Lenny Rachitsky

An effective PRD centers on a clearly defined problem and specific success metrics to ensure the team remains aligned on the 'why' before debating the 'how'.

"Problem-oriented: They crystallize the problem being solved in a few strong sentences—ideally near the top of the document—to focus the brainpower of every teammate in the same direction."

Choose a template that enforces brevity and focuses on essential structural elements like problem statements and success criteria rather than exhaustive documentation.

"In the end, if you want this document to be used, it needs to be readable. So keep it brief (that’s why I like the term 1-Pager), clean up formatting and comments anytime it starts to get messy, and p..."

Over-specifying features stifles the creative input of designers and engineers and can make the team feel micromanaged.

"There’s a fine line between articulating the important details of a project spec and spending three pages explaining one button. This annoying habit can apply to both the beginning of a project, telli..."

Assuming technical tasks are "quick" undermines the expertise of your engineers and risks burning them out on unrealistic promises.

"Instead of suggesting something will be quick, ask, “What would need to be true for this to be doable in the next x days?” It’s totally OK to suggest something will be quick occasionally, but if you’r..."

AI can automate the bulk of technical writing tasks, allowing PMs to focus their energy on the final refinement and nuance of product specs.

"Describe what you want in human language, get an 80% complete draft, refine it, and then ship. This is already happening with tools like ChatPRD."

Separating generative feedback from decision-making ensures more diverse input and prevents the loudest voices from prematurely narrowing the creative process.

"Design crits are intended to be very generative, and are explicitly not about making decisions. Designers share a file (often on FigJam), and we spend 10 minutes heads-down silently leaving stickies a..."

Use a comprehensive six-page narrative to facilitate deep asynchronous feedback from leadership before the actual review meeting.

"A week before a product review, Snowflake product managers share a six-page document for the topic with meeting attendees that outlines the customer problem, proposed solution, risks, and other key da..."

Keeping initial project documents to a single page forces clarity and ensures the team stays focused on core problems and goals before increasing complexity.

"A reminder of how valuable it is to keep these to one page, at least to start"

Including designers in early product planning avoids the inefficiencies of waterfall handoffs and leverages their ability to catalyze innovation and advocate for the user.

"I know it can be hard to add yet another person to the room, but the benefit outweighs the risk. A good example is during planning. I have known plenty of PMs that were eager to rush ahead with a list..."

Team execution speed is often increased more by removing distractions and blockers than by adding more resources.

"Narrow your team’s focus by taking one thing off their plate (e.g. a goal, a project)."

Fresh leadership can reclaim team productivity by identifying obsolete meetings and replacing them with meaningful shipping rituals.

"Figure out the meetings that are happening that people hate. Get rid of them or change them around to be meaningful. At Linktree, I axed 50% of meetings to create more maker time and consolidated arou..."

Rapid prototyping builds conviction and clarity faster than traditional, documentation-heavy product requirements in fast-moving environments.

"Conviction comes from prototyping, not paperwork. If I had written a PRD for every idea we explored for Figma Slides, I’d still be writing those docs."

Increasing team velocity is a primary driver of success in the early stages of a company, provided it is directed toward high-impact problems.

"Though speed shouldn’t be your number one priority (vs. say impact, or picking the right problems to tackle), it is highly correlated with success. Especially in the early stages of company building."

Maximum productivity requires uninterrupted blocks of time dedicated to a single task.

"“To produce at your peak level you need to work for extended periods with full concentration on a single task free from distraction.” — Cal Newport"

Frequent, brief alignments are necessary to maintain high velocity and quickly resolve emerging blockers.

"The faster you need to go, the more regularly you should be syncing. Keep these meetings short, focused, and decision-oriented."

Direct communication between cross-functional partners eliminates delays caused by waiting for intermediaries or formal meetings.

"Get cross-functional team members talking directly, especially when they’re blocked or confused about something. A quick call/DM can save days of wasted time."

Looping engineers into the discovery phase increases their motivation and ability to propose creative technical solutions.

"The more your team knows about the why and what, and feels the customer’s pain points, the more motivated, pro-active, and creative they’ll be."

Effective product velocity requires a balanced system of metrics that accounts for speed, quality, effectiveness, and impact simultaneously to prevent one dimension from being optimized at the expense of others.

"The four dimensions of Core 4 are designed to hold each other in tension: we don’t want to increase speed at the expense of developer experience, or spend more time on new features while quality takes..."

Deadlines serve as essential coordination anchors that gain legitimacy when they are transparently classified and built on team buy-in.

"Having deadlines is a super useful tool to get sh*t done. However, it’s important to be up-front about this. I like to say “Let’s come up with an arbitrary deadline!” when setting the date, just to be..."

Excellent execution requires a PM to simplify complexity and maintain a rapid delivery cadence while proactively clearing team blockages.

"Execution (aka, getting sh*t done) turned out to be the second most important PM attribute, highlighted by 75% of companies."

When a PM conducts pre-technical research on legacy systems, they can dramatically increase development speed by providing engineers with a ready-to-use functional blueprint.

"What I now do as a Product Manager is a ‘Pre-Technical Conception & Legacy study’, where I: Study the legacy product where the team will have to work on. I study all functional aspects, write document..."

Treating autonomous AI engineers as junior team members provides significant programming leverage and scales productivity through delegation.

"Working with Devin is familiar because it feels like adding a few junior engineers to your team. You toss them tasks, and they’ll get started with enthusiasm . . . It’s programming leverage—it’s produ..."

Solo founders can achieve significant business scale by utilizing autonomous AI as their primary engineering contributor to handle the bulk of development and maintenance.

"Claire Vo told me that Devin is the #2 contributor to her six-figure ChatPRD business (behind only her, for now) and touches 100% of their PRs, by reviewing code, updating documentation, or writing al..."

Start with simple AI automations to handle repetitive prep tasks like researching meeting participants to reclaim focus for high-value product work.

"Of all the flavors and approaches of agents today, the category I refer to as “AI automations” is currently the most practical for helping product managers with monotonous busywork. This includes tool..."

Identify tasks for AI delegation by using the 'junior intern' mental model to find work that requires basic judgment but doesn't need your high-level intuition.

"Ask yourself: What ongoing work requires some judgment and writing abilities—but not your full expertise and intuition? Put another way, if my company assigned me a junior intern, what would I have th..."

A successful AI agent design requires a deep understanding of the manual workflow and a focus on limiting scope to the most tedious sub-tasks.

"Just as when delegating to people, the fanciest AI will perform only as well as the instructions it’s given. Are you clear on how you would accomplish this task manually, with mouse, keyboard, and cof..."

Treat agent prompting like delegating to a human by providing clear instructions and specific templates of your past work to guide the AI's output.

"Just as when delegating to people, the fanciest AI will perform only as well as the instructions it’s given. The best way to gain this clarity is to do the task once or twice."

Select an 'AI automation' platform based on its ability to integrate with your existing tool stack and its focus on practical, browser-based PM tasks.

"Of all the flavors and approaches of agents today, the category I refer to as “AI automations” is currently the most practical for helping product managers with monotonous busywork. This includes tool..."

Treat your AI agent as a product by launching a Minimum Viable Agent with limited scope and iterating based on its real-world output.

"It’s more realistic to approach our agent like a new product, or a new process. As PMs, we know that to make both successful, we need to start small and cut scope."

Mitigate security and deployment risks by initially limiting an AI agent’s output to private direct messages where errors can be reviewed safely.

"Constraining the agent to only DM frees us for worry-free experimentation. Turn it on. (Don’t sweat this decision, since the only action it can take is privately DMing you.)"

Evaluate AI engineering tools using blind performance benchmarks to ensure you are adopting technology that produces the highest quality output for complex tasks.

"Devin ranks #1 in the Builder Arena, ahead of Cursor, Lovable, Replit, and Figma Make—a benchmark based on thousands of people blindly comparing the output of each AI’s product being given the same pr..."

Consolidating your product stack into an all-in-one platform enables seamless workflows between discovery, shipping, and experimentation that are difficult to achieve with disconnected tools.

"Being able to follow an issue from a session recording, to its impact in analytics, to shipping a fix as a feature flag, to testing a variant, to collecting feedback with surveys—that’s the holy grail..."

Successful PLG is impossible without a robust commitment to product analytics and engineering-backed data instrumentation.

"Tools such as Amplitude and Mixpanel are commonly used here, but, as the saying goes, “garbage in, garbage out.” Companies need to dedicate engineering resources to instrument tracking properly. Many..."

A central customer 360 database is required to bridge product usage data with sales and marketing activities for cross-functional intelligence.

"You want to connect various data sources, such as product usage, marketing campaigns (e.g. Marketo, HubSpot), sales activities (e.g. Salesforce), and third-party firmographic data (e.g. ZoomInfo, Clea..."

Small teams should prioritize buying third-party experimentation tools over building homegrown platforms to save on engineering and statistical overhead.

"The most common mistake I see is that companies skip buying and jump right into building. In other words, they bypass the option of using a third-party experimentation tool, often because the engineer..."

Building or customizing an internal tool for project tracking can help institutionalize a company's specific cultural values and review standards.

"Shopify has an internal system called GSD, which is a bit like Jira or a task management app, except it’s not really a task management app. It’s a project stakeholder reviewing tool."

Agentic development environments bridge the gap for non-engineers by translating plain English intent into complex command-line actions and troubleshooting.

"Anytime I run into a problem working in my Mac terminal, AI solves it for me. How did we ever work with computers without something like this? I just tell it what I want to do, and it figures it out."

Modern project management tools should integrate AI agents to streamline administrative overhead like initial ticket drafting and roadmap organization.

"A beautifully designed tool for tracking your team’s tasks, organizing projects, and building your roadmap. It even has deep agent integrations, so you can delegate your tickets to an agent to take a..."

Moving video editing from a timeline-based to a text-based interface allows any professional to produce high-quality launch and training videos without specialized training.

"An AI-powered editor that gives everyone (including product managers!) the power to create and edit professional videos. You edit videos like you edit Google Docs (wild!), and it now includes an agent..."

A robust analytics stack typically combines event tracking, a data warehouse, and transformation layers to provide a full picture of user behavior.

"A typical stack: Segment + GA/Amplitude/Mixpanel + BigQuery/Snowflake + dbt + Fivetran"

Modern product management requires a combination of specialized tools for communication, task tracking, and documentation to keep teams aligned.

"A typical stack: Slack/Teams + Jira/Trello/Productboard/Asana + Notion/GDocs + Google Sheets + Figma"

Figma has established itself as the dominant platform for product design, often supplemented by visual whiteboarding tools.

"Typical stack: Figma/Sketch/Adobe XD + Notion + Whimsical/Miro"

An effective user research stack must address the logistical challenges of recruiting and scheduling alongside the analytical challenge of synthesizing insights.

"Typical stack: Zoom + Calendly + Airtable + Typeform/SurveyMonkey/Qualtrics + Notion + Dovetail/EnjoyHQ + GA/Fullstory/Hotjar + Lookback/UserTesting"

Customer engagement platforms and cloud infrastructure typically represent the largest recurring software costs for growing startups.

"Most common: Intercom, AWS, G-Suite, Slack, Zapier"

Matching the right AI development tool to your specific technical needs—whether it's UI styling, backend persistence, or production integration—is critical for prototyping efficiency.

"Regardless of your choice, cloud development environments all support building more complex applications than chatbots, with the ability to deploy to the cloud and easily share updated iterations over..."

Turning static designs into interactive prototypes is now possible in minutes by uploading screenshots to AI-powered cloud development environments.

"But what’s cooler is that you can use these tools to build functional prototypes from a Figma design, convert a rough hand-drawn sketch to a working app, translate a PRD document into an interactive p..."

AI-powered cloud development environments allow anyone to go from a high-level concept to a working interactive application in minutes without needing to write code.

"If you haven’t been paying close attention over the past six months, you may have missed the rise of tools like Cursor, Replit Agent, v0, Bolt, and other new cutting-edge AI tools that allow you to bu..."

Effective troubleshooting in AI-assisted development often requires moving between generative tools for initial builds and local developer assistants for resolving complex bugs.

"One major drawback of Lovable is the lack of a code editor. To edit code, you have to ask the agent with prompting. This can make it difficult to debug issues directly in Lovable. I often find myself..."

AI vision capabilities enable the transformation of low-fidelity hand-drawn mockups into functional prototypes by automatically applying modern design frameworks.

"But what’s cooler is that you can use these tools to build functional prototypes from a Figma design, convert a rough hand-drawn sketch to a working app, translate a PRD document into an interactive p..."

AI tools enable teams to build customized internal utilities that handle data transformations and back-end logic without diverting core engineering resources.

"I use Replit whenever I need a fully functional back end or I want to use Python code. I’ve used it to build an MP4-to-GIF converter and a Substack image resizer—both tools I use weekly."

By combining visual references with accumulated project context, PMs can use AI to generate working prototypes in minutes rather than days.

"The Project uses those images as a reference, the entire context it has from its lifespan, and it generates a Lovable prompt I can copy straight in. Ten minutes later, we’re looking at a working proto..."

Vibe-coding platforms enable non-technical builders to move from natural language descriptions to fully hosted, production-ready applications with built-in security and authentication.

"A leading vibe-coding platform that takes a plain English description of what you want to create and builds a production-ready app. It includes a native database, user authentication, security scan, a..."

AI-powered document tools can automate the most time-consuming parts of a PM's job by transforming raw transcripts or notes into professional visual assets.

"Describe what you want, upload the raw data, and get back a compelling deck/doc/website. Creating decks and docs is one of the most time-consuming and annoying parts of most builders’ jobs."

Prototyping with actual design components allows for faster feedback cycles and a smoother handoff to engineering compared to static wireframes.

"It’s designed instead to be the best tool in the world at prototyping your ideas using your existing products’ styles, getting feedback from customers, and then helping you build a real product in you..."

Investing in a shared library of branded UI components allows any team member to generate high-quality, consistent prototypes without repetitive manual styling.

"Component libraries are the first big improvement you can bring to your team. They allow you to maintain branding and consistent styling without having to manually clean up each prototype to look like..."

Using a 'baselines and forks' workflow allows teams to preserve a master set of brand-accurate components while enabling rapid, non-destructive experimentation.

"Once you have your component library complete, pause! You’ll want to create a fork of the project and start to use your components in a new project. Your forked project will automatically reuse your c..."

To scale AI prototyping, teams must move beyond individual experimentation and define clear protocols for how and when prototypes are used throughout the development cycle.

"Without handoff guidance or high-quality prototypes, AI prototyping is left to explorations and experiments, which are hard to operationalize and scale."

High-fidelity prototypes eliminate the 'noise' of visual bugs, allowing stakeholders to focus on testing functional hypotheses rather than critiquing aesthetics.

"Spending time to improve your components is worth it. Every prototype made using them has better visual quality, is less distracting to stakeholders, and allows conversations to focus on the specific..."

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) bridges design and development by letting AI agents autonomously pull styling data and CSS directly from Figma into a code editor.

"In this case, we can use the Cursor agent to make calls to Figma’s MCP server to retrieve detailed styling information, and then transform that into components."

You can build a specialized knowledge assistant in hours by training a large language model on your specific content archives.

"Over the course of last week I built an AI-powered chatbot for Lenny that uses his entire newsletter archive to answer any question you have about product, growth, and startups. It’s built with GPT-3..."

AI vibe-coding platforms bridge the gap between initial concepts and functional code, allowing non-technical roles to validate ideas through live, interactive prototypes.

"PMs can turn sketches, screenshots, and ideas into live interactive prototypes. Designers can refine the UX inline. Engineers review the code in their GitHub repos."

Starting your first AI project is as simple as describing your desired outcome in plain language and iteratively refining the generated results.

"As you’re reading through this list and wondering what to do, try opening up one of the AI tools (or a few at a time) and simply describe what you want in plain English, as if you were talking to a re..."

The best inspiration for AI projects comes from identifying hyper-specific problems or manual workflows in your own daily life that generic software doesn't solve.

"Your stories opened up my mind to what’s possible, and even inspired me to vibe code a few new tools for myself, including this sweet YouTube thumbnail preview tool, a tool to help me craft tweets for..."

AI coding enables the era of 'n-of-1' software, allowing families to build custom tools for specific needs like bedtime story generation or specialized health tracking.

"Almost no examples are alike. Everyone is solving their own hyper-specific problem (e.g. group drafting app for your multi-sports fantasy league), or exploring a random idea they (or their kids) sugge..."

Choosing the right AI coding tool depends on whether you need a full development environment like Cursor or a rapid web-deployment platform like Replit or Lovable.

"Cursor, Claude Code, Replit, and Lovable were your favorite vibe-coding tools, followed by v0, Bolt, and ChatGPT. Honorable mentions to Gemini, n8n, Zapier Agent, Warp, and Windsurf."

Optimizing the technical workflow between 'code complete' and 'deployed' can unlock significant gains in shipping speed.

"Talk to your engineers about opportunities to speed up their review, approval, and deployment process."

Investing in unit testing builds a safety net that allows engineers to move faster and refactor code with confidence.

"The more confidence engineers have in their code working, the faster they’ll be able to make changes and ship."

Securing buy-in for technical infrastructure requires translating developer experience improvements into tangible business ROI, such as recovered engineering hours or saved salary costs.

"Instead of presenting these CI and release improvement projects as “tech debt repayment” or “workflow improvements” without clear goals and outcomes, you can use Core 4 to directly link efficiency pro..."

Benchmarking internal engineering metrics against industry peers provides necessary context to determine if current productivity levels are healthy or require intervention.

"While this is an extremely hard metric to evaluate in isolation, it’s very easy to look at your organization’s diffs per engineer against peer companies’ diffs per engineer and make an informed judgme..."

Quantitative metrics identify that a problem exists, but qualitative developer feedback is required to diagnose the specific friction points—like slow CI or flaky tests—that are actually hindering speed.

"From the qualitative results in the survey, many developers reported that release processes were hindering their velocity. Based on this, the company knew they needed to make investments in their cont..."

Anonymous, self-reported surveys are a highly effective tool for establishing a productivity baseline when automated workflow data is messy or unavailable.

"Important: responses must be anonymous to preserve trust, and this survey is designed for people who write code as part of their job. Depending on your company’s size, you may want to collect certain..."

Transitioning from engineering to product management is often the right move if you find yourself naturally gravitating toward coordination and strategy despite a baseline love for programming.

"I switched from engineering to product about ten years into my engineering career, and looking back it was one of the best decisions of my life. Though I loved programming, frankly, I was a mediocre e..."

Career fit for product management is signaled by a shift in motivation from technical architecture to business strategy and a preference for team coordination over heads-down execution.

"You expect to finally run the show — most of your time will be spent aligning engineers like yourself, along with designers, researchers, execs, etc."

Analytical thinking interviews evaluate your thought process and ability to structure a complex product problem rather than just finding a single correct answer.

"Analytical thinking (AT) interviews assess a candidate’s ability to understand a product in the context of its broader company and its market, establish metrics to track success, identify team goals,..."

A side project is ready to become a full-time pursuit when it demonstrates sustained personal enjoyment, consistent audience value, and an inexhaustible backlog of ideas after a rigorous testing period.

"There was a moment nine months in, after publishing something every single week, when I realized that it was still fun for me, people were finding it valuable, and I still had dozens of ideas for thin..."

Successfully transitioning to a growth PM role requires a proactive combination of communicating intent to leadership, mastering growth theory, and demonstrating value through hands-on projects.

"My approach to making this transition was simple—and I would suggest the same approach to you: 1. Ask 2. Learn 3. Do"

Public companies generally offer higher cash stability, while private companies leverage significantly higher equity packages to attract top senior talent.

"If you want to maximize your base salary (i.e. stability), join a public company in a Tier 1 U.S. city. If you want to maximize your upside, get into a senior IC or manager role at a private company i..."

Tech workers are generally optimistic about AI's impact on their specific tasks but remain anxious about how AI will shift long-term industry trajectories.

"Job function sentiment is even rosier, with 58.5% reporting optimistic feelings and only 25.1% pessimism about their specific role. This means that while many tech workers feel good about their immedi..."

Decoupling your personal identity from your job title allows for greater resilience and curiosity when considering new career paths.

"And finally, some of the most important and lasting advice was about creating distance between your work and your identity. This is especially relevant if you’re in your first full-time job, or if you..."

If you have consistently delivered impact and addressed gaps for over two years without recognition, the barrier to growth may be structural, necessitating a move to a new company.

"In many cases, it’s a matter of finding a better manager, or getting out of a rut at your current company. If you’re stuck at the same level for over two years, and nothing I’ve shared above seems to..."

Internal transfers are the most effective path into product management because they allow you to build on existing domain knowledge while bridging skill gaps in a supportive environment.

"If your goal is to break into Product Management, an internal transfer program is by far THE BEST way to do it. I previously wrote about the four most common paths into PM and without question this pa..."

Transitioning to management requires shifting from direct product execution to achieving results indirectly through the leverage of your team.

"In one sense managing PMs is the same job as an IC PM — marshaling the resources of your team to ship product and deliver business impact. In practice, it’s completely different. Instead of working di..."

Complacency is a signal to seek new challenges, as staying in a comfortable role for too long can hinder the most pivotal growth moments of your career.

"If you find yourself feeling too comfortable (and you have the means), make a change. Switch teams, switch roles, switch companies. Life is short."

The quality of your colleagues and the company culture are better predictors of career growth and satisfaction than the specific tasks in a job description.

"When looking for a job, I’d spend just as much time digging into the people as you spend on the actual job details. For sure get to know your future hiring manager and your future team before you take..."

Pivoting toward roles focused on capital efficiency and product-led growth offers the strongest career tailwinds in the current market.

"Growth roles are growing much faster than sales and marketing roles—although those roles show an upward inflection. This might mean an increasing focus on product-led growth, potentially driven by a n..."

Sabbaticals are peak life experiences that provide the necessary space for profound personal transformation and career clarity.

"First, you’re on the right track—I’ve interviewed more than 250 people from all walks of life, and I’ve never spoken to anyone who regretted taking time off."

Effective disconnection requires rigid digital boundaries and physical distance to strip away your professional persona and rediscover your natural self.

"Uninstall those apps, and set up email auto-responses! But while you’re disconnecting digitally, make time and space for connecting in-person; strengthening relationships with loved ones stands out as..."

Any activity that mirrors your professional routine prevents the mental reset necessary for a transformative sabbatical.

"Yes, it’s okay to work, just don’t Work. Doing anything that resembles your current job will make it more difficult to reap the benefits of time off."

Sabbaticals with family require balancing shared exploration with intentional time apart for individual growth.

"It’s obviously much more logistically difficult to do so, and a takeaway from the interviews on those traveling with partners is to ensure that you carve out some time apart to tackle personal goals (..."

The product job market is entering a period of significant recovery, with open roles and capital investment trending upward while layoffs slow down.

"There are over 6,000 open PM roles globally right now—53.6% above the bottom we saw in 2023, and already up 11% since the start of the year. This is the most open PM roles we’ve seen in over two years..."

AI-specific product management is currently the most explosive growth area in tech, with nearly 700 open roles specifically targeting this specialty.

"When you look at just AI PM roles—which includes roles at both AI companies (e.g. OpenAI, Anthropic, Scale) and roles specifically focused on AI products/features at any tech company (e.g. AI/ML PM at..."

While the Bay Area remains the dominant global hub for product roles, new opportunities are concentrating in specific emerging markets like Berlin and Austin.

"For PMs, nearly 20% of all open roles are based in the Bay Area. Since our last analysis, Berlin and Austin entered the top 10 locations with the most open PM roles, and Boston and L.A. fell out of th..."

Remote work for product managers is declining toward a new, lower baseline of roughly 20%, making location-specific searches increasingly necessary.

"The number of roles that allow you to work remotely continues to decline. At remote work’s peak in late 2022, we saw about 35% listed open PM roles as remote-friendly. Today, only 23% have a remote op..."

The product management job market is currently in a phase of stable, gradual recovery following the significant downturn of 2023.

"We are in the middle of a slow recovery that started in Q1 of this year, and the recovery is holding steady. After a peak in early 2022 (with over 10,000 open roles) and a significant slowdown through..."

While hiring for senior and lead product roles is growing fastest, entry and mid-level positions still comprise over a third of the market.

"The data shows that, yes, new Senior and above PM roles do appear to be growing at a faster rate than other levels. That being said, Entry/Mid-level make up over a third of open PM roles and are recov..."

Product management opportunities are increasingly concentrating in physical tech hubs like San Francisco as remote job availability continues to shrink.

"The San Francisco Bay Area is ascendant. In just the past two years, the share of open PM roles in the Bay Area went from 15.4% to over 20%—up 25% year over year! Over a fifth of all open PM roles at..."

Dedicated AI product roles are currently more prevalent within established tech companies than at AI-first startups.

"Of the 456 open AI PM roles mentioned above, 178 are at AI-first companies, and the remaining 278 roles are at tech companies that are not primarily AI-focused but have PM roles dedicated to AI projec..."

The tech labor market is shifting heavily toward specialized engineering and data roles while moving away from administrative and generalist support functions.

"It won’t surprise anyone that machine learning and data engineering roles are the fastest-growing in tech right now, growing 79% and 55% year over year, respectively. Two roles that are shrinking the..."

AI skills are becoming a baseline requirement for all product managers as personalization and recommendation systems become the standard user experience.

"All PMs will be AI PMs because she sees all products needing to have personalized experiences and recommender systems, and even to make technological advancements, you need to have an AI-centric view."

Transitioning from founder to PM requires shifting from a high-chaos, win-at-all-costs mentality to one focused on organizational stability and collaborative execution.

"As a PM, your job is to avoid chaos, to avoid changing course, and particularly at a large company to avoid pissing people off. The team looks to their PM to keep things running smoothly, productively..."

Prioritize joining organizations with a proven history of developing alumni into founders and senior leaders rather than just chasing high-growth "rocket ships."

"When people ask me where they should try to go work, outside of rolling the dice on the next rocket ship, I encourage them to find the company that (1) is best at teaching them the craft of product ma..."

High-prestige big tech companies may offer less external career acceleration than mid-sized companies because their skills can be overly specialized to internal systems.

"One explanation is that PMs at FAANG companies learn how to operate well within that specific company and are less successful elsewhere. Another explanation is that the best PMs at FAANG companies are..."

Targeted mid-sized companies like N26 and Intuit often provide a more reliable path to executive product leadership than larger tech conglomerates.

"N26 is especially strong at launching product leaders, ranking first in both CPO rate and Head of Product rate, and in the top 10 in four other categories."

If you intend to start a company, choose an employer like Palantir or LinkedIn that acts as a "founder mafia" with high rates of entrepreneurial alumni.

"The standout company is Palantir, where almost a quarter of Palantir PMs went on to start their own company. Almost a fifth of Plaid PM alumni went on to start a company, which is also incredible."

The inherent complexity and regulatory challenges of fintech create an environment that rapidly develops the "hard mode" skills required for high-level product leadership.

"One explanation, shared by my buddy Dennis Yang (PM at Chime), is that fintech nurtures strong product leaders because fintech work is on hard mode—lots of risk/fraud vectors, difficult stakeholders (..."

Certain organizational cultures, particularly Palantir and Notion, produce PMs with the specific versatility and ownership required to be the first hire at a startup.

"Palantir is a standout at fostering founders (ranking first by far) and first PMs at other companies."

True career acceleration is best measured by a company's ability to drive both internal promotions and the rapid advancement of its alumni in the external market.

"Intercom dominates. It’s the only company to rank in the top 10 on all four dimensions (1st in promotions internally, 5th in promotions externally, 7th in fastest to promotion, and 9th in fastest rise..."

Aspiring founders should distinguish between companies that produce a high volume of entrepreneurs and those that produce founders capable of raising venture-scale capital.

"The headline is Chime. Wow. Over 20% (one in five) of Chime’s PM alumni go on to not just start a company but also raise a Series A."

Specific companies act as 'leadership factories' by equipping PMs with the specific skill sets required to become CPOs, Heads of Product, or early-stage founding PMs.

"eBay, Intercom, N26, Palantir,and Notion stand out as companies that produce the highest rate of product leaders across the board. Whatever they are doing we should try to learn from."

A company’s lack of high 'promotion' data can sometimes be a sign of prestige, as its alumni may be so highly valued that they move laterally into elite roles at other top-tier rocketships.

"It turns out Stripe’s PMs get hired to be star PMs at rocketship companies. Instead of starting their own companies or climbing the ladder, they go on to become key PMs at top companies like OpenAI, A..."

Career paralysis often stems from irreconcilable fears and needs among different internal parts that must be addressed before an aligned decision can be made.

"Taking on a new project, negotiating your salary, handling a new promotion, delivering constructive feedback—these topics all tend to trigger inner conflict for most of us. IFS can help us turn toward..."

Effective negotiation depends on recognizing that your value as a domain expert is equivalent to that of a manager and using level-specific data to capture that value.

"You shouldn’t have to rise into management in order to increase your compensation. You’re equally or just as valuable not as a manager [but] as a domain expert. And that’s step one, understand that yo..."

Effective compensation benchmarking requires standardizing job levels into a consistent hierarchy because years of experience is a poor predictor of actual market value.

"But in reality, the more important relationship is between level and salary, and years of experience is only a correlated variable to job level. ... Levels are difficult to standardize across differen..."

Even among the highest-paying tech giants, compensation philosophies vary wildly between high-cash models and high-equity models.

"At Tesla, Microsoft, Nvidia, Apple, Meta, Google, and Netflix (the Magnificent 7), the starting base salary for a (non-APM) PM is $136,000, $156,000, $158,000, $158,000, $167,000, $199,000, and $343,0..."

Understanding the 'jump' levels in standard leveling frameworks helps identify when you have the most leverage for a significant compensation increase.

"The biggest salary jump happens going from L4 to L5 and M3 to M4. And then from VP to CPO."

Salary negotiation is a multi-stage process that begins during initial interviews and relies on gathering specific intelligence to build a collaborative case for higher compensation.

"Every recruiter worth their salt will ask about your salary expectations when you first start interviewing. Do not — I repeat, do not — give them a number. What to do instead: Ask for the range they’r..."

Evaluating startup equity requires an investor's mindset, focusing on underlying data like valuation, strike price, and financing rather than just the number of shares.

"Ask the questions an investor would ask because, *news flash*, you are now an investor — but instead of cash, you’re staking your time and earning trajectory on the company’s success. You can meet wit..."

Understanding where an initial offer sits within a company's salary band allows you to strategically address performance feedback or push for a higher level.

"Initial offer comes in low: The team may have felt that you have a lot of “room for growth.” In this case, my advice is to dig deeper and ask the interviewer to share feedback from folks who met you t..."

Many standard negotiation 'best practices' are actually myths that can alienate recruiters; success comes from collaborative problem-solving rather than aggressive posturing or email templates.

"Negotiating via email = MAJOR CRINGE and definitely a worse outcome. I know there are folks selling fill-in-the-blank templates out there. My advice if you want a meaningful/large increase is to have..."

Modern tech workers have shifted toward prioritizing salary over equity as they seek financial stability amid inflation and economic uncertainty.

"When evaluating a job offer, the most common priority for tech and other professionals is clear: salary. A significant 75% of respondents selected salary over equity as their top priority during negot..."

Maximizing base salary is a strategic long-term move because it sets a higher floor for future roles and amplifies the value of percentage-based bonuses.

"While some may feel pressure to prioritize equity for potential long-term gains, salary can also serve as a key driver of financial growth. An engineering manager at a publicly traded company making $..."

Industry-wide sentiment has moved away from the 'missionary' mindset toward a practical demand for predictable, liquid cash compensation.

"With past experiences of equity failing to deliver returns, some have become skeptical of its potential. Salary offers the reliability needed, particularly in an uncertain economic environment, where..."

Capturing specific proof of your impact while you still have access to internal data is critical for successfully navigating future interviews.

"Go open up a new doc and start dumping a list of times you’ve made an impact at your current job. Include metrics, screenshots, timelines, stories—anything that’ll help you tell the story of your succ..."

Preparing for performance review cycles before your leave starts ensures that your team—and your own career trajectory—remains on track.

"Write reviews for your team before you go out on leave (especially for anyone who you want to put up for promotion). Share them with your manager and HR before you go out, and incorporate any feedback..."

Advancing to the next level requires identifying the specific behaviors holding you back and creating a transparent, measurable action plan with your manager.

"No matter your role or level, there’s a skill or behavior that is keeping you from the next level. To get promoted, you’ll need to demonstrate that you’ve addressed that gap, in the eyes of both your..."

Promotion criteria often extend beyond formal career ladders, requiring you to observe and decode which specific behaviors are actually rewarded in practice at your organization.

"Explicitly or implicitly, every company prioritizes different skills and behaviors. If you pay attention to who gets promoted, you can start to see what actually matters at your company."

Managers are not mind readers; you must explicitly state your career ambitions to ensure they are factored into planning and organizational calibration.

"When was the last time you told your manager you’d love to get promoted? It may seem obvious to you, but they may not know how important this is to you. Bring it up at your next 1:1 and see what happe..."

The most effective way to prove readiness for promotion is to proactively perform the duties and manage the scope of the target role before you officially have the title.

"People don’t get promoted for doing their jobs really well. They get promoted by demonstrating their potential to do more. At many companies, you get promoted only after you’ve demonstrated you can ha..."

Securing a promotion to management requires a proactive strategy of performing management-level duties and explicitly communicating your career ambitions to leadership.

"The best way to get promoted into any role, including a PM manager, is to make it obvious you’d do a great job in that new role. This involves a combination of doing the job before you have the job, d..."

As AI automates technical execution, the value of product management shifts toward human-centric strategic discernment, stakeholder influence, and quality judgment.

"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..."

Excellence in product management is a learned skill developed by observing and modeling the specific behaviors of top performers.

"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 decis..."

Reliability is built by being extremely selective with your commitments and communicating priority clearly to stakeholders.

"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."

Highly effective PMs act as quality anchors who refuse to let their team settle for 'good enough' output.

"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 m..."

A PM's primary operational role is to act as the team's grease, hunting for and removing bottlenecks and unmade decisions.

"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."

Preparation is a competitive advantage that requires dedicated time to scan for upcoming risks, changes, and opportunities.

"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 t..."

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.

"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..."

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.

"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 great..."

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.

"Work your way up this stack, finding ways to refine and optimize each step: Execution —> Strategy —> Vision"

Technical literacy is a superpower that bridges the gap between business goals and engineering execution, leading to better decision-making and stronger professional relationships.

"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..."

By understanding the internal engineering workflow—from version control to tiered testing—PMs can better identify potential risks and ship higher-quality features.

"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 re..."

Progressing to a senior level is less about perfecting execution and more about mastering strategy, autonomy, and the ability to handle nuance.

"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 th..."

PMs who master SQL and statistics achieve higher velocity by self-serving their own data analysis and designing statistically valid experiments.

"Learn about SQL in a course or online, and start running queries. Take a class on statistics and experimental design."

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.

"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 compleme..."

True agency is the combination of knowing what you want to achieve independently and possessing the drive to navigate reality effectively to solve problems.

"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..."

Genuine learning requires pushing past the psychological discomfort of feeling incompetent to actually retain and apply new information.

"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."

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.

"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..."

Transitioning to PM leadership requires evolving from short-term execution to high-level strategy, people development, and clear cross-functional communication.

"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...."

First-principles thinking allows you to uncover breakthrough solutions by stripping away assumptions and rebuilding from fundamental truths.

"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 with..."

Building trust as a new product manager requires identifying and eliminating common behavioral anti-patterns that alienate engineering and design partners.

"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, u..."

Prompt engineering is essentially high-fidelity communication; the more specific guidance you provide, the better the output will be.

"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..."

Mastering strategy is a skill developed through deep market immersion, customer empathy, and the active study of established strategic frameworks.

"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 tim..."

Non-technical PMs can gain the most valuable technical leverage by understanding core concepts and system architecture rather than mastering syntax.

"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..."

Leveraging the expertise of engineering colleagues through structured, curious questioning is the fastest way for a PM to understand complex systems.

"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."

While not strictly necessary for most PM roles, building a project from scratch provides the deepest possible understanding of technical constraints and trade-offs.

"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..."

AI will automate data-intensive strategic tasks, shifting the PM's primary value toward soft skills and human-centric alignment.

"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 o..."

The most effective AI-era PMs will combine high-leverage hard skills (augmented by AI) with world-class human-centric soft skills.

"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 s..."

AI-powered quality assurance can proactively identify bugs and confusing user flows by analyzing your product specifications before launch.

"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."

PM leverage in the AI era comes from mastering the interface between human strategy and AI data-processing capabilities.

"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 mus..."

Systematic benchmarking of AI performance requires comparing expert-prompted outputs against high-quality human work through rigorous blind evaluations.

"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 t..."

Product management skills follow an automation timeline where tactical execution is delegated first, while strategic reasoning remains a human differentiator for longer.

"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..."

Incorporating personal passions and non-obvious connections into your work creates a 'human fingerprint' that differentiates it from average AI-generated output.

"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."

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.'

"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 insis..."

The individual contributor path is no longer a financial compromise, as senior domain experts often command higher median salaries than entry-level people 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 furt..."

Establishing a high-level IC ladder allows organizations to retain deep domain expertise while providing clear career and financial progression without management overhead.

"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 g..."

The transition to management often involves a temporary 'compensation plateau' where senior individual contributors earn more than early-stage managers.

"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."

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.

"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 i..."

Consistent execution and a track record of hitting goals create a virtuous cycle where past success fuels future influence.

"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 y..."

Mastering execution is the most essential skill for early-career PMs, as it allows them to maintain team momentum and ship valuable products.

"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..."

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.

"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."

