The Best of Lenny’s Newsletter—2024 Edition (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-best-of-lennys-newsletter-2024-edition)

---

Insight: Career advancement for product managers is accelerated by mastering influence, communication, and managing up rather than just technical execution.

Tactical advice:

• Utilize the Magic Loop framework to create a continuous feedback cycle for career progression.
• Master the Minto Pyramid Principle to improve the clarity and impact of your communication.

Source: The Best of Lenny’s Newsletter—2024 Edition (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-best-of-lennys-newsletter-2024-edition)

---

"Get reps in with an exercise that develops both written and verbal muscles: Write down the rationale for 3 of your favorite products (touching on the key elements above), and grab time with a friend to verbally walk them through these in roughly 2 minutes."

Insight: Verbalizing product rationale to a peer helps refine your strategic thinking and ensures your message is clear and compelling.

Tactical advice:

• Practice writing rationale for various products, covering users, revenue, and differentiators.
• Give yourself exactly two minutes to verbally walk through a strategic rationale with a partner.
• Ask your practice partner to repeat back the key points to ensure your message was clear.

Source: The definitive guide to mastering analytical thinking interviews (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-definitive-guide-to-mastering-analytical-thinking-interviews)

---

"Your first responsibility as a PM (especially as a new PM) is to help your team execute, today. To ship, to hit dates, to make sure everyone knows what they should be working on. But many PMs come into the role expecting to spend most of their time developing strategy, visioning, and thinking big."

Insight: New product managers must earn the right to focus on strategy by first proving they can successfully manage day-to-day execution and delivery.

Tactical advice:

• Ask your teammates directly if they need more help with execution or strategy work.
• Ensure project specs are clear and detailed enough to prevent blockers.
• Limit high-level strategy work to no more than 10% of your time initially.

Source: The most common pitfalls of new product managers (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-most-common-pitfalls-of-new-product-managers)

---

"In the simple form of the Magic Loop, you ask your manager what they need help to accomplish. However, as you understand your group and your company, you should be able to anticipate what needs to be done. In this model you evolve from asking what needs to be done to suggesting things that you can do that you believe will help."

Insight: Advancing to high-level roles requires a shift from reactively asking for orders to proactively identifying organizational gaps and proposing your own solutions.

Tactical advice:

• Observe team workflows to identify recurring bottlenecks and plan specific process improvements.
• Present your ideas as helpful suggestions using language like, 'I noticed X, and I’ve been thinking I could implement Y.'
• Always conclude your suggestions by asking if the idea would be helpful or if there are other priorities to address.

Source: The Magic Loop (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-magic-loop)

---

"Since the interviewer’s job is to efficiently collect specific signals to complete their evaluation, your job as a candidate is to generate clear, easy-to-identify signals."

Insight: Approaching the interview with empathy for the interviewer's rubric and time constraints helps you provide exactly the data they need to pass you.

Tactical advice:

• Use verbal signposts throughout your response to help the interviewer track your thinking against their evaluation rubric.
• Lead with structure to ensure the interviewer doesn't have to work hard to find the 'signal' in your answer.
• Be adaptable to redirection, as interviewers may guide you to specific areas where they still need more evidence.

Source: The definitive guide to mastering product sense interviews (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-definitive-guide-to-mastering-product-sense-interviews)

---

"Choices of programming languages, frameworks, and infrastructure all come with important trade-offs that impact what might make a project something that could take a few hours, or a few weeks. But perhaps more qualitatively, speaking the language of your engineers helps build trust and improves communication."

Insight: Understanding the specific technologies your team uses helps you predict project complexity and builds credibility with engineers.

Tactical advice:

• Inspect company GitHub repositories to identify dominant programming languages.
• Search codebase files for framework-specific syntax like React hooks or Next.js components.
• Ask developers about high-level technical trade-offs to build trust and learn the stack.

Source: The top 5 things PMs should know about engineering (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-top-5-things-pms-should-know-about-engineering)

---

"Knowing the hardest parts of the app to work on can help you plan more effectively and avoid project delays. There might not be much you can do about this as a PM, but it’s useful knowledge to have and can help you allocate resources more effectively."

Insight: Awareness of technical debt and tangled code sections prevents unrealistic scheduling and surprise delays.

Tactical advice:

• Interview fellow PMs about historical projects that suffered from unexpected technical complexity.
• Ask engineers to identify tangled or fragile areas of the codebase that are difficult to test.
• Document sensitive logical sections like onboarding to improve future resource allocation.

Source: The top 5 things PMs should know about engineering (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-top-5-things-pms-should-know-about-engineering)

---

"Writing code is only half the battle—you need to get it to your users by deploying the changes to production. Larger teams and more complex apps can have multi-day deployment processes that may delay projects and add to lead time. Knowing these pressure points can also help you more effectively batch features and understand what’s worth doing when."

Insight: Knowing how and when code is released allows PMs to optimize launch timing and batch small updates efficiently.

Tactical advice:

• Review merged pull requests to see which automated checks and deployment previews are triggered.
• Ask developers how long a standard deployment takes from merge to production.
• Batch minor updates based on whether the release process is manual or automated.

Source: The top 5 things PMs should know about engineering (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-top-5-things-pms-should-know-about-engineering)

---

"Great products have great copy, and you shouldn’t have to rely on your engineers to fix typos. Being able to make small changes yourself, be it copy or fixing an errant border radius (generally frontend stuff), will result in more polished products shipped faster."

Insight: Handling minor copy or design fixes yourself saves engineering resources and ensures product polish without delaying the roadmap.

Tactical advice:

• Ask an engineer to walk you through cloning a repository and opening a basic pull request.
• Limit personal code contributions to low-risk changes like copy edits or minor CSS tweaks.
• Focus on mastering the version control and CI process rather than complex code logic.

Source: The top 5 things PMs should know about engineering (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-top-5-things-pms-should-know-about-engineering)

---

"Outside of your company’s codebase, you need a basic understanding of how apps, data, and infrastructure work. Beyond being able to code, a conceptual understanding of what pieces come together to build applications is table stakes."

Insight: Conceptual knowledge of software architecture is essential for following technical discussions and understanding implementation constraints.

Tactical advice:

• Read engineering blogs from companies like Slack or Netflix to learn practical software usage.
• Search for and research every technical term you don't understand to build conceptual layers.
• Prepare pointed questions for 30-minute chats with external developer friends.

Source: The top 5 things PMs should know about engineering (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-top-5-things-pms-should-know-about-engineering)

---

"A few alternatives to an MBA to accelerate your PM career (sorted by how I’d sequence them): 1. Talk to your manager — work together on a plan to level you up 2. Find a PM mentor (or two) and meet monthly — ask hard questions 3. Work on a variety of products and teams — spend time doing growth, building foundational tools, creating infra, etc."

Insight: You can replicate the career benefits of an MBA by intentionally seeking diverse project exposure, high-level mentorship, and structured leveling plans within your current company.

Tactical advice:

• Collaborate with your manager to create a formal plan for leveling up your skills and title.
• Establish monthly meetings with one or two external PM mentors to ask challenging professional questions.
• Cycle through different types of product work, such as infrastructure or growth, to broaden your foundational knowledge.

Source: This Week #1: Must reads on growth, what PMs should focus on when joining a new team, and the value of an MBA (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/this-week-1-must-reads-on-growth-what-pms-should-focus-on-when-joining-a-new-tea)

---

"How do you know what kind of company you’re working at? A rule of thumb is wherever the majority of your growth comes from, that’s who’s driving the ship."

Insight: To understand your internal leverage and growth potential, identify which functional department is the primary engine of the company's revenue and user acquisition.

Tactical advice:

• Categorize the company as product-led, sales-led, engineering-led, or marketing-led based on the primary source of its growth.
• Research leadership backgrounds and decision-making patterns to confirm which department truly 'drives the ship' before joining.
• Align your career choices with companies where your function is central to the business model to maximize your professional impact.

Source: This Week #11: What should new PMs over-index on, and empowering product in a sales-driven org (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/this-week-11-what-should-new-pms-over-index-on-and-empowering-product-in-a-sales)

---

"The team looks to their PM to keep things running smoothly, productively, and happily. Thus, as you transition into this new role, focus on these softer skills — teamwork, collaboration, execution, buy-in, and communication. Don’t expect that hitting your goals will be the only thing that matters to your career as a PM, particularly as an IC."

Insight: In a large organization, a PM's success is measured as much by their ability to maintain team harmony and organizational alignment as by the products they deliver.

Tactical advice:

• Emphasize teamwork and collaboration over individual goal-hitting to ensure long-term career success.
• Minimize organizational chaos by avoiding frequent or sudden changes in product direction.
• Invest time in securing buy-in from cross-functional stakeholders before moving forward with initiatives.

Source: This Week #14: Transitioning from startup founder to product manager (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/this-week-14-transitioning-from-startup-founder-to-product-manager)

---

"As you progress in your PM career, moving from an individual contributor (IC), to a manager of PMs, to a manager of manager of PMs, your gaze rises from the week-to-week, to months out, to years out. You’re increasingly looking further out into the horizon — laying ground-work, anticipating challenges, and working towards a long-term vision."

Insight: Transitioning to PM leadership requires evolving from short-term execution to high-level strategy, people development, and clear cross-functional communication.

Tactical advice:

• Focus less on day-to-day execution and more on establishing a strong vision and strategy for your team.
• Prioritize high-impact work that significantly changes the trajectory of the business rather than incremental improvements.
• Develop concrete tactics for keeping stakeholders updated and communicating bad news clearly and concisely.

Source: This Week #3: Finding product/market fit, interviewing for a Director of PM role, and structuring discussions with senior leaders (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/this-week-3-finding-productmarket-fit-interviewing-for-a-director-of-pm-role-and)

---

"Stop debating opinions and talk to real users. Show your concepts to at least five users and use that to guide your thinking. Every time I’ve done this I’ve re-remembered how incredibly valuable talking to real users is."

Insight: Transforming vanity reports into actionable tools requires validating with real customers that the data presented actually informs their decisions and triggers specific behaviors.

Tactical advice:

• Identify a specific target action, such as increased usage or purchases, that the report is intended to drive.
• Replace high-level vanity metrics with granular data points that provide clear instructions for the user's next step.
• Iteratively test report iterations with customers to see if the information actually changes their behavior.

Source: This Week #4: Motivating engineers to hit deadlines, PM career ladders, and aligning with execs (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/this-week-4-motivating-engineers-to-hit-deadlines-pm-career-ladders-and-aligning)

---

"A great PM doesn’t try to work things out on their own but instead stays in good, open relationship, and in dialogue, as things constantly emerge. Be an open system. This is realistic. Be realistic."

Insight: Effective leadership in high-complexity environments relies on maintaining a broad perspective and fostering shared responsibility through constant dialogue.

Tactical advice:

• Deliberately shift from 'ground level' work to a 'top of the tower' view to maintain your perspective-taking capacity.
• Implement a daily mindfulness practice to remain calm and effective amidst volatility, uncertainty, and ambiguity.
• Ensure a clear shared purpose is established with your team to maintain alignment when project conditions become complex.

Source: This Week #5: Overcoming impostor syndrome, introducing growth to an org, and how to partner with your data scientist (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/this-week-5-overcoming-impostor-syndrome-introducing-growth-to-an-org-and-how-to)

---

Insight: PM hiring processes focus on a core set of competencies that include communication, strategic thinking, execution, and product sense.

Tactical advice:

• Prepare to demonstrate communication, execution, and strategic thinking during interviews.
• Develop your product sense to meet the expectations of top hiring companies.
• Research the specific skill sets that your target company emphasizes most.

Source: What is product management (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/what-is-product-management)

---

"1. Shape the product: Harness insights from customers, stakeholders, and data to prioritize and build a product that will have optimal impact on the business

1. Ship the product: Ship high-quality product on time and free of surprises
2. Synchronize the people: Align all stakeholders aligned around one vision, strategy, goal, roadmap, and timeline to avoid wasted time and effort"

Insight: The core of product management is a three-pronged responsibility: identifying the right things to build, ensuring they are delivered reliably, and keeping the entire organization in sync.

Tactical advice:

• Prioritize features by synthesizing data with insights from customers and stakeholders to maximize business impact.
• Maintain a predictable shipping cadence to ensure high-quality releases are delivered without surprises.
• Unify all stakeholders around a single vision and roadmap to prevent wasted effort and internal conflict.

Source: When to hire your first product manager (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/when-to-hire-your-first-product-manager)

---

Insight: Before hiring a dedicated PM, founders should distribute product responsibilities among product-minded designers and engineers to maintain momentum.

Tactical advice:

• Distribute 'PM duties' among the early team members until the company reaches roughly 10-15 engineers.
• Hire product-minded engineers who can prioritize customer integrations and sequence work-in-progress.
• Ensure someone is explicitly responsible for 'shaping' insights and 'shipping' high-quality features, even without a formal PM title.

Source: When they hired their first PM (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/when-they-hired-their-first-pm)

---

"Stop reading about AI and use it. Experiment with using ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude in your day-to-day work."

Insight: Active experimentation with AI tools is the only way to move beyond theory and understand how to integrate them into a daily product workflow.

Tactical advice:

• Replace standard search or drafting tasks with ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Claude.
• Use AI to generate initial product design concepts or PRD drafts.
• Experiment with using AI to extract insights from research or analyze data.

Source: Why PMs are best positioned to thrive in an AI world (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/why-pms-are-best-positioned-to-thrive-in-an-ai-world)

---

"Check out some of Andrej Karpathy’s videos explaining how LLMs work. Check out Andrew Ng’s online courses on machine learning, and AI for everyone."

Insight: Building a learning habit around AI trends requires a mix of following hands-on builders, technical experts, and curated industry news.

Tactical advice:

• Subscribe to newsletters like The Rundown or Superhuman AI to stay current.
• Listen to the No Priors podcast to understand the direction of AI investment and technology.
• Study educational content from experts like Andrew Ng to understand machine learning fundamentals.

Source: Why PMs are best positioned to thrive in an AI world (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/why-pms-are-best-positioned-to-thrive-in-an-ai-world)

---

"Your job as a PM is to deliver business impact by marshaling the resources of your team (both human and AI) to identify and solve the most impactful customer problems."

Insight: Modern product management requires redefining the role as an orchestrator of both human talent and AI capabilities to solve customer needs.

Tactical advice:

• Update internal role descriptions to include the direction of AI resources.
• Treat AI tools as a new type of team member that requires management and feedback.
• Prioritize 'glue stuff' like coordination and influence that AI cannot replicate.

Source: Why PMs are best positioned to thrive in an AI world (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/why-pms-are-best-positioned-to-thrive-in-an-ai-world)

---

Insight: Web3 product management deprioritizes company-first north-star metrics in favor of community success, intuition, and public engagement.

Tactical advice:

• Prioritize 'hearts over charts' by ensuring creators, liquidity providers, and developers are successful first.
• Rely on intuition and community feedback rather than A/B testing or extensive user data.
• Conduct all major product discussions and roadmap proposals in public forums like Discord and Snapshot.