To grow as a PM, you must move beyond administrative execution and start influencing the product strategy and vision.

"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."

Establishing trust and a strong reputation in the first 90 days requires identifying and executing low-effort, high-impact 'quick wins.'

"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..."

Creating business mind maps and priority roadmaps accelerates your own learning while providing immediate documentation value to the team.

"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 t..."

Subconsciously reinforcing your fit for a role is achieved by adopting the employer’s specific terminology and concepts.

"Use mirroring in your interview process. How? Use their language when describing your experiences."

Deeply indexing a small number of complex, recent projects prevents mental "blackouts" and ensures high-resolution answers.

"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 proj..."

Mastering AI collaboration is becoming a fundamental requirement for product managers to remain competitive in their roles.

"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."

The most effective way to master prompt engineering is to treat the AI as a coach for its own instructions.

"Also, a pro tip: You can ask ChatGPT for advice on how to best phrase your prompt. It’s very meta and very cool."

AI chatbots are rapidly transitioning from optional tools to essential daily co-pilots that the majority of product managers now rely on.

"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..."

Feature team PMs perform critical product work by translating vague stakeholder requests into useful customer experiences, often without the help of dedicated project managers.

"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."

Investing time to build structural mental models of your product mechanics is more effective for long-term success than prioritizing raw execution speed.

"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 slo..."

Succeeding as a first PM requires managing the tension of hands-on founders by providing clarity while remaining flexible to rapid changes.

"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..."

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.

"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, y..."

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.

"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 th..."

A successful PM ramp-up prioritizes listening and learning the existing context to avoid making premature mistakes that could damage founder trust.

"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!"

Transforming vanity reports into actionable tools requires validating with real customers that the data presented actually informs their decisions and triggers specific behaviors.

"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 talki..."

Practical application and peer discussion are more effective for mastering growth than consuming massive amounts of content in isolation.

"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 pr..."

New PMs should prioritize listening and low-stakes wins to overcome initial skepticism and build the trust necessary for long-term strategic influence.

"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 skept..."

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.

"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 expe..."

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.

"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 mon..."

A viable career path is found at the intersection of your interests and your ability to solve problems that others value.

"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..."

Asking for help is a fundamental professional skill and a 'career unlock' that distinguishes successful leaders from those who plateau due to hyper-independence.

"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,..."

The most effective help-seeking strategy begins with selecting low-stakes confidants, such as peers or friends, before escalating complex requests to leadership.

"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 fri..."

Effective leadership in high-complexity environments relies on maintaining a broad perspective and fostering shared responsibility through constant dialogue.

"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."

Interviewing is a distinct skill set from the job of product management, requiring systematic preparation across research, practice, and study to succeed.

"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..."

Thorough research involves more than reading—it requires active engagement with the product to form your own strategic hypotheses and prioritized improvement ideas.

"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 whe..."

Actual mock interviews are superior to passive reading because they force you to articulate your thoughts and synthesize frameworks under pressure.

"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..."

Mastering specific, named frameworks provides a mental scaffolding that ensures your interview answers are structured, comprehensive, and easy for the interviewer to follow.

"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..."

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.

"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 wor..."

Advancing to a senior PM level requires shifting from managing tasks to managing outcomes, mentoring others, and driving long-term strategic impact.

"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 ladde..."

Benchmarking your performance against public industry standards allows you to identify skill gaps that may not be explicitly highlighted by your current employer.

"There’s no better way to know what skills matter most in your role than by looking at how your company evaluates your performance."

Traditional technical proficiency like SQL remains the baseline requirement for PMs, but experience with LLMs is the most critical emerging differentiator.

"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 descriptio..."

Use ChatGPT as a clarity-enhancing editor to ensure your product vision is understandable to both kids and non-technical stakeholders.

"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..."

Organizational restructuring acts as a strategic catalyst for career advancement by unlocking leadership roles and increased responsibilities that were previously unavailable.

"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..."

Verbalizing product rationale to a peer helps refine your strategic thinking and ensures your message is clear and compelling.

"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 t..."

Mastering product sense requires balancing user empathy with a highly structured communication framework that signals competence to the interviewer.

"Product sense interviews assess your ability to identify user needs, articulate problems, and craft compelling solutions while demonstrating empathy, creativity, and structured thinking."

Controlling the interview's structure from the outset prevents wasted time and demonstrates the leadership skills expected of a senior PM.

"The best candidates approach these interviews as a specific game with clear rules rather than a casual conversation."

Approaching the interview with empathy for the interviewer's rubric and time constraints helps you provide exactly the data they need to pass you.

"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."

Advancing to high-level roles requires a shift from reactively asking for orders to proactively identifying organizational gaps and proposing your own solutions.

"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..."

Early career success for product managers depends on avoiding behavioral anti-patterns that range from being overly passive to overly controlling.

"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,..."

New product managers must earn the right to focus on strategy by first proving they can successfully manage day-to-day execution and delivery.

"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 int..."

A strong technical foundation allows PMs to communicate better with engineers and make more informed trade-offs without overstepping into implementation.

"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, an..."

Understanding the specific technologies your team uses helps you predict project complexity and builds credibility with engineers.

"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 per..."

Awareness of technical debt and tangled code sections prevents unrealistic scheduling and surprise delays.

"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 an..."

Knowing how and when code is released allows PMs to optimize launch timing and batch small updates efficiently.

"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..."

Handling minor copy or design fixes yourself saves engineering resources and ensures product polish without delaying the roadmap.

"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 fronte..."

Conceptual knowledge of software architecture is essential for following technical discussions and understanding implementation constraints.

"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 bui..."

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.

"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, bu..."

A product manager serves as a high-leverage business tool by coordinating cross-functional teams to solve customer problems that drive measurable results.

"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."

Early career growth for product managers is maximized by prioritizing tangible successes, established best practices, and the long-term value of a professional network.

"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."

To understand your internal leverage and growth potential, identify which functional department is the primary engine of the company's revenue and user acquisition.

"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."

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.

"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 pro..."

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.

"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 jo..."

As AI automates technical execution, the competitive advantage for PMs shifts toward strategic vision, clear communication, and refined product taste.

"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."

Active experimentation with AI tools is the only way to move beyond theory and understand how to integrate them into a daily product workflow.

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

Building a learning habit around AI trends requires a mix of following hands-on builders, technical experts, and curated industry news.

"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."

Modern product management requires redefining the role as an orchestrator of both human talent and AI capabilities to solve customer needs.

"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."

Building a strategic network across the organization provides a safety net of shared intelligence and surfaces new opportunities during structural transitions.

"One thing that consistently creates safety, reduces stress, and increases context is relationships. In an increasingly VUCA world, sharing perspectives and the burden of decisions with others will lig..."

An extensive professional network acts as an essential sourcing and de-risking mechanism for early-stage hiring.

"With a large network, not only do you have a pool of warm leads to tap into, you also have insight into who’s most incredible; for potential candidates it’s also less risky joining a company where the..."

Business storytelling is more effective when it uses humor strategies like nostalgia and exaggeration to hold attention and build trust.

"Humor is the strategic assembly of specific words, spoken in a specific way, to create a surprise that produces a smile or a laugh."

Successful presentations have a clearly defined objective and are delivered concisely to respect the audience's time.

"Make sure your audience knows the goal of the presentation— are you looking for a decision or general feedback, or purely sharing information? It’s not as obvious as you think."

Targeted, high-quality supplements can fill nutritional gaps and address specific performance issues like sleep quality.

"For those who have trouble falling and staying asleep, magnesium has been shown to radically improve sleep quality. I think the Momentous magnesium L-threonate supplement is the best out there."

Physical health is a critical performance lever that determines cognitive clarity and the ability to sustain the high demands of building a company.

"As it turns out, what you put in your body affects how you feel! If you’re not healthy, you’re not able to perform at your best, period. This is why so many in Silicon Valley are so obsessed with slee..."

Effective time management requires treating your calendar as a battery management system for your energy rather than just a schedule of tasks.

"The frame of viewing my calendar as a tool for energy management was a game changer. I had to systematically think through how to manage energy troughs and maintain the right levels of energy across t..."

Intentionally scheduling screen-free downtime allows the nervous system to reset from a 'fight or flight' state to a productive 'rest and digest' mode.

"One of the biggest hacks I’ve discovered is to take structured breaks throughout the workday. I put two 30-minute “DNS–Break” blocks on my calendar each day."

Imposing strict constraints on your total working hours forces more effective prioritization of high-leverage tasks.

"One of the most helpful changes I made was to set a limit of how much I would work in a day. I restricted myself to working around two hours less per day than my pre-injury baseline."

Significant burnout is a systemic issue in tech that directly undermines long-term career optimism and increases quitting intentions.

"44.67% of all respondents are currently experiencing *significant* burnout (meaning they said they’re “moderately,” “very,” or “completely” burned-out). Burnout doesn’t just affect tech workers’ exper..."

True professional autonomy begins with proactively auditing and owning your calendar to ensure your most productive hours are reserved for high-priority work.

"Burnout conquerors keep a keen eye on how they spend their time and energy at work to make sure they’re working smarter, not harder. An open block in their calendar to do deep work isn’t just going to..."

Treating health and wellness as foundational professional infrastructure allows you to maintain high performance and detect early signs of stress before they escalate.

"Burnout conquerors treat their health and wellness as critical professional infrastructure. Wellness is treated as a non-negotiable business need, not optional self-care."

Defining a clear leave timeline based on both policy and family needs prevents confusion and allows for better long-term project planning.

"Ultimately, when deciding on your timeline, I encourage you to optimize for what is best for your family and then be super-clear about the dates you’ll be gone."

Setting strict communication boundaries protects you from the stress of business decisions during the most demanding weeks of new parenthood.

"Plan for very limited or no availability, especially for the first few weeks. When you are exhausted with a screaming baby in your hands, you’ll be glad you have one less thing to worry about."

High-accuracy voice dictation can replace typing as the primary input method by correctly interpreting context and company-specific jargon.

"Press the function key on your laptop, talk, and it instantly (and accurately) transcribes everything you’ve said. It understands the context of the conversation, filters out filler words, and learns..."

Sustainability requires identifying your unique biological and psychological limits rather than attempting to match the stress tolerance of those around you.

"Staying within a range of acceptable tolerance in your life should be the goal, so that you flourish in all dimensions, not just the professional. Taking on too much pushes us into zones of intoleranc..."

Procrastination is often fueled by the false belief that 'tomorrow' will provide a better environment for action, whereas the only time to effect change is the present.

"‘Tomorrow is today.’ And what I mean by that is that so often I will in my head be like, ‘I’ll do that tomorrow. I’ll eat better tomorrow. I’ll think about that vision tomorrow. I’ll communicate bette..."

Ruthless prioritization requires constant physical reminders to prevent reactive tasks from hijacking your focus and energy.

"I have a post-it on my monitor that says, ‘Only work on what matters most.’ It sometimes falls off and I have to write it again. I go into work, someone emails me, and I’m like, ‘Oh god.’ But then I’m..."

Burnout is often driven by the subconscious assumption that leaders must handle everything alone, a mindset that can be reversed by building the muscle of asking for help.

"The exhaustion of subconsciously assuming I have to do everything on my own robbed me of agency, joy, and so much energy in my work. Shifting this has been radical for me in terms of my relationship t..."

Saying no is easier for both parties when you frame the rejection as a pre-existing personal policy rather than a specific judgment of their request.

"I created policies for myself like “I don’t do talks/podcasts/events/etc.” and “No CEOs, founders, or VCs on the podcast.” When I tell people that’s my policy, they totally understand and move on. You..."

Evaluate new opportunities by removing the emotional pressure of pleasing others and asking if the work aligns with your current high-level priorities.

"Imagine if there were no emotion involved: I ask myself, “If I didn’t care whether the other person felt disappointed or sad when I said no, what would I do?” Then I do that. Once the decision is clea..."

Setting strict boundaries for deep work naturally limits your available hours, acting as a forcing function to decline lower-priority requests.

"I have a policy of no meetings before 3 p.m. I reserve this time for “deep work” time, to work on the newsletter and prepare for podcast episodes. Quite a luxury, I know, but even during my day-job da..."

When message volume becomes unmanageable, silence is often a more professional and efficient response than a rushed or half-hearted reply.

"Just don’t reply: This may sound unkind, but I’ve learned that no reply feels better than a half-hearted reply. People know you’re busy, and will assume that you didn’t see it (totally understandable)..."

Investing in a specialized productivity interface for email can significantly reduce time spent on communication through faster workflows and automated assistance.

"Superhuman’s research shows that the average user gets through their inbox twice as fast (vs. using Gmail or Outlook) and saves four hours a week."

Even self-imposed, non-binding deadlines create a psychological pull that prevents important tasks from lingering indefinitely.

"One of my favorite techniques for getting someone to finish something that’s important but not urgent is to come up with an arbitrary deadline together. We both know it’s made up, but there’s a weird..."

Physical to-do lists prevent the digital avoidance and distraction that often occur when task management lives in the same environment as the work itself.

"Something I’ve learned about myself is that if my to-dos are sitting inside an app on my laptop, the one place I don’t want to look is that app on my laptop. However, when my to-dos are sitting right..."

Renegotiating existing commitments is often a low-consequence way to reclaim time and reduce stress, provided you communicate transparently.

"Backing out of something can feel terrible, but once you’ve experienced the relief from not having to do something your former self agreed to, you’ll find there’s a lot of power here. Better still, yo..."

Automating the repetitive typing of common phrases and links eliminates low-level friction and saves significant time over the long term.

"Anytime I find myself writing out an address, phrase, or paragraph over and over again, I turn it into an auto-expanding snippet. I’ve created snippets for common email replies, URLs, email addresses,..."

Auditing both your time and energy helps you identify the gap between how you want to work and how you actually spend your day.

"Step one in addressing this mismatch is to see how you’re currently allocating your time, to identify your revealed preferences versus your stated preferences. In addition to doing a time audit, I’ve..."

Flow state is more achievable when you treat your environment as a repeatable recipe that includes specific audio, dietary, and scheduling conditions.

"When have you felt the most productive? Where were you sitting, what were you wearing, what did you eat/drink, and what time of day was it? Learn what your mind and body need to get into the flow."

Disciplined Slack rituals and workspace configurations are necessary to protect focused deep-work time and prevent communication overload.

"Implement Slack rituals and norms to create boundaries and make sure you don’t spend your entire day playing digital Whac-A-Mole. Don’t go into Slack for the first half of your day (or pick the best w..."

During prolonged periods of transition fatigue, focusing on small, consistent habits provides the clarity and emotional agency needed to survive uncertainty.

"The solution for navigating the Neutral Zone is cultivating good habits. Why? When your destination is unclear, bold steps forward are often counterproductive and erroneous. Good habits on the other h..."

Establishing a sustainable resilience practice allows you to dispassionately observe the internal filters and anxieties that influence your professional decisions.

"Mindfulness is your capacity to dispassionately notice what is happening, as opposed to seeing life through your filters, fears or desires, e.g. noticing the subtle anxiety that drives your decisions..."

Prioritize long-term sustainability and content depth over high-frequency output to prevent burnout and maintain quality.

"Cutting back on a few posts per year will allow me to create deeper, higher-value content while maintaining a pace I can sustain long-term."

Real value is created during uninterrupted, cognitively demanding blocks of time, which must be scheduled and fiercely defended against meetings and distractions.

"The core idea is that any work of real value comes from people doing “deep work”—focused, uninterrupted, and cognitively demanding work that stretches their brain. Unfortunately, most of our time is s..."

Shifting the default from meetings to asynchronous communication reclaims significant time lost to attendance, preparation, and context-switching.

"One of the biggest unlocks in my productivity has been learning how to pivot a meeting request into an email conversation. The majority of the time this becomes a five-minute task versus a 30- to 60-m..."

Delegating low-impact tasks to a virtual assistant requires initial setup effort but eventually scales to reclaim dozens of hours of your time each week.

"An unlock for me has been finding an executive assistant to take on as many of these N and O tasks as possible. Everyone starts off thinking there’s very little an EA can do for them, and then months..."

Long-term productivity and burnout prevention are more about the discipline of saying no to excessive work than about optimizing how you do that work.

"Most of our burnout and overwhelm comes not from a lack of productivity tools and tricks, but from taking on too much work. The more you can do up front to make your workload less full, the better eve..."

Defining a very short list of essential daily goals before starting work ensures that high-value tasks aren't ignored for easy, low-impact wins.

"Before you open up your to-do list—and definitely before you dive into your work—pick one to three things that, if you got done today (and if you did nothing else), would make it a great day. Write th..."

Maintaining a formal list of tasks pending from others prevents balls from being dropped and frees up cognitive space by removing the need to remember follow-ups.

"Whenever you ask someone to do something for you, add them to your “waiting for” list. This tactic allows you to keep track of every open thread, versus relying on your memory, and makes it easy to re..."

A reliable system for tracking immediate actions and external dependencies reduces the cognitive load of deciding what to work on next.

"For me, the solution is to have a simple and trusted TODO system that includes two lists: 1. Your current set of priorities, as concrete actions (not vague project names) 2. A list of the people you a..."

Securing blocks of distraction-free time is the only way to ensure cognitively demanding tasks aren't consumed by logistical tasks.

"My trick for creating space for deep work is simple: 1. Block off time: I schedule two-hour blocks of DEEP WORK TIME on Monday, Wednesday and, Friday. 2. Protect that time: Make it crystal clear to ev..."

A reliable task management system clears mental distractions and reduces the friction of deciding what to work on next.

"Make it easy to know what your priorities are by having a TODO system that you can trust. Anything I don't get done that day, I re-write for the next day, which has the benefit of (1) reminding me of..."

Instead of saying a simple 'yes' or 'no' to new requests, place them within your current priority list and ask for stakeholder alignment on the resulting trade-offs.

"Take this new ask and prioritize it amongst the work you already have. Tell your manager where you prioritized this ask. For example, 'Great idea Ms. Manager! I've added this to my priority list, righ..."

Investing a small amount of time to review the upcoming week allows you to eliminate unnecessary meetings and anticipate team blockers before they occur.

"At the start of each week, take a few minutes to skim your calendar for the week ahead. Any meetings you should cancel? Any discussions you still need to prepare for? Any emails/docs/actions you need..."

Because of the high stakes and opacity of fundraising, founders need external support systems to manage the significant psychological strain.

"For an early stage founder, fundraising is one of the most nerve-racking parts of the job. It’s incredibly opaque, asymmetrical, and is often the difference between having a company and not."

Decoupling your professional worth from individual project outcomes prevents burnout and allows for more objective decision-making during inevitable failures.

"Although it’s important to be excited and bought into the projects you take on, it’s also important to not build your identity around your projects (both internally, or in the eyes of your leaders). P..."

Healing a co-founder relationship begins with intrapersonal mindfulness to understand your own emotional state before addressing the external conflict.

"When the relationships go awry, a good place to start is to consider what is going on for you personally. In our book Connect, my co-author and I underscore the importance of understanding that we are..."

Precisely naming your emotions using a structured vocabulary prevents thoughtless reactivity and expands your choices for responding to conflict.

"Begin by noticing how you are feeling. Are you disappointed? Disillusioned? Resentful? Frustrated? Angry? Worried? It might be useful to think about this initial exploration as intrapersonal mindfulne..."

Moving from blame to resolution requires identifying a superordinate goal both parties care about, such as the survival and health of the company.

"Allowing for the possibility that we are both responsible in our own way for the situation we are in reduces the tendency for either of us to be accusatory and increases the chance that we can develop..."

Consistent meditation serves as a structured physiological reset for professionals working in high-pressure environments.

"During these breaks, I disconnect from screens and focus on activities that stimulate the rest-and-digest response. For me, this has included meditation (I practice Vipassana)."

Adopting a mindset that views burnout as an organizational failure rather than a personal weakness is a critical psychological shield against exhaustion.

"While burnout conquerors take actionable steps toward preventing burnout in their own lives, they also know that the kind of deep exhaustion so many in the industry are feeling should not be blamed on..."

Regularly monitoring physical symptoms and behavioral changes is essential to identifying burnout before it manifests as a serious medical crisis.

"My therapist sat me down and ran me through an inventory of my bodily sensations, taking note of my jaw and neck tension, tightness in my chest, shallow breathing, and huge bags under my eyes."

Developing self-attunement provides the early warning system needed to defend your health before reaching peak burnout.

"As the months and years went on, I became much more attuned to myself, which gave me the tools to assess how I was doing at any point in time. That turned out to be the first in a series of steps that..."

Leaders must actively 'befriend' their fears of appearing incompetent or being a burden to unlock the emotional energy needed to seek support.

"Making an ask is vulnerable for everyone, and can provoke fear, anxiety, and stress. These emotions can be paralyzing, preventing you from seeking the support you desperately need to unblock your work..."

Developing an awareness of physical stress signals allows leaders to recognize fear-based avoidance before it leads to professional paralysis.

"Become familiar with your body’s vocabulary of fear. If you are unattuned to how fear shows up, it’s difficult to work with it."

Reframe impostor syndrome as a positive indicator of professional success and the presence of growth-oriented challenges.

"Impostor syndrome is normal and is generally a sign that you’re enjoying some degree of success in your life. Think of it this way: if you were pumping gas or stacking shelves somewhere, you wouldn’t..."

Negative self-talk and feelings of inadequacy are often symptoms of physical and emotional burnout rather than a true lack of ability.

"Career burnout is very common and can be primarily traced back to three causes: (1) over-caring, (2) lack of appreciation, and/or (3) not working to your strengths or at the appropriate ability. Burno..."

Entrepreneurship should be viewed as a long-term life commitment to a project rather than a strategic resume-building exercise.

"Don’t start a company as a career step: If you’re successful, it will most likely be your entire career, and if it’s not successful, that’s not something you generally aspire to."

Lasting fulfillment in product leadership comes from the continuous act of solving problems rather than the impossible goal of eliminating them forever.

"The key to reducing (and ending) suffering, for you and your team, is to accept that you won’t ever fully solve all of your problems. Fires will burn. People will get upset. Things will go wrong. This..."

Product managers must embrace impermanence to effectively navigate re-orgs, shifts in priorities, and the necessary decommissioning of their own products.

"Early in my PM career I felt that when I owned a product, it was my job to make sure it survived, no matter what. It took a long time for me to learn this is completely wrong—your job is to help accel..."

Effective leadership requires suppressing the ego and placing the organization's mission above personal recognition.

"As a PM, you’re often the default choice to present your team’s work and the first to get credit when things go well. In my experience, whenever I’ve instead given those opportunities to other team me..."

Unproductivity and burnout are often driven by hidden inner conflicts and poor emotional awareness rather than a lack of time-management tools.

"When people come to me with productivity questions, they can often recite many of the tactics you articulate, but they’re still unproductive, primarily because they are people-pleasing and have poor i..."

Resolving professional stuckness requires treating your various internal motivations as a 'family' of parts that need to be identified and integrated.

"Internal Family Systems (IFS) is a powerful method for uncovering and relating to different parts of ourselves (especially the ones in conflict with each other) and developing a more integrated, align..."

A critical leadership skill is the capacity to recognize and sit with internal anxiety and external chaos without letting them take over your day.

"I realized that it’s not about time management. The thing I’m actually working on is building my own tolerance of chaos at work. It’s about feeling less out of control and recognizing when I’m spirali..."

Anger at work is often a signal of a deeper unmet need that, when ignored, leads to destructive unconscious reactions like exploding or withdrawing.

"I’ve learned that anger isn’t something to suppress or feel ashamed of. It’ssomething that we need to be more skillful at owning and engaging with because, while it contains immense wisdom, it can cau..."

Building emotional self-awareness requires cataloging your physical sensations and default patterns to recognize anger before it bypasses your logic.

"Many of us are so used to labeling anger as “bad” or unprofessional that we avoid even acknowledging we’re experiencing it. The first step is noticing we’re in anger territory. I have found that payin..."

Regular customer contact is the only way to prevent internal assumptions from diverging from real-world user needs.

"Great PMs speak with their customers regularly. They know that no matter how confident they are about what their customers want, they are frequently wrong."

AI significantly accelerates finding insights in customer data, but human empathy remains the critical factor for deep discovery and connection.

"Tools will make it significantly easier to find the signal in the noise. However, customers will still want to talk to real people to share their honest challenges, ideas, and experiences. Skills like..."

Maintaining a continuous 'scrapbook' of customer evidence prevents the friction of starting from scratch during strategic planning cycles.

"I keep a **Notion database** of feedback screenshots, charts, support tickets, links to Gong calls, Slack threads, you name it. These are all organized by swim lanes (e.g. monetization, onboarding, in..."

True mastery of data involves moving beyond simple analysis to anchoring every product strategy and decision in deep customer insights.

"About 50% of the companies highlight the job of leveraging data and user research. It’s interesting that this only came up in half of companies. My take is that the remaining companies assume this is..."

Product thinking is most effectively introduced to engineering-heavy teams through structured but non-intrusive documentation that provides context before development starts.

"I'm in an engineering first org, so I had to introduce product into our development processes in a valuable and non-intrusive way. I did this by introducing Product Discovery documents on topics that..."

True product discovery requires performing the customer's actual work alongside them to identify real-world friction that interviews alone cannot reveal.

"You have to be the user to unlock this concept. I don’t mean that spiritually as in “think like the user”; I mean literally do their same job with your product as an extended member of their team and..."

Private advisory councils foster nuanced collaboration by removing the incentive for users to 'win' conversations in public forums.

"The trick is to form an advisory council—a group of passionate community representatives with whom you can discuss and ideate in a safe, private space. A private advisory council enables you to make t..."

Creating systems for direct builder-to-user communication transforms support into a high-velocity feedback loop that accelerates product iteration.

"Our rhythm was simple: (1) understand the customer’s problem, (2) unblock the customer by giving them immediate support, and (3) if needed, change the product so that other customers don’t run into th..."

Direct conversations with potential members are essential to uncover the underlying motivations that will actually drive participation and contribution.

"You have to talk to your potential members and identify their needs and motivations. It’s the simplest thing you can do to start building community today, yet it’s something that companies constantly..."

Customer discovery should focus on understanding the current alternative solutions and specific annoyances to identify where a new product can create differentiated value.

"Pick the people you talk to carefully. Figuring out the target audience for your product is very much part of this search, so be careful getting discouraged by talking to the wrong group of people."

Directly observing user behavior provides a firsthand understanding of emotional and functional needs that research reports often overlook.

"Don’t just read reports from researchers on your team; instead attend user research sessions to get firsthand exposure to user experiences and reactions. What’s important is to pay attention to micro..."

A high volume of discovery interviews conducted in a short window provides the density of feedback needed to quickly iterate toward a winning idea.

"We did a lot of interviews with CFOs, heads of procurement, heads of finance (I think the exact number is around 75), and over the span of two to three weeks. It really helped refine that idea. We had..."

Deeply understanding user pain through extensive interviewing is the only way to avoid building products that people don't actually need.

"Talk to many (ideally 100+) people from this segment. Identify a major pain point that you can solve. . . If you go after something that isn’t a major pain point for people, your product will struggle..."

Running discovery calls as sales pitches prevents you from obtaining an honest signal about whether a problem actually exists for the customer.

"However, we realized our first several “interviews” were actually sales pitches (e.g. “here’s this cool new thing, what do you think?”). Far too biased to get any real signal."

Observational research reveals friction points and pain points that users often cannot articulate or might misrepresent when asked directly.

"Don’t ask users if something is working—watch them do it. That will give you a much better sense of their pain points."

Effective customer discovery ignores polite encouragement and looks specifically for signs of intense pain or the natural pull of a working solution.

"When talking to people, look for two things: pain and pull. Pain tells you there’s an opportunity to solve a problem. Pull tells you that you’re actually solving the problem."

Validating a problem requires gathering a small number of high-quality data points and attempting to disprove the problem's significance.

"Look at both quantitative and qualitative evidence. Collect all data points that point to this being a real and important problem. Quality over quantity. Three to five strong data points is far better..."

Effective AI user testing must segment participants by their attitude toward the technology (embracers vs. skeptics) to avoid 'averaging out' feedback and creating a product that satisfies no one.

"When testing AI products, I focus on the following: 1. Longitudinal validation: Are we testing for a long enough period to understand how engagement changes once the novelty wears off? 2. High-touch t..."

Genuine market pull is identified by cold interest and sustained usage of even a primitive prototype, rather than polite feedback from a warm network.

"There are four signs your idea has legs: 1. People pay you money: Several people start to pay for your product, ideally people you don’t have a direct connection to 2. Continued usage: People continue..."

Cold outbound outreach provides the 'purest' validation signal because it forces the product to win on merit rather than personal relationships.

"Outbound sales is consistently the best signal for validating your idea (versus friends using your product, incubator batch-mates, or investor leads)."

While design partners help co-create complex solutions, a self-serve 'launch-and-see' approach is often faster for validating high-demand, developer-centric products.

"We specifically didn’t go the design partner route, and instead focused on getting a self-serve product out as soon as possible, specifically an email magic links product."

Treat your product strategy as a set of testable predictions rather than a fixed plan.

"With the Founding Hypothesis, you grab those predictions, drag them onto center stage, and hit them with a dazzling spotlight. And you might not like what you see. By the end, you’ll have a Founding H..."

High-quality product ideas originate from a combination of founder intuition and identifying features that elicit visceral excitement from prospective users.

"You’re at a huge advantage if you’re building a product that you yourself need or wish you had. If that’s the case, then your best initial ideas will come from you and your founding team. Pay attentio..."

Maintaining a high cadence of low-effort experiments is essential for continuous learning, even after the company scales.

"I think we did well but lost our scrappy, iterative mindset too early. Even without a ton of traffic -- we were wasting traffic not running more tests."

Shipping directly is often better than experimenting when the time to achieve statistical significance outweighs the value of the data or the change is low-risk.

"If you can run experiments quickly and easily (e.g. a few hours), this decision is generally easy: run the experiment. If running experiments is a pain in the butt, and the changes are relatively beni..."

Validating even small conversion changes requires significant traffic, often making experiments impractical for early-stage companies.

"It turns out you’d need *over 60,000 unique users* (per variation!) before you could draw a confident conclusion. That’s 120,000 users going through the flow before you can move on. For most startups,..."

Vocal demand for "free access" is often noise from users who do not actually have the problem-market fit or motivation to become retained, paying customers.

"Users may scream for freemium. Investors and advisors will agree. It might even start OK (we 4x’d users right out of the gate). But initial usage is different from long-term usage."

Closing the loop with customers by following up after their specific feedback has been implemented builds deep trust and loyalty.

"Keeping track of every piece of customer feedback we receive, and then actually following up after we've made improvements to let people know they've been heard."

To avoid building for a vocal minority, evaluate feedback based on its statistical representation and the influence of the users providing it.

"Just because someone is loud doesn’t mean you should act on their complaints. You need to get good at identifying whom you should pay attention to. That starts with examining who is being loud."

Direct transparency about why certain feedback is being deprioritized prevents users from feeling ignored and preserves long-term trust.

"If you decide to deprioritize a group’s feedback, make sure you help them understand why. Often these groups don’t realize that their ideas don’t represent the whole user base. They may assume that mo..."

Starting with smaller companies is often the most effective way to gain early traction because they have lower barriers to entry and faster decision-making cycles.

"VSBs or SMBs are the safest bet at first because these companies can make faster decisions, there’s less compliance/security risk, and you won’t need a robust sales team immediately. They are also mor..."

Narrowing your focus to one to three specific functional roles within an organization ensures sharper positioning and more efficient product development.

"Attacking everyone will pull your product in different directions, require you to build expertise in multiple channels at once, communicate to different types of customers at once, etc. It’s better to..."

Targeting the wrong audience can lead founders to abandon great ideas prematurely because they mistake poor audience fit for a bad product.

"If you’ve got a killer idea but you’re talking to the wrong people, you’ll come away thinking your idea stinks, and give up. But the same idea pitched to different people can change everything."

Starting with an extremely restricted beachhead market allows a startup to deliver undeniable value and build a passionate community before attempting to scale.

"Try to get super-specific and super-narrow with your ICP. Almost comically narrow."

Cold outreach response rates provide the most objective validation of an ICP because they lack the social bias inherent in warm introductions.

"Data from outbound sales is the best signal for what’s working, versus leads from investors and friends."

The ideal initial company size is often one where the organization is large enough to suffer from the problem but small enough to implement the solution rapidly.

"Looker was a technical product, created right at the very start of data moving to the cloud and large, event style data being treated as business critical for analysis. ... The companies tended to be..."

ICP expansion must be a deliberate move triggered by high existing customer satisfaction and the resource capacity to support a new segment without compromising the original one.

"We knew we were ready to expand when we felt like, one, we were getting customer love and, two, we had sufficient engineering bandwidth to go and build the features and products without letting go of..."

To gain early traction, you must define an initial target audience so narrow that it might seem comical to outsiders.

"When it comes to the question of the target customer, the most common mistake is the definition is too broad. It must be almost comically narrow, to the point where you may be misunderstood for such a..."

Starting with a broad audience is a trap because larger markets rely on social proof and references that early-stage startups don't yet possess.

"If you want to build a big business, you don’t go after the big market first, because those people only buy based on references, and you don’t have the references. You need to create a beachhead, a ni..."

Identifying the right initial audience is a foundational step that makes every subsequent stage of scaling—from pitching to retention—significantly easier.

"Spend time promoting your product to the wrong people and you’ll waste your time or, worse, go nowhere and give up. But if you can identify the right early users for your product in time, you’ll find..."

Successful consumer companies manually recruit early users who define the platform's culture and provide a roadmap for new users to follow.

"The founders picked their first users carefully, courting people who would be good photographers—especially designers who had high Twitter follower counts. Those first users would help set the right a..."

A specific and actionable ICP must define a single market segment where both the value of the solution and the method of customer acquisition are uniform.

"Simply put, an ICP must be a single market segment: a group of people for whom the value of solving a problem is roughly the same, and who can be reached in roughly the same way. “People who use Excel..."

Narrowing your target segment to the group with the most acute pain point dramatically increases your chances of finding immediate product-market fit.

"A product that’s 10x better on average might actually be 50x better for some groups but only 1.1x better for others. Picking the right group will determine whether you quickly find product-market fit..."

Optimal customer segmentation focuses on the specific characteristics and contexts of users who derive the most benefit from your unique differentiators.

"Your best-fit target customers are customers who really care a lot about your unique value."

Early success requires a hyper-specific definition of your target user to avoid diluting your product's value proposition.

"Narrowly and concretely define who you’re building for. . . Resist solving adjacent problems, or problems for other segments. Continue to come back to your primary segment and the primary problem you’..."

B2B targeting requires starting with firmographic segmentation to find the right accounts and then layering in personas to understand the individual gatekeepers.

"In B2B, you first segment your customers via firmographics, i.e. things like how many employees, revenue, geography, etc. Then, a more actionable segmentation is: “three-member or more creative agenci..."

The most effective starting point for a network is a niche audience in a specific situation, rather than a broad demographic or geographic segment.

"My advice: Your product’s first atomic network is probably smaller and more specific than you think. Not a massive segment of users, or a particular customer segment, or a city, but instead something..."

Monitoring how users 'hack' existing features reveals high-intent categories that should be formalized into the product vertical roadmap.

"We found that many more people were part of Facebook Groups communities that had been set up specifically for buying, selling, and trading than we expected."

The nature of your product-market fit signals depends on whether you are solving a problem for a broad market or a narrow, niche set of early adopters.

"The intensity of the pull is a factor of the fit (how good your product is at solving the user’s problem) AND initial market size (is it niche or broad). Dropbox, Netflix, and Tinder were 10x better p..."

A hyper-specific target audience allows a startup to concentrate its limited resources on solving one problem better than any established incumbent.

"Your target audience should also be very narrow. Almost comically narrow. Shoot for at least three narrowing characteristics."

Effective PMs provide clear direction through strong opinions but remain flexible enough to pivot when presented with new evidence.

"Great PMs always have a point of view, but loosely held. They know they aren’t on the team simply to coordinate other people’s work—that their team is looking to them for new ideas, novel insights, an..."

The only way to close the gap between your high standards and your current abilities is to produce a massive volume of work on strict deadlines.

"It is only by going through a volume of work that you’re going to catch up and close that gap. And the work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions. I took longer to figure out how to do this..."

Successful features from other products rarely work if copied blindly; they must be deconstructed to understand the underlying user motivations and then adapted to fit your specific product context.

"I came away from these attempts realizing that I needed a better understanding of how to borrow ideas from other products intelligently. Now when looking to adopt a feature, I ask myself: Why is this..."

Product sense is a learned skill rooted in the dual pillars of user empathy and creative problem-solving.

"Product sense is the skill of consistently being able to craft products (or make changes to existing products) that have the intended impact on their users. Product sense relies on (1) empathy to disc..."

Systematically comparing and critiquing products helps identify the strategic design choices and UX paradigms that drive successful user experiences.

"I spend one or two hours a month trying out new products and deconstructing them. The goal is to strengthen my intuition about why some products work well and others don’t—this also helps me identify..."

A service-oriented mindset shifts the focus from using user problems to build a better product to using the product as a tool to solve user problems.

"With a service-oriented mindset, it’s the opposite: the product is just a tool to help solve the user problem, which is the ultimate goal."

Qualitative 'feel'—the instinctive user response to polish and performance—is a primary driver of adoption in product-led growth models.

"It’s my belief that the feel of software is vital to adoption, especially when you are going for product-led growth. People respond instinctively to how something feels, and you can’t fake it."

Successful community building requires shifting from a one-to-many value delivery model to a many-to-many model where members create value for each other.

"To build an audience, you help people. To build a community, you help people help each other. It’s a subtle but massive difference in mindset."