Source: A product manager’s guide to web3 (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/a-product-managers-guide-to-web3)

---

Insight: A comprehensive coverage plan protects your personal time while ensuring the business remains operational in your absence.

Tactical advice:

• Assign a directly responsible individual (DRI) for every project and recurring meeting.
• Finalize the document at least one month before your due date to account for early arrivals.
• Set an auto-response on email and Slack containing a direct link to the plan.

Source: How to create an exceptional coverage plan for your parental leave (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-create-an-exceptional-coverage-plan-for-your-parental-leave)

---

Insight:

Source: How to develop product sense (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-develop-product-sense)

---

Insight: Effective product management is built on the foundation of constant, clear, and broad communication across all mediums.

Tactical advice:

• Treat every document, email, and meeting as a core part of your job's communication output.
• Communicate often and broadly to ensure no one on the team is left in the dark.
• Focus on doubling down on your communication strengths while filling in gaps in other skills.

Source: How to get into product management (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-get-into-product-management)

---

Insight: Effective product decisions require a strategic framework that breaks down business problems into solvable chunks.

Tactical advice:

• Break problems into solvable chunks using structured frameworks.
• Guide your team through a clear vision to make problems less of an issue.
• Marshal team resources to drive business value through consistent decision-making.

Source: How to get into product management (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-get-into-product-management)

---

Insight: Developing an "aura of reliability" depends on being more organized, detail-oriented, and prepared than any other member of the team.

Tactical advice:

• Be organized, detail-oriented, and more prepared than anyone else on your team.
• Adopt a proactive mindset by consistently asking how to move the product forward.
• Develop a growth mindset to learn the job quickly in high-pressure environments.

Source: How to get into product management (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-get-into-product-management)

---

Insight: High performance for an individual product manager is defined by a clear hierarchy consisting of team impact, personal contribution, and stakeholder perception.

Tactical advice:

• Ask if your team is delivering tangible business impact.
• Assess whether you are personally driving strategy and vision beyond basic execution.
• Gauge if key stakeholders and teammates view you as a leader they want to work with.

Source: How to know if you're doing a good job as a product manager (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-know-if-youre-doing-a-good-job-as-a-product-manager)

---

Insight: Effective product management is essentially high-level communication across various channels and stakeholders.

Tactical advice:

• Force yourself to review every email at least once before sending to cut unnecessary content.
• Always seek feedback from at least one peer before sharing a document widely.
• State the specific goal and agenda in every meeting invite to ensure productivity.

Source: Startup PM vs. big company PM (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/startup-pm-vs-big-company-pm)

---

Insight: Maintaining an exceptionally high quality bar for all output pushes teams to innovate beyond existing industry standards.

Tactical advice:

• Challenge teams to build solutions that transcend existing online paradigms.
• Use founder-led examples and guidance to model the expected level of excellence.
• Obsess over the quality of every team interaction, from hiring to product design.

Source: What Seven Years at Airbnb Taught Me About Building a Business (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/what-seven-years-at-airbnb-taught-me-about-building-a-business)

---

Insight: In an AI-enhanced landscape, the most durable product skills are those centered on identifying high-value opportunities and securing organizational alignment.

Tactical advice:

• Practice the art of getting buy-in from stakeholders to move ideas forward effectively.
• Learn to prioritize the highest-ROI opportunities from an endless stream of potential ideas.
• Develop deep expertise in the levers of adoption, growth, and retention.

Source: 1,000,000 (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/1000000-taking-a-moment-to-celebrate-and-reflect-and-then-back-to-work)

---

Insight: The product management career path progresses through three distinct milestones: senior individual contributor, manager of PMs, and manager of managers.

Tactical advice:

• Target the transition from entry-level PM to senior PM as your primary focus for career acceleration.
• Anticipate approximately three years to progress from entry-level to a senior role.
• Prepare for management roles like Group PM or Director once you have mastered the senior IC level.

Source: Becoming a senior Product Manager (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/becoming-a-senior-product-manager)

---

Insight: Adopting a 'chef' mindset by reasoning from first principles allows you to unlock innovation by questioning established analogies and industry norms.

Tactical advice:

• Deconstruct complex problems into their most basic truths rather than following existing recipes.
• Experiment with raw 'ingredients' or fundamental components to create original solutions.
• Reject conventional wisdom and analogies to find more effective, unconventional paths.

Source: Essential reading for product builders—part 1 (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/essential-reading-for-product-builders-part-1)

---

Insight: AI-driven simulations transform abstract growth goals into repeatable practice sessions that build confidence for real-world execution.

Tactical advice:

• Use scenario-based AI learning loops to help team members apply theoretical skills to life.
• Identify core competencies like strategic thinking for targeted practice with custom GPTs.
• Implement low-pressure simulations to build confidence before team members present to executives.

Source: How to become a supermanager with AI (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-become-a-supermanager-with-ai)

---

Insight: The concept of an AI second brain is platform-agnostic and can be replicated across Claude, Gemini, or ChatGPT using their respective project and custom instruction features.

Tactical advice:

• Apply identical custom instructions to Claude 'Projects' or Gemini 'Gems' to create consistent AI personalities across platforms.
• Maintain a centralized folder of initiative-related PDFs and CSVs to easily sync context across multiple AI tools.
• Test different models on the same context files to see which AI provides the sharpest pushback or creative alternatives for your role.

Source: How to build your PM second brain with ChatGPT (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-build-your-pm-second-brain-with-chatgpt)

---

Insight: A compelling career story bridges the gap between your past achievements and how the new role specifically accelerates your growth.

Tactical advice:

• Develop one single, decisive reason for wanting the job rather than a list of minor points.
• Avoid mentioning work hygiene factors like compensation, commute, or remote work.
• Refrain from making negative comments about past employers or colleagues.

Source: How to pass any first-round interview (even in a terrible talent market) (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-pass-any-first-round-interview-even-in-a-terrible-talent-market)

---

Insight: Asking prepared, high-signal questions at the end of an interview demonstrates thorough research and professional maturity.

Tactical advice:

• Budget for candidate questions to take up roughly 20% of the total interview time.
• Research the company's core competencies to inform your line of questioning.

Source: How to pass any first-round interview (even in a terrible talent market) (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-pass-any-first-round-interview-even-in-a-terrible-talent-market)

---

Insight: To identify a feature team during the interview process, look for indicators that the organization rewards shipping volume over hitting specific metrics or solving user problems.

Tactical advice:

• Ask the interviewer if PMs are praised for the number of features they ship or for the specific goals they achieve.
• Inquire whether product discovery and problem prioritization are driven by PMs or handed down as top-down directives.
• Determine if teams are expected to iterate on a solution post-launch until the customer problem is realized.

Source: In defense of feature team product managers (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/in-defense-of-feature-team-product-managers)

---

Insight:

Source: Inspiration for the year ahead (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/inspiration-for-the-year-ahead)

---

Insight: Clarity on whether you need information, perspective, or advocacy ensures that your request is actionable and appropriately directed to the right person.

Tactical advice:

• Identify if you are seeking 'task progression' or 'emotional support' before reaching out.
• Assess whether the blockage is due to lack of skills, lack of time, or missing information.
• Determine if you need the recipient to be an advocate for your work or just a provider of information.

Source: On asking for help (even when you really don’t want to) (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/on-asking-for-help-even-when-you-really-dont-want-to)

---

Insight: Pre-crafting narratives for common behavioral scenarios prevents you from stumbling over details and helps you focus on communicating your impact.