Scaling a marketplace requires narrowing focus from numerous early-stage tactics to a core set of eight proven, scalable growth levers.

"Early on, you do things that don’t scale. At some point, though, you need to scale the things you’re doing. As a result, the number of levers you can rely on for growth at scale is substantially reduc..."

Successful scale requires recognizing when the unscalable tactics used for bootstrapping have reached their expiration date.

"Many of the early levers we used to drive growth were a moment in time things that no longer work at all or at scale. We used them where we could to bootstrap the company for a period."

Growth loops can be intentionally engineered by creating dedicated funnels that convert one side of the marketplace into the other.

"It wasn't until 2015 that we built the "R2D funnel" which became the largest attributable signup source of riders turning into drivers!"

In industries like fintech where trust is the primary barrier, growth is best achieved by leveraging external validation from friends, authorities, and social proof.

"For a product that relies on trust, there’s nothing more powerful than an endorsement from a friend. Airbnb had a similar trust challenge, both on the guest side (“stay in a stranger’s home, are you c..."

Successful growth loops should be built upon existing organic user behaviors rather than attempting to manufacture new ones from scratch.

"If you’re thinking about exploring this viral loop for your business, my number one piece of advice is to **first see if it’s already happening. Only lean into it if you’re already seeing this behavio..."

Tracking conversion across time-based cohorts helps identify the specific windows of opportunity and latency in the user journey from buyer to seller.

"For many businesses with this demand-to-supply dynamic, there tends to be some latency. As such, I’d start by looking at the following: 1. **Buyer-to-seller conversion rates in the first month, after..."

Failure is more often caused by the inability to acquire users efficiently than by the quality of the product itself.

"“Most businesses actually get zero distribution channels to work. Poor distribution — not product — is the number one cause of failure.”"

Sustainable growth can be achieved by architecting loops where supply drives demand and demand drives supply, creating an accelerating flywheel.

"A second type of distribution advantage is developing a unique viral loop that allows you to grow more quickly and efficiently than anyone else in your market."

Visualizing growth as a reinforcing loop allows teams to align on a shared strategy and prioritize projects that generate compounding momentum.

"A flywheel is just a tool for you and your team to identify and align on which parts of the business matter most. Of all of the things that you can work on, which investments accelerate your flywheel,..."

A flywheel provides a strategic framework to distinguish between essential investments that accelerate growth and distractions that offer no compounding value.

"For example, in the case of Amazon, their flywheel makes it clear that growth alone will lead to lower costs over time. Thus, their time is best spent adding sellers and improving the customer experie..."

Before turning to traditional growth tactics like performance marketing, core product innovations often provide the most significant growth unlocks.

"Initially for Snap, the biggest growth accelerations consistently came from raw, pure, product-innovation-driven growth. Ephemeral messaging in 2011, Stories in 2013, and face filters in 2015—those dr..."

Long-term sustainability is built by identifying your most effective growth engine and optimizing it through technical and operational excellence.

"Many of the most durable inflections came from the company leaning into their primary growth engine (e.g. SEO, virality)"

The most successful GTM strategy usually involves starting with one clear motion while planning to eventually integrate both self-serve and sales-led elements as the company scales.

"Of the 30 companies I looked at, 19 of them started off product-led, but 100% of them added a sales team to assist with growth/expansion. Four completely switch to a sales-led motion. Interestingly, z..."

A North Star metric is best identified by building a MECE model of user engagement and simulating which transition between user states has the highest compounding impact on total growth.

"The blocks, or buckets, represent different user segments with different levels of engagement. And every single user who has ever used the product is in one, and only one, bucket on any given day. Tha..."

When organic acquisition is already strong, the most efficient path to growth is often fixing 'leaky bucket' retention issues through gamification and engagement loops.

"We prioritized working on retention over new-user acquisition because all of our new-user acquisition was organic, and, at the time, we didn’t have an obvious lever to pull to supercharge that."

Selecting a growth channel is a process of elimination that starts with understanding user behavior and identifying your product's unique value proposition.

"Where should you invest? In addition to the tips I’ve included throughout, I suggest working your way through these five steps: Step 1: Who are your early adopters? Step 2: Where do they spend time? S..."

A structured focus on optimizing existing core features and user flows often generates more growth than building new products or adjacent functionality.

"I can confidently say that product teams frequently, or even usually, drive more growth by optimizing engagement with existing key features than by launching new ones. And in an economic environment w..."

Quantitative analysis allows you to move beyond intuition and identify the specific product behaviors that actually drive business growth.

"A correlation analysis will tell you how strongly the use of a feature is related to the movement of your various growth metrics. There are many popular, easy-to-use tools (including some free ones) f..."

By modeling the current trend of historical data, linear regression can provide highly accurate estimates for when specific growth milestones will be reached.

"Linear regression is also often used for predicting averages for user activity, growth, and revenue. For example, at Change.org I used regression to forecast the day and time when we hit 200 million u..."

Distribution strategy cannot be outsourced or delayed; it must be hypothesized and integrated into the product design before reaching product-market fit.

"As you explore potential product-market fit, it is crucial to have hypotheses on how you will distribute your product. For example, if you are planning to be product-led, then the product has to be de..."

Personal leadership by founders during the search for PMF ensures growth initiatives are tightly aligned with the company vision and builds a necessary growth culture.

"Founder-led growth is the best path here, where the founder drives growth efforts across product-led, marketing-led, or sales-led motions. The benefit of founder-led growth at this stage is quick deci..."

Identify the one primary engine that matches your product's natural strengths—virality, marketing, content, or sales—and focus on it exclusively until it is fully scaled.

"Most companies find the vast majority of their growth from just one of those four growth engines, and until you’ve scaled your core engine, time spent optimizing a secondary or tertiary engine is rare..."

Supply-side growth loops often rely on peer-to-peer virality and the natural movement of workers between businesses within a tight-knit industry.

"The restaurant industry is very tight. Every restaurateur sure knows each other -- so if someone is trying something out, there is a virality that takes place. We benefited from that. A year or two la..."

Challenging pre-existing assumptions through a detailed funnel audit can reveal growth channels that offer significantly higher scale than current focus areas.

"Also, look for opportunities that might turn pre-existing assumptions on their head. The team was optimizing traffic coming from paid marketing channels because they’ve historically converted better...."

True marketing effectiveness is defined by incrementality—the sales that would not have occurred without the specific marketing spend.

"The most important problem in marketing is this: If we spend an additional $1,000 on some marketing activity, how many additional sales would we drive? Marketers sometimes refer to this concept as “in..."

MMM uses aggregate statistical data rather than individual tracking, making it a critical tool for measuring offline channels and navigating digital privacy restrictions.

"Marketing mix modeling (MMM): a statistical modeling technique that marketers use to determine which channels in their marketing mix deserve credit for sales, in order to reallocate budget to the high..."

No single measurement method is perfect; accuracy requires cross-validating results from tracking, modeling, and experimental testing.

"Each of these methods has strengths and weaknesses, but by triangulating the truth through combining multiple methods, you can get a more accurate measurement. The goal of triangulation is to determin..."

Consumer startups should focus on mastering a single growth engine—virality, SEO, or paid marketing—rather than diluting their efforts across multiple channels.

"A common pitfall of early-stage startups is trying to invest in too many engines at once and not nail any. At scale, in order to win a market, you have to become world-class at your primary growth eng..."

Choosing a growth engine requires understanding whether your competitive advantage lies in your business model's margins, your content's search authority, or your product's viral loops.

"In the case of paid marketing and SEO, you are competing for a customer’s attention. Paid marketing becomes a business-model competition (who can turn this customer attention into enough value that th..."

A complete go-to-market strategy for a consumer startup bridges the gap between manual, unscalable early growth and one automated, scalable long-term engine.

"Your job as a founder looking to grow your product is to (1) creatively execute two to three kickstarting tactics and (2) become world-class at one primary growth engine. That’s essentially your high-..."

Growth lubricants like conversion and retention optimization are only effective when they are designed in tandem with the product's core growth engine.

"By this point, you have a startup idea, a product, some early users, and hopefully a glimmer of product-market fit. Even if you don’t have any of these, you should still be thinking about how your pro..."

Every growth engine requires a specific 'fuel'—such as proprietary content for SEO or capital for paid ads—that must be secured and scaled alongside the product.

"SEO becomes a ranking-algorithm competition (who can capitalize on their content in such a way that ‘deciders’ like Google want to continue to send traffic their way)."

Building a sustained social product for a Gen Z audience requires a long-term commitment to capturing critical mass within localized, high-density networks before attempting broad viral expansion.

"It took years to build critical mass by launching at enough schools to see a significant inflection in our growth and the development of real network effects. This August, we reached fourth overall in..."

True product-led growth occurs when the product is architected so that existing users naturally recruit new users, creating a self-sustaining cycle.

"Normally, to grow your business, YOU need to go find every new users or customer. However, if you’re building a product like DoorDash, Faire, Substack, Dropbox, Eventbrite, and many of the companies y..."

Marketplaces can significantly lower acquisition costs by recruiting suppliers who have an inherent motivation to bring their own audience to the platform.

"The key is that your supply has a clear motivation to bring you demand. With this loop, Cameo can focus most of its efforts into recruiting celebrities, knowing that much of the other side of the mark..."

A comprehensive funnel audit requires combining personal walkthroughs, observation of non-technical users, and granular data analysis across different user segments.

"Go through your own flow. Put yourself in the shoes of your major customer groups. Where do you find yourself getting stuck, confused about what to do next, or distracted?"

Mapping your growth model allows you to identify the specific mathematical levers that drive your North Star metric and reveal your business's biggest constraints.

"Start with your business’ north star metric —whether it’s revenue, subscriptions, or media consumed— and figure out what set of levers move that metric. [...] This combination of levers is often refer..."

Mapping a PLG funnel requires designing a frictionless journey from the initial marketing touchpoint to a self-service purchase.

"Start by mapping out the major steps of how users would interact with your product-led growth motion, such as marketing site, free version, and checkout flow."

A successful PLG audit identifies friction by combining first-hand walkthroughs of the user journey with quantitative data on drop-off points.

"Run through the entire user journey from a customer's perspective to understand where potential bottlenecks and pain points exist. This includes the initial website visit, the sign-up process, the ini..."

Scaling a network-effect business is a process of 'copying and pasting' successful atomic networks into adjacent markets until they become interconnected.

"The concept of atomic networks is powerful because if you can build one, you can probably build two. Each one often becomes easier, because each network can be intertwined with the next—Slack’s succes..."

Unit economics provide the necessary context to determine if your customer acquisition and monetization strategies are sustainable.

"Payback period: Average time to pay back CAC. Gross margins: Net sales revenue minus the cost of goods sold. ARPU: Average revenue per user. Growth spend efficiency: CAC/LTV."

Sustainable long-term growth is driven by one of four core loops—SEO, paid ads, sales, or virality—where outputs are directly reinvested to generate new inputs.

"The growth engine is a self-sustaining growth loop that drives nearly all your growth long-term. Of all the components, the growth engine is the most important because it’s the only component that can..."

Temporary surges in growth can be manufactured at any stage through time-bound, high-impact events like PR, viral content, or major platform features.

"Turbo boosts are one-off events that accelerate growth temporarily but don’t last. There’s some overlap here with kickstarts, but the difference is that kickstarts are effective for getting you starte..."

A growth engine is only effective if you can consistently provide the specific input it requires, whether that is content, capital, or active users.

"Fuel is the input that your engine runs on. The way to think about fuel tactically is to work backward from your engine—the more (right kind of) fuel you have (e.g. more users), the faster you’ll grow..."

Performance marketing should not be an isolated function but a core driver that dictates supply acquisition and business alignment.

"When paid marketing is just a function, optimizing campaigns in a cubicle, it doesn’t inform the rest of the business and the funnel doesn’t work. There just isn’t much you can do to optimize paid ad..."

True scale is achieved by building the entire organization's machinery to specifically serve the needs of your primary acquisition channel.

"Think about product-channel fit: How can you create a product / company / organization that the machinery of the org was built to fulfill the needs of the customer from that channel?"

Growth strategy should evolve from early drivers like SEO to a relentless focus on the paid channel that best matches your product's user intent.

"People talk about Product-Market Fit. We realized we needed Product-Channel Fit. And it became clear Google AdWords was that for us. Initially, SEO was the primary growth driver, but eventually, growt..."

Massive product growth is typically driven by concentrated one-to-many broadcast moments rather than the mythical many-to-many viral spread.

"Digital blockbusters are not about a million one-to-one moments as much as they are about a few one-to-one-million moments. Extended to the full world of hits, this new finding suggests that articles,..."

A successful growth strategy combines viral loops to maximize ongoing free growth with periodic broadcast events to inject large numbers of new users into those loops.

"Even though products don’t grow virally for long, it’s still absolutely worthwhile to optimize mechanisms of virality (e.g. word of mouth, invites, referrals, a remarkable product), since that can dri..."

Investor interest depends on the quality and sustainability of revenue, requiring a deep breakdown of ARR components and efficiency metrics beyond the headline growth rate.

"Beyond simply growth, it’s equally important to look at components of ARR (new, retained, expansion, resurrection, contraction, churn) and customer concentration, and be mindful of the sustainability..."

Payback period benchmarks vary significantly by business model, requiring startups to measure their efficiency against specific industry standards for B2C, SMB, or Enterprise sectors.

"For B2C businesses, a payback period ofless than 1 month is GREAT, 6 months is GOOD, and 12 months is OK. And the exceptional cases can pay back their acquisition costs on the first transaction."

To avoid artificially optimistic growth metrics, payback periods must be calculated using gross profit rather than top-line revenue.

"The biggest mistake founders make when calculating their payback period is looking at revenue, without subtracting the cost of good sold (i.e. margin): “If a startup acquires a customer for $100, and..."

Blended payback metrics can be misleading because they allow free organic growth to disguise the inefficiencies of paid acquisition channels.

"It’s important for teams to report payback on paid CAC, and not blended. Teams will eventually want granularity into customer quality by acquisition channel, but as a starting point, it’s important to..."

Startups can accelerate their growth loops by incentivizing upfront cash collection through annual plans, effectively creating a self-funding acquisition engine.

"Businesses with a high proportion of annual plans will have a shorter payback period because you collect the cash up front! This is a key lever for businesses to pull, especially D2C companies that go..."

While short payback periods are generally preferred, longer windows are strategically sound for mature businesses with highly predictable, high-value customer lifetimes.

"It is important to remember that what really matters is the ultimate LTV of the customer. If your product is incredibly sticky (i.e. more than 5-year LTV) or shows high growth in account (through addi..."

Initial payback targets should be set based on the specific loyalty, purchase frequency, and switching costs inherent to your product's category.

"I tend to start with a baseline of wanting to see payback within 6-12 months. That’s usually something that you can predict with relatively decent confidence and, if you’re growing quickly, allows you..."

Payback period is a superior metric for early-stage startups because it provides a concrete measure of cash flow rather than relying on speculative long-term LTV projections.

"Increasingly, startups are focusing on payback periods over LTV/CAC ratios because accurately calculating LTV for an early-stage company is highly suspect. This is the same reason you don’t want long..."

Creating secondary side-products or 'drops' can capture market attention and funnel high-intent users toward your primary brand.

"Launch a non-core product offering that gets attention, which reflects attention toward your brand and/or core product."

Urgent, limited-time promotions create a clear catalyst for user conversion by leveraging humor, novelty, or cultural timing.

"Running a promotion on your existing product, giving people a reason to pay attention and act."

Using a contribution margin break-even framework for paid growth is often more realistic than LTV-based models when unit economics vary across markets.

"In paid, we invest based on a ‘Time to Contribution Margin Break-Even.’ We don't invest on an LTV basis because every market is different. To say we can predict unit economics of each business and mar..."

When long-term unit economics are difficult to forecast, a contribution profit payback model is the safest framework for paid marketing.

"The way we think about it is if we put out $5 to acquire a customer at time zero, how many months does it take to generate $5 in contribution profit (everything above fixed OpEx - like salary and rent..."

Turbo boosts provide meaningful one-off spikes in awareness and growth but are inherently unsustainable as long-term acquisition engines.

"Turbo boosts—one-off growth spikes that quickly fade: PR (e.g. Snapchat Spectacles launch), Viral content (e.g. Dollar Shave Club video), Influencer posts (e.g. Kylie Jenner and Casper), Marketing cam..."

Choosing a content-driven growth strategy requires matching your content source—users or employees—with your primary distribution goal of either search discoverability or social sharing.

"Where you sit on this 2x2 is based on what you’re optimizing for (SEO vs. virality) and who’s generating the content (users vs. employees)."

The choice between SEO and viral content depends on whether your product solves an active search intent or provides a social hook that benefits from word-of-mouth discovery.

"Is your goal to bring SEO traffic, to drive virality, to build your brand, or to enable sales? Make sure you’re clear on this."

Treat YouTube as a search engine initially to build a baseline audience before transitioning to high-engagement, algorithmic content designed for broader reach.

"Our first strategy on YouTube was SEO: creating videos that answer questions people are looking for (i.e. ‘pitch deck’). Once we built an audience, we produce content focused on the YouTube algorithm:..."

Growth in the AI era requires shifting from direct distribution to building an ecosystem of trusted intermediaries who already have access to your target audience.

"Instead of going directly to your prospects, go through intermediaries who already have access and trust with your audience. ... a flywheel emerges when you properly implement this overarching strateg..."

Mapping a successful ecosystem requires moving beyond isolated tactics to identify a interconnected network of partners that already hold the attention of your prospects.

"You’re likely familiar with the individual tactics within an ecosystem strategy: influencer and creator relationships, channel partnerships, developer relations, communities, product integrations, and..."

Select ecosystem partners based on their existing credibility and the level of trust they have earned with your specific target audience segments.

"Since their product centers on trust, it’s smart to partner with high-trust creators who their (compliance-minded) audience already knows. It’s clear that a significant share of their paid spend now g..."

Ecosystem-led growth is a force multiplier that should be used to enhance the credibility and performance of every existing marketing channel.

"Ecosystem partners fuel inbound, add value and credibility to your outbound messages, accelerate product virality, make events more enticing, and ground lifecycle marketing in real use cases."

Scaling a creator program requires moving from simple sponsorship to providing structured formats and virality-based incentives.

"Gamma built an ecosystem of micro-influencers across TikTok, Instagram, X, and LinkedIn to show off presentations built with Gamma’s AI design tool. They paid them not just to post but offered a bonus..."

Building product integrations with fast-growing complementary tools creates a natural distribution channel that expands as your partners scale.

"The Postgres development platform and database became the default backend for vibe-coding products like Lovable. As these companies grew, so did Supabase. In addition to these “integration” partners,..."

Products frequently fail not because of their features, but because the company chose a distribution channel that didn't align with their route to market.

"What is a sales channel? It’s a route to market for a product or set of products. It can range from your website to a sophisticated sales force. Selecting the right channel is critical for any busines..."

Startups must identify a unique distribution advantage to reach their target audience more efficiently than competitors in an increasingly crowded market.

"To break through the noise, and often to even raise money, you need a unique distribution advantage. You need to find a way to go directly to your early target audience more cheaply and quickly than y..."

Long-term success at scale requires dominating a single primary growth channel within your specific market.

"At scale, there’s essentially only one winning strategy: Become world-class at one growth channel (performance marketing, virality, content, or sales) within your market."

Leveraging a pre-existing audience provides an immediate unfair advantage by creating a free, direct connection to your target market.

"Start building an audience, ideally on a platform that draws the type of people you’ll eventually want to sell to."

Being an early adopter of a new, rapidly growing platform can provide massive distribution before competition saturates the channel.

"Tinker with new platforms (e.g. VR, Snapchat apps, Substack, etc.) when they do launch to see if they are worth investing in, and check out Mike Maples’s writing on inflection points for inspiration o..."

While difficult and time-consuming, a well-placed partnership with an established player can provide a startup with massive early distribution.

"Come up with a list of potential partners and ask yourself what you can do to help them achieve their goals. Then go find someone at these companies to pitch, and figure out how long it might take to..."

Organic online growth is driven by creating a product or company story so compelling that influencers, reporters, and users are naturally excited to share it.

"The next best (a.k.a. cheapest) way to learn of new products is to see people on the internet (organically) talking about them. This includes seeing social media posts, press, influencers organically..."

For physical products, high visibility in the "wild" and attractive design turn every existing user or shelf placement into a discovery engine.

"Many new products are discovered by people simply happening upon them while being out and about in the world—noticing a new cereal on the shelf, seeing a Tesla drive by, peeping a Peloton sitting in a..."

Out-of-home advertising serves both as a long-term brand builder and a surgical tool for capturing specific audiences in concentrated geographic areas.

"This is traditionally a hard channel to measure a return on investment in, but can build a massive brand moat if done well (e.g., Nike, Apple, and Coke). It’s also a powerful tactic to get the attenti..."

In-home promotions are ideal for Direct-to-Consumer brands with high margins or recurring revenue that can offset the significant costs of TV and direct mail.

"Direct mail particularly has become a staple of DTC product growth strategies, and podcast and newsletter ads have been an increasingly popular way to get in front of new customers. This channel is be..."

Outbound sales is the necessary engine for complex, high-value enterprise products or for early-stage startups searching for their first handful of customers.

"This channel is best suited to products: That have high AOVs and high LTV (to support the cost of a sales team), That require hand-holding to be successful, That are just getting started and looking f..."

Early growth is typically driven by mastering a single acquisition strategy rather than spreading resources across multiple channels.

"Most startups found their early users from just a single strategy. A few like Product Hunt and Pinterest found success using a handful. No one found success from more than three."

Physically visiting high-density hubs of your target audience allows for immediate demand validation and high-conversion onboarding.

"Tony and the team printed a bunch of flyers charging $6 for delivery and put them all over Stanford University. He and the team first wanted to see if there was demand. That was how it all started."

Targeted online growth stems from providing valuable content to established digital communities where your specific audience already spends time.

"Drew created a simple video, demoing the product, and published it on April 2007 on Hacker News with the title "My YC app: Dropbox – Throw away your USB drive. That video brought the first users to th..."

Your personal network provides a high-trust seed group that can validate the product and ignite local word-of-mouth growth.

"When Mark finished the site, we told a couple of friends. And then one of them suggested putting it on the Kirkland House online mailing list, which was, like, three hundred people. And, once they did..."

Influencer outreach is most effective when you build genuine relationships with respected community members before asking for amplification.

"Posing as a home theater enthusiast or cinephile, he would join the conversation in communities geared toward DVD fanatics and movie buffs, befriend the major players, and slowly, over time, alert the..."

Maximize the return on content creation by planning for multi-channel distribution and repurposing from the start.

"Mileage is my term for taking one content idea or marketing asset and expanding upon it, repurposing it to various formats, and/or using the same research to create a new piece of content. In short, i..."

Utilizing your existing network provides a low-friction starting point for gathering initial product feedback and users.

"The easiest and fastest way to find your early users, and a large driver of early growth for about 20% of startups, is to reach out to your friends and former colleagues."

Meet early adopters in the specific niche communities they already frequent to minimize acquisition friction.

"Go where your target audience hangs out, online or offline (e.g. forums, Product Hunt, college campuses, Craigslist, etc.)"

Influencers can act as a powerful growth catalyst by providing immediate access and social proof to established audiences.

"Some see all of their early growth come from just a single channel (e.g. Udemy and PR, Etsy and online and offline communities, Twitter and influencers)."

Tangible marketing materials are effective for bootstrapping local awareness in products with a geographic component.

"If you’re a marketplace or platform (e.g. DoorDash, Cameo, Substack): 1. Reach out to targeted strangers (e.g. DM celebs, email owners) 2. Get physical placement (e.g. stickers, flyers)"

Success in the consumer app market requires choosing a primary growth channel early and ensuring every product feature reinforces that specific acquisition loop.

"Determine how you’ll grow (e.g. paid ads, word of mouth, or SEO) and then make sure your product roadmap is actively supporting this growth engine."

Budget allocation should be a data-driven exercise focused on total business growth rather than a internal competition for channel credit.

"Different attribution models will make one channel look better than another, which can cause political infighting in siloed organizations. The goal should be to make marketing perform better, which ul..."

Incrementality testing protects companies from 'attribution fraud'—situations where marketing takes credit for customers who would have bought anyway.

"You won’t succeed at growth long-term without deeply understanding and operationalizing attribution and incrementality. You risk endlessly spending money on seemingly good ideas that have exactly zero..."

As privacy changes degrade traditional user tracking, marketers must pivot to aggregate methods like MMM and lift testing to maintain visibility.

"Although it’s true you can never achieve 100% clarity in marketing measurement, you’d be surprised at how close you can get by combining the right techniques."

The most sophisticated consumer brands use 'triangulation'—combining MTA, MMM, and CLS—to achieve the most accurate possible view of marketing performance.

"Over 40% of the brands in the database are using at least two methods together, and around 20% use all three. ... Using multiple measurement methods is like getting a second opinion after visiting the..."

Winning at paid marketing is a business-model challenge where the company with the highest customer value can afford to spend the most to capture attention.

"Paid marketing becomes a business-model competition (who can turn this customer attention into enough value that they can bid more than anyone else for that attention)."

One-off 'turbo boosts' like creative PR stunts or community infiltration are essential for building initial momentum before a sustainable growth engine takes over.

"Note, even though there are a limited set of strategies, there are infinite ways to be creative about how you execute each of them, e.g. Netflix infiltrating DVD forums, Hipcamp setting up tables outs..."

The most effective way to kickstart a labor marketplace is to identify and master the four primary supply acquisition channels: job boards, direct outreach, word of mouth, and paid social.

"Labor marketplaces are generally heavily supply-constrained—meaning their growth is bottlenecked by their lack of supply—so it’s crucial that founders of labor marketplaces nail their supply growth st..."

Selecting the right growth channel requires identifying where your specific supply-side demographic already spends their time and searches for work.

"No question, the single most popular channel for early supply growth in a labor marketplace, particularly for companies that focus on one type of role (e.g. nurses), is posting a generic role to an ex..."

Supply-side participants are best reached through a combination of highly targeted digital ads and the use of authentic user success stories that resonate with their specific needs.

"We saw a lot of success with ads on LinkedIn, FB, and Google. Also niche podcasts and newsletters. Surprisingly effective and low CAC."

Building a community before a marketplace provides a pre-vetted supply pool and a deep understanding of the professional pains the product needs to solve.

"For us, we started by building a community. ... And then it grew to be a huge community, and this is back when every tech company said they had a pipeline problem, but we just kept growing, so we were..."

A market downturn can create a unique window for 'land grabs' where decreased competition leads to significantly lower advertising costs for stable companies.

"Right now CAC is low, and LTV is forever. Broad audience prospecting."

Standalone, ungated tools can capture high-intent search traffic and provide a friction-free bridge to your core product.

"These “sidecar” products help you attract a high-intent audience, add value to their experience (no paywall or gates required), and then nudge visitors to create an account (often to save their progre..."

Focus your resources on mastering one primary growth engine—self-service, sales-assist, or outbound sales—as these drive the majority of growth for top B2B companies.

"Most of your growth will come from one of the top three: inbound self-service, inbound sales-assist, or outbound sales. Spend most of your time optimizing that channel."

Sustainable acquisition in consumer subscriptions is achieved by maintaining high free user growth while keeping the payback period under six months.

"Free user growth: MoM growth in free/trial users [*Over 20% is great*]. Payback period: How long it takes to recover the cost of acquiring a new customer from their subscription revenue [*Under 6 mont..."

Maximizing raw sign-up volume can be counterproductive if the additional users lack the intent required to activate and convert.

"I recommend that you replace sign-ups as a core marketing KPI with activated sign-ups, which creates a stronger alignment between marketing and product. Then revisit your onboarding flow with the mind..."

The first 1,000 users are typically acquired through manual, unscalable tactics that put the product directly in front of a specific niche.

"‘Kickstarts’ are unscalable tactics for acquiring your first 1,000 users. Once you get going, your strategy will shift to building a scalable growth engine, but for now, don’t worry too much about tha..."

B2B startups should view out-of-home advertising as a long-term investment in brand awareness and future recall rather than a tool for immediate lead generation.

"It’s important to remember that billboards and other OOH spots are broad-stroke mediums, so they work best for high-level brand awareness, rather than immediate pipeline generation. For B2B businesses..."

High-impact billboard creative relies on simple, emotionally resonant concepts that are easily understood by the target demographic at a glance.

"The most important thing is a simple and compelling creative concept—ideally one that elicits an emotional response. It doesn’t have to be humor (as we typically lean into), but it has to be easily un..."

Successful out-of-home planning requires mapping your target audience's physical commute and movement patterns to maximize high-frequency impressions.

"For out-of-home, it’s not enough to know who your ideal buyer is; you have to understand their physical habits—where they live, where they work, and how they move back and forth."

Out-of-home campaigns achieve their greatest ROI when physical placements are treated as content for a broader, coordinated digital and social media push.

"The best tip I can give someone planning to invest in OOH for the first time is to get loud on social media when the campaign goes live. Hire a professional photographer to take photos of the placemen..."

While direct attribution for physical ads is imperfect, success should be measured through correlated lifts in branded search traffic and self-reported attribution from sales opportunities.

"During the campaign, we saw a more than 25% uplift in branded search traffic and an over 70% increase in branded search clicks globally (social media is powerful!). We also sustained a 10% to 15% upli..."

Startups should invest in OOH when they have the financial runway to prioritize long-term brand intuition and logical audience presence over perfect attribution data.

"With out-of-home advertising, you should make the investment because the logic makes sense. While you should try to get a directional read on OOH impact, you also have to use your best judgment around..."

Strategically time OOH campaigns to coincide with peak industry seasons and major events where your target audience is physically concentrated.

"We don’t just think of OOH as ads; we think of them as experiences. The more you integrate your OOH strategy with complementary channels, frequency and resonance go up—and the more effective each can..."

For products with long transaction cycles, conversion optimization must focus on re-engagement and helping the user navigate each incremental step of the journey.

"Home shopping is not a short transaction cycle, so engagement was a very important – getting people activated, re-engagement them with email/push, and helping them take the next step toward buying a h..."

B2B activation is a multi-step process that must satisfy the individual user, the collaborative team, and the financial buyer through distinct value milestones.

"For B2B, there are actually multiple aha moments for different personas. With your free SaaS product, you need to get an individual user to hit the aha moment via product usage quickly. ... You need t..."

Higher conversion is achieved by removing friction from the user journey while adding guidance that helps users reach their first activation moment faster.

"Ask customer support and sales about one thing that’s blocking users."

Maximize activation by front-loading critical commitments and core mental models when user motivation is at its highest.

"Day 1 is the day your users have the most momentum they will ever have. Catching them at this moment with the right features and mental model will drive higher opt-in rates and engagement than at any..."

Significant conversion gains start with defining a narrow, measurable user behavior at the center of the design process.

"We went through the behavioral design process with the goal of boosting the number of users who linked their bank account. By redesigning the choice architecture and creating CTAs with this in mind, l..."

High-friction steps involving sensitive data require redesigning the choice architecture to make the benefit of proceeding outweigh the perceived cost.

"To do this, it needs access to a user’s bank account—but this bank-linkage step creates friction. It’s a common drop-off moment for users: 92.9% give up during the process. We went through the behavio..."

Integrating express payment methods reduces friction by eliminating manual data entry and builds user confidence through recognizable trust signals.

"Not only did this make it easier to pay, but we didn’t have to ask for the donor’s name and email address, since we get their info directly from PayPal or the mobile wallet. We also think these brands..."

Being transparent about communication frequency and clearly stating the value of a subscription can significantly increase opt-in rates.

"After we changed the checkbox copy to be up front about how many emails they should expect to get and why they should subscribe, the share of donors who subscribed more than doubled to 55%:"

Combining a polished visual design with an embedded conversion form on the homepage is significantly more effective than using a simple call-to-action button.

"A website visitor was 35% more likely to donate (that’s huge!) if they saw the new design with the embedded donation form instead of the old one. Conversion increased from 1.98% to 2.67% (strong for t..."

Ongoing assistance and proactive guidance are necessary to bridge the gap for users between initial intent and a successful outcome in complex flows.

"ARIA has four key principles: Analyze, Reduce, Introduce, and Assist. This isn’t a one-and-done process, however. The intent is not to choose a feature, go through the four principles once, and then m..."

Multi-player B2B products require a dual-track activation strategy that monitors individual user habits alongside collective workspace sophistication.

"At Airtable, we look at both user- and workspace/team-level metrics. I’ve also found that it’s better to be precise and see a low activation rate percentage among users with a high likelihood of long-..."

Quantitative validation requires testing multiple variables including the specific action, its frequency, and the time window in which it occurs.

"We ran the correlation analysis between the key events we brainstormed and the four-week retention rate (where we saw the retention curve hit a plateau). We then checked if the frequency of hitting th..."

In the absence of historical data, early-stage startups should use qualitative signals from target users to build and survey a list of potential activation milestones.

"We conducted in-depth interviews with our target segment and asked them, ‘What are the signals that this product is solving your problem?’ We brainstormed a list of actions that reflect those signals...."

The only way to confirm an activation milestone is to prove that increasing the number of users who reach it leads to a measurable lift in retention.

"Run some experiments to see if increasing the percentage of users hitting that moment increases their retention rate, to see if any of those correlative relationships translate into true causality. A..."

Improving retention requires identifying specific friction points, such as abstract messaging or intrusive permission requests, that cause immediate churn.

"Many people didn’t really understand what Slack did, even after visiting our homepage, which was too abstract at the time. People would land in the Slack app and not know what to do because of competi..."

Determining an 'aha moment' requires analyzing not just which features correlate with retention, but also the specific frequency of use required to see a meaningful impact.

"As a bonus, the Compass report in Amplitude also shows the impact of the frequency of activity on retention. For example, it helped us determine if logging food once in 7 days (versus, say, five times..."

The greatest opportunity to improve retention lies in optimizing the first-time experience rather than adding features for existing power users.

"“The standard advice of listening to long-term customers who are already retained, and adding features for them— that doesn’t work. But that’s where most product teams spend their time. In my experien..."

Onboarding is the most effective lever for retention because it is easier to guide users to existing value than to invent entirely new reasons for them to stay.

"In my experience, the real levers to improve retention dramatically are in the experience for new users. Why? Because, again, it’s very hard to invent (sustainable) new customer value — you’re lucky i..."

Systematically auditing the signup and onboarding funnel frequently reveals simple friction fixes that significantly boost conversion rates.

"Hunt for unnecessary friction points—especially during signup and onboarding—and implement best-practice fixes. There’s always something lurking here that people have overlooked."

Strategic friction ensures that only motivated users who are likely to find long-term value complete the difficult steps necessary for activation.

"Adding onboarding friction can be good. The prevailing sentiment is that friction in onboarding is bad. Not true. Friction can be critical to driving short-term adoption and long-term retention."

Optimizing conversion is a high-leverage way to boost growth efficiency and secure long-term gains.

"Increasing conversion (a.k.a fix the “leaks” in your funnel, get it?) is one of the highest ROI investments a growth team can make, particularly once you’ve got your top-of-funnel growth engines (e.g...."

Protecting a user's progress and context prevents them from wandering away from the core conversion goal.

"When you click on an Airbnb listing (in search, from the home page, etc.), it always opens up in a new tab. Why? We found that helping a user avoid losing track of all of their options helps them cont..."

Psychological nudges and constant value reinforcement keep users motivated to finish the conversion process.

"Giving users a reason to act now, by conveying a sense of scarcity (e.g. this property is usually booked), is a powerful motivator and a big conversion opportunity."

Minimizing effort through streamlined processes and optimized performance is critical for reducing drop-off.

"When you can’t remove steps from a flow, the next best thing is to set smart default answers. For example, as a new host, listing your home involves dozens of questions — your availability, your price..."

The 'aha moment' is the specific set of user actions and timeframe that serves as the strongest indicator of core value realization and future retention.

"GitLab defined their 'aha' moment as 'two users using two features within 14 days'. This indicates that the initial user found value in the product and was confident enough to invite a coworker, demon..."

User activation is achieved by minimizing the time-to-value and proactively guiding users to their first meaningful success with the product.

"You also need to think about how to provide value to your users quickly. Give users a warm start and helping them get started with your product as soon as possible. This could mean offering sample con..."

A healthy conversion funnel requires tracking progress from the initial landing page visit through activation and final signup completion.

"Landing conversion: % visitors click CTA. Activation: % visitors who “activate”, whatever that means for your product. % visitors complete your sign-up flow. % visitors signup."

Effective activation is defined by the speed at which users reach a specific milestone that demonstrates the product's core value proposition.

"Activation rate: The percentage of free/trial users who hit a valuable milestone in the first X days after signing up (e.g. meditate, watch a show, listen to a song, find a match, sync a folder, etc.)"

An effective activation milestone must be the earliest measurable action that strongly correlates with a user finding long-term value in the product.

"Your activation milestone (often referred to as your “aha moment”) is the earliest point in your onboarding flow that, by showing your product’s value, is predictive of long-term retention."

Activation rates vary significantly by product type and friction levels, making it essential to benchmark against peers in your specific category.

"Based on our survey results, broadly, the average activation rate is 34%, and the median activation rate is 25%."

Optimizing the activation rate is the most effective way to drive long-term retention because it ensures users realize value before they have a chance to churn.

"Increasing activation rate is one of the highest-leverage growth levers across most products, and it’s often the single best way to increase your retention."

To move from correlation to causality, a milestone must demonstrate a significant divergence in the long-term retention curves between activated and non-activated users.

"Users who hit your activation milestone should retain at a rate at least 2x better than those who do not complete the activation step."