Tactical advice:

• Draft specific stories for times you led impactful projects or resolved conflicts with engineers.
• Prepare a detailed explanation of a time you made a mistake and what you learned from it.
• Identify a scenario where you relied on instinct over data and be ready to justify your reasoning.

Source: Preparing for a PM interview (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/preparing-for-a-pm-interview)

---

Insight: Relying on objective data and established principles reduces friction and speeds up decision-making in large organizations.

Tactical advice:

• Study how successful companies like Airbnb and Netflix make decisions through rigorous experimentation.
• Form your own point of view on every decision but stay ready to change it given new information.
• Differentiate between Type-1 (irreversible) and Type-2 (reversible) decisions to apply the right amount of caution.

Source: Startup PM vs. big company PM (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/startup-pm-vs-big-company-pm)

---

Insight: Estimation questions evaluate a candidate's ability to simplify complex problems into logical formulas using well-reasoned assumptions.

Tactical advice:

• Construct a logical formula that breaks a large estimation into smaller, calculable parts.
• Use reasonable assumptions for variables and clearly explain your rationale for each figure.
• Sanity-check your final estimate against real-world logic to ensure it is in the correct ballpark.

Source: The definitive guide to mastering analytical thinking interviews (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-definitive-guide-to-mastering-analytical-thinking-interviews)

---

Insight: One of the most valuable things a PM can do is act as a buffer for the team, protecting 'makers' from distractions so they can maintain flow.

Tactical advice:

• Instruct people outside your team to route questions through you rather than contacting makers directly.
• Filter and handle administrative or ad hoc requests yourself whenever possible.
• Actively push back on external asks that disrupt the team's focus.

Source: The most common pitfalls of new product managers (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-most-common-pitfalls-of-new-product-managers)

---

Insight: Early-career product managers should prioritize a specific subset of core skills before attempting to master all ten common PM attributes.

Tactical advice:

• Assess your current proficiency against common PM career ladders.
• Focus initial growth efforts on communication, execution, and customer insights.
• Ask your manager to define what an 'amazing' performance looks like in your current role.

Source: What is product management (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/what-is-product-management)

---

Insight: The nature of the product management role is determined by the specific skills a company values and the amount of authority granted to the PM function.

Tactical advice:

• Ask prospective employers which specific PM skills they value most highly.
• Determine if a company views the PM as a 'mini-CEO' or a project manager.
• Research how much influence PMs have compared to other functions at a target company.

Source: What is product management (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/what-is-product-management)

---

Logan Kilpatrick

Insight: Moving beyond standard chat interfaces to multimodal and innovative UX paradigms like infinite canvases is the next frontier of AI usability.

Tactical advice:

• Experiment with multimodal AI capabilities including voice, video, and image interaction.
• Design user experiences around new paradigms like the infinite canvas to make complex data more human-readable.
• Look for UX solutions that solve specific user friction points that standard chat interfaces cannot address.

Source: Inside OpenAI | Logan Kilpatrick (head of developer relations) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkMbkWG2ca4) @ 00:18:35

---

Luc Levesque

Insight:

Source: Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xf_ZXIGCQb0) @ 00:38:26

---

Maggie Crowley

"If you ever find yourself saying something like, that's not my job, that's probably a thing you should do. And you know what? It probably isn't your job and it probably is someone else's job and you can spend your life getting frustrated at that or you can just get over and get the work done."

Insight: True career advancement in product management comes from the willingness to simplify complex priorities, follow up on results, and take ownership of the unglamorous tasks required to ship a successful product.

Tactical advice:

• Identify the single most important priority and stick with it long enough to see it finished.
• Proactively report on feature performance and metrics to leadership without being prompted.
• Volunteer for unglamorous but necessary tasks like customer support or sales calls to ensure product outcomes.

Source: Mastering product strategy and growing as a PM | Maggie Crowley (Toast, Drift, Tripadvisor) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LjddcccYIo) @ 00:04:10

---

Manik Gupta

"I think the main thing that I would say here for people who are early in career is just surround yourself with people who are really good at what they do. Learn from them. And by the way, play the long game. Once you find someone like that, stick to them."

Insight: The most significant catalyst for career growth is surrounding yourself with elite talent and maintaining those relationships to build long-term shared trust.

Tactical advice:

• Seek out and work alongside "A plus" talent early in your career.
• Prioritize building shared trust and long-term collaboration with high-performing peers.
• Adopt a philosophy of technology optimism to identify high-impact opportunities.

Source: Manik Gupta (ex-CPO Uber, Google Maps) on how to build consumer apps, why it’s useful to be optimistic about technology, creating inflections in your PM career, the changing CPO role, and more @ 00:03:39

---

Marc Andreessen

"Every coder now believes they can also be a product manager and a designer because they have AI. Every product manager thinks they can be a coder and a designer, and then every designer knows they can be a product manager and a coder. They're actually all kind of correct."

Insight: AI enables professionals to cross-pollinate skills across engineering, design, and product, creating an exponential additive effect on their individual value.

Tactical advice:

• Spend every spare hour talking to AI and asking it to train you up in new domains.
• Leverage AI to become proficient in coding, design, and product management simultaneously.
• Focus on the additive effect of mastering three disciplines to become a super-relevant specialist.

Source: Marc Andreessen: The real AI boom hasn’t even started yet (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87Pm0SGTtN8) @ 00:36:01

---

Marty Cagan

Insight: For a product manager to be effective, they must be freed from administrative herding to focus on the deep work of ensuring value and viability.

Tactical advice:

• Eliminate the PM’s responsibility for purely administrative tasks like herding cats or simple documentation.
• Protect the PM's schedule so they can focus on the 'homework' required to validate customer value and business viability.
• Ensure the PM has direct access to customers and business constraints without being blocked by intermediaries.

Source: The nature of product | Marty Cagan, Silicon Valley Product Group (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-KVGHoQ_98) @ 48:35

---

Matt LeMay

"If you were the CEO of this company, would you fully fund your own team? Frankly, most of the people I ask that question to don't know the answer right away."

Insight: The most effective way to ensure a product team's longevity is to view it through the eyes of a CEO and justify its cost through measurable impact.

Tactical advice:

• Ask yourself if you would fully fund your own team if the money were coming out of your pocket as CEO.
• Articulate the top-line business impact of your work to demonstrate that your team is a profitable investment.
• Identify and eliminate 'work around the work' that provides support but doesn't drive measurable growth.

Source: The one question that saves product careers | Matt LeMay (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ts9ZvlkeWGs) @ 00:12:17

---

Mayur Kamat

"The main learnings from that is, don't take on projects that are going to be six months, a year, because you just generally don't have control over the macro."

Insight: Early in your career, prioritize roles that offer rapid feedback loops and avoid long-term projects where external macro factors can easily derail your efforts.

Tactical advice:

• Avoid taking on massive projects with timelines exceeding six months before establishing a baseline of data.
• Prioritize starting your career on the West Coast of the U.S. to maximize networking and learning.
• Ignore compensation early in your career in favor of finding the highest-growth environments.

Source: Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVyfuSBwbNA) @ 00:19:12

---

"The challenge with being a product manager is, everybody thinks they can do the job. Anybody who uses the product thinks they have ideas, so at some point in time, you're like, "What is my discipline? What is my science?" The moment you build experimentation, you've now made it scientific."

Insight: Defining your unique value as a product manager requires shifting from subjective intuition to a scientific, experiment-driven methodology.

Tactical advice:

• Transition your workflow from opinion-based decision-making to structured experimentation.
• Identify the unique 'science' of your discipline to differentiate your contribution from general feedback.
• Focus your energy on how quickly you can move from a hypothesis to actionable data.

Source: Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVyfuSBwbNA) @ 00:36:00

---

Melissa Perri

"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."

Insight: Advancing from a product owner to a product manager role requires shifting your focus from backlog execution to strategic discovery and customer validation.

Tactical advice:

• Move beyond managing the 'how' and 'when' of development to investigating the 'why' of customer needs.
• Incorporate hypothesis testing and customer validation before committing any initiatives to engineering work.
• Engage in end-to-end product management, including market research and strategy, rather than just tactical sprint support.

Source: How to create a winning product strategy | Melissa Perri @ 00:56:55

---

"I started to learn that there was this product owner role in Scrum where I was talking more about how we traditionally talk about product management, understand your customer, go out test things, make sure there's a hypothesis, don't just blindly build what you want to build."

Insight: To create an outcome-focused product resume, you must demonstrate your ability to drive value through research and validation rather than just managing a delivery queue.

Tactical advice:

• Frame past achievements around hypotheses tested and customer insights gained rather than features shipped.
• Explicitly state the customer value or business outcome achieved by specific product initiatives.
• Highlight experience with the discovery phase of development to demonstrate your ability to identify the right things to build.

Source: How to create a winning product strategy | Melissa Perri @ 01:02:56

---

Melissa Tan

Insight:

Source: Building high-performing teams | Melissa Tan (Webflow, Dropbox, Canva) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DoEfXj1b_ko) @ 00:22:58

---

Mihika Kapoor

Insight: Navigating ambiguity requires framing every setback or pivot as a necessary learning step toward the ultimate vision.

Tactical advice:

• Acknowledge that the product development cycle is inherently messy and chaotic to manage team expectations.
• Use a clear, compelling vision as a north star to maintain morale during project lows.
• Foster an entrepreneurial mindset by giving the team the space to see ahead into the horizon.

Source: Vision, conviction, and hype: How to build 0 to 1 inside a company | Mihika Kapoor (Product at Figma) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDq6_CPaRjM) @ 01:07:40

---

Mike Krieger

Insight: Effectively prompting AI requires moving beyond simple requests to mastering the structure of cross-stack changes and question composition.

Tactical advice:

• Practice composing detailed questions that account for both backend and frontend implications.
• Nurture a process of discovery and inquiry rather than just delegating cognition to the model.
• Treat prompt engineering as a core skill for structuring functional demos early in the development process.

Source: Anthropic’s CPO on what comes next | Mike Krieger (co-founder of Instagram) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKrBGOFs0GY) @ 00:27:30

---

Molly Graham

"And for me, learning this muscle of both learning to give away what you've gotten good at and move on to the next shiny pile of Legos. And learning that the emotions associated with that are inevitable. I've been doing this for 18, 20 years, I still get attacked by these emotions all the time, but that doesn't mean that you shouldn't give them away and move on to the next thing."

Insight: Scaling your impact in a high-growth company requires the continuous, emotionally difficult process of delegating roles you have mastered to make room for new, more complex challenges.

Tactical advice:

• Identify tasks you have become 'good' at as the primary candidates for delegation.
• Expect and accept feelings of territorialism or fear as a normal part of the scaling process.
• Focus on the transition from building individual components to architecting entire systems or organizations.

Source: The high-growth handbook: Molly Graham’s frameworks for leading through chaos, change, and scale (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twzLDx9iers) @ 00:11:47

---

Nan Yu

Insight: Approach the hiring process as a product discovery exercise to identify and solve the hiring manager's most urgent problems.

Tactical advice:

• Treat job interviews like discovery calls to uncover the hiring manager's 'burning problems.'
• Position your skills and previous successes as direct solutions to the organization's current struggles.
• Focus on identifying the specific operational gaps in the team that you are uniquely qualified to fill.

Source: Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTr21kgCFF4) @ 01:04:31

---

Nikhyl Singhal

"Well, in some ways the reason I called my newsletter, my podcast The Skip is because I always think about not the next job, but the one after it. Maybe think about not your boss's job but your boss's boss's job and what do I need to think about to get there."

Insight: Planning your career like a product roadmap ensures that your current choices are in service of your long-term goals rather than just reactions to immediate frustrations.

Tactical advice:

• Work backwards from your end-state career goal to determine your next move.
• Break your career trajectory into distinct versions (v1, v2, v3) to prioritize long-term growth.
• Assess current roles based on whether they enable the job after your next one.

Source: Building a long and meaningful career | Nikhyl Singhal (Meta, Google) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_WQuUIYnJg) @ 00:07:07

---

Insight: A narrow focus on specific company types can leave senior leaders with expertise gaps when attempting to scale a new organization.

Tactical advice:

• Identify the expertise required for the next phase of your company's organization and seek mentors who have seen it.
• Supplement startup experience with lessons from 'MAGMA' companies to understand execution at scale.
• Avoid relying solely on a single company's culture to define your leadership style.

Source: Building a long and meaningful career | Nikhyl Singhal (Meta, Google) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_WQuUIYnJg) @ 00:53:27

---

Insight: Building a diverse set of experiences across different company stages makes you a more versatile and satisfied builder.

Tactical advice:

• Seek out experiences at various stages, from pre-product-market fit to high-scale environments.
• Prioritize learning how to solve both 'inside the building' and 'outside the building' problems.
• Focus on the diversity of your experiences rather than just collecting prestigious corporate logos.

Source: Building a long and meaningful career | Nikhyl Singhal (Meta, Google) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_WQuUIYnJg) @ 00:22:56

---

Insight: Executive success often requires hands-on experience with scale and organizational growth that is unique to large, established tech companies.

Tactical advice:

• Gain experience at large-scale companies to build the endorsement needed for high-level executive roles.
• Learn the specific challenges of managing millions of customers to prepare for C-level positions at growth companies.
• Study how different organizational phases operate to bring that expertise to future leadership roles.

Source: Building a long and meaningful career | Nikhyl Singhal (Meta, Google) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_WQuUIYnJg) @ 00:35:12

---

Noah Weiss

"I would say to folks in general, if you're joining company and the CEO does the role that is your functional area of expertise, it's probably the area where you'll learn the most because they're hopefully world class at it. But also, one will you'll be the most frustrated at times because you're going to feel like you have less agency. You should just know that going into it."

Insight: Accelerating your professional skills often requires trading some individual agency for the opportunity to work under a CEO who is a master of your discipline.

Tactical advice:

• Choose roles where the founder shares your functional background to receive world-class mentorship and expertise.
• Expect and prepare for the frustration of reduced autonomy when working for a strongly opinionated founder.
• Focus on internalizing the intuition and language of expert leaders to improve your own product decision-making.

Source: The 10 traits of great PMs, how AI will impact your product, and Slack’s product development process | Noah Weiss (Slack, Foursquare, Google) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrRlVOWe5GE) @ 01:02:34

---

Paige Costello

Insight:

Source: How to ask the right questions, project confidence, and win over skeptics | Paige Costello (Asana, Intercom, Intuit) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7S6nSmOsUI) @ 00:29:34

---

Patrick Campbell

Insight: Complex organizational problems are best solved by breaking them down into their most fundamental, actionable components.

Tactical advice:

• Deconstruct vague company goals into small, measurable tasks.
• Challenge existing assumptions by asking 'why' at every level of a problem.
• Focus resources on the single most impactful variable within a complex issue.

Source: 10 lessons on bootstrapping a $200m business | Patrick Campbell (ProfitWell) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjLSCrSg5QY) @ 00:35:01

---

Robby Stein

Insight: Professional mastery in product leadership is built on an intense, foundational curiosity about why users behave the way they do and how systems work.