Adding a time constraint to your activation definition allows you to measure the speed at which users reach their 'aha moment' and form habits.

"For example, for a multi-user SaaS products (e.g. Figma), teams often set their activation metrics on workspace- or account-level actions (e.g. “workspace with 10 items created and 2+ active editors b..."

Free-to-paid conversion benchmarks vary significantly depending on whether the product uses a self-serve freemium model, a sales-assist motion, or a time-limited free trial.

"On average, 3%-5% is a GOOD conversion rate for a freemium self-serve product, and 6%-8% is GREAT. For a freemium product with a sales-assist motion, 5%-7% is a GOOD conversion and 10%-15% is GREAT. P..."

Activation is the gateway to monetization, and success is largely determined by the quality of the user's first-day experience.

"The first-day experience is the most critical part of the user journey and represents your best shot at moving the needle on activation. I’ll typically find that 40%-60% of new users never return to t..."

Waitlist conversion rates decay rapidly over time, typically dropping by more than half if users are not onboarded within the first three months.

"For converting to a free sign-up, conversion rates range widely, from 25% to 85%, averaging around 50% if you get people off the waitlist in under a month and below 20% if you wait over three months...."

High-intent audience targeting is more effective for conversion than pursuing absolute volume from low-quality traffic sources.

"Conversion is innately tied to intent, so if you can increase the quality of the people on the waitlist, conversion will go up. One founder shared that conversion rates coming from one podcast were an..."

Waitlist engagement strategies must shift from direct conversion to re-education as the time since the initial signup increases.

"The older the cohorts, the more of a full-funnel approach you have to take. Start top-of-funnel—awareness, education, reeducating them on what the product is. People who sign up more recently have suc..."

Significant conversion improvements are found by pursuing ideal-state user experiences rather than micro-optimizing existing, flawed funnels.

"Instead of spending months or years micro-optimizing individual parts of the funnel, we stepped back and explored what the ideal booking experience would look like. In this case, it was unquestionably..."

PLG lifecycle marketing must shift focus from lead nurturing to driving specific product engagement through multi-channel, usage-triggered messaging.

"For a PLG product, however, you’ll leverage channels like email, in-app messages, push notifications, and SMS to drive product usage and user engagement—so lifecycle marketing tools such as Customer.i..."

Retention is driven by ensuring users consistently realize the product's core value and proactively resurrecting those who have churned.

"Manually onboard new users, to make sure they see your value."

Removing friction from core user flows allows users to realize the full value of a feature that they might have otherwise abandoned mid-process.

"The first consistently effective way to increase engagement with a feature is by reducing the friction associated with using it. This includes reducing the number of steps, reducing the effort to comp..."

Improving retention is the single most critical growth lever because a business cannot scale effectively if it is losing the users it acquires.

"As Brian Balfour pointed out, “if you have poor retention, nothing else matters.” As you’ll see in the examples below, it is certainly possible to increase retention, and when you can pull it off it’s..."

Blended churn metrics mask business health; cohort analysis is required to see if retention curves flatten and indicate true product-market fit.

"The easy (but less useful) way to measure retention is by looking at the percentage of active users that are no longer-active a month/week/day later, e.g. “5% of our users churn each month.” Though us..."

An effective cancellation flow prevents permanent churn by providing temporary alternatives tailored to the user's specific reason for leaving.

"One of the more successful experiments we ran at Airbnb to reduce host churn was to give hosts a way to “pause” their listing, instead of removing it. This gave them time to deal with whatever they ne..."

Retention increases when a product becomes deeply embedded in a user's workflow or social network, creating high switching costs.

"The more integrated your product is into a person life, or an organization’s workflow, the harder it is quit. For example, Slack (just try taking it away), AWS (just imagine the switching costs), and..."

Accurately measuring retention requires a commitment to precise data reporting and a tailored definition of activity that fits your specific business model.

"At the same time, retention is both the most important and the least understood metric at most companies. In my experience, it takes up to six months to nail accurate retention reporting."

The choice between X-day and unbounded retention should depend on whether your product usage is regular and predictable or more chaotic and long-term.

"My general favorite method is unbounded retention because (1) I like my KPIs to be connected, proportional, and correlated to each other, and (2) unbounded retention is the inverse of churn, so it giv..."

Segmenting free and paid users is essential to prevent highly engaged customers from masking the true behavior and conversion potential of free users.

"Often a mistake I see SaaS companies make is reporting one “blended” retention, with a mix of free and paid users. This can be misleading, because users who pay for the product are likely to use it wa..."

Retaining users in a subscription model requires transforming difficult tasks into engaging habits using behavioral psychology and gamified feedback loops.

"Learning a language is hard, especially since it’s self-motivated learning. So we knew we had to create a fun experience in order to create a sticky product with good retention. We gamified language l..."

Reducing churn during a crisis requires active empathy expressed through flexible financial commitments and increased product accessibility.

"In addition to just messaging, try to remove as much friction. Double down on fremium offers, extend trials, give credits, and short-term subscription commitments. Show empathy to your markets."

A single-player mode provides the foundational retention needed to survive the difficult early stages of network building, giving the team time to iterate on social features.

"In our case, having a single-player mode gave us more time to launch and refine key social features that improved the network effects of our product. Great retention reduces the cost of making mistake..."

Social products without a core single-player utility risk a nonlinear 'inverse K-factor' death spiral where a few departures rapidly destroy the platform's value.

"As your friends start leaving, the product quickly gets significantly worse. That decay in value is nonlinear. Early departures disproportionally worsen the overall value of the network."

A significant portion of bounced users can be recovered by addressing timing, distractions, or confusion through targeted messaging.

"Most of your bounced users won’t actually want what you’re selling (sorry). But, a significant percentage of bounced users are just not ready to buy right then, or got distracted by another task, or g..."

Long-term retention is established in the first few days by ensuring users quickly reach a proven milestone of value.

"The 'aha' moment refers to the first time a user experiences value from your product. This concept originated from Facebook's early growth strategy where if a user added 10 friends within 7 days, they..."

Measure retention at both the individual user and logo levels to distinguish between individual engagement and the overall health of your accounts.

"- **User retention**: % of new users who are still active 3-6 months later - **Logo retention:** % of new companies who are still active 3-6 months later - **[L7/L30 retention](https://a16z.com/2018/0..."

Retention must be monitored at three levels: individual users, the overall company (logo), and frequency of usage (L7/L30).

"User retention: % of new users who are still active 3-6 months later. Logo retention:% of new companies who are still active 3-6 months later. [L7/L30 retention]: Number of days that users are active..."

Retention tracking should be tailored to your business model, using shorter windows for free users and longer windows for paid customers.

"As you learn more about what levers most impact the health and growth of your business (e.g. retention, margins, acquisition, etc.), focus on those. Try to narrow in on the two or three metrics that m..."

Long-term engagement is best measured by tracking the percentage of users who continue to perform high-value actions weeks after their initial sign-up.

"Cohort engagement: The percentage of users who are still doing something valuable (e.g. meditating, watching, listening, learning, matching, etc.) X weeks after signing up."

Healthy retention is marked by cohort curves that stabilize over time and a systematic ability to resurrect users who previously churned.

"Cohort retention: The percentage of paid users who are still paying X months later [*Over 70% at 6 months is great*]. Resurrection: The percentage of churned users who re-subscribe."

Segmenting churn into categories like involuntary payment failures or 'soft' usage declines allows teams to apply targeted technical and product fixes to specific loss drivers.

"Churn should always be modeled between (1) intentional and involuntary churn and (2) soft and hard churn. Where I see companies losing meaningful percentage points is in overlooking involuntary churn—..."

While monthly churn is a convenient high-level dashboard metric, deeper metrics like cohort and net revenue retention are better predictors of long-term product-market fit.

"Though you should generally spend your time focusing on cohort retention and net revenue retention instead of monthly churn—because monthly churn blends new and existing users and hides what’s really..."

True product health is found by identifying the 'asymptote' where your cohort retention curve flattens, proving that a segment of users finds permanent value in your product.

"Monthly churn benchmarks all add up to the most important retention metric of all: the point at which your cohort retention asymptotes. Chart the percentage of users remaining in a given cohort over t..."

For B2B companies, net revenue retention is the ultimate benchmark because expansion revenue from growing customers can compensate for high churn among smaller accounts.

"In SMB/Mid-Market SaaS especially, revenue retention is much more important than customer retention. Net revenue retention can look very healthy even with low logo retention in these businesses."

Monthly churn acts as a constant tax on growth, dictating the exact acquisition volume required just to prevent the business from shrinking.

"Losing 2% of users each month? Grow by over 2% and you’re 📈. Depressingly, your monthly churn stat also tells you how quickly you’ll churn through your users if you do nothing. For example, with an 8..."

User retention benchmarks vary significantly by business category, meaning a 'good' rate for consumer social would be considered a failure for enterprise SaaS.

"“Great retention is the scalable way to grow a product. It’s the best indicator of product-market fit, it is the most important factor in a user’s lifetime value, and high retention drives all of the..."

Net revenue retention is a distinct metric from user retention that accounts for expansion revenue and is heavily influenced by whether a sales model is bottom-up or enterprise-led.

"Let’s define net revenue retention as a company’s monthly recurring revenue (MRR) one year ago divided into the current month’s MRR from that same group of customers. Essentially, how much revenue are..."

Shift from one-time acquisition bonuses to recurring guarantees to attract higher-intent supply and foster long-term habits.

"Too often we indexed in a juicy bonuses (join now get $1000!). The premise of those weren’t habit forming -- a guarantee is. You naturally get higher intent users through the funnel."

Referral programs frequently provide more leverage on the supply side of a marketplace than the demand side.

"Referrals is massive on the dasher side. It is effective on the consumer side too, but less so."

Referral programs can become a company's most efficient and highest-quality growth channel by leveraging the existing user base rather than competing for traditional paid ads.

"While leading the supply growth work at Airbnb, one of the teams I oversaw built and scaled the host referrals program. The team (made up of folks much smarter than I) took it from a nascent half-func..."

A referral program acts as an accelerator for existing organic word-of-mouth rather than a way to manufacture interest from scratch.

"The added incentive that a referral program offers simply adds fuel to an existing fire. I haven’t seen referrals work when there wasn’t strong existing WOM."

Effective incentives must be high enough to genuinely motivate users while remaining within the bounds of your customer acquisition cost limits.

"The key to a strong referrals program is having an incentive that genuinly motivates people to take action. An extra $10 likely won’t cut it. Talk to your users and get a sense of what they’d get exci..."

Successful referral programs require deep data integration to track funnel health and distinguish incremental growth from simple cannibalization.

"You’ll be an order of magnitude more successful in developing this program if you have a data scientist deeply involved in the planning and iterations."

Optimization requires moving beyond simple existence to maximizing discoverability and conversion through repeated exposure across the user journey.

"Don’t expect your users to immediately (1) discover, (2) understand, and (3) be motivated to refer friends. Repeat the pitch at every touch-point, highlighting the incentive, and don’t rely on one-off..."

A successful referral program for trust-dependent products must provide meaningful incentives and tie rewards to high-value user milestones rather than just sign-ups.

"When designing your referrals program, it’s important that (1) the referer has a meaningful incentive, be it cash or credits, that (2) this program is easily discoverable, and that (3) you are incenti..."

A successful community flywheel converts organic user excitement and community contributions into predictable acquisition and retention funnels.

"Supabase shows how to turn organic pull (GitHub stars, YC adoption, vibe-coding buzz) from developers into structured funnels, lifecycle paths, and monetization."

Viral mechanics succeed by offering tiered rewards or priority access that incentivize users to act as an organic distribution engine.

"Harry’s gave users had the opportunity to earn free products by sharing an invite with friends. The more friends who signed up using your unique referral link, the bigger the prize you earned."

Word-of-mouth is the most efficient growth channel but is only viable if the product is naturally better with others or is truly remarkable.

"This is by far the cheapest and best way to grow if you can pull it off. Most products do not grow this way (and it’s nearly impossible to layer on if the product isn’t naturally suited for this), so..."

Viral growth is a function of how many users share, how well those invites convert, and the total volume of active users available to act as the engine's fuel.

"Thinking back to our formula above, you have three levers at your disposal: 1. Increasing sharing rate: More word-of-mouth, invitations, or experiential serendipity 2. Increasing conversion rate: Gett..."

Virality is only a viable growth strategy if the product is naturally better with others or inherently remarkable enough to spark organic sharing.

"You should only invest in virality if you are confident that virality will be your primary growth engine for your product. As opposed to (1) performance marketing, (2) content, or (3) sales."

Virality encompasses a broad spectrum of behaviors, ranging from active collaboration and incentives to passive observation of the product in action.

"There are three forms of virality, with 2-3 versions of each, for a total of seven types of virality: 1. Word-of-mouth virality... 2. Invitation virality... 3. Experiential virality..."

Organic word-of-mouth is triggered when a product creates an experience so remarkable that users feel compelled to share it to gain status or help others.

"Word-of-mouth is primarily driven by remarkable experiences (an experience worth remarking about), so start there."

The most sustainable viral growth comes from 'multi-player' utility, where the product provides significantly more value when used within a social or professional group.

"How might you make the user’s life easier if their friends or colleagues were also using it? e.g. easier to share content, a secure communication channel"

Experiential serendipity drives growth by making the product's presence felt by non-users through passive visibility and active content sharing.

"Experiential virality: Seeing the product in action. 6. Passively: Seeing the product as you go about your day (e.g. Citizen) 7. Actively: Being sent a piece of content from the product, which leads y..."

Incentivizing existing participants to refer their peers can reduce acquisition overhead and generate higher-quality supply than purely paid channels.

"Referrals (online program) was more impactful top-line, but Ambassadors (people referring users on the ground) were key piece to the launch strategy in each city -- seeding supply and demand ahead of..."

Virality and word-of-mouth are often the most effective and cost-efficient engines for consumer apps, particularly in the early stages of scaling.

"If you look at the composition of growth of Airbnb, WOM was by far the biggest driver early on. Way over 50% on the guest side and way over 70% on the host side."

To drive meaningful supply referrals, incentives should be two-sided and paid out only after the referred user reaches a clear activation milestone.

"Later, we had a two-sided referral program where if supply referred new supply, we would pay them $50 for each activated pro (after completing their first gig). If they referred a restaurant we would..."

Ambassadors should be leveraged not just for marketing, but as deep domain experts who provide the data and social trust necessary to penetrate a new niche.

"We’d recruit an ambassador and then work with them to understand the mechanics of their school, which took less time as we became more familiar with complex schedules. They were consistently excited t..."

Virality is most effective when it is an inherent part of the product experience rather than a manufactured marketing tactic.

"External virality is the classic form of virality through multiplayer use and product exposure, which we’ve come to associate with collaboration products like Zoom, Loom, or Typeform."

A community-led strategy incentivizes power users to create discoverable content that attracts and activates new users.

"Templates can also be a way to kickstart a community strategy where you source templates from your power users (for example, Miro’s [Miroverse](https://miro.com/miroverse/)) or even let users monetize..."

Track internal expansion by measuring the rate at which users invite colleagues and how effectively those invitations convert into active seats.

"- **Invite rate:** % of new users who sent at least one invite in the first X days - **Invite conversion rate:** % of users who receive an invite that sign-up in the next X days - **Virality factor:**..."

Virality within an organization is driven by the rate at which users invite others and how effectively those invites convert into new signups.

"Invite rate:% of new users who sent at least one invite in the first X days. Invite conversion rate:% of users who receive an invite that sign-up in the next X days. Virality factor:% of new users who..."

Scalable SEO is built by combining unique, comprehensive data sets with PR and content efforts that drive high-quality backlinks.

"SEO was and continues to be an important channel for us. We took advantage of our PR and content groups to drive traffic and links to our site, and created the most comprehensive database of homes wit..."

A successful editorial SEO program is built on identifying content gaps where existing search results fail to provide high-quality, differentiated value to the user.

"Research topics where searchers are underserved, and create content that delivers compelling, valuable, and differentiated value to those searchers."

Internal linking provides the necessary structural pathways for search engine crawlers to discover, index, and rank your content by distributing link equity.

"Internal links allow search engine crawlers to index your site’s pages more effectively by showing how your content is interconnected. This helps the search engines understand the hierarchy of your co..."

A systematic audit of your site's link architecture identifies technical errors and performance gaps that directly hinder search engine optimization efforts.

"Using a program like Screaming Frog, crawl your site to pull data for an internal link audit. You’ll learn the total number of internal links, find any broken links that take visitors to an error page..."

Leveraging high-traffic 'crawl points' as entry points for search engine spiders allows you to efficiently distribute authority to your site's deeper pages.

"These high-authority and popular pages, called “crawl points,” are locations where Google enters your site. And a page’s proximity to a crawl point influences its share of the link juice."

SEO experiments must bucket by the page level rather than the user level to ensure search engine crawlers receive a consistent experience across every visit.

"When you’re running an SEO experiment you’re testing on the page level. Thus, you need to have an experimentation system that can do your bucketing on the page level."

Executing an SEO experiment requires a longer duration than standard A/B tests to account for search engine discovery and a 'difference in difference' analysis to manage baseline traffic imbalances.

"You’ll want to let the experiment run for a while so that Google can discover the changes, and make the necessary adjustments. SEO experiments take more time than A/B tests to show impact."

Incoming organic traffic is the only reliable success metric for SEO experiments, as ranking and click data from third-party tools are often heavily sampled or geographically skewed.

"Your single source of truth is incoming organic traffic. Anything else is unreliable. If more people are coming into your site through organic traffic, then your experiment was a success."

Investment in custom SEO experimentation infrastructure is only justifiable for companies with thousands of programmatic pages where organic traffic is already a primary growth engine.

"It’s worth noting that building out an SEO experimentation framework isn’t a trivial task and that in 95% of cases, I recommend most startups avoid doing so."

Title tag experiments are highly impactful because they allow you to replace truncated, low-value descriptions with structured, high-intent keywords that match searcher intent.

"Since the title tag is truncated, there's a good chance you cut off keywords and content before they even appear there. The current implementation isn't bad, but since files do have tags associated wi..."

Successful SEO content experiments focus on unique, page-specific changes where the traffic impact can be isolated to the treatment group.

"Anything your heart desires, as long as it’s an on-page change and the effects are limited to only one page. If you want to test your title tags, meta descriptions, or image alt tags – run wild."

SEO frameworks are designed for on-page experiments like meta data updates; structural changes like internal linking require manual data science analysis because the benefit accrues to pages outside the treatment bucket.

"Anything your heart desires, as long as it’s an on-page change and the effects are limited to only one page. However, if you want to measure the effectiveness of internal linking, that’s an entirely d..."

Scaling through SEO requires long-term conviction and a massive upfront investment of resources before seeing meaningful traffic.

"SEO was a big bet because it takes a long time to see results. Often you start investing in it, and the first results you see are six months in and they’re not very encouraging. You only start to see..."

Templates function as both a high-conversion SEO landing page and a shortcut to user activation.

"Templates help you attract a diverse set of potential users by showing how you help them achieve *their* specific goal in *their* own language."

Programmatic SEO allows you to capture niche search intent at scale by generating pages for every possible product use case or integration.

"Not much content is needed—just enough to convey value and the context of how you help a user achieve their goal—but this content gets multiplied to be discoverable no matter the user’s context."

Technical documentation is an untapped growth engine if it is optimized for search and provides clear paths to product adoption.

"Most tech companies have put significant energy into documentation to let users troubleshoot problems and get help on their own. This documentation tends to be hard to find, poorly indexed in search,..."

Focus on low-volume, long-tail keywords to drive immediate conversions while building domain authority through high-quality content over time.

"Generally, the lower volume/longer tail keywords will lead to high conversions because the user is further down the funnel. (“flower shop” versus “where to buy flowers in Burbank”)"

Success in SEO for startups comes from programmatically generating high-value content that serves both users and search bots at scale.

"SEO is all about creating web pages. Lots of web pages. But not just any web pages. The secret is to create pages that are as helpful to search engines as they are to your users."

Target high-intent, long-tail keyword formulas where your unique data provides a distinct advantage over established incumbents.

"Instead, you want to create pages that capture a specific and valuable user intent. SEO isn’t about capturing the top keywords — it’s about capturing the long-tail of keywords. Sure, you won’t catch t..."

Treat SEO page creation as a programmatic 'Mad Libs' exercise where internal and public data points fill a standardized, high-quality template.

"Instead, you’ll want to create the content programmatically, using the data points that you’ve outlined in the previous exercise, and then apply it to the keywords that you’re targeting. Think of your..."

Technical fundamentals like unique title tags and robust internal linking are essential for helping Google understand site hierarchy and discover new pages.

"Internal linking: This is far and away the most overlooked SEO feature. This is the biggest optimization recommendation that I make to every company that I’ve ever consulted for. Internal links are li..."

High-velocity experimentation requires reducing friction in the testing process, starting with scrappy internal tools and evolving into robust infrastructure as the company scales.

"When systems are still in flux, you don't want to overinvest in tooling that will become outdated immediately when your data schema gets updated or some other piece of infrastructure changes. However,..."

A successful experimentation strategy balances low-effort optimizations with high-risk bets while maintaining focus on a single North Star metric to navigate trade-offs.

"When it comes to product nudges and defaults, it’s worth testing a few iterations to see if you can find a win. Staying focused on our North Star metric (total dollars raised) also allowed us to recog..."

High-velocity experimentation is only possible when a growth team has full ownership of their tech stack and a modular environment that doesn't rely on core engineering for every change.

"We invested heavily in our testing infrastructure. For example, we built a sandbox environment designed to allow us to rapidly experiment (e.g. a modularized website, Optimizely, Mixpanel, etc.). To d..."

Randomized testing is the gold standard for marketing measurement because it provides the only definitive way to observe the counterfactual.

"Testing/conversion lift studies (CLS): regularly run by marketers to validate what performance would look like if you switched a channel off, or scaled spend up or down."

Rigorous prioritization allows teams to ignore 'favourite' low-impact ideas and discover 'nice-to-have' features that are actually massive drivers of growth.

"Overall, we found that Dropbox teams that adopted DRICE were able to move their key metric by twice as much as teams that stuck to a simpler prioritization process."

Regardless of the framework used, prioritization of conversion experiments should be driven by the ratio of engineering cost to the predicted improvement in user behavior.

"One thing you’ll notice is that although there are many ways to look at it, in the end it always comes down to your best guess at ROI — the ratio of (1) effort to launch, and (2) expected impact."

Successful conversion optimization relies on a continuous feedback loop where you re-evaluate ROI after every launch to decide whether to double down or shift focus.

"Every project you ship is an opportunity to learn about what works or doesn’t. Re-evaluate ROI after you get feedback. If you see standout results around a particular hypothesis, double down with addi..."

High experiment velocity creates a compounding effect where early wins continuously multiply future growth gains over time.

"To get the best long-term gains, you should always have a sense of urgency. The quicker you launch winning experiments, the quicker those changes impact your growth. Not only that, but these improveme..."

A high-velocity A/B testing culture compounds small conversion gains into massive competitive advantages in paid marketing.

"When I left in 2012, we were running more than 100 concurrent experiments any given time, and incredibly fast paced. Anybody in the product team could still have and idea in the morning and have it ru..."

Geographic expansion becomes a powerful growth engine when the process for selecting and activating new markets is standardized and accelerated.

"For many years a big lever for us was expanding geographically. As we got better at selecting and launching new markets, each new market would reach critical growth milestones faster and faster."

Geographic expansion is a potent, one-time growth lever that is best deployed after finding product-market fit but before the primary growth engine is fully scaled.

"Expanding geographically is one of the biggest growth accelerants you’ll have, but it’s also something you can really only do once. From what I’ve seen across the growth stories I’ve gathered, broad g..."

International expansion is a strategic move to increase defensibility, capture global market share, and strengthen network effects against rising competitors.

"International expansion will make your business more defensible, create a lot of business value, and build a truly global brand. It’s also fantastic for employee morale and recruiting – when you tell..."

Growth that has hit a ceiling in one market can be re-accelerated through automated translation platforms and localized operations.

"So they implemented this new platform that automatically translated Facebook into hundreds of languages, and the growth re-accelerated."

Marketplace expansion should only occur once the first market demonstrates a self-sustaining flywheel and operational stability, unless extreme competitive pressure dictates a 'land grab' strategy.

"Expand into a second market as soon as you feel like your first market is working, you have a semblance of a playbook, and the resources to do it. If, however, you’re in an extremely competitive envir..."

Prioritize new markets by creating a weighted scoring system that combines general demographic data with niche-specific indicators of supply and demand behavior.

"Alongside population size and density, determine which 2 to 3 attributes tell you a market is ideal for your marketplace, throw your best guesses into a spreadsheet, stack-rank your options, and itera..."

Automated translation tools can scale localization faster and more effectively than manual efforts if validated by performance data.

"The localization for our ad copy was done by Google translate, even when we got really big. A lot of team members were upset with our ad copy sometimes, so we asked them to give us better copy, which..."

To avoid generic, corporate-sounding announcements, you must provide stylistic direction or explicit personas to the AI.

"Say you’re asking ChatGPT to write an announcement for a new feature. You want to make sure the phrasing is attention-grabbing and factual but that the message is also authentic to your product and cu..."

To overcome the 'event horizon of attention,' a launch must be truly remarkable—literally worth making a remark about.

"Here’s the hard truth: No one cares about your new product. As Marc Andreessen said, “everyone’s time is already allocated.”"

Involving community leaders during the pre-launch phase creates a sense of co-creation and ensures a warm reception at launch.

"We reached out to board members of the homeowners association, and they were more than willing to hear us out. After an initial conversation, they invited us to present the concept to more residents a..."

Structured briefs prevent wasted effort by forcing alignment on project goals and audiences before execution begins.

"The GACCS framework (Goals, Audience, Creative, Channels, Stakeholders) keeps teams from doing busywork, drives cross-team alignment, and helps marketers produce more work that your prospects and cust..."

A top-ranking Product Hunt launch requires significant preparation time and a strategic, multi-phase community engagement plan.

"Product Hunt is one of the most effective ways to get early users for a product. It’s free, available to everyone, and if you can pull off a great launch, Product Hunt can change your startup’s growth..."

Product Hunt is a high-effort channel that is best suited for brand awareness and social proof rather than as a primary long-term growth engine.

"With such a large investment of time and team hours, you need to ask yourself—are there better ways you could be using your time? Especially if you’re looking for a sustained increase in signups or la..."

Prioritize business growth metrics over leaderboard rankings to ensure the launch drives actual value for the company.

"First things first—set a conversion goal for your product. It’s great to aim for the top spot on Product Hunt, but what actually matters are your business KPIs: website visits, new signups, and trial..."

A 30-day pre-launch warm-up period is critical for ensuring your supporters have the established accounts necessary to influence the ranking algorithm.

"Imagine throwing a party and not telling anyone until the day of. That’s what it’s like to launch on Product Hunt without warming up your audience. Start building buzz 30 days in advance of your plann..."

Staggered global outreach prevents momentum drops and maintains visibility throughout the 24-hour competition cycle.

"One of the most overlooked strategies is playing the time-zone game to your advantage. Spreading your votes throughout the day is crucial, as is launching at 12:01 a.m. Pacific Time. Product Hunt’s al..."

The Product Hunt algorithm prioritizes engagement from established, seasoned members and discounts sudden spikes from brand-new accounts.

"If your supporters have not signed up to Product Hunt in advance and they create brand-new accounts on launch day to upvote, there is a high likelihood that these votes end up being removed by the Pro..."

Rapid local adoption is best achieved through high-density launch events in closed networks where the product is tailored to feel native to that specific community.

"The night we launched, more than half of the student body joined in just the first three hours. For our first 17 schools, we repeated this process of launching white-labeled apps, each with the school..."

Successful network launches often require counterintuitive, unscalable tactics to create the initial momentum and density required for self-sustainability.

"The networked product should be launched in its simplest possible form—not fully featured—so that it has a dead simple value proposition. The target should be on building a tiny, atomic network—the sm..."

Launching is a strategic commitment because once performance data exists, investors will weight it heavily, potentially penalizing a startup for weak early traction.

"If you’ve launched and have very little traction, it’s worse than being pre-launch, because it shows the market/value prop is already demonstrably weak. This is why no data is better than bad/small da..."

Scope a product launch by focusing on a high-polish core experience, even if it requires leaving out major expected features that haven't reached the quality bar.

"When we officially launched Figma, we limited ourselves to a core set of features that felt polished and well-designed, instead of cramming in features. We didn’t have components, styles, or even mult..."

Using actual product engagement data as a lead qualifier provides higher intent signals for sales teams than traditional marketing touchpoints.

"Meaningful product usage become the key success factors for generating PQLs (product qualified leads), which can be then passed over to the sales team similarly to MQLs. In some cases, the prospect cu..."

Product-led companies must eventually add human sales to navigate organizational sign-offs and capture larger deal sizes that self-serve motions cannot reach.

"As the company starts to scale, relying purely on self-serve often results in an asymptotic flattening of the growth curve, resulting in linear or worse, declining growth."

Sales-led companies can unlock significant growth by adding a self-serve product specifically to act as a high-quality lead generation engine.

"However, there are enough customers out there who want to kick the tires and try your product without getting into a long-term protracted negotiation with a salesperson. If you don’t have self-serve o..."

A B2B company's sales motion is not permanent; successful businesses often pivot between product-led and sales-led approaches as they scale and evolve.

"You can adjust your sales strategy down the road — Zoom and Amplitude started sales-driven and later became bottom-up-driven. Box and New Relic did the reverse."

Converting early users often requires a 'super hacky' mix of self-service flows and direct founder intervention to resolve technical or legal roadblocks.

"The first 1k-ish customers either signed up through me or self-serve (routed to me if they had questions; we also had to create a B2B TOS). The first 10 customers were all inbound and mostly SMB or bu..."

Adding PLG to a sales-led company is not about replacing the sales team but about creating a complementary funnel that lowers entry barriers and expands market reach.

"The question is not either or but both and a matter of sequencing. PLG is perfect for lowering the barrier for more people to try the product and broaden the reach."

PQLs and PQAs allow sales teams to target high-potential accounts based on real-time usage data and ideal customer profile fit.

"In the sales team involvement route, if the customer fits the ideal customer profile (like being from a Fortune 500 company), the sales or customer success team may reach out to them to provide person..."

Delaying the addition of sales to a self-serve product can allow competitors to capture high-value enterprise segments and lock you out of the market.

"The crux of this article is that waiting too long to add sales-involvement often leads to a large opportunity cost. Many successful self-serve applications saw their market position usurped by competi..."

Hire your first salesperson when you identify high-potential signals like multiple active user pods in one company or high-value signups who fail to activate.

"Rather, teams within organizations might start using Slack to communicate amongst themselves, and the addition of an “Account Manager” (psssst...it’s a salesperson) helped unify those various pods int..."

Sales teams are economically viable for self-serve products only when the human labor cost required to convert a user is substantially lower than the resulting revenue uplift.

"Imagine a situation where the average user of your software ends up spending $5,000 a year. And further imagine you know that engaging with a hung, unactivated user doubles the probability they conver..."

Effective bottom-up sales prioritization requires a data-driven approach to identifying high-potential users who have stalled in the activation funnel.

"If you can differentiate between the valuable hung users and everyone else, this can work. For example, if early Slack sees that a Director of IT from, say, Tesla had signed up for a Slack account, an..."

In a product-led sales motion, sales reps should act as guides that help users navigate organizational hurdles rather than just acting as a replacement for self-service.

"Sales reps can enhance the user’s experience by helping guide them through the buying process rather than forcing them to go it alone. Contract size used to dictate when procurement got involved. Now..."

Moving upmarket is the natural evolution for B2B SaaS because it is functionally easier to add complexity for enterprises than to strip it away for smaller users.

"It is easier to add things to adapt to enterprise than it is to start complex and then simplify over time. Removing features, flows, permissions, data fields, salespeople, etc. goes against the natura..."

A powerful B2B pitch should move from a broad market-level perspective to a demonstration of unique value rather than simply listing product features.

"The pitch structure is composed of two main parts: the setup and the follow-through. The setup is where we give customers a way to think about the entire market and get them aligned with our point of..."

Methodical feature walkthroughs fail because they force the customer to determine for themselves why your features matter and how they differ from the competition.

"Many of the B2B companies I work with use a pitch structure that is essentially a feature walkthrough. The sales rep logs in to the product and methodically takes the customer through as many features..."

To make positioning actionable, the sales pitch must be centered on the specific business value that only your product can provide.

"Differentiated value (the value we can deliver to a customer’s business that nobody else can) is the core of our positioning, so it makes sense that it should form the core of our sales pitch."

Every successful B2B startup eventually transitions from founder-led sales to a dedicated sales team, regardless of their initial go-to-market motion.

"100% of companies ended up building a sales team, including every bottom-up driven business. Most companies kick-started growth with founder-led sales."

For complex, mission-critical products, engineers and domain experts build more trust and sell more effectively than professional salespeople by focusing on technical value and shared experience.

"Instead of forcing our government customers into opportunistic pitches from professional relationship brokers, we could put former operators and engineers in the room instead. As a result, we could sp..."

For B2B companies, having pre-existing warm connections to target buyers is a significant distribution advantage over cold outreach.

"Begin building a community, a network, or individual connections to people who may one day need what you’re building. If you don’t have these connections by the time you launch, look for an accelerato..."

Finding your first B2B customers requires a manual, non-scalable sequence of actions that prioritizes high-trust relationships before moving to public launches.

"None of these seven strategies scale. That’s why they work. In B2B, it always starts with hand-to-hand combat."

Cold outreach is a highly effective tool for early-stage B2B growth provided it is creative, targeted, and personalized rather than automated.

"One of the recurring themes (and biggest surprises) across my interviews is the value, and effectiveness, of going cold outbound in the early stages—cold emails, cold DMs, cold calling. But you need t..."

Investor networks provide a warm path to early adopters, but founders must proactively audit those connections and set specific outreach quotas to maximize the channel.

"We asked our angel investors and combed their LinkedIn networks. I had a target of 15 to 18 net new IT folks at different companies to talk to every month for the first six months and probably hit 85%..."

Content creation serves as a powerful engine that builds authority and captures demand via a waitlist before a product officially launches.

"A surprising number of founders found their early customers by putting out compelling content online and first building a following."

While personal networks provide the easiest path to initial users due to high trust, they must be chosen carefully to ensure they actually match your ideal customer profile.

"Think about your friends—and their friends. Do any fit your ideal customer profile? This group will have the most innate trust (and the lowest amount of skepticism) about your idea."

Success in community-led customer acquisition depends on building social capital through genuine participation rather than direct pitching.

"When joining communities, focus first on adding value to the community. No one wants to pay attention to you if you’re there just to pitch your product."

Personal networks are the most reliable source for early B2B customers because they provide the baseline of trust required for users to take a risk on a new product.

"In practice, it’s even easier — almost every B2B business BOTH hits up their personal network AND heads to the places their potential customers were spending time. The question isn’t which of these tw..."

Systematically identifying and reaching out to influencers and target users in their existing online or offline communities is a primary driver for early B2B growth.

"In search of more feedback, we turned to Twitter which I realized we could use to determine the most influential designers. After getting the data, I further filtered the list to people that were pers..."

The necessity of leveraging personal networks increases significantly if your product requires a top-down sales process rather than a self-serve, bottom-up motion.

"Tapping your personal network is even more important if you need to “sell” your product (i.e. not going bottom-up), likely because early customers need to have a reason to trust you."

Professional networks serve as a critical asset for B2B founders, and they can be intentionally expanded through strategic partnerships and startup programs.

"It’s a huge advantage to have a strong personal network in B2B, which you can also build by bringing on a connector investor or joining an incubator such as YC."

B2B companies typically convert early users through one of three primary motions: bottom-up self-service, bottom-up with inside sales support, or outbound founder-led sales.

"It turns out there are just three strategies early-on: 1. Bottom-up + self-service: Users discover your product, sign up for a free plan, love it, and upgrade themselves in order to get more functiona..."

High-hustle, unconventional networking can provide direct access to the 'underbelly' of an industry that online research cannot replicate.

"After many dead ends, we found our mule in a health insurance sales rep named Ari. He was energized by our hustle and invited us to shadow every meeting he had lined up at the conference."

Founders must personally perform manual operations and support roles in the early days to deeply understand user pain points and build a better product.

"Suril was the co-founder and CEO at Savvy, which in the early days meant he was my insurance advisor, enrollment specialist, and customer support—basically my personal health insurance guru."

Scaling a content team requires transitioning from founder-led 'DNA' to a specialized group of at least five people who maintain the same level of product passion and quality.

"The best content will be produced by people who truly care about the product/business/topic—normally, the founders or a passionate full-time employee."

While flawed by lower-funnel bias, digital tracking and multi-touch attribution (MTA) provide the essential foundational data for online marketing measurement.

"Digital tracking is measuring marketing performance through UTM codes or tracking pixels. When tracking is discussed, “last touch” or “last click” attribution is always mentioned as the default form o..."

To build a lasting brand, avoid overly descriptive names in favor of those that spark imagination and establish consumer trust.

"A great name creates a foundation of trust with consumers, gives meaning and voice to a new idea, and builds cumulative advantage over time. Names that are too descriptive and too comfortable won’t ge..."

Renaming should move a brand from a limiting, literal description to an original name that provides the strategic flexibility to expand into new industries.

"As the company grew and developed an expense platform as well, TripActions no longer worked even descriptively. We created Navan, a palindrome that links to travel (“navigation”) but offers the origin..."

Effective naming requires a high-volume, disciplined exploration process that bypasses the low-energy results of traditional group brainstorming.

"Quantity breeds quality. Developing a brand name is a treasure hunt. You need to explore, and then explore again. And you need to explore in places where you think there may be no chance of finding th..."

Brand names can leverage sound symbolism to subconsciously communicate specific attributes like speed, cleanliness, or reliability to the consumer.

"Imagine the sound of your brand before you start naming. Should your name sound fast? Full? Reliable? ... An invented name with the Latin word for health (“san”) in the middle, a “da” sound that deliv..."

Organic growth through PR and word of mouth requires a story that is truly "remarkable"—meaning others feel compelled to remark on it.

"The more interesting, unique, or surprising your product, team, or events are, the more you’ll be able to take advantage of this distribution advantage. Note that every founder thinks their product an..."

High-impact PR stunts and media blitzes can accelerate market entry and create the necessary awareness to seed new supply and demand.

"In January 2012, to officially launch in Europe, we did a PR blitz to drum up as much press as possible with campaigns like ‘Rent the country of Liechtenstein on Airbnb.’"

Prolific guest blogging on established publications allows you to borrow the authority and audience of larger media outlets.

"Solely through guest blogging we’ve acquired around 100,000 users within the first 9 months of running Buffer."

Narrative-driven storytelling featuring real users can generate significant supply growth by creating emotional resonance that syndicated press outlets find highly shareable.

"In the early days, we saw a lot of success pitching the stories of our users to press. ... Phoebe’s story resonated so strongly with so many women, and overnight we acquired thousands of users as this..."

Establishing a regular, transparent review cadence with the CEO and cross-functional leads creates a shared understanding of product quality and accelerates decision-making.

"Product review meetings happen every Tuesday and Thursday for a total of two hours. These two hours are divided into 20-minute slots that product teams sign up to present. The agenda of these meetings..."

High-quality product decisions are best made by evaluating an entire framework of options rather than debating a single proposed solution in isolation.

"One thing I encourage for both is to first present the “option space”—it’s really powerful to have a framework that maps all possible solutions or problems and use that as a device to discuss high-lev..."

Empowered teams should own their design process end-to-end, using leadership primarily for cross-group alignment rather than detailed feature approvals.

"We are relatively extreme in letting the teams autonomously drive their own agendas. That is, once a pod has been assigned an area of responsibility, a great outcome is that they come up with the resp..."

Replacing formal meetings with continuous, asynchronous feedback loops and internal testing accelerates development cycles.

"We don’t have formal product or design reviews. It’s more ad hoc and iterative, which enables us to move faster. For example, our designers share an early design in a project-related Slack group and g..."

Structuring product reviews into distinct stages based on the development lifecycle ensures alignment on the problem before teams commit to a solution.

"Product reviews can focus on different stages of the product development lifecycle: P-Strat: long-term strategy and vision; P0: the opportunity and problem that we want to pursue; P1: the proposed sol..."

Defining quality through simple metaphors and following up with regular retrospective reviews helps teams operationalize a high bar for excellence.

"One of the product leaders came up with the 'Mona Lisa principle'—simply put, everything we ship should be like a Mona Lisa painting, something we’d be proud of putting our name on. . . Every month, t..."

Replace slow approval processes with a 'farm for dissent' model that uses transparent communication and lightweight, non-blocking jam sessions to maintain velocity.

"At Ramp, we build in the open and empower teams as much as possible to make the decisions in order to move quickly. What this means in practice is that every spec, design, decision, progress, and stat..."

Standardizing the project lifecycle into clear review phases and requiring async video updates improves PM storytelling and ensures cross-functional alignment.

"It’s actually been really good practice for the PM team, because most of these reviews come with a short video from the PM explaining what the product or project is. I think it’s great practice for PM..."

Structure product reviews as alignment sessions rather than sales pitches to ensure consistent decision-making across the organization.

"The goal of a product review isn’t to “sell” the leadership team on a new investment but to detail customer requirements, align on relative business priorities, and provide a clear direction of how to..."

You can overcome executive skepticism by recasting your proposal in a way that prioritizes the leader’s specific philosophy or values.

"It’s often more effective to speak their language and demonstrate how my proposal will help them reach their goals, not mine, because stakeholders are focused on their own problems and are more recept..."

Active synthesis and progressive alignment prevent meetings from getting stuck on misunderstandings and ensure the group reaches a decision within the allotted time.

"I seek various points in meetings to synthesize the conversation to make various people feel heard and to ensure that everyone is following along and on the same page. I can surface any misunderstandi..."

Building trust when delivering bad news requires proactively providing context, learnings, and a clear path forward rather than just reporting a failure.

"The trick to sharing bad news effectively is to imagine being on the other side of the table. What would you want to know if you were in charge? If you’re like most people, you’d want to know everythi..."

Approaching failure with transparency, optimism, and a clear plan for next steps transforms a setback into an opportunity for leadership respect.

"More than that, I’d encourage you to lean into it: “This project failed. Let me tell you what happened, what we’ve learned, and what we’re recommending as next steps.” Leaders respect people who are c..."

Effective leadership requires taking full personal responsibility for how your communication is received, treating any misunderstanding as your own failure to correct.

"But make no mistake, when this happens, it is your fault. You have to sit down and ask questions from a place of humility to hear what they took away from what you said. Take full responsibility for a..."

Executive presence is built by replacing submissive language patterns with direct, assertive phrasing that projects mature self-confidence.

"Presence is a combination of verbal cues, body language, and mindset. One of the actions you can take to improve your presence is to stop saying “sorry” when it’s not warranted."

Persuasive storytelling prioritizes the audience's business goals and strips away any context that does not directly support a decision.

"Good storytelling means you present a narrative that resonates with your audience. Focus on why stakeholders should care about the idea. For example, prioritizing a recommendation feature will improve..."

Effective tradeoff communication requires framing choices so that leaders are forced to prioritize one initiative over another instead of defaulting to unrealistic expectations.

"While presenting the pros and cons between two priorities, I’d somehow always end up committing to doing *both*, and in less time than I had planned. As you’d expect, this usually went … badly. I’d bu..."

Leaders are more likely to support your prioritization when it is explicitly tied to company-wide objectives rather than narrow team targets.

"Framing your tradeoff in terms of company goals means that they won’t have to do that same thing in their own heads. It reassures them that you’re making the best global prioritization decision for th..."

When proposing high-risk projects, assemble a multi-layered evidence package—including data, user research, and analogous successes—to justify the investment.

"To convince ourselves, and then the execs, we pulled together evidence of this idea working in other fields, including double-blind studies, experiment design, and other online review systems. This ev..."

Sending a weekly async update is a high-leverage way for new leaders to build trust and maintain visibility without adding meetings.

"I immediately start sending a regular (weekly) written update on observations, personal areas of focus, and kudos that allows you to scale leadership visibility in an async way. This is a great way fo..."

Bridge the gap between vague executive feedback and concrete product work by using user research to move discussions from opinion-based to data-driven.

"When your execs tell you that your ideas aren’t “actionable”, dig further. Why not? What would make them more actionable? Why do they think this? When they share ideas that are too blue-sky, what can..."

In high-stakes, short-notice meetings, immediately present your conclusion to ensure the core message is delivered even if the meeting time is cut short.

"As Barbara says, “you think from the bottom up, but you present from the top-down.” Save your audience time and effort by just telling them what you’ve concluded."

Colleagues evaluate the depth and quality of your thinking based on the clarity of your writing and speaking.

"Great PMs take pride in the clarity and conciseness of their documents, emails, presentations, and meetings. They know that people judge the quality of their thinking by the quality of their writing a..."

Executive-level clarity is best achieved by establishing a shared, non-controversial 'Situation' before introducing complications or proposals.

"The best executive communication starts with the state of affairs. It’s fact-based, unambiguous. It’s totally not controversial. No matter what side of an issue or a hard choice you’re on, you should..."

Normalizing asynchronous communication protects focused work time from being interrupted by non-urgent inquiries.

"For non-timely questions, avoid distracting team members by making it easy (and normal) to communicate asynchronously."

High-quality written communication requires a disciplined editing process and external feedback loops to ensure clarity.

"Force yourself to look at every email at least once before you send it. There’s always something you can cut or clarify."

Structure business narratives around the Situation-Complication-Resolution framework to provide necessary context and urgency before proposing a solution.

"If you simplify this further, there are three parts to every narrative: Situation, Complication, Resolution. 1. Situation: What is the state of affairs today. Facts, data, and unambiguous background...."

Effective communication with leadership involves sharing your problem-solving process to demonstrate autonomy while remaining open to feedback.

"Luckily, there’s a template that helps avoid all these problems: 1. Hi manager, let me tell you about a challenge I ran into ______ 2. Here’s how I’m thinking of handling it (or did handle it) ______..."

Proactively signaling your career aspirations to your manager triggers the frequency illusion, making them more likely to spot and offer you relevant opportunities as they arise.

"Start by telling your manager you want this, e.g. “Hey, manager, I just want to let you know that I’m really interested in product growth, and I want to get into a growth-focused role as soon as I can..."

To pivot a founder's core idea, you must bring them along your discovery journey by sharing real-time data and framing the change as an evolution based on new information.

"How might you bring them along the same journey you went on that convinced you that this was the wrong direction? What were the key data points, experiences, and learnings for you? Share them as you e..."

Product leaders must advocate for strategic roadmaps but ultimately commit to the CEO's direction to preserve the trust necessary to influence future decisions.

"But once a CEO has made up their mind, the product leader needs to commit to the decision. Otherwise they’ll irreparably damage their trust with the CEO."

Earning a founder's trust requires a gradual transition of product control, proven through constant communication and consistent execution.

"Start exercising responsibility and control over the product slowly at first, and then more quickly over time as you build bonds with your CEO. Don’t expect full autonomy for the first months, until y..."

A consistent, structured weekly update reduces manager anxiety and ensures you receive the support needed to clear blockers.

"I suggest sending a simple weekly “State of The Me” email to your boss with (1) your current priorities, (2) things on your mind, and (3) blockers you need help with. Try it for two weeks — it’ll work..."

Managing last-minute requests requires a transparent discussion about trade-offs to ensure the manager understands what will be deprioritized.

"When asked to take on new work, particularly last-minute, prioritize it amongst your existing priorities and most importantly share your updated priorities with your manager. Don’t assume your manager..."

Saying no effectively requires moving from a reactive stance to a structured process of active listening, independent evaluation, and constructive feedback.

"My advice to you for saying no effectively is to follow this three-step process: Step 1: Listen, ask questions; Step 2: Form your own point of view; Step 3: Respond constructively."

To successfully kill a bad idea, you must construct a fact-based argument that illustrates low ROI or high risk without appearing personally biased.

"What I find works best is to be as unbiased as I possibly can in my writeup. Let facts speak for themselves. Leave opinions off the table, especially at first."

You can effectively say 'no' to a specific solution by identifying the underlying problem and proposing a more efficient way to achieve the same goal.

"Your manager may have identified a big opportunity but may not have nailed the optimal way to tackle it. While marinating on the idea in step 2 of our process, look for a simpler, or even more impactf..."

Practicing the Socratic method when presented with new ideas helps ensure you aren't missing broader context or hidden insights known only to leadership.

"When you first hear your manager’s idea, avoid reacting with a quick yes or no. Especially if you think it’s a terrible idea. Instead, start by getting curious. Force yourself to ask at least three qu..."

Proactively soliciting performance feedback in a non-confrontational manner ensures you are meeting core expectations before attempting to negotiate for growth opportunities.

"A good way to ask is to wait until a relatively quiet time, when there is no crisis going on (or less of one than usual, for a chaotic workplace), and ask your manager if you can talk with them for a..."

Combining narrative context with an answer-first structure creates emails that are easy to digest while remaining highly persuasive for management.

"When crafting an argument, first share the Situation, then the share the Complications, and then share your proposed Resolution. That’s the SCR framework! It’s a deceivingly simple-but-powerful way to..."

Aligning early with leadership on the reality of a turnaround prevents performance misunderstandings during the transition period.

"It’s critical that your manager, and other influential leaders, understand the situation that you are being put into. It’s likely for the next 6-12 months you’ll drive less business impact than you ha..."

Validation and active listening are essential for preventing stakeholders from entering a defensive stress response that blocks alignment.

"People often won’t listen to you until they feel that you’ve fully heard them. When people don’t think you deeply understand their POV, they often become obsessed with repeating their points more forc..."

Effective remote meetings require a rigorous paper trail consisting of shared agendas, documented decisions, and clear owner assignments for all next steps.

"Whenever you’re on a call, make sure that anything that’s important gets written down. Options that were discussed, decisions that were made and next steps, plus who is going to do them. Go even furth..."

Meeting effectiveness is measured by how well a PM uses them to unblock the team and maintain alignment on the roadmap.

"Pay attention to people around you that are good at shipping — how do they run meetings, how do they address issues as they arise, what systems do they use to keep their team aligned?"

The most effective PM team meetings prioritize psychological safety and vulnerability, creating a dedicated space for peers to help each other solve difficult systemic challenges.

"Our PM team has a section carved out for “what feels hard [harder than it should be]?” The purpose of this section is to discuss sticking points up and down the stack: troubleshooting comms with Team..."

Recurring meetings should only exist if they solve a specific problem that cannot be addressed more efficiently through other channels.

"Don’t do this meeting just to do it. Make certain that adding (or continuing this meeting) is consistently worth everyone’s time. What problem are you trying to solve?"

Optimizing meeting cadence based on team size prevents burnout and ensures the content remains relevant and non-redundant.

"I’d suggest one to two times a month. The bigger the team, the less frequent. A weekly PM team meeting becomes redundant with your 1:1’s."

A living, shared agenda document fosters transparency and allows team members to prepare or contribute topics in advance.

"Put the agenda for each meeting into a shared Google doc (or whatever document platform you prefer), and link to it in the invite. As new items come up throughout the week, add to this doc."

Injecting fun and social elements into recurring meetings prevents them from becoming dreaded chores and helps build a more resilient team culture.

"PM team meetings tend to get super serious. Find ways to add a bit of joy and lightheartedness to the meetings."

AI note-taking tools allow you to stay present in meetings by handling transcription and summarization while still keeping you in control of the final output.

"As you take notes, it silently transcribes everything said in the background. Once the meeting is complete, Granola enhances your notes, summarizing what everyone said, and makes it easy to share (and..."

Completing small tasks and achieving alignment during a meeting prevents the accumulation of post-meeting administrative debt.

"Instead of adding action items from meetings to a to-do list, do the action items *live in the meeting*. With everyone watching. While screensharing."

Short, asynchronous video clips can effectively replace synchronous meetings for communicating nuanced concepts without the scheduling overhead.

"Use a Loom (or a Slack video clip) when the reason for a meeting is to communicate a nuanced, high-bandwidth concept. Treat your audience like, well, an audience; be intentional about converting them..."

Effective meetings are defined by intentionality, limited participation, and clear accountability for next steps.

"Include the goal of the meeting in your invite, ideally along with an agenda. If you attend a meeting that doesn’t feel productive, call it out. Invite as few people as possible. Leave with clear acti..."

Regular, structured peer accountability sessions maintain founder velocity and provide a support system to address the inherent loneliness of building a startup.

"Group Office Hours key question: “What are your goals for the next two weeks and what were your goals for the last two weeks? Did you hit the goals? If not, what came in the way of hitting the goals?”"

Proactively identifying information gaps and conflicting priorities is high-leverage work that prevents team dysfunction.

"Great PMs hunt for misalignment and quickly push everyone back into alignment. They know that team dysfunction is often rooted in people simply having different information, motives, or priorities. Th..."

Team alignment and performance start with a unified leadership front between the product, engineering, and design leads.

"Great PMs build a tight leadership triad with their EM and DM. They know that their team operates best when the leaders of the team speak with one voice, and since most of the team reports to the eng...."

Successful influence starts with gathering intelligence on how specific stakeholders make decisions and identifying the goals and OKRs they prioritize.

"To effectively influence stakeholders, the first step is to understand how each person makes decisions––what they value (e.g. goals, incentives), who they consult, and what they’re afraid of. I usuall..."

Partner teams with deep backlogs require evidence that supporting your project will directly help them achieve their own OKRs and metrics.

"Based on the intel I gathered about the partner team at YouTube, I realized it wouldn’t be enough to emphasize how strategic my project was to the company. The partner team had a long backlog of reque..."

Stakeholders often have different internal interpretations of a problem, making explicit alignment essential to avoid building the wrong thing.

"Problem statements are like silver burritos. Everyone on your team has a unique version of the problem in their heads. Your job is to eradicate this misalignment early and often. Open up the wrapper a..."

Consensus-based decision-making is often a trap in product development that sacrifices speed and quality for unanimous agreement.

"Operating by consensus slows everything down, it wastes everyone’s time, and rarely leads to the best outcome. It CAN work, but it’s rarely optimal."

Productive resolution of team disagreements often begins by surfacing hidden data and ensuring everyone is working from the same set of facts.

"When you find your team heading in the wrong direction, come back to the facts. Assume you’re wrong. What do you see that your team doesn’t see? More importantly, what does *your team* see that you do..."

Navigating bureaucracy effectively requires identifying the true decision-maker and framing requests with high-trust, concrete data to justify prioritization over competing tasks.

"Find the decision-maker: Who makes the final call on what’s prioritized? Focus your efforts on that person. If that person says they will defer to someone else, focus on that other person."

In scaling organizations, prioritize impact over rigid ownership by using 'heads-up' communication to pursue ambiguous opportunities without being paralyzed by a need for formal approval.

"A healthier approach that I’d recommend is to simply communicate to leadership and associated teams that you plan to tackle a project in an ambiguous area, and ask them to let you know by a specific d..."

Building strong relationships with distributed teams requires over-communicating to maintain clarity and normalizing the habit of asking for clarification.

"Good relationships with remote engineers and designers require ensuring that there are methods for avoiding miscommunication. You do this by maintaining clarity. Your goal on a remote team is to creat..."

Effective prioritization requires moving beyond anecdotal data to provide a clear, defensible rationale that respects the impact on your teammates' careers.

"To avoid this, my advice is to (1) always have a strong “why this is a problem” argument in your PRDs/1-Pagers and (2) speak with the engineer, designer, etc. in person when kicking off a non-trivial..."

Successful persuasion requires shifting from selling a solution to demonstrating how your proposal directly fulfills the specific objectives of your stakeholders.

"Buy-in is the result of showing your team why your idea achieves their goals. It sounds trite, but it’s true. In practice, however, it is difficult to do."

Early collaboration transforms stakeholders from potential critics into invested partners by giving them a stake in the project's ultimate outcome.

"If you co-create your idea with your team, your team will be infinitely more receptive to your suggestions. Co-creation means collaborating with others to identify the best solution or plan of action."

Stakeholder alignment remains a primarily human task because it requires navigating nuance and opinionated perspectives that AI cannot yet manage.

"On the other side, what are people best at? People stuff! Aligning opinionated stakeholders, unblocking blockers, pushing teams to work harder, creating amazing experiences, getting buy-in on big idea..."

Centralize the resolution of cross-team priority mismatches into a recurring, founder-led roundtable to ensure alignment with company strategy.

"If there’s ever a question about competing priorities, we flag them and review them in our quarterly planning roundtable the last week of every planning cycle. Anyone is welcome to add an item to the..."

Approaching new requests with genuine curiosity rather than defensiveness builds trust and allows you to uncover valuable insights hidden within stakeholder feedback.

"In the moment, I remind myself that the most important first reaction is to pause, think, and then ask clarifying questions instead of reacting defensively. I might say something like “That’s interest..."

Proactive and creative communication of your roadmap ensures that stakeholders already understand and respect your priorities before you have to defend them.

"The more work that your team has done up front to bring leadership into the story of your priorities and strategy prior to this decision point, the less work your team will have to do when new request..."

To overcome stakeholder skepticism, reframe your proposal to highlight how it directly supports their existing priorities and metrics.

"Initially, my pitch was around my team’s goals: increasing host retention and host engagement. But after a bit of back-and-forth, I adjusted my pitch to focus on what I knew the search team cared abou..."

Trust is a cumulative resource that must be proactively built during stable times so it can be drawn upon when you need support for difficult initiatives.

"You can charge your battery by doing things that build trust, and tap into your reserves when you need people to trust you. ... Why did Samwise Gamgee leave everything behind and risk his life to help..."

Alignment is most durable when stakeholders are brought on your thought journey early, allowing them to understand the 'why' behind the eventual decision.

"Instead, if you take the time to make sure the other person truly sees what you see, and understands why this is the correct (and only) path, they’ll follow you, and stick with you through difficult t..."

Strategic alignment with authority figures can boost your mission's credibility, but over-reliance on borrowed power eventually diminishes your own leadership voice.

"The credibility of other people/institutions will trickle down to you. ... A word of warning: The more you rely on authority, the more your authority fades. You start to become just a middle person, w..."

Likability is a fundamental pillar of persuasion; stakeholders are significantly more likely to support the initiatives of people they genuinely enjoy working with.

"A final strategy for increasing your influence is simply to be likable. It may sound trivial, but it turns out it’s one of the most powerful ways to build your influence. As Robert Cialdini (world exp..."

Adopting a shared framework for briefs creates a common language that reduces friction and alienation between marketing and product teams.

"GACCS is a simple yet flexible framework for writing a marketing brief. It’s a common language to get buy-in and alignment on marketing work. You can also think of GACCS as the one-pager for marketing..."

Effective PMs balance high stakeholder regard with the courage to reject low-value requests to ensure the product remains successful.

"It’s easy to over-index here and focus too much on people liking you and doing everything leaders suggest. You don’t need 100% of people to love you, and part of your job is pushing back on bad ideas."

Securing resources for a bottom-up idea requires combining high-energy evangelism with tangible prototypes that prove the concept's potential.

"Figma Slides was a bottom-up initiative that came to life through a mixture of prototyping, camaraderie, and optimism bordering on delusion. Evangelizing the idea at hackathons, vision pitches, and pr..."

Turning a project into a company-wide priority requires consistent, transparent sharing of raw progress to build stakeholder investment.

"Think of your product as a small flame. Your job? Grow it into an unstoppable wildfire inside your company. Do that by sharing progress early and often."

True product velocity is a vector of speed and direction, necessitating total alignment between product and engineering to ensure that moving faster actually results in customer value.

"Product velocity is about speed and direction. When teams get too focused on “moving fast” but don’t have alignment on what to work on, they end up working on competing priorities and pulling in diffe..."

Strategic alignment is often an illusion that requires structured exercises to expose and resolve divergent views among leadership.

"If I asked three co-founders to write down their startup’s target customer, I got three different answers. If I asked a team what differentiated their product from the competition, I got a 60-minute d..."

Including cross-functional partners in the goal-setting process fosters shared ownership and reduces friction over priorities and timelines.

"Designers and engineers are most engaged when they are involved in goal setting and goal breakdown. Sometimes product managers hesitate to “waste people’s time” in sessions about goals, but I would ar..."

A manager's 'first team' shifts from their direct reports to their cross-functional peer managers to ensure a cohesive leadership front.

"As a manager, your team is now your peer managers (e.g. EM, design manager, DS manager, etc). It’s essential that you work as one unit because your team will be looking to you each of you for a clear..."

PM leadership is defined by the ability to inspire teams, harmonize differences of opinion, and lobby for resources without having direct formal authority over team members.

"Surprisingly, though not so surprisingly (since PMs are generally de facto leaders of their team), leadership ended up being the single most cited PM skill, highlighted by 85% of the companies (all bu..."

Influence in product management is earned by empowering cross-functional partners rather than relying on positional power.

"The best PMs quickly become the de-facto leaders of their cross-functional teams, not because of any actual authority, but because they help everyone on the team do the best work of their lives."

Investing time in strategy is the only way to resolve the 'why' confusion that leads to stalled projects and unproductive internal debates.

"At Headspace back in 2016, we had established our product roadmap and success metrics and our mission and vision, but teams were still confused about why we were working on the projects we chose. With..."

When roles overlap, initiate a direct, one-on-one conversation to align on ideal responsibilities and codify a plan before escalating to management.

"First, try to work it out the person directly — If at all possible, talk to the person about this one-on-one first. I bet you they are feeling the same frustration."

Internal advocacy requires persistence and the use of low-cost experiments to prove demand before formal resources are allocated.

"Unfortunately, I was terrible at selling the idea, and for five years, nothing happened. We tried hackathons, enlisting interns, and testing new products (Wishlist, I’m looking at you), but we never q..."

Effective product leadership requires leading through influence and collaboration rather than assuming top-down authority over peer teammates.

"Your teammates didn’t sign up to report to you. They are your peers, and they expect for their ideas to be heard and their input to be taken into account. The good news is that this will actually lead..."

The composition of your project team and meeting attendees is as critical to the outcome as the work itself.

"Think carefully about who you want on your next team. Who’s going to help you align, make decisions, and ship—and who’s going to derail everything?"

The success of a decision-making meeting is determined by the alignment work performed behind the scenes before the session starts.

"Don’t go into important decision meetings not knowing how key stakeholders will feel. Meetings should be low-drama and full of non-surprises. To accomplish this, do the pre-work."

Proactively identifying and correcting friction between cross-functional partners is one of the highest-leverage activities for a product leader.

"An important habit of highly effective product managers is to be endlessly hunting for misalignment—and quickly pushing everyone back into alignment. For example, rooting out misalignment between desi..."

Interpersonal influence is built on the foundation of high-quality evidence combined with professional trust.

"I’m reminded of how much of your ability to influence others really boils down to two things: (1) how convincing your evidence is and (2) how much people trust you, your evidence, and others on your s..."

Prioritizing high-volume, repetitive tasks ensures that AI adoption yields immediate, visible productivity gains.

"Most companies fail at AI adoption because they try to do everything at once. Instead, find the high-volume and repetitive tasks that are taking up the most employee time and streamline those first wi..."

Choosing the right AI optimization technique requires identifying whether the goal is to specialize the model's behavior or provide it with dynamic, external context.

"RAG is a technique that gives models access to additional information at run-time that they weren’t trained on. It’s like giving the model an open-book test instead of having it answer from memory."

The most effective way to integrate AI into an existing product is to identify a high-friction 'chore' within the core workflow where automation offers immediate and substantial time savings.

"Start with a core workflow that feels like a chore where the promise-to-payoff is high if you get it right. You want to select a place where the upfront user effort (like taking the leap to try it out..."

As foundation models become commoditized, product defensibility shifts to proprietary data ownership and the creation of superior, vertical-specific user interfaces.

"The data and the interfaces may become more important than the models themselves, which are becoming increasingly commoditized, available via open source, and pushed to the edge. ... The AI products I..."

Startups can build defensible moats against incumbents by tackling complex problems that current foundation models struggle with, turning future model improvements into tailwinds.

"It’s actually easier and safer for startups to work on hard problems, problems that cannot quite be solved with today’s foundation models. We’re excited about riding the capability curve of improving..."

High-quality AI output is less a function of the base model and more a result of 'good old-fashioned product engineering' like feedback loops and post-processing filters.

"Most people think about AI-assisted services in terms of the model quality, but model quality is just a tiny piece of the total product. It turns out that post-processing filters, contractual guarante..."

GPT-3 is essentially a probability engine that generates text by predicting the most likely words to follow a given prompt based on statistical patterns from its training data.

"GPT-3 and ChatGPT are both “large language models.” These are machine-learning models that are very good at generating natural-sounding text, code, and more. They’re trained using large data sets of t..."

AI allows content creators to transform static, one-way archives into interactive, two-way conversational experiences.

"The best way to prepare for a fast-approaching future is to dive in and get your hands dirty. That’s what I’ve been doing over at Every—I’m writing weekly about my experiments with using GPT-3 to buil..."

Avoid building with AI for its own sake by ensuring every technical implementation addresses a validated and data-backed user problem.

"Don’t fall for the “shiny object trap.” Make sure there is a problem and pain point that needs to be solved in a smart way. Once you figure that out, only then figure out how to implement it (by hirin..."

Managing AI projects requires shifting from a deterministic launch mindset to one that embraces long-term scientific experimentation and high uncertainty.

"PMs should get comfortable with having research scientists on their teams. A lot of PMs are very used to saying, “Okay, I’m going to do XYZ on launch” and don’t know how to approach researchers."

AI products require a development lifecycle that accounts for non-deterministic behavior and the constant tradeoff between system agency and human control.

"AI systems behave differently. They introduce non-determinism on both ends: in other words, there’s unpredictability in how users engage and how the system responds."

Transitioning to higher AI autonomy should be data-driven, occurring only when you have sufficient signal that the system performs reliably under real-world noise.

"How long you stay in each version depends entirely on how much behavioral signal you’re seeing. You’re optimizing for understanding how your AI behaves under real-world noise and variation."

Real AI adoption is signaled by a move away from flashy demos toward rigorous evaluation frameworks and accuracy metrics.

"Instead of focusing on shiny demos, look for rigorous data and evaluations. I’ve seen too many PMs present flashy demos to executives only to stumble when asked about data and evaluations (including s..."

Evals serve as the unit tests for AI products, transforming subjective quality assessments into objective, quantitative benchmarks.

"Evals (short for “evaluations”) are structured ways to measure how well an AI system performs on specific tasks, such as correctness, safety, helpfulness, or tone. They define what “good” looks like f..."

Evaluations provide the empirical data needed to move beyond subjective "vibe checks" and ensure an AI product's long-term quality and reliability.

"Evals are the only way you can break down each step in the system and measure *specifically* what impact an individual change might have on a product, giving you the data and confidence to take the ri..."

Selecting the right evaluation method involves balancing user accuracy (human evals), speed (code-based evals), and scalability (LLM-as-judge).

"LLM-based evals allow you to generate classification labels in an automated way that resembles human-labeled data—without needing to have users or subject-matter experts label all of your data."

Writing effective evaluations requires a structured prompt that defines the role, data, success criteria, and specific labels for the LLM judge.

"Clearly articulating what you want your judge-LLM to measure isn’t just a step in the process; it’s the difference between a mediocre AI and one that consistently delights users. Building these writin..."

High-quality AI products require a continuous loop of capturing real user data, running automated evaluations, and iterating on the system based on those findings.

"Gathering data to evaluate, writing evals, analyzing the results, and integrating feedback from evals is an iterative workflow from initial development through continuous improvement after launch."

The biggest missed opportunity for AI product managers is failing to move beyond manual testing and prompt obsession into systematic evaluations.

"After years of building AI products, I’ve noticed something surprising: every PM building with generative AI obsesses over crafting better prompts and using the latest LLM, yet almost no one masters t..."

Use standard, battle-tested criteria like hallucination and correctness to catch common AI failure modes before they reach users.

"As a user, you want evals that are (1) specific, (2) battle-tested, and (3) test for specific areas of success."

AI evaluations only drive product improvement when they are grounded in real-world failure modes rather than generic metrics.

"Many teams build eval dashboards that look useful but are ultimately ignored and don’t lead to better products, because the metrics these evals report are disconnected from real user problems."

Systematic error analysis transforms anecdotal observations into a prioritized taxonomy of failures that defines your evaluation strategy.

"The process that tells you where to focus is referred to as “error analysis” and should result in a clean and prioritized list of your product’s most common failure modes."

Automated judges must be grounded in human-labeled datasets that use binary labels and critiques to ensure alignment with your quality bar.

"The expert’s task is to provide two things for every user interaction with your AI, grouped by session: a binary pass/fail judgment and a detailed critique."

Evaluating multi-turn sessions rather than isolated turns is essential for capturing context loss and conversation flow issues.

"It is through the process of reviewing outputs and articulating what feels “wrong” that the true criteria for success emerge."

Traditional engagement metrics are often inflated by 'tourist' curiosity, making longitudinal retention the only reliable indicator of true AI product-market fit.

"Demo value isn’t user value. Building a cool AI demo doesn’t mean we have a product that customers love and is useful."

AI models often prioritize sounding confident over being factually correct, necessitating that you provide specific context to 'ground' their answers.

"Hallucination is a technical term that refers to the model’s propensity to return nonsensical or false completions depending on what’s asked of it. Basically, the model is like a very smart and overea..."

Evaluation metrics for AI must be designed to mitigate non-determinism by measuring how closely system responses align with curated reference data.

"In our framework, product builders work in a continuous loop of development (CD) and calibration (CC). During development, you scope the problem, design the architecture, and set up evaluations to kee..."

AI maintenance is a calibration process of identifying specific failure patterns in production and applying targeted fixes to reduce non-determinism.

"Once you’ve deployed, you enter the calibration loop, where you observe real behavior, figure out what broke, and make targeted improvements. With every cycle, the system earns a bit more agency."

A reference dataset is the essential baseline for AI development, providing a concrete standard for what expected behavior and necessary context look like.

"Since most products start cold, aim to gather at least 20 to 100 examples up front. This dataset helps you evaluate system performance and also tells you what context your assistant needs in order to..."

AI features require proactive UX design and user education to help people overcome the paralysis of an empty prompt box and build trust in probabilistic outputs.

"All of this underscored to us that AI tools require a combination of intuitive product design and broader, ongoing education to support these behavior shifts. You can't ‘flip the switch’ with AI—socie..."

Successful AI scaling requires versioning features based on an 'agency-control' ladder, where autonomy is increased only after performance is verified at lower levels.

"Start by identifying a set of features that are high control and low agency (version 1 in the image above). These should be small, testable, and easy to observe. From there, think about how those capa..."

Building AI systems without early human-in-the-loop controls creates 'black box' issues that make debugging and tracing errors impossible.

"If you haven’t tested how the system behaves under high control, you’re not ready to give it high agency. And if you hand over too much agency without the system earning it first, you may lose visibil..."

Product-led growth transforms the product itself into the primary vehicle for distribution, customer education, and revenue generation.

"At its core, product-led growth (PLG) is about leveraging your product to acquire, activate, convert, retain, and monetize your user base. In PLG, your product is not only the set of features that sol..."

Visualizing the user journey helps identify necessary shifts in data infrastructure and organizational structure required to support a product-led motion.

"If you don’t have a PLG funnel today, draw a potential funnel out on a whiteboard. Imagine how a potential customer would travel through that journey, and how your product and teams might need to chan..."

Focusing your initial PLG investment on your funnel's tightest bottleneck ensures the fastest learnings and highest ROI.

"Ask yourself: What is the biggest constraint—and potential unlock—in your growth model? Is it (1) acquisition, (2) activation, (3) conversion, or (4) retention/expansion? The answer to that question s..."

PLG is a holistic business strategy that fails when treated as a collection of minor product tweaks or simple UI updates.

"To be successful with PLG, you’ll need to invest in multiple areas at once and work through multiple initiatives. It is never as simple as making one change (e.g. opening a free trial or adding an onb..."

Adding a PLG motion to a B2B product requires a sequenced approach: establish data foundations first, then implement optimization tools, and finally build dedicated teams.

"If you want to launch a PLG motion, data infrastructure is an absolute must. You need to be willing to make the investment to build it out. Once you have it in place, implement an experimentation plat..."

Treating 'free' as an acquisition tool rather than a monetization plan allows you to lower barriers to entry and capture market attention.

"Making a product free isn’t a revenue, pricing, or monetization strategy—it’s an acquisition strategy. It’s always a means to lower CAC, increased virality, and a way to get people’s attention in a cr..."

Forcing a pure product-led growth model can cause revenue to stall if the product requires human sales intervention to navigate enterprise complexities.

"And actually, revenue flatlined. Revenue was growing, and then in Q2, Q3 of 2015, it started flattening. So around Q4 it was starting to become kind of clear that, okay, this product-led-growth thing—..."

PLG is not a fit for every business; it requires a product that can deliver value autonomously and a market large enough to support a high-volume funnel.

"For example, if your product requires extensive customization for the customer to see value, or if you are targeting only a handful of large companies, then PLG may not be the best approach."

A product's suitability for self-serve depends primarily on how easily a target user can reach an "aha" moment without external assistance.

"Successful self-service is about allowing a user to get to success and have that “aha” activation moment on their own. So the question that follows from this is how easy is it for users to get to that..."

A marketplace's longevity depends on creating enough value and transaction "happiness" that neither side has a reason to circumvent the platform.

"“The ultimate success of your marketplace will depend on your ability to create meaningfully more happiness in the average transaction than any substitute, not how many transactions you accumulate.”"

Successful marketplace launches require achieving high density by focusing exclusively on one geographic area or product category at a time.

"Every marketplace started off by concentrating on just a single city or category (except Thumbtack, for better or worse)."

To compete with non-marketplace alternatives, a platform must win by being significantly more convenient, offering lower prices, or unlocking supply that was previously inaccessible.

"The marketplace model allows you to offer the unbeatable combination of (1) variety and (2) trust, and when a startup can deliver these reliably and on-demand, they win."

While money is the primary motivator for all supply, individuals seek life-changing income opportunities while businesses prioritize incremental revenue and clear ROI.

"In every marketplace I’ve come across, it always comes down to money on the supply side. That being said, there is an interesting nuance in the value prop depending on whether your supply consists of..."

Successful marketplace evaluation requires verifying that the model provides a fundamental advantage in convenience, price, or supply access over traditional alternatives.

"On top of all the challenges that all startups need to overcome to build durable businesses (e.g. finding product-market fit, unit economics, beating the competition, etc.), marketplaces have to find..."

Enhanced review systems that go beyond star ratings to include text, photos, and mutual requirements provide the rich data users need to make confident, quick decisions.

"As a result, we also began publishing full text reviews and photos of the dishes that were being reviewed to help customers avoid the paradox of choice and make well-informed decisions more quickly, w..."

A marketplace can build deep trust by taking on the specialized vetting and expert judgment calls that individual users are unqualified or uncomfortable performing themselves.

"We found that prior to Good Dog, people were attempting to make judgment calls based on their own intuition, which left them feeling unsure and uncomfortable. Our team is prepared and trained to make..."