Tactical advice:

• Cultivate a mindset that prioritizes asking 'why' until you reach the bedrock of a problem or user behavior.
• View every user interaction as an opportunity to discover new areas of curiosity that can be fulfilled by the product.
• Encourage team curiosity to ensure you are constantly exploring the vastness of unmet user needs.

Source: 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) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOnsqqVbIeY) @ 01:10:49

---

Ryan Singer

Insight: Transition the PM role from managing ceremonies and tickets to deeply shaping the business concept and problem definition before the build starts.

Tactical advice:

• Focus PM time on "cracking the nut" of the idea alongside designers and engineers.
• Prioritize sharpening the project's concept over writing exhaustive PRDs.
• Use shaping sessions to negotiate how an idea fits within the company's time appetite.

Source: A better way to plan, build, and ship products | Ryan Singer (creator of “Shape Up,” early employee at 37signals) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GF-yUANql0c) @ 01:26:10

---

Sachin Monga

Insight: Startups can avoid the frequent reorgs of big companies by focusing on timeless customer missions rather than shifting product surfaces.

Tactical advice:

• Apply the cross-functional 'full stack' team model from big tech to ensure teams have all necessary resources to execute.
• Use data and evidence-based perspectives from large-scale platforms to validate startup vision and intuition.
• Resist the big-company habit of re-organizing teams around new product surfaces or trends.

Source: Building Substack | Sachin Monga (Substack, Facebook) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKP2HrMc23s) @ 00:16:37

---

Sam Lessin

"You want to repeat names back is a really, really valuable thing to think about when you're meeting someone and say, 'Hey, Lenny, it's great to meet you.' Why? It shows that you're actually trying to remember the person's name."

Insight: Effective first impressions are built on active listening techniques that demonstrate you value the individual you are meeting.

Tactical advice:

• Repeat a person's name back to them immediately after being introduced to aid memory and signal focus.
• Maintain consistent eye contact to show respect and presence in the conversation.
• Use a firm handshake that conveys confidence without being aggressive.

Source: How to show up in any room with a low heart rate: Silicon Valley’s missing etiquette playbook | Sam Lessin (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtKJ3A6DWTs) @ 00:10:10

---

Insight: Business dining etiquette requires demonstrating situational awareness by avoiding choices that impose excessive costs on your host.

Tactical advice:

• Avoid ordering the most expensive item on the menu during a business meal.
• Focus on relationship building and conversation rather than the food or beverage selection.
• Mirror the level of formality and the pace of the person hosting the meal.

Source: How to show up in any room with a low heart rate: Silicon Valley’s missing etiquette playbook | Sam Lessin (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtKJ3A6DWTs) @ 00:33:49

---

Insight: Humor is a powerful tool for building trust and cutting through social noise, provided it is grounded in useful information or a deeper truth.

Tactical advice:

• Use humor strategically to cut through the noise of a crowded professional environment.
• Ensure your humor is grounded in a 'deeper truth' to ensure it builds trust rather than just being a distraction.
• Aim for the intersection of 'hilarious and useful' in your professional storytelling.

Source: How to show up in any room with a low heart rate: Silicon Valley’s missing etiquette playbook | Sam Lessin (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtKJ3A6DWTs) @ 00:43:04

---

Insight: Basic personal hygiene and understanding social rules are the fundamental prerequisites for professional presence, regardless of how casual your attire is.

Tactical advice:

• Prioritize high-quality personal hygiene to ensure you are approachable in professional settings.
• Learn the underlying rules of etiquette even if you choose to dress casually in 'Silicon Valley style.'
• Focus on signaling effort and respect through your presentation rather than brand names.

Source: How to show up in any room with a low heart rate: Silicon Valley’s missing etiquette playbook | Sam Lessin (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtKJ3A6DWTs) @ 00:28:59

---

Insight: Professional scheduling requires grace and flexibility, acknowledging that back-to-back calendars often lead to unavoidable delays.

Tactical advice:

• Avoid becoming indignant if a contact is a few minutes late to a meeting.
• Apologize briefly and move directly into the agenda if you are the one running late.
• Keep meeting dynamics productive by not harping on minor scheduling mishaps.

Source: How to show up in any room with a low heart rate: Silicon Valley’s missing etiquette playbook | Sam Lessin (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtKJ3A6DWTs) @ 00:49:28

---

Insight: Exiting conversations gracefully involves maintaining a low heart rate and ensuring the relationship remains more important than the transaction.

Tactical advice:

• Avoid making a production of your departure from professional gatherings.
• Ensure your final impression mirrors the same calm and abundance you projected upon arrival.
• Follow up on connections made without making the follow-up feel purely transactional.

Source: How to show up in any room with a low heart rate: Silicon Valley’s missing etiquette playbook | Sam Lessin (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtKJ3A6DWTs) @ 01:06:05

---

Sam Schillace

Insight:

Source: How to be more innovative | Sam Schillace (Microsoft deputy CTO, creator of Google Docs) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOWDoDpQ7Xg) @ 01:09:28

---

Sanchan Saxena

Insight: Working with visionary founders teaches the value of extreme persistence and the importance of starting with an unconstrained vision.

Tactical advice:

• Study founders who refuse to take 'no' for an answer to understand how to drive ambitious scaling.
• Observe how leaders maintain a world-class culture while scaling an organization from dozens to thousands of employees.
• Learn to navigate founder-led crises by observing their direct involvement in core product strategy.

Source: Sanchan Saxena (VP of Product at Coinbase) on the inside story of how Airbnb made it through Covid; what he’s learned from Brian Chesky, Brian Armstrong, and Kevin Systrom; much more @ 00:12:09

---

Scott Wu

Insight: Programming remains a critical skill because it teaches the fundamental ability to give precise, structured instructions to computers, which is even more valuable as AI capabilities grow.

Tactical advice:

• Practice breaking down complex problems into small, executable steps that a computer or AI can understand.
• Prioritize learning computer science fundamentals and logic over specific programming language syntax.

Source: How Devin replaces your junior engineers with infinite AI interns that never sleep | Scott Wu (Cognition CEO) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7m_xKFqSxTo) @ 00:25:29

---

Seth Godin

Insight: Strategic thinkers must identify the invisible cultural and structural systems that protect the status quo to find points of leverage for change.

Tactical advice:

• Name the invisible systems and cultural norms that constrain your product's growth.
• Identify the fears and incentives that keep the current system in place.
• Focus your strategy on the specific points where a system is most susceptible to change.

Source: Seth Godin's best tactics for building remarkable products, strategies, brands and more (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyWTDmDjNy4) @ 00:33:22

---

Insight: Product managers fail when they focus on pleasing their superiors rather than building empathy for the user and managing the hard constraints of the business.

Tactical advice:

• Prioritize delighting the end user over seeking approval from internal management.
• Treat time and money as absolute constraints rather than flexible suggestions.
• Design products with inherent network effects that encourage users to spread the idea.

Source: Seth Godin's best tactics for building remarkable products, strategies, brands and more (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyWTDmDjNy4) @ 00:14:26

---

Shaun Clowes

"And Steve Blanken, people used to talk about you should be spending 80% of your time thinking about things going on outside the building. You might not be outside the building, but you should spend 80% of your time thinking outside the building. And I would say that very small number of PMs do that. They get dragged into internal politics, they get dragged into scrum management or scrum execution or product delivery, like elements of the delivery thing and you just can't win that way."

Insight: Great product managers achieve disproportionate impact by prioritizing external market insights over internal delivery processes.