Solving the marketplace chicken-and-egg problem requires focusing on the first principles of selection, quality, and pricing rather than searching for growth hacks.

"Everyone's always looking for the hack - what's the channel that will unlock something big? But every time we looked for a reason we weren't growing, it always came back to the basics –– selection, de..."

Select an initial market where specific environmental or demographic factors naturally create high demand for your solution.

"We selected our initial markets where there would likely be demand, e.g. Chicago in the winter. A high household income, fewer households with cars, and frequently inclement weather — typically means..."

A marketplace is defined by its role as a platform that facilitates transactions between independent supply and demand without owning the inventory itself.

"A marketplace business is one that (1) connects demand (i.e. people who want a thing) with (2) supply (i.e. people who have that thing), and (3) leads to a financial transaction. These businesses do n..."

Cracking the chicken-and-egg problem requires a sequenced approach: first constrain the scope, then choose one side (typically supply) to dominate.

"Once you’ve decided how to constrain your marketplace (geo or category), you then need to decide which side of the marketplace to put most of your resources behind — growing supply (e.g. dog walkers)..."

Properly identifying whether you are a marketplace or a utility platform prevents you from building misaligned features like 'discovery' that might alienate power users.

"Realizing we weren't a marketplace was the best thing that happened to us. It allowed us to take ‘Discovery’ (find a creator to pledge) off our roadmap, because we realized this would misalign us with..."

Geographic expansion succeeds by establishing a foundation through personal networks within a new city to spark initial word-of-mouth growth.

"We’d first focus on our network of vets that my co-founders or colleagues may know in that city and then rely immediately upon word of mouth and referrals, getting them to start talking to others in t..."

To prevent supply churn, marketplaces must secure and display high-quality demand to attract and activate supply-side interest.

"We learned that to get the initial supply activated, we actually need to have some solid high-quality hospital shifts (demand) listed first to attract vet interest. So even before we recruit the suppl..."

Maintaining service quality becomes exponentially harder and more essential as a marketplace transitions from early adopters to the mainstream.

"As you scale and attract a more mainstream audience, preserving the level of service that keeps customers coming back becomes increasingly difficult, but also increasingly critical. You’re forced to m..."

Marketplaces must establish a formal 'carrot and stick' framework to enforce baseline service levels.

"The single most common strategy to maintain quality in their marketplace, utilized by about two-thirds of the companies I spoke with, was to define (and share) clear standards for the minimum level of..."

Direct human intervention during onboarding ensures that new supply meets a minimum standard of quality before their first transaction.

"For every new listing we brought onboard, we went through a 12-point checklist (e.g. number of pictures, length of title, etc), so that every listing that went live had a minimum standard and was imme..."

The search ranking algorithm is the most cost-effective and powerful tool for steering customer demand toward high-quality supply.

"Search results were the lever that we used to control everything in the business. That was the product. The reason Rover pulled ahead of competition is that we had a much better understanding of marke..."

Identifying the specific behaviors that predict repeat usage allows marketplaces to curate their supply for long-term LTV.

"We found that high quality supply drove repeat usage. For example, we prioritized sitters who have done multiple transactions with the same owner. My advice is to figure out what the germane signals a..."

A robust review system builds a self-correcting ecosystem by vetting both sides of the transaction and accelerating high-quality supply growth.

"At Airbnb we take reviews and ratings very seriously. In the early days, reviews were a great tool to vet supply (hosts and their listings) and demand (guests) on the growing marketplace. By encouragi..."

To overcome the chicken-and-egg problem, focus on bootstrapping the supply side first by making the product valuable for one side independently or using subsidies.

"In most cases you’ll be supply constrained from the start (you need something to sell after all), thus most of the solutions focus on growing supply."

To overcome the cold start problem, focus on building the smallest possible self-sustaining group of users before attempting broad expansion.

"Whether for credit cards, multiplayer games, or business collaboration software, the “atomic network” is the smallest network needed that can stand on its own. It needs to have enough density and stab..."

The success of a new marketplace often hinges on a 'liquidity hack'—a creative or manual intervention that solves the initial cold-start problem.

"The prime directive of a marketplace is to generate liquidity where none existed before. The founding insight for most great marketplace businesses is principally a ‘liquidity hack.’ Uber hacked liqui..."

Scaling prematurely before ensuring high transaction completion rates leads to irreversible user churn and wasted growth spend.

"At TaskRabbit, we scaled before we had product market fit. We should have focused on fill rate — the percentage of tasks posted that were complete. It was well under 100%, and people who didn’t get ma..."

Capturing structured data from the start is critical for building effective search and discovery tools that pair supply with demand.

"Structured the data around the supply — in the early days it was event title, date, location, and then a free form field for event description. This made it very difficult to understand the supply inv..."

To achieve demand-side fit, you must win by being significantly cheaper, offering a better product through exclusive supply, or providing a superior user experience.

"No matter how clever your marketplace model, you’re in trouble if there isn’t a big hungry market looking for what you’re selling."

In marketplace businesses, improving the quality, selection, and accessibility of supply is often the primary driver of growth inflections.

"In terms of increasing selection, the biggest early unlock was geographic expansion to the suburbs with big enterprise merchants like Cheesecake Factory, Chick-fil-A, and Chipotle, as well as local he..."

The most effective way to build a large marketplace is to start small by constraining the business to a specific geography or category.

"The research points to two ways to constrain a marketplace: (1) by geography, and (2) by category. If the offering requires supply and demand to be in the same physical location, the constraint is alw..."

Define specific supply-side density targets to ensure that the demand side has enough variety to stay engaged and transact.

"A rule of thumb was that if we could get to 50-100 concentrated restaurants in a city, we had enough for a consumer to land on the site, cast a wide net, and get a consideration set that was meaningfu..."

The vast majority of successful marketplaces achieve liquidity by concentrating nearly all early resources on growing the supply side first.

"The lesson we took away from this was that all that matters is supply. So we decided to focus on that above all else. We postponed building brand and delightful product until we had liquidity. Dozens..."

Supply acquisition can be deprioritized in favor of demand when the service offers a low-friction, high-incentive value proposition that attracts providers naturally.

"For us, the scarce resource was demand. I don’t think we were ever supply constrained. Supply was easy. It was the dynamics of the market -- if you are someone who loves dogs, you work from home, you..."

Successful marketplaces typically bootstrap their initial supply by focusing on only two or three high-impact acquisition levers rather than diversifying too early.

"The median number of levers that the biggest marketplace companies relied on to kickstart supply growth was just TWO (and the average was 2.5). Though this isn’t necessarily true for everyone, the les..."

To efficiently scale initial supply, you must evaluate all potential levers but ultimately prioritize the two that offer the strongest product-market fit for your specific participants.

"One fascinating meta-learning that emerged from this research is how few levers individual companies found success in early-on. The median number of levers that the biggest marketplace companies relie..."

Direct sales is the most common and effective lever for bootstrapping supply because it allows you to personally overcome obstacles and pick high-quality participants.

"One of the most significant learnings (and surprises) for me in doing this research was how important one-on-one direct sales was to most early marketplaces. Sales ended up being a crucial lever for a..."

Subsidizing supply—through leads, income guarantees, or equipment—removes the risk for new participants and builds the initial liquidity needed to attract demand.

"We subsidized leads in almost all of our marketplaces to get them going. We wanted to show new users the quality of our connections and give them a risk-free way to get started. We would then slowly t..."

A 'single-player mode' tool attracts supply by providing immediate utility, allowing you to build a base of users before you have any demand to offer them.

"We decided to invest in the software side of the business -- we created a solution that could stand on its own without the demand side. What this meant was building a suite of tools for restaurants to..."

Recruiting suppliers in person at community events creates a self-scaling effect as early adopters naturally evangelize the platform to their peers.

"The main thing that I believe really worked was recruiting sellers in person at craft fairs and elsewhere. This was a small activity in terms of human effort, but it scaled beyond that since the selle..."

Growth depends on identifying which side of the marketplace is the primary bottleneck so that resources are not wasted on the side that has already reached diminishing returns.

"It simply means that your biggest constraint to driving additional transactions is a lack of supply (e.g. Airbnb Homes, Uber drivers) or a lack of demand (e.g. Rover dog owners, TaskRabbit customers)...."

Building quantitative models to track supply and demand health across different markets allows for precise resource allocation as the marketplace scales.

"To address this, these companies developed models or heuristics to help them understand which side needed their focus. Though never perfect, and constantly evolving, these models were instrumental in..."

The chicken-and-egg problem is solved by identifying which side of the marketplace is most motivated to recruit the other side to fulfill their own goals.

"Amazing! With this loop, Cameo can focus most of its efforts into recruiting celebrities, knowing that much of the other side of the marketplace will come along for free."

Solve the cold-start problem by creating low-friction tools that allow users to migrate their existing organic activity into a structured marketplace format.

"That led us to make it a “one-checkbox experience,” which allowed sellers to take items that were already being listed in groups and cross-post them into the Marketplace Tab as a way to seed the early..."

Focusing on 'activated' supply ensures that your growth efforts result in inventory that actually facilitates transactions and adds value to the marketplace.

"My advice is to track not just raw new supply but ‘activated supply’—supply that has reached some milestone that tells you it’s valuable. For example, a Lyft driver with at least one completed ride, a..."

Your initial take rate should be calculated as a function of the demand you generate and the operational ease you provide, adjusted downward by the intensity of market competition.

"Differences in take rates are primarily driven by three factors: (1) whether you can drive new demand, (2) how much convenience you provide the seller, and (3) the level of competition in the market."

To successfully raise your take rate post-launch, you must deliver measurable improvements in seller convenience or the quality of demand you drive to their business.

"Say you’ve already set a take rate and you want to increase it. Coming back to our formula, you have three options: 1. Increase the convenience. 2. Improve the demand. 3. Reduce competition: Tough one..."

High take rates create friction and leave a margin opportunity for competitors, whereas lower rates can secure a long-term edge in winner-take-all markets.

"The most dangerous strategy for any platform company is to price too high – to charge a greedy and overzealous rake that could serve to undermine the whole point of having a platform in the first plac..."

Benchmarking requires first categorizing your business as either a platform that facilitates existing business or a marketplace that generates new demand.

"There is a relatively clear distinction between “platform” businesses (which make it easier for you to run your business, like Patreon and Substack), and Marketplaces (which also bring you new busines..."

Tiered pricing structures allow a platform to maximize revenue by mapping different take rates to the specific level of service or demand each seller segment consumes.

"Companies like Upwork, Patreon, StockX, Doordash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub take advantage of The Take Rate Formula by offering different take rates for more or less Convenience and Demand."

To reliably scale a marketplace in a new country, focus on achieving liquidity in highly constrained geographic areas before expanding to broader regions.

"One of our favorite tactics is a divide and conquer cycle: Constrain geo, achieve liquidity, review geo (split or move). For example, if you want to launch in the UK, start with London. Achieve liquid..."

Transitioning a marketplace requires identifying the core friction point for users and setting an ambitious, singular goal to drive the shift in behavior.

"We crafted a strategy that would transition the Airbnb marketplace from a “request to book” model to an “instant book” model. A world where guests could book available homes instantly. Though only 5%..."

Subsidizing the customer experience through design or cost-absorption is necessary to guarantee quality in commoditized or low-ticket categories.

"Lower size transactions means they have to be higher quality experience by definition, so you have to subsidize it. We heavily subsidize quality of the room, with great tables, great sound proofing. M..."

Focusing on demand-side retention ensures the marketplace is providing repeatable value rather than just temporary growth.

"Once we had the tab within the Facebook app to drive buyer engagement, we settled on the key metric of weekly buyer retention."

The term 'liquidity' is too ambiguous for operational use; instead, teams should communicate using specific, measurable components like fill rate or supply success.

"Since there’s so much confusion around this term, I prefer to avoid using it altogether when we’re describing operational metrics, and instead get specific about what I mean (e.g. fill rate, supply qu..."

Marketplaces thrive on certainty; failing to provide high fill rates or fast matching times leads to users abandoning the platform for more reliable alternatives.

"The most fundamental job of a marketplace is to efficiently match supply with demand. If you can’t do this reliably (i.e. fill-rate) or quickly (i.e. time-to-match), you’ll fail."

Marketplace profitability depends on balancing competitive pricing for demand with adequate compensation to keep the supply side engaged.

"Rooted in the challenge of offering better/cheaper products to customers is both (1) making sure your supply earns enough to make it worth their while, and (2) at the same time extracting enough value..."

Evidence of organic buyer-to-seller conversion, even at a tiny scale, is a powerful signal of a marketplace's future organic growth potential.

"A seed-stage company I recently evaluated as a potential investment has just 38 sellers on its platform, but five of them started out as buyers on the platform. This at least gives me some early indic..."

The most effective way to size a market is to simplify it into two variables: the total number of potential customers and the revenue potential per customer.

"The simplest and most important way to think about market size is (a) how many potential customers are there and (b) what might each customer be worth to you. Thinking about the number of customers an..."

The singular defining characteristic of a startup is its fundamental design for rapid growth, regardless of its industry or funding source.

"A startup is a company designed to grow fast. Being newly founded does not in itself make a company a startup. Nor is it necessary for a startup to work on technology, or take venture funding, or have..."

The most ambitious and valuable startup ideas are often overlooked because they involve operational 'schleps' that frighten away most potential founders.

"That scariness makes ambitious ideas doubly valuable. In addition to their intrinsic value, they’re like undervalued stocks in the sense that there’s less demand for them among founders. If you pick a..."

Before assessing specialized models like marketplaces, ensure the underlying business fundamentals—like product-market fit, market size, and distribution—are sound.

"Most marketplaces fail not because of the marketplace, but because of more fundamental reasons — not building something people want, too small a market, inability to acquire users, etc. So start by lo..."

Before analyzing marketplace mechanics, evaluate the fundamental business health, market size, and customer demand.

"After looking at 100+ marketplace businesses over the past few years, I’ve learned an important lesson: First, forget about the marketplace part. Start by looking at the business."

The quality of the market is the ultimate arbiter of success, often outweighing the talent of the team.

"When a great team meets a lousy market, market wins. When a lousy team meets a great market, market wins. When a great team meets a great market, something special happens."

A successful startup idea requires a 'why now' inflection point in technology, regulation, or behavior that makes the idea viable today when it wasn't before.

"The thing that I like to assume is every startup idea’s been tried … So, the question is not, has my idea been tried before? The question is, is it the right time for my idea to happen?"

Efficient user acquisition through a clear, unique distribution strategy is as critical to success as the product itself.

"Most businesses actually get zero distribution channels to work. Poor distribution — not product — is the number one cause of failure."

A venture-scale B2B idea must address a problem significant enough to support at least $100 million in annual revenue.

"There need to be a lot of people willing to spend a lot of money to solve the problem. Most startups fail not because the idea isn’t good but because the market for the solution is just too small. If..."

Great consumer businesses are more likely to emerge from organic curiosity and problem-solving than from forced brainstorming sessions.

"Less than a third of founders were actively ideating a startup idea when they came up with their big idea. In other words, most startup ideas emerged organically."

Commit to building code only after you have confirmed that people are willing to hire you—or use your manual solution—to solve a specific, high-value problem.

"And then we got an email from an old Dropbox colleague who was like, ‘I hear you guys have become SOC 2 consultants. That’s super-weird. I thought you were going to do other things with your life. But..."

Sustainable B2B businesses must solve 'hair-on-fire' problems that are essential to a user's job performance, not just incremental conveniences.

"In B2B, you’re unlikely to build a big business if you aren’t solving significant pain. . . These products aren’t just nice-to-have. You basically can’t do your job well without them."

The startup landscape is shifting away from consumer applications toward B2B AI, infrastructure, and specialized enterprise tools.

"Based on batch profiles, founders are betting on AI (specifically, B2B AI) to be the next big thing. The most promising subcategories include “Engineering, Product, and Design,” Infrastructure, and Sa..."

Successful startups are built on solving specific, painful problems rather than pursuing trends, industry patterns, or preconceived visions.

"Looking back, the lesson is clear. Good startup ideas are not about pattern recognition, modernizing, or finding wedges—they are about solving a specific problem."

The climate tech sector offers massive economic opportunities for software professionals to apply traditional product and engineering skills to decarbonization challenges.

"Software founders are realizing their skills are relevant in addressing climate change. What’s needed are core PM and engineering skills, not necessarily deep scientific knowledge or domain expertise."

Timing is the primary justification for venture capital investment because it validates why an unprofitable early-stage company can eventually capture a massive, emerging opportunity.

"The importance of the ‘why now’ has a lot to do with the reason venture capital exists. Venture capital works because there is justification for being an unprofitable company at the outset because the..."

Startup tailwinds can be categorized into five specific sources: technological ubiquity, new data/APIs, regulatory changes, behavioral shifts, and shifts in societal beliefs.

"Of course any startup benefits from the tightest definition of why now—if the company literally couldn’t have existed without the ‘why now.’ Platform, technology, regulatory shifts are all examples of..."

Evaluating market timing requires looking beyond market size to identify powerful macro currents that increase your probability of success.

"I think of markets like currents, not whether or not they are big bodies of water. The stronger the current, the higher your chance of success. ‘Why now’ is often a description of a current— a macro o..."

A true 10x product advantage is often unlocked by underlying technology shifts that were unavailable just a few years prior.

"Uber would not have been possible without smartphones + GPS. Salesforce wouldn’t have been possible without maturity of web browsers + widespread broadband."

Venture-scale success requires a credible path to reaching $100M in annual revenue and a $1B valuation within a decade.

"A simple rule of thumb for what makes an idea venture-scale is having a path to $100 million a year in revenue and hitting $1 billion+ valuation, in 10 years. Essentially, can you get big, fast?"

A venture-scale market requires a total addressable market large enough to support $100M in annual revenue based on specific user volume and pricing assumptions.

"Do the math. What would have to be true for your business to reach $100M in revenue in one year? How many people would need to be using it (and/or paying for it), and how much should you need to make..."

Successful venture-scale ideas solve problems that are not only large in market size but also urgent and financially valuable to customers.

"So instead I tell founders to think about the *problem* they’re solving, specifically my [LUV framework](https://hunterwalk.com/2017/04/12/why-i-care-about-problem-size-more-than-market-size/): 1. **..."

Venture capital is best suited for software-driven models where incremental capital infusions unlock exponential growth and profit without proportional increases in headcount.

"Venture-scale businesses need to have a business model that scales. This means as the company grows, every incremental dollar that goes into the business unlocks more and more revenue, and eventually..."

Fundraising is primarily a process of establishing deep confidence that your company can successfully utilize capital to reach a massive scale.

"Ultimately, fundraising is an exercise in building trust. Each investment is incredibly significant to each fund and in order to convince a fund that you are worthy of that big check, you need them to..."

Allocating significant time to material preparation allows for the reflection and narrative refinement necessary to build a truly convincing case.

"I typically recommend spending at least 4 weeks building the deck and supporting materials. I find founders realize there are stronger elements they should have included 1-2 weeks into the pitch proce..."

Vetting your pitch with a trusted network before going live identifies weaknesses and builds the confidence required for official investor meetings.

"Typically I recommend founders prepare their materials to about 70% completeness and then test them before going into battle. Put together a coherent story with great supporting data (not necessarily..."

A successful raise requires a structured, high-volume target list to generate enough momentum and competition among lead investors.

"Planning your outreach is probably the most overlooked and tedious part of building a successful process. Your goal at this stage is to build a long list of funds who could lead your round."

Series A readiness is reached when you can demonstrate a proven product-market fit that is ready to be accelerated by a significant injection of capital.

"Generally the way to think about whether you are ready for a Series A is whether you’ve proven a credible value hypothesis. This is a combination of factors including the market you’re attacking, the..."

A cohesive narrative that connects your product vision to large-scale market trends is more persuasive than a collection of disconnected data points.

"The key is that your materials tell a compelling story. They need to explain what you’re building, why you’re building it, and how your strategy will capture considerable revenue in the future. The be..."

Fundraising must be timed to ensure you maintain leverage by having enough cash to walk away from a bad deal.

"Generally I recommend having at least 8 months of runway when going out to raise. The most important thing is that your business is showing the signs that you should raise Series A. If you only have 4..."

Building investor relationships in a remote environment requires proactive digital content and multiple interactions over time to establish trust.

"One thing that Covid has changed is that building a relationship with a VC, with fewer in-person meetings, is now harder. To make up for the lack of in-person face time, you need to find more digital..."

To maximize network utility, founders should optimize for eigenvector centrality by connecting with the most influential nodes in many different, unrelated industries.

"A person with high degree centrality is a mayor of a small town, or the most popular kid in high school. Within the context of a network where everyone knows each other, they are the most connected pe..."

Effective investor communication treats the 'ask' like a product, optimizing for the recipient's ease of execution to maximize the response rate.

"If I had to simplify what makes for a good investor ask into three main concepts, they would be: Targeted: Only send them to the people who are relevant. Time-bounded: Ideally, executing the request s..."

Setting clear expectations of active involvement before closing an investment creates a social contract that allows founders to hold investors accountable later.

"If you expect your investors to be actively involved, you should let them know before you accept their money. This is really important because it gives you permission to hold them accountable to what..."

Treating investor engagement as a volume-based funnel allows you to track and improve the ROI of your network through concrete data.

"From June 27, 2019, to October 26, 2022 (about 3 years and 4 months), I personally sent 2,626 requests to our investor network. Of those emails sent out, 1,664 received a response, and 1,151 were able..."

Establishing a recurring internal process to surface team bottlenecks ensures that investor requests are consistently relevant and high-leverage.

"Every month, my EA sends a message to our team asking them for two things that they could use help with. The responses are consolidated and added to our investor update, and I add them to my list as w..."

When pitching a wedge, demonstrate how a narrow entry point creates a position of strength and a clear, logical path to capturing a massive market.

"When I say it needs to have a good wedge, I’m looking for an entry point that provides some sort of power to the startup."

Joining Y Combinator significantly increases a startup's chances of survival and achieving a high-value exit compared to the industry average.

"Selected founders receive $500,000 in seed funding in exchange for roughly 7% equity. Four times a year, founders are immersed in a three-month cohort, or “batch,” with about 125 other startups, which..."

Venture capital acts as a powerful drug that can supercharge growth but often introduces extreme pressure, loss of control, and a ticking time bomb of expectations.

"If there were a Surgeon General warning on this drug, it might read, “Beware. VC funding may lead to dependence and complication. Some users have reported extreme anxiety, loss of control, and nightma..."

Since top angel investors are often less visible than major funds yet provide the majority of early-stage capital, founders must use data-driven lists to identify and prioritize the most active backers.

"The top funds are a known quantity, but the top angel investors are not. And that’s who generally makes up the majority of early-stage funding and cap tables. Especially if you’re trying to bootstrap..."

Top-tier venture expectations generally follow the "triple, triple, double, double, double" growth path once a startup reaches its first $1M in ARR.

"Classic top-level growth for Tier 1 ventures investors is 3x, 3x, 2x, 2x, 2x after 1M in revenue, so 1M to 3M to 9M to 18M to 36M, etc. Anything above that is obviously great, but many other factors c..."

For early-stage B2B fundraising, the velocity of reaching the $1M ARR milestone is a more significant signal than early month-over-month percentage growth.

"Generally, 0 to $1m ARR in 12mo or shorter is great. There are obvious exceptions to this—not every company’s success can be measured in ARR since launch (Figma, OSS, etc.)."

Early-stage consumer startups should prioritize deep user engagement and organic retention over top-line revenue to prove long-term viability to investors.

"For consumer, I focus on engagement and retention first and foremost. >50% DAU/MAU or >50% D30 retention is excellent. If you have both of those, only then do I worry about whether you can grow it."

Only raise significant capital when you are certain the investment will generate a growth rate high enough to justify the cost of equity dilution.

"Raise capital when you are confident that you can use it to attain a higher growth rate and the higher growth rate is worth a trade-off in dilution. Higher growth rates increase the value of a busines..."

A 'why now' narrative is most effective when it explains what has changed to prevent your startup from suffering the same fate as previous failed attempts.

"For every good idea, there are probably dozens of founders over the years who have attempted to build a company around a similar premise. And most of them are like those ships that never returned. It..."

A compelling 'why now' narrative should be built around a specific platform, technology, or regulatory shift that makes your product uniquely viable at this exact moment.

"Of course any startup benefits from the tightest definition of*****why now*****—if the company literally couldn’t have existed without the ‘why now.’ Platform, technology, regulatory shifts are all ex..."

Investors use the 'why now' question to determine if a startup can capture an early, compounding advantage that justifies the risk of initial unprofitability.

"The importance of the ‘why now’ has a lot to do with the reason venture capital exists. Venture capital works because there is justification for being an unprofitable company at the outset because the..."

Raising venture capital fundamentally shifts your company's focus toward rapid growth, high-stakes exit expectations, and potential loss of control.

"Bootstrapping is for lifestyle businesses that want cash flow, and (venture) funding is for companies trying to create a billion dollars in annual revenue. Simple as that."

Early B2B success often relies on founders personally selling to build the human trust necessary for customers to adopt a new, unproven product.

"Frederic (my co-founder) and I personally sold them. Really it was looking then in the eye and getting them to trust us that it would work and be valuable. It was hard. A real grind in the beginning."

The most valuable gift a PM can provide their team is focus, which requires clear sequencing rather than just saying no.

"Great PMs ruthlessly prioritize, both the team’s work and their own. They know that there are always more ideas than time, and that the greatest gift they can give their team is focus."

Balancing a team's roadmap with a specific ratio of incremental work and big bets ensures the business sees immediate value while the team pursues long-term innovation.

"Tactically, my rule of thumb is to spend 80% of my team’s time on short-term low-risk incremental wins, and 20% on high-risk, long-term bets. This way, we can continue to move our KPIs while bringing..."

AI provides a high-quality foundation for roadmapping, but human teams are still required to navigate tradeoffs and build internal consensus.

"AI tools will give you a strong first draft (taking in your strategy, user research, and goals) and help you prioritize ideas, but you’ll still spend time with your team brainstorming, reviewing data..."

Effective ideation requires filtering high-level strategic priorities through a bottom-up straw-man process to verify execution feasibility.

"Initially, a straw-man plan is built (bottom-up), with the “big rocks” that are planned for the year. It is presented to the leadership team for high-level feedback. Then a more detailed plan is put t..."

Explicitly codifying product principles provides a decision-making framework that maintains consistency and alignment as an organization scales.

"In the broader product organization, we’ve codified eight product principles, which have become especially essential at Miro’s scale and pace of growth. We use the principles to make choices in what w..."

An ongoing stack rank (OSR) transforms vague priority debates into concrete choices between specific project outcomes.

"In your OSR, every discrete project is sequenced according to its priority, its resourcing, and its outcomes. It is complementary to your OKRs, which might be at a higher level and less numerous. With..."

Use organizational goals and OKRs as a primary filter to prioritize high-impact marketing initiatives over low-value busywork.

"To determine what to create next, you need to consider the potential impact. The best way to do that is to make sure the work ladders up to a higher-level goal or OKR and to have a clear sense of what..."

Ruthlessly narrowing focus leads to a disproportionate increase in execution quality and speed.

"The fewer things you focus on, the better those remaining things will go. I’ve seen this work miracles time, and time again."

Initial prioritization should use directional 'SWAGs' and relative T-shirt sizing to quickly compare dozens of ideas without getting bogged down in false precision.

"In short, RICE-ing is the process of T-shirt scoring (i.e. S/M/L) your ideas according to their: Reach: How many of your customers would experience the new idea; Impact: If the idea pans out, how much..."

Moving from relative T-shirt sizes to concrete financial models and day-level engineering tasks ensures projects are 'shovel-ready' and truly high-ROI before work begins.

"During DRICE, we will go from: A 30-second estimate to a 30-minute estimate; A relative scoring (S/M/L) to a $X of expected annualized revenue; 'Wouldn’t it be cool if' to 'We are shovel-ready'."

Involving an experienced engineer in the prioritization phase can radically change a project's ROI by identifying technical shortcuts or hidden complexities that T-shirt sizing misses.

"This is the place for a growth engineer to kick the tires of the assumptions behind the original T-shirt-size estimate. Projects could end up being much simpler (like the PayPal example) or much harde..."

Calculating ROI as 'dollars per engineering week' provides a universal metric for comparing projects with different scales of impact and effort.

"Through a DRICE estimate, we reduced the engineering estimate and increased the success likelihood for our 'Checkout with PayPal' idea. With 30 minutes from PM and engineering, we’ve taken the idea fr..."

Standardized prioritization should be a recurring quarterly ritual to ensure the team is always focused on the most impactful work as the product evolves.

"The frameworks are primarily intended for growth teams, but the practices apply to any team focused on moving a business metric. This prioritization process should be run every planning cycle."

Use a 2x2 matrix to separate immediate fires from long-term strategic value to ensure you are focusing on the work that actually matters.

"It’s a simple tool to help you prioritize tasks, using a 2x2 grid. It has you map all of your options into quadrants based on how urgent and important the task is and, through this simple process, hel..."

Maintaining multiple roadmaps for a single team fragments accountability and transparency, necessitating a unified document for true cross-functional alignment.

"Note, it's totally fine for individual functions (e.g. the research team) to keep their own internal roadmap to keep track of their internal sub-tasks (e.g. schedule a focus group), but it's vital tha..."

An effective roadmap acts as a central coordination tool that clarifies individual responsibilities and timing for the entire team.

"In that sense, a roadmap is like the musical score. It tells everyone on the team who’s responsible what, when they need to start and finish, and how all of the parts come together to create something..."

Simple impact-to-cost frameworks are often more effective than complex scoring systems because they facilitate team discussion rather than relying on flawed mathematical formulas.

"In most situations, ignore most of these frameworks and just keep it simple. 1. Make a single list of all your team’s ideas 2. T-shirt-size (XS, S, M, L, XL) each idea on two dimensions: estimated imp..."

Balancing high-risk bets with incremental wins provides the necessary 'cover-fire' of moving metrics while working on long-term breakthroughs.

"I like to follow the 80/20 rule: Roughly 80% of resources go to incremental low-risk projects, and 20% go to longer-term higher-risk bets. Take on too many long-term big bets, and leaders will wonder..."

At the pre-product-market fit stage, the only prioritization that matters is achieving high satisfaction for a tiny, specific group of initial users.

"Broadly, your single goal as an early-stage pre-PMF startup should be to make 10 customers very happy. Everything you prioritize should be in service of this goal."

Over-theorizing and relying on insufficient data are fatal traps for early-stage startups that need to learn through shipping.

"I’ve seen a lot of founders (particularly ex-PMs) with incredibly detailed strategy docs and really nice decks who don’t ship often enough, and thus end up building something no one really needed. If..."

Protecting team focus involves helping leadership re-verify that current work-in-progress remains the highest priority compared to new suggestions.

"The goal is to avoid disrupting existing impactful work, even if the idea is a good one, by reminding your manager why you committed to it in the first place."

Keep the development backlog focused exclusively on actionable tickets by moving raw ideas and feature requests to a separate repository.

"If it’s not dev work but an idea, feature request, etc. instead, it should live somewhere other than your backlog. Plus, schedule intentional time to groom your backlog."

Effective planning bridges the gap between vision and reality by creating realistic, measurable goals that have full stakeholder buy-in.

"Similarly, about 50% of companies highlighted planning and goal setting as a core PM job. You could argue this is a subset of execution, but the fact that most companies broke this out into its own jo..."

Align engineering and product resources with high-leverage features that drive the vast majority of growth rather than low-impact projects.

"In 2012, for example, we devoted hundreds of people across the company working on pages that collectively sold 700 items per day. We had three or four people working on search, which sold 100,000 item..."

Maintaining product simplicity requires proactive pruning of features to ensure that 'robust' functionality doesn't transition into 'bloated' complexity.

"“The first version of your product is usually simple. As you keep building, the product becomes more robust in quality, utility, and experience. But there’s a tipping point after which ‘robust’ can sn..."

High-quality roadmap ideas are rarely the product of group brainstorming; they require a deliberate synthesis of customer observation, churn analysis, and visionary thinking.

"Large brainstorms—bad source for big new ideas, but has other benefits such as getting everyone on the team involved in the process 🎯"

High-stakes meetings should be the culmination of a series of individual alignments rather than the first time stakeholders see a controversial proposal.

"If your plan is to just show up and hope the meeting goes well in full view of key decision makers, then you have a high risk of not getting the outcome you want. Instead, I prepare key attendees befo..."

Maintain leadership confidence during project failure by being a proactive problem-solver who provides a definitive recommendation on the next steps.

"It is essential that you provide your leaders with a recommendation for how to proceed. Be the solution to the problem, not just the messenger of it. Should you iterate one more time? Kill it?"

Teams generally prefer clear direction and forward momentum over endless debates aimed at reaching a perfect consensus.

"Try this next time you’re stuck on a decision: Ask your team if they’d rather keep hashing it out or for you to just make a call. I bet you they’d rather just move on."

Scenario planning should account for extreme survival risks while identifying long-term upside opportunities created by the disruption of legacy competitors.

"Job #1 is to build and understand a worst case scenario. What would happen if you had to sustain 6 months of zero revenue, and 18 more without the ability to profitably acquire new customers?"

Shift from seeking consensus to ensuring everyone is heard before a single accountable owner makes the final call.

"What is important isn’t that everyone agrees, it’s that everyone is listened to. And then the right person makes a decision, communicates it clearly, and rallies everyone around it."

High-functioning organizations require deliberate cultural mechanisms and significant energy to ensure that uncomfortable truths are surfaced before decisions are made.

"Important truths can be uncomfortable and make people defensive. Any high-functioning organization has to have mechanisms and a culture that supports truth-telling. You have to talk about that and how..."

Formal decision-making processes should be reserved for high-stakes, irreversible choices to prevent slowing down the organization with unnecessary overhead.

"A decision-making framework is only needed when there is lack of clarity about a decision that is higher-risk. Higher risk can mean that the decision has long-term implications or that it can be costl..."

Improving decision quality starts with increasing the transparency of the process so employees understand how choices are actually being made.

"It’s not the decisions themselves employees are frustrated with, it’s the lack of transparency around how decisions are made. And employees crave transparency."

Annual planning provides a strategic north star that guides quarterly execution, ensuring that short-term team goals contribute to the company's long-term bets.

"The yearly company OKRs define our biggest strategic bets and highest-priority investments for the next year. ... Our Strategy and Biz Ops team leads the coordination for the yearly company OKR proces..."

Efficient product planning requires a multi-layered cadence that balances long-term strategic investments with frequent tactical adjustments based on new information.

"Planning cycles haven’t changed too much over the years. They’ve been roughly quarterly in the beginning, but over time, we began formalizing things a bit more, where there was a cadence for different..."

Effective planning balances top-down strategic alignment with bottom-up pod execution using structured yearly 'W' and quarterly 'M' cadences.

"The annual process works along a “W” shape, similar to the framework Lenny suggested here. It starts at the top, with the Gong management team setting up top company priorities—usually three or four...."

Use a tiered resolution approach for planning cycles to maintain operational rigor in the near term while allowing for strategic flexibility in the long term.

"All that said, we roughly plan for each half, with differing resolutions for the two quarters. As an example, at the beginning of this year, we said for Q1, list out all of your projects in detail wit..."

A tiered planning cadence balances long-term strategic alignment with the agility to respond to immediate market shifts.

"Themes once a year, which gets translated into a six-month plan, and then there are four six-week cycles inside each half."

Align diverse product teams by establishing a small set of high-level company priorities ("big boulders") that all individual plans must map back to.

"We spend a good bit of time on planning, and planning frequently, with both quarterly and annual planning cycles. I sometimes joke that if it’s been more than six weeks without some planning exercise,..."

Effective annual plans use a standardized narrative format to bridge the gap between high-level company goals and specific customer-centric scenarios.

"The annual plans are generally structured as a six-pager that captures the overall state of the product, goals, measurable success indicators over the coming fiscal year, and a set of customer scenari..."

Goal setting will become an editorial process where PMs validate and refine metrics suggested by AI based on business constraints.

"AI tooling will become increasingly smart at suggesting goals you should be optimizing for, based on your strategy, business requirements, and constraints. PMs will become editors of super-intelligent..."

When traditional OKRs feel like arbitrary tasks, using philosophical 'headlines' can help teams align on high-level impact rather than just chasing a single metric.

"I asked teams to instead define headlines—essentially, claims that they’d like to make by the end of some time period. For example, it might be something like “Figma is the most efficient way to desig..."

Skip rigid goal-setting frameworks like OKRs if the administrative overhead of maintaining them outweighs the benefit of the clarity they provide.

"We tried using OKRs at Gong at some stage across the company, but we found out that the process of updating OKRs to align with reality was time-consuming and the framework did not provide us with enou..."

Strategic, theme-based goals and a single North Star metric can be more empowering and less distracting than rigid per-project OKRs.

"We also don’t have metrics goals for the product or any projects, but we do have a North Star company-level metric goal. For a B2B tool like ours that takes some time for a company to adopt the tool o..."

Streamlining OKR layers and reducing planning frequency prevents administrative bloat and keeps teams focused on a small set of high-impact priorities.

"So we’ve removed extra layers and now have Company-, AMPED-, and Product Stream-level OKRs, with each team just deciding which OKRs they will support. It has brought much-needed alignment and clarity..."

For zero-to-one product initiatives, use shipping milestones as primary key results until the product is mature enough to be measured by traditional outcome metrics.

"In other areas, things are sufficiently nascent that a lot of our key results end up being like “ship this thing,” and it has frankly been a journey for us to figure out when so much of what we’re try..."

Effective planning in fast-paced environments combines strictly measurable quarterly objectives with flexible weekly targets to maintain momentum amidst rapid technological shifts.

"Each week we have a kickoff meeting where everyone sets high-level expectations for their week. We have a culture of setting 75% weekly goals: everyone identifies their top priority for the week and t..."

Rigid adherence to numerical OKRs can lead to fragmented product experiences and the optimization of metrics at the expense of overall craft and cohesion.

"I think Tobi just does not agree with that philosophy of product development and thinks that you end up with a lot of micro-optimizations of local maxima that may say you drove that number up, but the..."

Writing annual strategic themes as customer testimonials ensures that leadership's vision remains centered on real merchant value.

"We try to imagine a Shopify merchant writing an email to a friend where they say, 'Here’s why I love Shopify, and here’s why I’m going to keep using it for my business.'"

Structured quarterly goal-setting sessions align the team by connecting their specific mission to broader company objectives through a collaborative review of past performance.

"When you define quarterly goals, invite your whole team to participate. Use the time to reflect on how you did last quarter and consider where to focus this quarter."

Goals translate high-level aspirations into quantifiable targets that objectively measure the success of a strategy.

"Goals are simply a way to measure the progress of your strategy toward achieving your ultimate vision."

Goals only drive impact when they are integrated into the team's regular operating cadence and supported by valid, accessible data.

"Operationalize: Build this metric into your team workflows. Find a cadence of checking in on this metric individually with your team, and with management. Share progress on the goal frequently."

Leaders must explicitly define what success looks like to prevent team members from projecting their own conflicting priorities onto a shared project.

"Similarly, projects often look delicious to team members because they're each imagining different goals — goals that they are personally most excited about (e.g. increase conversion vs. make users hap..."

Goals act as the essential verification layer that proves whether your day-to-day actions are actually fulfilling your long-term mission and vision.

"You start with your Mission (what are you trying to achieve), which informs your Vision (what does the world look like when you achieve it), which then leads to your Strategy (how you plan to get ther..."

Design objectives should be reframed as business sub-goals to ensure that critical UX attributes like usability and consistency are recognized as direct drivers of conversion and loyalty.

"Some of the things people call design goals are consistency, usability, accessibility, and delight. Guess what. All of these things drive use, conversion, and loyalty. All things that are critical to..."

Evaluate major technical or design investments by calculating their long-term ROI on business outcomes and the risks associated with delaying the work.

"To answer your question about how we balanced this outcome-thinking with engineering and design needs (which often don’t directly drive that outcome), it’s simple — extend your outcome thinking furthe..."

Countering short-term pressure requires visualizing the long-term operational and morale costs that current leadership might be overlooking.

"Put on your fortune-teller hat and predict the future a little bit. If we decide to take this thing on now, what happens next quarter? Next year? What ongoing costs do we take on?"

Integrating a new product as a feature within an existing ecosystem provides distribution and discovery advantages that often outweigh the branding benefits of a standalone app.

"We debated for some time and finally decided that having a tab in the largest app in the world was preferable to having a separate app."

When traditional metrics or strategic frameworks create ambiguity, prioritize features by asking which decision provides the most value to the largest volume of users.

"For a given user, is feature X or feature Y more valuable? What about for a room full of users? Or a stadium full of users? What decision best serves the most people?"

Sustained motivation requires an explicit and frequent connection between daily tasks and the company's broader mission.

"Great PMs frequently remind teammates of how their work connects to the mission. They know that people don’t work at companies to pull levers, move metrics, or hit goals."

To create a superior customer experience, you must question the necessity of existing friction and design the ideal state from the ground up.

"We rethought every single piece of what we were doing from the ground up, from first principles. Not locked into the way that people had been doing it. We asked how should it be? Where’s the pain and..."

Cascading a multi-year vision into an annual strategy and then a rolling roadmap creates a balance between long-term strategic direction and short-term operational agility.

"At the company level, we have a 'three-year painted picture,' which is a high-level picture that Miro’s Leadership Team co-develops and that defines the outcomes we want to achieve—both for our users..."

A vision statement provides a qualitative description of the future state your team is working to create.

"Next comes your vision: What does the world (or your product) look like when you’ve achieved your mission?"

A visual north star prevents product fragmentation by providing a guiding light that helps the team understand how near-term steps contribute to a cohesive long-term destination.

"A north star is a guiding light that helps align a team on the plan for the product, showing how the pieces will fit together. Without it, you're liable to miss the opportunity to innovate, are likely..."

A complete product strategy bridges the gap between today’s pain points and an inspiring future through a structured framework and thematic roadmap.

"There are three parts to a strategy: (1) vision, (2) strategic framework, and (3) roadmap. You can get started with whichever one calls to you:"

A v1 product does not need to be feature-complete to be great; it must execute a tiny set of core values exceptionally well.

"Pick three key attributes or features, get those things very, very right, and then forget about everything else. Those three attributes define the fundamental essence and value of the product—the rest..."

The foundation of product success is a crystal-clear understanding of the specific problem being solved for a specific audience before any development begins.

"A product succeeds because it solves a problem for people. This sounds very basic, but it is the single most important thing to understand about building good products. The first step in building some..."

Strategy communication must prioritize simplicity and memorability to ensure the plan actually influences daily decision-making across the organization.

"Even the most genius of strategies will fail if communicated badly. To influence day-to-day activities, strategies need to be simple enough for leaders at every level of the organization to understand..."

Strategy execution is an iterative process that requires constant re-evaluation of opportunities and steady experimentation to maintain progress toward the goal.

"Our team then dove into each of these tracks — developing hypotheses, ideating on solutions, and launching dozens of experiments to make steady progress towards our goal. Every quarter or so, we re-ev..."

A cohesive organizational plan follows a logical sequence where the strategy bridges the gap between the long-term vision and specific tactical goals.

"Once you align on your Mission and Vision you can focus on your Strategy — which then informs the Goals and Roadmap: Mission → Vision → Strategy → Goals → Roadmap"

The most effective strategy documents use a narrative structure that moves logically from the current situation to a specific complication, followed by a proposed solution.

"To write out a strategy, I usually start with this company strategy template or a team strategy template, and then roughly follow The Minto Pyramid Principle: 1. What is the current situation? 2. What..."

Building a successful consumer business requires a sequential focus on insight, audience identification, hook creation, early adoption, retention, and scaling.

"Step 1: INSIGHT: Come up with your idea. Step 2: AUDIENCE: Identify your super-specific who. Step 3: HOOK: Craft your pitch. Step 4: REACH: Find your early adopters by doing things that don’t scale. S..."

A structured two-day workshop can help teams align on core strategy and differentiation before investing months into development.

"The Foundation Sprint is a two-day workshop for a team at the beginning of a big project. On the morning of day one, you’ll define the basics of your project; then, in the afternoon, you’ll craft diff..."

Distilling your product strategy into a simple, fill-in-the-blanks sentence ensures the core promise is clear and easily understood by customers.

"The Founding Hypothesis is a handy Mad Libs–style sentence that we can fill in to understand and test a team’s strategy. Yes, the Founding Hypothesis is simple, but that’s exactly what makes it so pow..."

Evaluating multiple strategic directions helps teams avoid committing to a flawed approach based on unexamined assumptions.

"On day two, you’ll evaluate multiple options and choose an approach to your project. By the end, you’ll have a Founding Hypothesis: a clear statement of what you believe that can be proved (or disprov..."

Horizontal products succeed by capturing a larger portion of a specific audience's workflow rather than by simply solving a single problem for everyone.

"Horizontal products win if a specific audience encounters enough use cases that they want one tool to address them all. Figma won because it captured a much larger portion of an app designer’s workflo..."

A mission statement serves as the foundation of all planning by defining the team's fundamental reason for being.

"Normally you start with your mission—why does your team (or company) even exist? What are you trying to achieve? What is your purpose?"

Strategy bridges the gap between vision and execution by identifying the few key bets that will drive success.

"Your strategy is simply your plan to achieve your vision—your plan to win. a strategy is essentially a short description of your plan, with 3 to 5 concrete investments that, if you get right, will bri..."

Using narrative-driven analogies, like movie plots, can help a team internalize and remember how different layers of strategy connect.

"Strategy: Get into casino cage → get through doors with code that changes every 12 hours → Get into an elevator that requires fingerprints and vocal verification → Get past two guards with Uzis → Get..."

A successful wedge strategy uses intense focus on a specific use case to break into a market, build momentum, and eventually expand into a much larger opportunity.

"The wedge metaphor to me is most useful in making sure you’re not a blunt instrument trying to chop into a market by being everything for everyone, but instead the sharp blade with extraordinary focus..."

Startups should prioritize a wedge strategy when facing entrenched incumbents, whereas products that require high utility from day one may need to attack the market broadly.

"A wedge seems most essential when you’re going after a market that is (1) entrenched or (2) crowded. When it’s hard to break in head-on."

The most effective product wedge solves a very specific, high-intensity problem that allows for rapid adoption and usage velocity.

"Wedge selection should be very intentional. Don’t just build for the first customer persona you think of or the closest city to where you live. Build for the group that has the most acute pain point,..."

For marketplaces and network-effects businesses, starting narrow is essential for building the density and liquidity required to create a defensible platform.

"Liquidity is the name of the game with marketplaces. It’s faster to build liquidity in more narrowly defined market segments. Building density in one subvertical helps a team more effectively build a..."

A roadmap should only be developed after the mission, vision, and strategy are established, as these provide the necessary criteria for prioritization.

"Developing a roadmap without a strategy is like heading into battle without a plan. Your prioritization needs to be driven by your Goals/KPIs, which come from your Strategy, which are rooted in your M..."

The strategy sprint uses a rigorous scoring system to transform a massive list of user problems into a handful of high-impact strategic pillars.

"Day 2 of the strategy sprint is the single most important day of the whole 8-to-12-week strategy process. This is where the actual strategic pillars are selected."

Leadership interviews provide critical historical context and pet ideas that prevent the strategy team from repeating past failures.

"Key leaders like founders/CEO have really important nuggets of wisdom tucked away in their back pockets, which structured leadership interviews can unearth. And I’ve found that these leaders typically..."

A complete strategy document must clearly articulate what the company will not do to ensure resources are focused on the highest-impact pillars.

"A good strategy articulation typically includes three components: 3 to 5 areas for the company or the team to focus on, which we will henceforth refer to as strategic pillars; Several areas that shoul..."

Product strategy sits in the void between mission and vision and the execution roadmap, serving as the logic for prioritization.

"Product strategy sits in between the mission and vision and the plan, either at the company level or at the team level. At the company level, the mission and vision is typically articulated by the fou..."

High-quality product and strategy documents effectively map to the narrative flow of context, problem, and solution.

"Similarly, when crafting your product strategy, my favorite product 1-Pager template follows the SCR format fairly directly (Situation = Description, Complication = Problem, and Resolution = What):"

A clear product strategy is essential for prioritizing high-impact work and preventing the team from becoming a 'feature factory' that just ships for the sake of shipping.

"Shipping isn’t success. Success is shipping work that (1) has meaningful impact on the business, (2) has high ROI relative to other opportunities, and (3) moves you closer to achieving your strategy...."

Categorizing your business correctly is the first step toward focusing on the specific metrics—like activation for software or margins for goods—that determine survival.

"B2C subscription businesses come in many shapes and sizes, but you can roughly break them down into three categories: Content, Software, and Physical Goods."

Expand into obvious adjacent services as soon as the organization has the capacity to prevent ceding the market to new niche competitors.

"We waited too long to expand into dog walking, and into other services for the marketplace. One specific downside of that is Wag existing. It’s exactly the same demand base."

Restrictive early policies intended to lock in supply can backfire by allowing competitors to build a more comprehensive and discoverable directory.

"We made a critical decision the helped early on, but then bit us in the ass later. The only way you could be listed on our site is if you used us fully — you had to use us for internal bookings and on..."

Choose free trials for high-priced products requiring human intervention, and use freemium for lower-priced products that users can successfully navigate on their own.

"Go trial if your self-service product doesn’t convert well and you have a high price point. Otherwise, go freemium combined with a trial of your pro plan."

Delay implementing a freemium model until you have a deep understanding of your target segments and a proven conversion path from lead to customer.

"Don’t do freemium until you truly understand how to convert leads to customers, because you’ll end up increasing noise or false positives when you’re trying to figure out your segment beachheads."

Improving monetization requires balancing broader price increases with targeted incentives like annual plan discounts or charging power users for higher value.

"Encourage annual plans by offering a larger (limited-time) discount."

Using smart defaults to nudge users toward recurring payments can vastly increase lifetime value, even if it results in a small dip in one-time conversion rates.

"One-time donations still decreased slightly, but the lifetime value of the increased monthly donations outweighed the one-time donation decrease in this iteration. Smart defaults FTW!"

While pre-checking fee-coverage boxes maximizes the number of users who pay extra, it can hurt overall conversion by creating a price discrepancy at the point of purchase.

"The share of donors who covered fees decreased from 85% to 60%, showing the power of defaults—but the conversion decrease disappeared, so we shipped it."

Direct monetization is the preferred strategy for AI features because it allows companies to manage high compute costs and clearly measure customer willingness to pay.

"As a rule of thumb, I believe direct is best, either offering the new AI feature/product as an add-on or bundling it in the existing plan with a price increase (or usage-based component). And this see..."

The decision to bundle or sell an AI feature as an add-on should be driven by the percentage of the user base expected to use it.

"In most companies I have worked with, the benchmark for whether or not to include a feature in a bundle or as an add-on is: If over 70% of users are likely to utilize the feature, it is advisable to b..."

Using an add-on model for new AI features provides the most accurate data for understanding ROI and customer value.

"The add-on strategy is the “purest” form of direct monetization and will provide you with the cleanest data in terms of adoption and monetization. Also, the ability to track the direct impact of your..."

Competitive dynamics may necessitate an indirect monetization strategy to maintain market position, even if direct costs suggest otherwise.

"In reality, very few companies get to choose their monetization strategy in isolation. If a competing company is launching a similar AI feature but choosing an indirect monetization strategy, you will..."

Restarting trials for existing users allows them to experience product improvements and creates urgency to upgrade to premium plans.

"Restart a paid trial for your existing user base on a predetermined date, providing access to premium functionality at no cost for a limited time. And no, it’s not just about making users simply eligi..."

Heavy paywalls can stifle organic growth; a successful freemium model provides enough value for free users to become a massive, word-of-mouth acquisition engine.

"Most B2C subscription products limit the free user experience heavily in order to grow subscribers. In my experience, this slows down organic growth, because only payers can use your product and tell..."

Postponing paid plans can accelerate initial adoption, allowing you to use power-user feedback to determine which features and value triggers justify a premium price.

"We initially started without any paid plans. Our thinking was that it'll spread faster if we don't charge. Eventually though, not paying became the barrier for companies to adopt it, so we started cha..."

While per-seat monthly fees are the B2B standard, the most effective pricing model aligns revenue with the specific value metric your customers care about most.

"There are four options for charging B2B users: a flat monthly fee, a per-seat monthly fee, usage-based fee, or a transaction fee. Most of the companies I looked at charge a monthly per-seat fee, and s..."

Lowering the barrier to entry with a free tier or trial is a nearly universal strategy for B2B companies to maximize discovery and word-of-mouth growth.

"Nearly company offered a free plan from the outset — usually a freemium tier, and occasionally a trial period."

Launching without a paid plan can accelerate initial growth, but a lack of pricing can eventually become a barrier to entry for professional organizations.

"We initially started without any paid plans. Our thinking was that it'll spread faster if we don't charge. Eventually though, not paying became the barrier for companies to adopt it, so we started cha..."

Utilizing price sensitivity surveys helps B2B startups align their pricing with user value perceptions rather than guessing at price points.

"We sent our users the Van Westendorp survey to get a good feel for what they thought was a fair price for Segment. It essentially gives you these 4 pricing curves, and you can plot out what makes sens..."

Offering free access via freemium or trials is a near-universal strategy for lowering the barrier to entry in B2B growth.

"Nearly company offered a free plan from the outset — usually a freemium tier, and occasionally a trial period."

Freemium success is inextricably linked to the onboarding experience and whether the product's core value can be delivered without high-friction setup steps.

"“Freemium” and “friction” are tied at the hip. The success (or failure) of freemium can be directly impacted by friction in onboarding. If you change one, you probably need to rethink the other."

Early pricing should focus on establishing the correct order of magnitude and value metric rather than agonizing over exact dollar amounts.

"In the beginning, the actual number you're charging isn't that important. There are some exceptions, but for the most part, you should first be figuring out the range you're in: a $10 product, $100 pr..."

Aligning your pricing to a value metric ensures that growth is baked into your monetization through automatic expansion and reduced churn.

"A “value metric” is essentially what you charge for. For example: per seat, per 1,000 visits, per CPA, per GB used, per transaction, etc. If you get everything else wrong in pricing, but you get your..."

Effective customer segments must be data-driven and include quantitative characteristics like willingness to pay, LTV, and feature preferences.

"When used properly, quantified personas and segments are beautiful tools. The information needs to go beyond just cute names like “Startup Steve," with a cute avatar, and cute meetings where people te..."

Monetization should be treated as a continuous product process that requires quarterly iteration on segments, packaging, and positioning.

"The most successful companies optimize monetization in some manner every quarter. You may be thinking, “they change their price every 3 months!?” No, and that's the first lesson of monetization: prici..."

Delaying monetization can be a strategic lever to prioritize market ubiquity and organizational adoption over immediate revenue milestones.

"In some instances, there’s good reason to push out monetization. In the case of Loom, co-founder Shahed Khan shared, “We didn’t monetize Loom for several years intentionally, as our focus was to becom..."

The choice of research method depends on the product's familiarity; simpler methods like Van Westendorp only work for established categories where customers have clear price references.

"Should you use the Van Westendorp? We say proceed with caution, unless you’re including questions that reduce hypothetical bias (see this guide for examples) and you’re focusing on more established pr..."

Standard surveys often suffer from 'hypothetical bias' where people pledge higher amounts than they would actually spend in the real world.

"To overcome the hypothetical bias associated with Van Westendorp, economists have developed 'incentive-compatible' pricing methods. These methods give you an incentive to report what you would really..."

The most effective B2B pricing strategies start with direct customer conversations to identify what features actually drive value.

"While the optimal recipe is to do both qual and quant, anything is better than doing nothing. As pricing expert Madhavan Ramanujam says on Lenny’s Podcast, 'Talk to at least one person. Most companies..."

Willingness-to-pay is not a fixed attribute; it is a perception that can be actively shaped through positioning, storytelling, and choice architecture.

"Assuming that price is a 'magic number' implies that people have predetermined their willingness to pay for your product; they have a number in their head. But in reality, most of your customers haven..."

Pricing is a massive growth lever that requires minimal engineering effort compared to feature development, yet it remains underutilized due to fear and perceived complexity.

"Pricing is the most under-leveraged growth lever. It can drive enormous sustained growth (quickly) and often takes very little product work, yet is rarely prioritized or even discussed within product..."

Innovation in business models typically occurs by either stacking multiple revenue streams together or replacing a standard model with one that significantly improves the customer's cost structure.

"If you’re currently selling a thing, could you add a subscription (e.g. Peleton, Robinhood Gold) or advertising (e.g. Kindle)?"

The choice between freemium and free trial models involves a trade-off between higher total sign-up volume and higher user intent/conversion rates.

"My theory for why free trial products are so much higher is that these products are typically attracting a user that’s more ready to buy, which then makes them more innately ripe for sales involvement..."

True leadership and market expansion come from selling the aspirational outcome your product enables rather than just the product features themselves.

"Being successful at selling horseback riding means they grow the market for their product while giving the perfect context for talking about their saddles. It lets them position themselves as the lead..."

Solidifying strategic pillars like customer personas and brand stories is a necessary prerequisite for efficient tactical execution.

"If you are struggling to write a GACCS, it might mean you don’t have alignment on your marketing foundation. Your marketing foundation includes having a shared understanding of OKRs or goals, ideal cu..."

A successful product pitch must be remarkable enough to break through noise and give potential users a reason to pay attention.

"Competition is so fierce that you have to create something remarkable in order to succeed. Something remarkable is worth talking about. Worth noticing. Exceptional. New. Interesting. The opposite of r..."

True differentiation comes from identifying what is fundamentally different about your solution compared to existing alternatives, not just what is incrementally better.

"Start by making a list of products that your users currently use to solve the same problem your product does. . . Now compare this alternative with your product. What’s unique to your solution?"

Effective positioning matches the user's specific need with the product's primary function through the lens of what they are 'hiring' the product to accomplish.

"If you’re not familiar with the Jobs-to-Be-Done framework, the basic premise is that your users are “hiring” your product to do a job for them. . . Simply match the needs and wants of your users with..."

Effective brand positioning requires a provocative point of view that addresses C-level problems rather than safe, committee-driven feature lists.

"‘Safe’ marketing and positioning kills companies. ‘Consensus’ messaging created by committees is never any good. Be the forcing function to grow a backbone, stand for something, and make a splash in t..."

Messaging during a crisis should focus on solving immediate customer problems—such as remote work or delivery—while demonstrating empathy through reduced friction and flexible terms.

"Don’t include “covid” in the messaging, instead come in with a solution to the problem the user is facing. Make sure you don’t look like you are trying to profit from covid."

Marketplaces can create a competitive moat by intentionally setting a significantly higher quality bar than the industry standard.

"Quality was always seen as a differentiator for us. We knew we had a higher bar than our competitors. Wanted to be the company with the most stringent background checks, highest bar for quality in the..."

In a professional world often devoid of levity, being even slightly amusing provides a distinct strategic advantage over more serious competitors.

"Even better, the business world—with the exception of advertising and the Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholders meeting—is often devoid of humor, which means if you are funny or even mildly amusing,..."

Effective positioning serves as context-setting that aligns a product's unique strengths with the specific needs of a target audience.

"Positioning defines how your product is a leader at delivering something that a well-defined set of customers cares a lot about."

To establish true differentiation, you must first identify what customers would actually do or use if your product did not exist.

"I had the realization that the starting point had to be competitive alternatives. If it wasn’t, what we ended up with was positioning that sounded good in the office but didn’t work with customers bec..."

A product struggling with adoption may be fundamentally sound but trapped in the wrong market category, requiring a shift in context rather than a rebuild.

"Instead of killing the product straight away, they decided to take a shot at repositioning our “Microsoft Access killer” as an “embeddable database for mobile devices.” The product took off."

Differentiated value is the specific outcome that a unique capability provides when compared directly to the customer's current alternatives.

"The unique value that you can provide to customers is completely dependent on your differentiated features. Your differentiated features are only “differentiated” when you compare them to competitive..."

Effective positioning is a structured process of defining your competitive context to make your product's unique value obvious to the right customers.

"Positioning as a concept is not new; it defines how your product is the best in the world at delivering some value that a well-defined set of companies care a lot about."

Positioning problems manifest as customer confusion during sales calls or inconsistent internal narratives about what the product actually does.

"You’ll get to listen to customers who are like, “Back up and pitch it to me again. Can you say that again?” Sometimes they’d say, “Oh, you are like Salesforce” or “I can do this on a spreadsheet; why..."

Positioning is the strategic foundation that must be defined before you can create effective homepage copy, sales decks, or brand identities.

"These concepts are distinct, because positioning is a fundamental precursor to messaging. By messaging, people mean “This is the text on the homepage.” You can’t write that until you understand the va..."

Early-stage startups should remain flexible with positioning until they identify consistent patterns in customer needs and competitive behavior.

"For an early-stage company trying to find PMF, the positioning makes less sense, because there is a lot of validation of the product hypothesis first. Allow the market and customers to pull you as opp..."

Internal misalignment often occurs when the founder's successful sales narrative hasn't been codified or updated for the rest of the leadership team.

"Most cases April has dealt with are misalignment problems within the org and not positioning problems. The founder often has the positioning story done right with their early customer calls, but their..."

Establishing a strong strategic foundation ensures that your chosen metrics are purposeful and aligned with the company’s broader mission.

"Top candidates don’t just describe a product’s features but establish a compelling case for why it matters to users, the business, and the market. This foundation makes all subsequent metrics and reco..."

You can unlock significant growth without changing the product by simply refining the messaging to better communicate its value to the right people.

"You may have the perfect solution for the perfect person, but if they don’t understand how your product will help them, they won’t pay attention."

Connecting usage frequency to tangible business results creates a clear link between AI adoption and career impact.

"Like any good PM, you should track AI adoption as inputs (who’s using AI) and outputs (what business value it’s creating). You should also reward employees who are leading the charge to keep the momen..."

Success criteria should be specific, measurable numbers that connect directly to the team's higher-level KPIs.

"Ideally this is a specific metric, with a defined goal, that you can easily measure. Ideally it directly connects to your team’s KPI’s. Ideally it is based on hard data about the opportunity size, inv..."

A single quantitative north-star metric provides a common language for prioritization, making it possible to compare the value of disparate projects and hold leaders accountable to outcomes.

"The CFO was experiencing a similar version of this problem, so we came up with the idea of establishing a north star metric: nights booked. We would use this as a common denominator for projects so we..."

Product measurement should evolve from technical stability to user value and finally to business impact as a product matures.

"As we became convinced that the product is stable, we focused our attention more on outcome metrics. For example, since the product helps sellers book meetings, we looked at the number of meetings boo..."

Focus your optimization efforts on the specific features that mathematically show the strongest relationship to your primary growth drivers.

"First, you need to figure out which features to focus on. That means you need to analyze your data to identify which of your features are most correlated with growth, and then analyze the engagement l..."

Success rates and completion metrics provide a more granular understanding of product performance than simple adoption numbers.

"One final important metric to measure is success rate. This doesn’t apply to every feature, but many features have a concept of a successful outcome for the user. For instance, what percentage of resu..."

Correlation analysis serves as a rapid diagnostic tool to identify which product features are most closely linked to user behavior before performing more complex modeling.

"Correlation does not imply causation, but it’s the simplest and fastest way to locate which features or metrics correlate the most with high or low user engagement. In my work, I like to run a correla..."

Linear regression moves beyond simply identifying a relationship to quantifying exactly how much an increase in one variable will likely impact another.

"Linear regression takes correlation analysis further and shows how much one variable affects another and, more importantly, whether you can use the pattern of one variable to predict and estimate the..."

The choice between correlation and regression is determined by whether you need to confirm the existence of a link or quantify the predictive power of one metric over another.

"If you can swap X and Y and get the same result, use correlation. If changing them affects your outcome, use regression. If your analysis aims to answer if there is a relationship between X and Y, use..."

Pinpointing the specific operational threshold that triggers user churn allows you to set a data-driven 'north star' for supply quality.

"The aha moment, or inflection point, was a 3 minutes ETA. Under 3 minutes felt instantaneous. When it was over 3 minutes, you were incentivized to shop around, take the bus, walk, or take another ride..."

Defining active users by their core product actions, such as making a transaction or logging data, provides much cleaner and more accurate retention data than tracking broad events like logins.

"Most companies use logins or app opens as main events for the “active users” definition.But given that I always aim for the cleanest and most precise data reporting, I’d recommend using the main user..."

Shifting your North Star from a lagging indicator like ARR to a volume-based usage metric can mask fundamental flaws in retention and monetization.

"As a result, we reoriented the entire company, board, and investor base to focus on the metric of weekly active companies, not ARR. Our North Star was now to get as many companies using Equals as poss..."

Visualizing data metrics as an organizational hierarchy helps teams focus on the user actions that predict revenue rather than just chasing the revenue outcome itself.

"Whether you are a marketplace, SaaS, direct-to-consumer, social network, or any other type of business, you can think of your data as a company organizational chart: Revenue is the 'CEO' (it’s an outc..."

A data audit bridges the gap between the qualitative user experience and the quantitative reality of the funnel, revealing exactly where users drop off.

"Pair the audit with data on how many people are on your website, how many go through the signup process, how many reach the 'aha' moment, and how many are successful in self-checkout. This combination..."

Evaluate monetization by tracking free-to-paid conversion rates alongside the efficiency of your customer acquisition spend.

"- **Paid company conversion:** % of free companies that convert to paid within X days - **Payback period**: Average time to pay back CAC - **Gross margins**: Net sales revenue minus the cost of goods..."

Founders should prioritize accessibility and simplicity by starting with Google Sheets before graduating to more complex visualization tools.

"Surprisingly (though not that surprisingly) Google Sheets was by far the most used tool, followed by Profitwell and Google Data Studio (sitting on top of Google Sheets)."

Align your focus with the two or three metrics that most directly impact your specific business model's health and growth.

"As you learn more about what levers most impact the health and growth of your business (e.g. retention, margins, acquisition, etc.), focus on those. Try to narrow in on the two or three metrics that m..."

Bookings serve as a cleaner growth north-star than GMV because they isolate actual usage from pricing volatility and transaction size outliers.

"If fill rate is the ultimate measure of marketplace health, bookings is the best way to track marketplace growth. Unlike GMV (which is also incredibly important, as you’ll see below), bookings removes..."

When a baseline control group doesn't exist, replace A/B testing with absolute success benchmarks like target retention rates.

"If you’re launching a brand new independent product, or pivoting the product, you likely have nothing to compare this new product against (other than it *not* existing). In this case, you’re better of..."

Pivoting is a standard part of the startup journey, with nearly half of successful B2B companies changing their core idea before finding success.

"~40% of startups pivoted at least once before landing on their winning idea—oftentimes more than once."

Pivoting is a standard part of the B2B journey, with nearly half of successful startups failing at their first idea before finding product-market fit.

"Forty percent (nearly half!) of the companies I spoke with went through at least one failed idea before discovering something that worked. Some went through 10. As Christina Cacioppo eloquently put it..."

Strategic pivots require the courage to admit failure and the speed to revert to a working model before the business is permanently damaged.

"Both the results we were seeing in the data and our early traction selling Equals told us we needed to (1) kill free *and* (2) add friction back to onboarding. Quickly. And once we did, everything cha..."

When product-market fit remains elusive and customers reject the product for ambiguous reasons, it may be time to seek a soft landing rather than continuing to build into a void.

"During that time, we knew our customers would reject the product for ambiguous reasons, our team would second-guess our strategy, and our investors would tell us to pivot. We stuck to our guns for ove..."

Pivoting is a common and critical decision for startup success, occurring in a significant percentage of both B2B and consumer companies.

"Based on my research, one in three B2B startups, and one in five consumer startups, pivot before finding their big idea. That’s a lot! Pivoting is the second most consequential decision you’ll make as..."

Pivot ideas are often hidden within the original product as specific features or internal tools that demonstrate clear organic traction.

"That being said, the majority of pivots emerged from founders narrowing their focus to a single feature or piece of tech that was showing pull. A surprising number of successful pivots (over a fourth..."

Most startups find their pivot point within a year of launch, though successful outliers show the timeline can range from months to half a decade.

"A fourth of companies pivoted less than three months after launching their initial product. The median time was one year. Notion took four years, and Lyft took five."

Pivoting is fundamentally about managing opportunity cost to maximize your chances of finding product-market fit through multiple 'shots on goal.'

"My takeaway is that you should have a hard conversation with your co-founder around the three-month mark, and depending on how it’s going (see below), either re-commit or change the idea. Then schedul..."

Identifying whether you need a clean-slate ideation pivot or a 'hard pivot' based on existing product elements determines your strategy for finding a new direction.

"Ideation pivots: This is when an early-stage startup changes its idea before having a fully formed product or meaningful traction. Hard pivots: This is when a company with a live product and real user..."

Standardizing your evaluation timelines against successful startup benchmarks helps prevent founders from waiting too long to change a failing course.

"Ideation pivots generally happen within three months of launching your original idea. Hard pivots generally happen within two years after launch, and most around the one-year mark. I suspect the small..."

While operational effectiveness is necessary for profitability, strategic differentiation is more sustainable because it avoids the 'race to the bottom' that occurs when competitors copy your efficiencies.

"He found that there are only two paths to winning a market: 1. Operational effectiveness: Performing activities better than rivals 2. Differentiating: Performing activities differently, or performing..."

To challenge an established incumbent, you must provide a distinct value proposition that allows you to step out of their shadow rather than competing on their terms.

"Differentiating becomes even more important if you’re entering a crowded market or coming after an established player. You need to give people a reason to choose you, and to even pay attention in the..."

Industry disruption can be achieved by offering a competitor's paid core product for free and monetizing through alternative revenue streams.

"Find a way to make free a product that is currently not free, and you’ll get a lot of people’s attention. Chime disrupted the entrenched banking industry by offering fee-free banking—while making mone..."

To displace incumbents, your B2B solution must offer an improvement of at least four points on a ten-point scale compared to current alternatives.

"Your solution needs to be +4 better for anyone to care about your product. This also means that if the existing solution gets a 6 or higher, it’ll be very hard to replace (e.g. Excel)."

Effective differentiation requires a deep understanding of exactly who you are competing against and why your approach is fundamentally superior.

"Teams that build winning products share some fundamental traits. They know their customers—and what problem they can solve for them. They know which approach to take—and why it’s superior to the alter..."

Incumbents are often protected by 'true' switching costs—like career stakes and internal politics—rather than just the technical difficulty of migration.

"Generally, teams think about switching costs as the amount of time and money needed to install one solution and remove another. But true switching costs are much more than that: they include the polit..."

Effective strategic research includes 'comparables'—companies solving similar problems in different markets—to broaden the team's perspective.

"Competitors are players operating in the same space in an effort to win a similar set of customers. Comparables are players that are tackling similar problems but perhaps in a different market/space...."

Strategic advantage is found at the intersection of a product's unique strengths and user motivations that competitors cannot easily satisfy.

"Identify a unique strength that your company/product has that aligns well with the current opportunities in your environment. Then leverage that strength in a way that others cannot easily replicate...."

Startups can overcome massive incumbents by monopolizing long-tail markets and secondary niches where large players lack specialized inventory.

"Unlike our competitors (e.g. Expedia, Orbitz), we didn’t have access to chain hotels in big markets, so we focused on long-tail markets early-on. We build inventory in secondary and tertiary destinati..."

Product-market fit is rarely a binary 'aha' moment; it is a gradual process of identifying and winning over increasingly larger market segments.

"PMF has been so gradual; I might even say . . . linear. There’s not just one hump that we got over and thought, ‘Okay, now it’s clicking.’ It’s more like we’re chipping away at these obstacles and get..."

B2B startups typically require a two-year commitment to iteration and validation before they reach a point of clear product-market fit.

"The median time from idea to feeling product-market fit was roughly 2 years. Start to worry if you’ve been working on your idea for over 2 years and not feeling PMF (see below what that feels like), a..."

The quality of the market is the primary determinant of startup success, as a strong market naturally pulls a product toward viability even with a mediocre team.

"Personally, I’ll take the third position—I’ll assert that *market* is the most important factor in a startup’s success or failure. Why? In a great market—a market with lots of real potential customers..."

True product-market fit is defined by high retention and growth driven by a product that people genuinely want and are willing to pay for.

"Most marketplaces fail not because of the marketplace, but because of more fundamental reasons — not building something people want, too small a market, inability to acquire users, etc. So start by lo..."

Early product/market fit is validated by observing visceral user passion, a willingness to pay, and a deep understanding of the customer's core pain point.

"In my experience, you never really know you have PMF until you’ve built the thing, gotten people to use it, and enough people continue to use it for an extended period. Also, it’s not a binary, big-ba..."

Finding product-market fit typically requires a minimum of two years of effort, including both pre-launch development and post-launch iteration.

"The average time from launch to PMF is around 1.5 years. This doesn’t even include the time it takes to build the v1, which is often another 1+ years of work. So expect to put in at least two years be..."

The strongest signal of product-market fit is compounding organic growth and virality that occurs without significant marketing spend.

"When you're putting almost no effort into growth but it's clear the product itself is becoming 'word of mouth' viral, you know you have something really special. Then all efforts shift to keeping that..."

For localized businesses, product-market fit is only confirmed once the core model can be successfully and systematically replicated in a second market.

"I felt we had PMF close to 9-12 months in, after we were able to replicate the same or better success in city 2 vs. city 1."

The timeline to product-market fit varies wildly, ranging from immediate viral takeoff to a long slog of relentless iteration.

"The rise of Tinder was really fast, and there were very, very few changes to the product before it had already taken off."

Iterating toward product-market fit requires an obsessive focus that prioritizes retention signals above all other business activities.

"Do whatever is required to get to product-market fit. Including changing out people, rewriting your product, moving into a different market, telling customers no when you don’t want to, telling custom..."

Consistent cohort retention that settles above zero percent is the most objective proof that a segment of the market truly wants your product.

"You measure cohort retention by bucketing all the users who joined during a certain month/week/day (that’s your cohort) and looking at how many in this group are still active x months/weeks/days later..."

True product-market fit is achieved when product retention and growth engines are synchronized to drive sustainable user acquisition.

"You have product-market fit when your retention creates enough money (or content/virality) to drive sustainable acquisition."

Product-market fit is recognizable when market demand begins to pull the product out of the company faster than the team can keep up with it.

"You can always feel product/market fit when it's happening. The customers are buying the product just as fast as you can make it -- or usage is growing just as fast as you can add more servers. Money..."

The strongest signal of pre-product market fit is a customer's willingness to commit capital or emotional energy before the solution is even built.

"Are people willing to pay you for this product? Ask them this directly. Even try to get them to pay you now (i.e. literally send them an invoice) to get early access to the product. Nothing will be a..."

A cohort retention curve that levels off suggests a subset of the market finds permanent value in the product, confirming quantitative product-market fit.

"Plot the % active users over time (for various cohorts) to create a retention curve. If it flattens off at some point, you have probably found product/market fit for some market or audience."