Tactical advice:

• Spend 80% of your time thinking about market and competitor dynamics outside your company.
• Frame every product document from the perspective of the customer or market.
• Support strategic statements with specific anecdotes and data points rather than general assertions.

Source: Why great AI products are all about the data | Shaun Clowes (CPO Confluent, ex-Salesforce, Atlassian) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVS1gTAQYSU) @ 00:05:31

---

Shreyas Doshi

Insight: High agency is the ability to take on critical, unfamiliar challenges and find creative ways to succeed despite a lack of formal experience.

Tactical advice:

• Accept high-stakes responsibilities even when they fall outside your current domain expertise.
• Focus on creative execution and ownership of the final outcome regardless of existing roadblocks.
• Cultivate resilience by maintaining progress and finding workarounds when initial strategies fail.

Source: 4 questions Shreyas Doshi wishes he’d asked himself sooner | Former PM leader at Stripe, Twitter, Google (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atS060bNpE0) @ 01:11:55

---

Shreyas Doshi Live

Insight: Career frustration for product leaders often stems from a mismatch between their natural superpowers and the operational level at which they spend their time.

Tactical advice:

• Identify whether your natural strengths lie in execution, strategy, or organizational optics.
• Audit your daily schedule to ensure you aren't spending the majority of your time at a level that causes chronic friction.
• Adjust your role or delegation patterns to better align your responsibilities with your product superpowers.

Source: Shreyas Doshi Live @ 00:38:18

---

Shweta Shriva

"Are you proactively trying to challenge your own assumptions is extremely important, right? As a big enough product manager as well as a seasoned product leader, if you're not doing enough of that, then I think you might not be listening."

Insight: Effective product management requires the empathy to question your own biases and the humility to recognize that not listening to dissenting signals leads to poor decision-making.

Tactical advice:

• Practice challenging your own internal logic before making key product decisions to ensure you are truly listening to the data.
• Approach complex user behavior with a beginner's mindset to avoid missing subtle cues and social norms.
• Foster a team culture where challenging the leader's assumptions is encouraged as a core part of the product process.

Source: Product lessons from Waymo | Shweta Shrivastava (Waymo, Amazon, Cisco) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtNmAjNF3Tc) @ 00:29:33

---

"The MVP bar itself for safety is extremely high for us. So, the core product management philosophy also, getting an MVP out there and then iterating with the real world deployment. It applies, but it's just a different bar on that MVP."

Insight: When transitioning to safety-critical hardware, the definition of a Minimum Viable Product must shift from 'speed-to-market' to an uncompromising standard of safety and technical validation.

Tactical advice:

• Set a significantly higher bar for initial viability to ensure safety is never compromised for the sake of iterative deployment.
• Develop deep technical expertise to handle the complexity and 'technically deep' requirements of systems that bridge software and hardware.
• Cultivate the tenacity to play the 'long game,' optimizing for foundational improvements over superficial short-term wins.

Source: Product lessons from Waymo | Shweta Shrivastava (Waymo, Amazon, Cisco) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtNmAjNF3Tc) @ 00:08:29

---

Sri Batchu

Insight:

Source: Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcYCU5UAZOk) @ 01:06:35

---

Sriram and Aarthi

"I hate Jobs-to-be-Done, I think it is a terrible framework, I think no successful company has ever been built on top of JTBD and if you pick JTBD, you're probably doomed and I'll give you an example."

Insight: Frameworks like JTBD can fail in complex social systems because they focus on individual tasks rather than the essential trade-offs required to balance the needs of multiple users within a network.

Tactical advice:

• Prioritize the health of the overall system over the 'job' of any single user in a social product.
• Be willing to intentionally degrade one user's experience if it provides a critical benefit to another part of the network's ecosystem.
• Evaluate features using systems thinking to determine how they affect the broader network rather than just individual user convenience.

Source: Hot takes and techno-optimism from tech’s top power couple | Sriram and Aarthi (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsD5ycT_umw) @ 01:09:22

---

Insight:

Source: Hot takes and techno-optimism from tech’s top power couple | Sriram and Aarthi (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsD5ycT_umw) @ 01:17:50

---

Tamar Yehoshua

"People have a tendency ... Especially product managers are very ambitious and they want to get to the next level and they're always eyeing the next job, but you're not going to get the next job unless you do really well at the job that you're in. Knock it out of the park. However simple, however easy it may be to you, do a great job."

Insight: Career acceleration depends on excelling in your current position and developing a deep understanding of human motivations for both building products and leading teams.

Tactical advice:

• Focus on doing a great job in your current role to earn the opportunity for future career advancement.
• Master the core technical skills, product knowledge, and metric understanding that serve as table stakes in tech roles.
• Ask lots of questions to deeply understand the motivations of both the people using your product and those on your team.

Source: Lessons in product leadership and AI strategy from Glean, Google, Amazon, and Slack | Tamar Yehoshua (Product at Glean, ex-Google and Slack) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZoSeOltKqQk) @ 00:02:17

---

Insight: Internal operational chaos is common in hyper-growth startups and often has little correlation with overall business success if product-market fit is strong.

Tactical advice:

• Prioritize product-market fit, distribution, and sales over internal operational perfection in early-stage startups.
• Identify whether a company's chaos is a manageable byproduct of growth or a fundamental failure of leadership alignment.
• Avoid getting frustrated by broken internal systems if the core business metrics are growing rapidly.

Source: Lessons in product leadership and AI strategy from Glean, Google, Amazon, and Slack | Tamar Yehoshua (Product at Glean, ex-Google and Slack) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZoSeOltKqQk) @ 00:11:19

---

"Don't assume you know. Marc Benioff would always say, 'Have a beginner's mind. Go in assuming that you know nothing and listen to your customers, listen to the people.' Because I also see this as you're building a feature and you think it's the best thing."

Insight: Maintain a beginner's mind to avoid the trap of building features based on personal assumptions rather than genuine customer needs.

Tactical advice:

• Approach product development with a beginner's mind, assuming you know nothing about user needs.
• Listen to your customers and people around you to develop perspective on their actual goals.
• Avoid over-prioritizing features you built personally; earn their place through demonstrated value.

Source: Lessons in product leadership and AI strategy from Glean, Google, Amazon, and Slack | Tamar Yehoshua (Product at Glean, ex-Google and Slack) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZoSeOltKqQk) @ 00:26:37

---

Insight: Stay relevant in the age of AI by becoming an active user of the technology in your personal and professional workflows.

Tactical advice:

• Experiment with AI tools to automate repetitive PM tasks like status checks or feedback analysis.
• Use AI to summarize long-form content and competitive research to increase your bandwidth.
• Incorporate LLMs into your daily routine to understand their strengths and limitations first-hand.

Source: Lessons in product leadership and AI strategy from Glean, Google, Amazon, and Slack | Tamar Yehoshua (Product at Glean, ex-Google and Slack) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZoSeOltKqQk) @ 00:50:21

---

Tom Conrad

Insight: High-profile product failures can accelerate a career by providing unique learning opportunities and visibility that more moderate successes cannot offer.

Tactical advice:

• View participation in a notable failure as a source of hard-won expertise.
• Focus on the specific skills and resilience gained during a company's struggle.
• Use the notoriety of a public failure to open doors to ambitious new roles.

Source: Billion dollar failures, and billion dollar success | Tom Conrad (Quibi, Pandora, Pets.com, Snap, Zero) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maK0XD9ARoI) @ 00:14:37

---

Insight: Product-oriented leaders must master the balance between diving into fine details and empowering their teams to own the execution.

Tactical advice:

• Stay close enough to the product details to maintain quality and vision.
• Create clear boundaries to give talented team members the space to innovate.
• Transition from doing the work to facilitating the environment where great work happens.

Source: Billion dollar failures, and billion dollar success | Tom Conrad (Quibi, Pandora, Pets.com, Snap, Zero) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maK0XD9ARoI) @ 01:01:18

---

Insight: Early career growth is accelerated by developing deep mastery in a single discipline before expanding into broader roles.

Tactical advice:

• Go deep into one functional area to build a foundation of expertise.
• Choose environments that allow for focused 'swim-lane' development early on.
• Understand the difference between contributing broadly and mastering a specific craft.

Source: Billion dollar failures, and billion dollar success | Tom Conrad (Quibi, Pandora, Pets.com, Snap, Zero) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maK0XD9ARoI) @ 00:35:56

---

Varun Mohan

Insight: Success for product builders in the AI era requires deep, hands-on experimentation with new tools to understand how core workflows are changing.

Tactical advice:

• Get hands-on with as many emerging AI products as possible to understand their potential impact on your field.
• Focus on building 'agency' as a core skill to drive value when code generation is commoditized.

Source: 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) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Z0RCxDZdrE) @ 00:17:31

---

Vikrama Dhiman

"I created a career growth framework for product managers, which comprises of three things, and I call it three W's. So what you produce, what you bring to the table, and what's your operating model?"

Insight: Rapid career growth in product management requires balancing tangible outputs, personal impact, and an effective operating model with others.

Tactical advice:

• Master your core craft outputs before moving on to high-level strategy.
• Evaluate your progress across all three 'W' axes to identify where your growth might be stalling.
• Continue to hone your craft on outputs even as you transition to owning broader outcomes.

Source: A framework for PM skill development | Vikrama Dhiman (Gojek) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImSvm11GR0Y) @ 00:04:48

---

Insight: Early-career success is defined by flawless execution and being useful through tangible artifacts rather than driving high-level strategy.

Tactical advice:

• Identify the specific areas where your leaders are blocked and volunteer to deliver the first drafts of those tasks.
• Focus on shipping products on time and bug-free to earn the right to influence strategy later.
• Prioritize being useful by doing small things that make an impact, like ranking content sources or drafting product notes.

Source: A framework for PM skill development | Vikrama Dhiman (Gojek) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImSvm11GR0Y) @ 00:07:11

---

"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."

Insight: Career plateaus are often caused by psychological blockers like externalizing blame or clinging to outdated self-narratives.

Tactical advice:

• Audit the 'stories' you tell yourself about your identity to ensure they aren't limiting your potential.
• Focus your energy exclusively on factors within your direct control rather than external organizational hurdles.
• Maintain a flexible mindset regarding change to stay on a growth path.

Source: A framework for PM skill development | Vikrama Dhiman (Gojek) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImSvm11GR0Y) @ 00:26:55

---

"It's a very, very important thing for you to know that you are one part of the cog wheel, you're not the entire wheel yourself. And a lot of the folklore around product managers can make you confused, especially when you're starting off in your career."

Insight: Product management is defined by effective collaboration and unblocking others rather than being a 'mini CEO' who owns the entire process.

Tactical advice:

• Ask your product and design leaders exactly what areas they are currently blocked on and offer to unblock them.
• Volunteer to own first drafts of leadership reviews or legal briefs to make the team's life simpler.
• View yourself as a co-collaborator who pairs with other disciplines to move the product forward.

Source: A framework for PM skill development | Vikrama Dhiman (Gojek) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImSvm11GR0Y) @ 00:46:56

---

Insight: Systematically developing PM skills requires identifying which axes provide the most leverage based on your unique professional background.

Tactical advice:

• Map your current skills against the eight PM axes to identify gaps.
• Focus on developing complementary skills that offer the most leverage for your specific role.
• Prioritize skill development based on your current career stage and organizational needs.

Source: A framework for PM skill development | Vikrama Dhiman (Gojek) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImSvm11GR0Y) @ 00:38:51

---

Insight: Manage professional feedback by categorizing it into specific skill axes rather than viewing it as a general critique of your performance.

Tactical advice:

• Channel feedback into a structured eight-axes framework to remove the emotional sting.
• Pick the single highest-leverage area for improvement to avoid becoming overwhelmed.
• Avoid the mistake of trying to improve in every direction simultaneously.

Source: A framework for PM skill development | Vikrama Dhiman (Gojek) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImSvm11GR0Y) @ 00:37:09

---

Will Larson

Insight:

Source: The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9ftpRhRiJE) @ 01:14:17

---

Yuhki Yamashata

"And I think that's what a good PM can do. All these different ideas, and opinions, and problems, and how do you distill it down? And so I think that's one aspect of storytelling that's really important."

Insight: Mastering product storytelling requires the ability to synthesize disparate opinions and complex data into a singular, cohesive thesis that drives team action.

Tactical advice:

• Synthesize meeting notes into a distilled message that provides a clear path forward.
• Develop frameworks to offer stakeholders a consistent lens for understanding complex problems.
• Aim for 'memification' by crafting insights so powerful that leaders repeat them in other contexts.

Source: Yuhki Yamashata @ 00:12:45

---

Insight: The PM's unique contribution is owning the 'why' behind product decisions, which empowers the rest of the team to make high-quality local choices autonomously.

Tactical advice:

• Define the 'why' with enough clarity that designers and engineers can make decisions without the PM present.
• Facilitate trade-offs across different functions rather than dictating specific technical or design solutions.
• Ensure every member of the team understands the core mission so they can act as autonomous product owners.

Source: Yuhki Yamashata @ 00:19:17

---

Zevi Arnovitz

Insight: Use specialized AI 'projects' to compartmentalize context and prevent the AI from becoming a sycophantic 'people pleaser' during your preparation.

Tactical advice:

• Create a dedicated Claude Project for interview coaching fed with high-quality frameworks and prep materials.
• Explicitly prompt the AI to challenge you and provide honest, critical feedback on your performance.
• Build a simple quiz game within the AI project to drill your weak areas and technical concepts.

Source: The non-technical PM’s guide to building with Cursor | Zevi Arnovitz (Meta) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1em64iUFt3U) @ 00:58:37

---

"The second thing is if you're non-technical like me, code is terrifying. It's the scariest thing in the world to look at, and I look at it as kind of like exposure therapy... you take the time to converse and to learn, which I think is critical."

Insight: Turn every coding task into a technical education by requiring the AI to explain concepts and architectural decisions using the 80/20 rule.

Tactical advice:

• Instruct the AI to treat you as a 'technical PM in the making' who needs mid-level engineering explanations.
• Use a /learning command to force the AI to explain the why behind its code before it executes a task.
• Focus on learning high-level architecture and navigation rather than memorizing syntax.

Source: The non-technical PM’s guide to building with Cursor | Zevi Arnovitz (Meta) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1em64iUFt3U) @ 00:28:18

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"It's the best time to be a junior, contrary to what a lot of people are saying, how there's no more junior roles out there. Yeah, that's true, but also when else in history could you get out of school and just build a startup on your own?"

Insight: Juniors can accelerate their careers by using AI to build full products independently, shifting their focus from proving intelligence to becoming the best learner.

Tactical advice:

• Build your own startup or side project using AI tools to develop the 'builder' mindset early.
• Identify the 'superpowers' of your teammates and use AI to help you learn and adopt those skills as your own.
• Focus on becoming the best person at using AI in your organization to ensure you are the one who replaces others, rather than being replaced.

Source: The non-technical PM’s guide to building with Cursor | Zevi Arnovitz (Meta) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1em64iUFt3U) @ 01:03:26

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