The 'Sean Ellis test' provides a clear qualitative benchmark for product-market fit based on the intensity of user reliance on the product.

"Survey your users and ask them ‘How would you feel if you could no longer use the product?’ and measure the percent who answer ‘very disappointed.’ If that percentage is over 40%, you have PMF."

Burn efficiency acts as a proxy for product-market fit by showing whether growth is being 'pulled' by the market or 'pushed' by excessive spending.

"The higher the Burn Multiple, the more the startup is burning to achieve each unit of growth. The lower the Burn Multiple, the more efficient the growth is. This is a Measure of Product-Market Fit."

Founders often mistake expressions of personal support and investor confidence for actual market demand, leading to a false sense of progress.

"On some level, all founders suffer from “happy ears”—the chronic confirmation bias pervading conversations with customers, partners, team members, and investors. We tend to have irrational levels of c..."

A product’s viability can be destroyed if the target user's role evolves and their core problems are reassigned to other teams or vertical tools.

"As we took Cascade to market, we were dismayed to find that the business analyst role had changed, making us less relevant. A lot of big-data wrangling and analysis was being shifted to more technical..."

True product-market fit in a marketplace is signaled by high user retention and a growth model where organic referrals significantly outperform paid acquisition.

"Our first market had extremely high product-market fit. Engagement (orders per week) and retention were high, and over 90% of new users came from friends telling their friends."

Top B2B startups typically reach the $1M ARR milestone within 18 months of securing their first customer.

"On average, it took top B2B startups ~2 years from founding to hit $1m ARR, and roughly 1.5 years after closing their first customer. My takeaway is that once you’ve signed your first customer, you sh..."

Headcount should be treated as a cost center and management burden that should only be increased after achieving product-market fit.

"The only metric that merits congratulations is product traction/PMF. Fight the urge to use vanity metrics (like team size or news mentions) as a sign of progress."

The primary cause of startup failure is a lack of direct customer engagement, which prevents founders from discovering and validating product-market fit.

"If I drill down what makes companies fail, it’s quite simple. It’s just like they don’t talk to users, which means they don’t find product-market fit. And if they don’t find product-market fit, nothin..."

Focusing on top-line growth before securing retention is a trap, as early growth can be 'brute-forced' but will ultimately fail without a stable user base.

"It’s a huge mistake to focus on the growth number before getting retention. You can often hit the ‘great’ number at an early stage by brute force because the numbers are so small. Unfortunately, that..."

Retention is the single most reliable quantitative indicator of product-market fit because it proves the product provides sustainable value to its users.

"“Great retention is the scalable way to grow a product. It’s the best indicator of product-market fit, it is the most important factor in a user’s lifetime value, and high retention drives all of the..."

Product-market fit is often characterized by a shift from "pushing" a product to feeling a market "pull" that manifests as uncontrollable organic growth and desperate customer demand.

"Every company did have a clear moment where they recognized they had PMF, and many did experience a sudden hard-to-miss pull from the market, BUT many companies did not see it immediately. For many co..."

Persistence and iteration are often required to find fit, as many iconic companies took years of failure and adjustment before finding a repeatable model.

"About half of these companies found PMF immediately after launch, but half spent months or years iterating to get there. Once they got there though, it became obvious."

Determine product-market fit by triangulating user affection, relative utility, and actual behavior through targeted research methods.

"While product-market fit looks different for every product, it’s hard to imagine a scenario where you’ll attain PMF if people don’t feel some degree of affection for your product, don’t find it useful..."

A successful PMF survey must go beyond general satisfaction to capture specific metrics on user disappointment, comparative advantage, and real-world usage patterns.

"Product-market fit happens only when a set of underlying assumptions end up being true. So try to break down what those assumptions might be for your product, and use questions that measure your progr..."

When performing small-scale qualitative research, true product-market fit is signaled by users’ ability to clearly articulate why your product is superior to existing alternatives.

"There should be clear, qualitative daylight between the ways that people talk about using your product and the ways they use alternatives, and people should have no trouble articulating detailed speci..."

Attempting to scale through hiring or marketing before confirming product/market fit is a primary cause of startup failure.

"One of the most common ways that startups die is premature scaling, a term first used by Steve Blank. A business is scaling prematurely if it is spending significant amounts of money on growth before..."

A web3 startup needs a PM when organizational complexity hinders execution or when the user experience becomes a primary competitive factor.

"The engineering team has grown too large to prioritize and self-coordinate projects; a PM adds efficiency (e.g. multiple Layer 1 protocols and EVM solutions)."

Interviewing for a Director of Product Management requires a shift in focus toward evaluating strategic thinking, people leadership, and high-level stakeholder management.

"Now, what is different between hiring a Director of PM vs. an IC PM? I’d say the top three differences are that they will be (1) managing PMs, (2) taking on large scope, and (3) working closely with s..."

Treating a job description as a high-leverage marketing asset rather than a routine HR document drives higher quality applications and strengthens your company brand.

"You don’t have many opportunities to break through the noise, and considering the meh’ness of most job postings, putting extra effort into creating a remarkable (i.e. worth remarking about) job postin..."

The most reliable channel for sourcing early-stage talent is the personal and professional networks of the founders, leveraging past colleagues who have a proven work ethic.

"Unsurprisingly, hiring friends and former colleagues was by far the biggest channel. This also in part explains why multi-time founders, and anyone with a large network (e.g. Y Combinator), have an ad..."

Bringing recruiting in-house early prevents the compromise on talent quality that often occurs with external agencies driven by closing speed incentives.

"Initially all of us three founders ran the recruiting process, and while it worked for a little while, it wasn’t something we were necessarily particularly good at or passionate about. We cared about..."

In an AI-enabled environment, technical ability and direct individual contribution are more valuable for PMs than traditional skills in process management and building internal consensus.

"When you take a look at resumes of PMs, a lot of them prioritize helping other people and finding alignment. I believe this becomes less important with the advent of AI. So you don’t necessarily need..."

PM hiring is a high-volume activity that requires screening many candidates to yield a single successful hire due to low conversion rates at each stage.

"Many early-stage teams underestimate how many candidates they need to speak to to make one hire. In our data we also saw that only 13% of inbound applicants even make it to the first screen."

Successful product teams are built by attracting naturally passionate "believers" rather than attempting to persuade skeptical experts.

"If you need to sell someone really really (like, really really) hard to join you, they are probably not the right fit. The best teammates are the ones begging their managers to work on your project."

The right time to hire a first PM is after achieving product/market fit and when the engineering team is large enough to require dedicated roadmap management.

"My advice is that it’s time to hire your first product manager when all three of the following are met: You’ve achieved product/market fit and need to scale; Your engineering team is greater than seve..."

While startup timing varies, most companies hire their first PM once they reach 10-15 engineers or when the founders no longer have the capacity to manage the product alongside growth.

"The typical company waited two to three years to hire their first product manager. They typically had 10 to 15 engineers and 15 to 25 total employees."

B2B startups often require an earlier PM hire to manage complex customer feedback and prioritize integration requests that can otherwise overwhelm founders.

"Surprisingly, more than half of companies hired their first PM before finding product-market fit, which is counter to the advice you hear. Particularly in B2B."

A dedicated product manager is necessary when the current team lacks the skill or the desire to manage product strategy, execution, and stakeholder alignment.

"If you don’t want to hire a PM yet, the question becomes whether you have the right combination of people to fill these roles. Specifically, are the people good at these jobs, and do they want to do t..."

While most successful companies hire their first PM between their 15th and 100th employee, the ideal timing depends on founder product sense and the complexity of the user interface.

"Based on this small sampling, the first PM is generally hired as the 15th - 100th employee, and 2 - 4 years after founding. Note, this doesn’t mean this is the optimal time to hire your first PM — jus..."

Founders must provide a foundation of financial security through salary to overcome widespread equity skepticism and attract high-quality talent.

"If you’re a founder trying to attract top talent, this data reveals that focusing solely on equity might not be enough. A stronger salary offer paired with meaningful equity can strike the right balan..."

Candidate preference for equity is highly predictable based on their seniority, gender, and geographic location.

"Job level also strongly influences equity preference, with senior executives and founders showing a higher preference for equity compared with people managers and ICs. In fact, for each increase in se..."

Building a successful early-stage team requires creating a sense of 'gravity' through a combination of captivating vision, high team standards, and relentless founder effort.

"I’ve consistently seen a divide between startups that are hiring world-class people month after month and those that struggle for many months to fill a single role. Don’t get me wrong, hiring great pe..."

A compelling and well-articulated long-term vision is the most effective tool for attracting top talent who want their work to be truly meaningful.

"“Articulating a crystal clear and ambitious vision makes it easy for candidates to visualize what they are building towards for the next five years.”"

Personalizing the offer stage with high-touch experiences and radical transparency helps small startups compete with larger companies for elite talent.

"“We see the actual offer stage as a big place you can stand out. We do a Zoom to surprise the candidate with everyone from their interview panel to share why they’re excited about the candidate potent..."

Maintaining an uncompromisingly high talent bar for early hires creates a compounding effect where high-quality employees attract more high-quality candidates.

"“The best talent wants to work with the best talent. Find great people from the beginning. Never lower your recruiting bar to hire someone because they can fill a short-term need. It will be very temp..."

Implementing a work trial allows companies to move beyond superficial interview performance and gain high-fidelity signal on a candidate's actual productivity.

"The more we thought about why some hires succeeded and some didn’t, the more we recognized that there is no substitute for working alongside someone in the trenches."

Basing work trial prompts on historical real-world challenges allows the hiring team to leverage their deep understanding of the problem to better evaluate the candidate’s solution.

"The project was typically from a real-world situation we faced and solved in the past. This allowed us to know the ins and outs of the problem, which is useful when assessing and guiding candidates."

Compensating candidates for their work trial time ensures a fair exchange and helps secure commitment from high-quality talent who might otherwise opt out.

"It’s so very hard a priori to know if someone can do the job. So we just pay them to do it!"

To convince leadership, demonstrate how standard interviews prioritize irrelevant charisma over the actual skills required for the role.

"We recognized we were being influenced by aspects of an interview—such as someone’s manner of speaking or behavior in a restaurant—that have no bearing on how a candidate will actually perform. Some p..."

High-fidelity work trials are the best way to evaluate a candidate's actual judgment, taste, and ability to collaborate on real projects.

"Job candidates go through a paid work trial. Theyjoin the team for 1-5 days and work on a real project with the team."

PM interview projects should prioritize the evaluation of a candidate's structured thinking and communication process rather than just the final solution.

"The goal of the project is to get a taste of how a candidate approaches a new problem. Most importantly, you aren’t looking at how close they got to the right answer. Instead, you are looking at how t..."

A structured, consistent interview process using standardized behavioral questions is essential for reducing bias and making fair comparisons between PM candidates.

"And don’t forget to keep your questions consistent, with predefined good and bad answers, to avoid bias. Companies should rely on a structured interview that standardizes the process among candidates,..."

Probing into past product failures and ambiguous situations reveals a candidate's true mindset, humility, and ability to navigate professional adversity.

"You can learn the most about how a person operates, thinks, and collaborates by exploring times when things didn’t go as planned. If they get hired, you can guarantee they’ll face unexpected challenge..."

A PM's impact is measured not just by shipped outcomes, but by their initiative and their ability to frame complex problems as existential opportunities that rally a team.

"The thought experiment for me is always, coming out of that, do I feel compelled to work on that problem? Right? No matter how boring it sounds on the surface, I think a really great product manager c..."

Cultural fit is best assessed through indicators of humility and self-awareness, specifically the ability to candidly discuss personal mistakes without defensiveness.

"It tells me you have some humor, you’re humble, and you can point out when you’ve made a mistake. You’ve done enough to be able to confidently say, of course I’ve made a mistake. Because none of us ar..."

When hiring for a novel role, you can refine your selection criteria during the review process by identifying the sweet spot between proven expertise and future career upside.

"I wasn’t exactly sure what profile I was looking for when I started, but I knew I wanted to find people who were senior enough to have had firsthand experience building world-class, successful, and im..."

The ideal first PM is typically an execution-oriented individual contributor or an internal transfer who already understands the product and customer base.

"Most first PMs were previously individual-contributor product managers, or senior PMs. Very few were previously former directors, VPs, or heads of product. Surprisingly, almost a fourth were engineers..."

Structuring teams around specific business objectives rather than feature ownership empowers them to work across any necessary product surface to achieve their goals.

"For example, at Airbnb we had a team oriented around the outcome of getting hosts more bookings, NOT a team owning the “host products” that then figured out how to drive bookings. Similarly, we had a..."

A truly outcome-oriented organization is characterized by its willingness to let teams cross product boundaries and prioritize business impact over feature-centric roadmaps.

"Do you organize teams around a goal, or around product/surface areas? Are teams encouraged to work on any part of the product to achieve their goals, or are they pushed to stay within their lanes? Do..."

Growth reporting lines should be determined by company structure: CPO for product-centricity, or CRO to minimize friction with established sales motions.

"Heads of growth most commonly report to product leaders, but sometimes they may roll up into sales/GTM organizations to better align incentives and KPIs. Sometimes you may see a head of growth reporti..."

Transitioning from a centralized pool to an embedded model ensures data scientists are partners in strategy and planning, making data a critical input at the start of the product cycle.

"Data scientists were not just 'consulted' on product, but data itself became critical to decision-making. Data scientists sat next to PMs and along with the engineers and designers were a critical voi..."

Organizational design should be dictated by the proximity of the North Star metric to revenue, favoring GM models for direct revenue drivers and functional models for engagement drivers.

"The closer your North Star metric is to revenue, the more suited your organization is to a GM model."

A hybrid model allows companies to combine the speed of GM-led business units with the organizational alignment and shared infrastructure of centralized functional teams.

"In practice, most companies operate in a hybrid model but skew toward the GM or functional mode. Depending on what is needed for specific products and teams to succeed, some parts of the company are G..."

GM structures demand deep domain specialists to own specific business outcomes, whereas functional models benefit from versatile leaders who can be repositioned across different product areas.

"In GM organizations, leaders with depth of expertise in one specific domain are crucial, because they are responsible for the success of their business area alone."

Functional organizational structures are most effective at creating the seamless customer journeys and organic flywheels necessary for defensible growth-stage success.

"Functional models optimize for product growth through cohesive customer journeys. This is especially critical for growth-stage companies. When the customer journey is seamless, organic flywheels emerg..."

Pairing product and engineering leads at every organizational level ensures that business strategy and technical execution are balanced and share accountability for success.

"The team is managed by two or three “co-leads.” Typically, a PM lead and an Engineering lead head up the team, sometimes joined by a Learning and Curriculum lead (experts in learning science, curricul..."

While metrics-based teams drive growth and optimization, feature-based teams are necessary for solving qualitative product problems that lack a single, direct quantifiable indicator of success.

"While all of our teams are metrics-driven, we tend to structure product teams as either (1) metric-based or (2) feature-based. Metric-based teams are structured around clear metrics that impact someth..."

Scaling a multi-product organization requires a hybrid structure of vertical product teams and horizontal platform teams to maintain both focus and consistency.

"Right now, we organize around products and platforms. We have two products—Figma Design and FigJam—so we have two teams solely focused on the respective product. We then have “horizontal” platform tea..."

Maintaining professional reporting chains ensures employees are managed by leaders who understand their specific craft and career path.

"Very intentionally, all people report up through a professional chain. That is, all product designers report to the head of product design (who reports to me), all analysts report to the head of analy..."

Distributing product responsibilities across engineering and design fosters a stronger sense of collective ownership and holistic product thinking.

"Instead of having a PM for every team or area of the product, we like to see that the broader team collectively thinks about the product and how features are delivered, not just the PMs."

Assembling and dispersing teams around specific projects prevents siloing and maintains a focus on the broader product context.

"We have purposely avoided product-area-specific teams (e.g. the roadmaps product team, the cycles product team, etc.), as I see it can be a way for people to get too trapped in their specific product..."

A unified 'Product' organization with reporting lines to founders can maintain holistic focus and high execution speed.

"Product and design report to me (CEO). We have engineering managers, but engineering ultimately reports up to my co-founders: Tuomas for infrastructure and Europe engineering, and Jori for U.S. engine..."

Integrating analytics and marketing directly into product streams ensures cross-functional alignment and a holistic perspective from the start of the development process.

"Today the product organization is a cross-functional team composed of Analytics, (Product) Marketing, Product, Engineering, and Design—or AMPED for short. AMPED is organized into seven 'product stream..."

For products with highly interdependent features, a centralized coordination mechanism is vital to ensure updates in one area benefit the entire platform without breaking adjacent use cases.

"You can’t decompose Notion into individual products. So if you’re working on the Project Management offering at Notion and you change how databases work, or you change how pages work, that has implica..."

Relying solely on product-minded engineers can leave gaps in consistent user feedback integration and cross-functional coordination, making early PM hires essential for balanced growth.

"We didn’t have PMs until two years ago, at around 50 or 60 engineers. I’m not sure this was actually ideal. ... That said, there is a difference between engineers who think about product, and product..."

Consolidating all product, technical, and research functions under a single leader fosters proactive cross-talk and ensures strategic visibility across the entire organization.

"We have a unified product and technology organization—engineering, product management, design, data, user research, and security all roll up to me. Our data lead, design lead, research lead, engineeri..."

Minimize organizational overhead by structuring around tiny, parallelized teams that use AI to bypass traditional alignment bottlenecks.

"My goal is to structure teams around minimizing ‘coordination headwind,’ as described by Alex Komoroske in this deck on seeing organizations as slime mold. The rough idea is that coordination costs (c..."

Design your organization structure to force cross-functional cooperation by placing product, engineering, and design under a single leader.

"Everyone should report to the same tech-minded leader. There is no better way to force a relationship to happen than by having each head report into the same leader—in our case, we all report into the..."

Consolidating business units into broad product divisions ensures that the final user experience feels like a single, cohesive vision rather than a collection of silos.

"The best companies figure out how to make sure you can’t see the org chart through the product."

Organizing teams by customer workloads instead of internal features prevents organizational silos and keeps teams focused on unified user experiences.

"Teams at Snowflake are organized more around customer workloads (various programs or applications running in the Data Cloud), rather than specific features or feature areas."

Product management and design should operate as a co-design partnership where the PM defines the problem context and the designer owns the resulting user experience.

"Product brings the context of the problem we're solving and why it matters. Together with Design and Eng, a range of solutions are explored. Eng provides options that are feasible (based on whatever c..."

The fundamental difference between feature and empowered teams is whether the culture rewards the quantity of features shipped (outputs) or the actual business impact achieved (outcomes).

"John’s original post lists 12 ways to know you’re in a feature factory, which I boil down to rewarding outputs over outcomes. Feature-factory teams are praised for shipping many features but not for a..."

Feature-factory models can be a rational choice for businesses that need to move fast, reach competitive feature parity, or execute on a founder's clear and winning vision.

"Where our thinking diverges is that I see the feature factory as the right choice for some CEOs to run their companies, especially when those CEOs have a clear and compelling product vision."

Autonomy is maximized when teams have all the cross-functional resources they need to own entire business outcomes.

"Form cross-functional teams, with all of the resources necessary to ship, and empower them to drive outcomes."

Standardizing the Senior PM level as the transition point between IC and management roles provides clear and predictable career pathing.

"Two-thirds of companies have both an IC track and a manager track. When there’s a manager track, you can switch at L6 (i.e. Sr. Product Manager)"

Effective PM evaluation relies on prioritizing core competencies like leadership and impact over purely technical skills.

"Most common attributes/competencies/skills (in order): 1. Leadership 2. Impact 3. Scope 4. Execution 5. Communication 6. Vision 7. Strategy 8. Collaboration 9. Planning 10. Technical skills"

Benchmarking PM levels against industry leaders helps companies avoid title inflation and maintain a structure recognizable to external talent.

"Four companies (Stripe, Airbnb, Lyft, and Facebook) try to avoid title inflation and stick to “Product Manager” for the majority of IC levels. Stripe officially sticks to the “Product Manager” title a..."

Empowering self-contained units with a narrow focus and autonomous mandates is the most effective way to drive consistent team impact.

"Optimize for dedicated cross-functional teams with a clear mandate. In my experience, this is the single most impactful thing leaders can do when setting up a team. You want self-contained teams that..."

PLG team structures should evolve through three distinct phases—beginning, growing, and scaling—rather than following a single static model.

"If you are serious about your PLG motion, you will need to have a dedicated team working on it. But, importantly, there is no “standard” PLG team setup that works for all companies. And even within a..."

Growth is the process of connecting more users to existing product value through optimized distribution strategies rather than expanding the product's core features.

"Growth teams don’t build net new products or features. Instead, they work on creating distribution strategies that help acquire, activate, engage, and monetize customers on the existing product value."

The choice between centralized and decentralized structures depends on whether your priority is execution speed or embedding growth culture across all product teams.

"Centralized growth teams are optimized for velocity. They operate as a lean, mean, execution-hungry machine."

Hiring a growth team before achieving product-market fit wastes capital because growth functions require a validated product to scale effectively.

"Growth is about increasing the distribution of the core product. If there is no validation that the product has found PMF, growth has nothing to grow. PMF has to happen first, then growth."

Successful first growth hires are specialists whose skills directly match the specific bottleneck in your current customer journey.

"Your first growth hire’s skill set should be anchored to the biggest growth lever that is currently experiencing friction: acquisition, activation, engagement, or monetization. Is your biggest bottlen..."

Growth hiring should follow a logical progression from generalist 'Builders' who validate the model to specialists who capture value and leaders who innovate.

"In almost all cases, you want to start by hiring a Builder, to prove your model’s validity. If most of your assumptions were right and you are enjoying early traction, you should move to Optimizers ne..."

Successful PLG requires a dedicated, cross-functional team rather than individual owners who lack the resources to influence both product and go-to-market functions.

"If you're serious about PLG, then a dedicated team is necessary. Assigning just one person to manage all the different stakeholders and parts of PLG won't cut it."

A tiny, high-leverage team combining commercial competitiveness with deep technical data skills can manage massive spend more effectively than a large, automated department.

"It was actually only two guys: one banker and one coder. Peter (the banker) was extremely competitive. He would scream and shout when he was losing his #1 position. He had a simple success criteria: w..."

Sequence your early hires to fill specific gaps in your founding team's capabilities, prioritizing technical horsepower unless the founders can build the product themselves.

"Over two-thirds of the companies hired an engineer as employee #1. Not a big surprise. In the rare case when an engineer wasn’t the first hire, it usually came down to the founding team having enough..."

While solo founders are technically welcome at elite incubators, the statistical reality shows a strong institutional preference for multi-founder teams.

"Solo founders are at a disadvantage. Although solo founders are encouraged, the data does show a steep decline in the number of them accepted to YC."

Equity for late-joining co-founders should reflect their long-term impact on the company, typically ranging from 10% to an equal split, rather than being treated as a standard employee grant.

"If they’re a true cofounder, would you consider giving them equity starting around 10% of the company — all the way up to a share equal to yours? For a very early stage company, we see “late-arriving..."

Technical co-founders are essential because great products emerge from continuous, hands-on iteration that cannot be captured in a static outsource specification.

"Contracting an engineering team to build the product doesn’t really work because you can’t spec your way to a great product; you have to be part of the iterations."

When building a founding team, cultural alignment and genuine mission-driven excitement are more critical than specific industry experience.

"The most important thing Airbnb looked for in early hires is how excited they were to be there. The second thing was to understand their true motivations and make sure they mapped to the company’s cor..."

Peer-led learning programs leverage existing internal enthusiasm to scale AI skills more effectively than top-down training.

"Every company has AI power users who are just itching to share what they’ve learned. Set up the right channels and resources for them to train everyone else."

Effective management requires balancing the hard work of convincing others and maintaining team agency with the leader's responsibility to ensure a successful outcome.

"True, there is more power. True, you have more say over what happens. But, what people don’t realize until they get into a management role is that you actually spend *more* time convincing people of y..."

Managers must accept their role as the final decision-maker and be willing to overrule the team when they have a strong conviction about the best path forward.

"There’s a reason that there’s a *boss* on a team: to make decisions. It’s your responsibility (and, by definition, your job) to help the team achieve the best possible outcomes. Making the right decis..."

Managers must prevent subordinates from delegating their problems upward, as accepting these 'monkeys' creates a backlog of work and disempowers the team.

"Subordinate-imposed time begins the moment a monkey successfully leaps from the back of a subordinate to the back of his or her superior and does not end until the monkey is returned to its proper own..."

Scaling requires leaders to intentionally give away current responsibilities and 'Legos' to others to clear the path for solving larger, more complex problems.

"But the best way to manage scaling (and one of the secrets to succeeding in a rapidly growing company) is to ignore those instincts, and go find a bigger and better Lego tower to build. Chances are if..."

Moving from line manager to manager of managers is a fundamentally different role with a learning curve that is often underestimated.

"Most people intuitively understand that the transition from IC to line manager is a role change with a steep learning curve. But the notion that the learning curve from line manager to manager of mana..."

Skip-level meetings should be prioritized for gathering unfiltered context rather than for making on-the-spot decisions that disempower your direct-report managers.

"But in general, off-the-cuff solutions and strong opinions actually undermine your direct-report managers in the management chain and disempower them in front of their own team. You rob your direct-re..."

Developing leadership leverage requires training yourself to solve problems and review work through the layer of your direct-report managers rather than bypassing them.

"The analogy can be applied to managing managers by engaging with the following thought experiment: “If I had zero access to any IC in my organization and could only push or pull information from my ma..."

Managerial effectiveness is the primary driver of team well-being, directly impacting burnout, belonging, and the likelihood of talent staying.

"People with great managers also feel 63% (!) more belonging, 31% less burnout, and 62% (!!!) more job enjoyment compared to those with ineffective managers. Leadership quality may be the single most i..."

Managers can accelerate their team's writing growth by codifying repetitive feedback into an AI tool that provides instant, objective rubrics.

"To scale myself, I distilled my most common writing feedback into a GPT called “The Executive Editor” (try it [here](https://chatgpt.com/g/g-67328e9be4988190baa9b07a00b2628c-hilary-s-executive-editor)..."

Scenario-based AI simulations provide a low-stakes environment for team members to sharpen logical reasoning and real-time persuasion skills.

"I created a GPT specifically designed to help product managers strengthen these skills through scenario-based simulations that mirror real-world situations, such as feature prioritization or balancing..."

Effective synthesis is a core competency that requires human reflection before leveraging AI to ensure the tool is a secondary perspective rather than a crutch.

"Before looking at AI-generated notes, I ask team members to write down the top three takeaways they personally find essential from a meeting. This approach encourages them to prioritize, reflect on wh..."

Managers can scale their specific coaching style by encoding their standards and feedback patterns into custom AI models.

"The skills that make for great managers—providing clear, consistent feedback and articulating the difference between good and excellent—translate remarkably well to creating GPTs that can give your te..."

The supermanager uses AI to handle routine feedback and initial reviews to dedicate more human time to high-leverage coaching moments.

"A supermanager harnesses AI to amplify their impact while fully embracing the human side of management. By scaling their efforts, supermanagers can effectively oversee larger, flatter teams and extend..."

Delegating initial review cycles to AI removes the manager as a bottleneck, allowing the team to move faster while maintaining quality.

"Previously, in order to avoid becoming a bottleneck, I could review only high-stakes communications, like emails to the CEO or all-hands presentations. Now my team can receive ongoing feedback from “m..."

Effective managers must resist the social pressure of mediocrity and use calibration processes to aggressively uphold high performance standards.

"The default path is to make everyone feel good by letting OK work slide. The more courageous path is to push everyone around you to keep that bar as high as possible. Rage against the dying of the lig..."

Scaling yourself as a PM requires fostering a culture where product is a shared team responsibility rather than a single role's burden.

"Create a self-reliant team by empowering your teammates as experts in their disciplines, encouraging them to think like PMs and keep initiatives moving when you’re not in the room. As PM, you might be..."

Build a structured product career ladder by mapping core skill competencies to specific rubrics for each seniority level.

"I really like Ravi Mehta's product competency approach. He introduces his framework here but the full guide has a rubric for the skill level at each seniority: What’s Your Shape? A Product Manager’s G..."

Creating a shared vocabulary of business metrics empowers all employees to participate more proactively in strategic company discussions.

"Created a deck on business terms used at our company that many may not be familiar with. Things like MRR, ACV, CAC, CTR, ASO, etc. The idea was to enable everyone to be more proactively involved in di..."

Gathering feedback from five to eight peers provides the necessary signal to form an objective and well-rounded assessment of a report's performance.

"Start by gathering data on how your direct report did, both by seeking input from your report’s peers and a self-assessment from the individual directly. You want to get as much signal as possible at..."

Requesting a self-review ensures the performance conversation incorporates the report's perspective on their own achievements and future goals.

"Ahead of our upcoming performance conversation, I would love to get your perspective on how things went. Could you please answer these three questions, along with anything else you’d like to share, an..."

Highlighting and doubling down on a report's unique strengths often creates more organizational impact than focusing exclusively on their weaknesses.

"The reality is that an individual will have just as much impact (if not more) on an organization if they flex what they are really good at, instead of just trying to improve on the areas they’re strug..."

Founders must shift to a 'trust is given' mindset to successfully onboard their first PM and empower them to make meaningful decisions.

"Ask yourself if you’re ready to trust someone else with your beloved product. Many founders desperately want help but also aren’t willing to trust an outsider. To set them up for success, choose to tr..."

To avoid defensiveness in difficult conversations, stick to 'your side of the net' by only sharing observed behaviors and their personal impact on you.

"Notice how in raising the issue in this way, she has stayed on her side of the “net,” meaning she has not attributed a motive, imputed any intent, or made any judgment. If she had gone over the net, s..."

Frame feedback around the "gain"—what you want to move toward—rather than just the "pain" of what is going wrong.

"It is profoundly more effective and inspiring to frame feedback based on the experiences or results we want to move toward (the gain) instead of focusing only on what we want to move away from (the pa..."

Use your emotional reactions as signals to help you identify and articulate the "dream within the conflict" before starting a conversation.

"The challenge is that feedback doesn’t typically show up in our brains in such a crisply articulated, ready-for-prime-time state. It takes some translating to get our raw reactions into a form that’s..."

Shifting from internal judgments to observable actions helps avoid the threat mindset that prevents people from clearly processing feedback.

"It takes some translating to get our raw reactions into a form that’s more likely to have the desired impact (the 'gain'). That form must include: What both parties ultimately care about (the Goal), W..."

Feedback is most effective when it moves away from subjective judgments and toward specific results and desired future experiences.

"Hearing what you both want more of makes it easier to feel motivated and excited about the future rather than frustrated about what’s not working in the present."

Tapping into a team's best ideas requires creating inclusive spaces where every voice, especially the quietest, is empowered to contribute.

"Great PMs make sure everyone has a chance to be heard. They know that most of the best ideas won’t come from them, and that the simple act of listening goes a very long way."

Deflecting success to the team builds long-term morale and accurately reflects the reality that PM success is team success.

"Great PMs amplify the successes and contributions of team members. They know that the success of a PM is measured primarily by the success of their team."

As the team's emotional anchor, a PM's positive energy and attitude significantly impact the group's culture and morale.

"Great PMs bring good vibes to the team. They know that they are the unofficial-but-de-facto leader of the team, and that the vibes they bring trickle down throughout the team."

To maintain morale when making unpopular decisions, first identify the objectively correct path and then focus on the interpersonal work of helping the team feel heard and respected.

"A thought exercise I recommend is to always ask yourself: *If I take people’s feelings out of the equation, what would I do?* This simple question often ends up revealing the right answer. With that,..."

Recontextualizing data as the "voice of the customer" at scale helps cross-functional teams embrace experimentation as a tool for empathy and better user experiences.

"We made a real effort to characterize data in a human light. I liked to frame data as the voice of our customers. Early on the founders would meet with guests and hosts to hear what was and wasn't wor..."

Institutionalize velocity as the core solution to business problems, acknowledging that any time spent planning is time stolen from building.

"At Ramp, our culture is velocity. It shapes every process and team ritual. It’s how we develop our people. It’s our solution to nearly every problem."

Establish transparent, recurring rituals like open jam sessions to ensure senior leadership alignment without creating gatekeepers.

"So for key decisions and high-risk projects, we now trust the PMs to bring these up in the weekly product “jam session.” This is meant to accelerate context sharing, decisions, and alignment between p..."

A high-quality product culture requires the courage to pursue 'rad' improvements based on intuition and craft, even when they aren't tied to revenue optimization.

"We’re not the kind of company that would deem something a failure or not approve something to go ahead just because you can’t put a metric on it."

Deliberately creating unique team rituals and inside jokes fosters the extreme camaraderie and irrational commitment needed to ship complex projects.

"Culture isn’t just a nice-to-have—it’s a cheat code for momentum, creativity, and execution. A product’s success depends on a team culture so strong it feels borderline religious."

Psychological safety is the fundamental requirement for a high-performing team that can take risks and move fast.

"“After years of research, Google discovered the secret weapon to building a great team was creating a sense of psychological safety.” — Inc"

Asking for help is a leadership competence that models psychological safety and fosters sustainable, reciprocal team dynamics.

"When done well, asking for help does not diminish your ownership or credibility. It increases your agency, builds higher-trust relationships, and models a willingness to put your vulnerability aside f..."

Low-stakes personal sharing rituals humanize team members and create a foundation of trust that leads to better technical collaboration.

"Every Monday morning, I asked the team to send me photos of their weekend/vacation. I collated it into individual slides and at the start of our team meeting, we went around the room talking about you..."

Sabbatical programs should be tiered based on tenure goals, using shorter breaks to retain junior talent and longer rewards for veteran employees.

"Determine your priorities, and design your sabbatical policy(ies) accordingly. To retain staff through Cycle 1, design a shorter sabbatical (~3+ months) within the first ~4 years of their employment...."

Extended leave policies significantly increase average tenure by offering a clear incentive for employees to stay past their typical departure window.

"Our research found that companies that offer a sabbatical policy not only retain their talent—80% of employees return—their people return more loyal, more creative, and more personally fulfilled."

True customer obsession is achieved when customer support is integrated into the core workflows of every team member rather than being siloed.

"That attitude soon became part of our early culture: Customer support is everyone’s job. Even after we hired a dedicated support team, our designers and developers continued to respond directly to cus..."

Driving AI adoption requires moving beyond high-level mandates to address specific organizational friction and provide clear guidance on daily use cases.

"The biggest barrier to AI adoption isn’t technology; it’s organizational change. At many companies, employees are struggling with vague AI mandates, procurement bottlenecks, and lack of guidance on th..."

An effective AI memo must bridge the gap between company vision and individual workflow by providing concrete, actionable examples.

"Saying “we are AI-first” means nothing if employees don’t know what that actually means for their day-to-day work. The companies that succeed provide specific tactics that employees and teams can adop..."

Streamlining procurement is essential to prevent employees from using unapproved personal accounts and to encourage safe experimentation with sanctioned tools.

"Most companies have long approval processes for AI tools. But what they don’t realize is that their employees are already using AI. They’re just using it from their personal accounts."

Move to a GM model only after proving multiple product lines and achieving the scale where the founder can no longer effectively act as the sole general manager.

"To scale the founder’s role, companies consider GM models typically after they have multiple proven product groups, predictable business outcomes, and significant scale."

Determining whether your market sector is in growth, decline, or a steady state is the essential first step to choosing the correct crisis response strategy.

"When you look at your business, you’ll fall into one of three buckets: 1. You are seeing growth 2. You are falling apart 3. You are chugging along Figure out which bucket you are in."

Effective crisis management requires bypassing standard bureaucracy by empowering a small, fast-moving incident response team to make immediate pivots.

"Assembling a small trusted team and giving them enough leeway to make rapid tactical decisions is critical. Overly managing communications can be damaging when each day brings significant new informat..."

Aggressive and disciplined cash management is necessary to secure survival and provide the liquidity needed to seize future market opportunities.

"The aim here is to ensure that your company has adequate cash flow and access to capital. Not only does a lack of liquidity create immediate problems but it also is critically important to your abilit..."

Leadership during organizational turbulence requires facilitating dialogue that helps the team align on a shared purpose and make meaning of the changes.

"It’s possible, through dialogue, to create a shared purpose for your role and your team, and a primary leadership responsibility is to help others make meaning. Step back and ask yourself: what matter..."

True senior leadership is demonstrated by diagnosing organizational friction and presenting proactive, concrete proposals for change before they are mandated.

"Ultimately, where you want to be as much as possible is being the person who recognizes that change should happen, figures out a plan to make it happen, and then makes it happen. This is what being a..."

Gaining team buy-in for difficult changes requires mapping organizational improvements to individual drivers like career growth or work-life balance.

"Figure out what motivates the key members of the team, and connect the changes you want to make with their personal motivations. For example: They want to drive impact: Show how the issues you’ve iden..."

Successful process changes rely on building a strong case with peer leaders and incorporating direct team feedback before implementation.

"Put together your own POV on what’s not working, and what should happen. Talk to your peer leads and get their perspective and support. Sit down with the team and share what you plan to change, get th..."

New skip leads must avoid the trap of covering for a struggling manager by doing the work themselves, which hides underperformance and prevents organizational scaling.

"Even though the skip leader subconsciously (or even explicitly) knows that the line manager is struggling, confronting the issue head-on is hard—especially as a new skip. So the natural inclination is..."

Root-cause analysis of manager-related team friction should focus on the skip lead’s failure to properly hire, coach, or evaluate their direct reports.

"In fact, I believe strongly that all manager challenges are either directly or indirectly about the skip lead. Instead of placing all the burden on the manager, we need to shift our analytic lens upwa..."

Turnaround situations offer significant career growth potential for leaders willing to make difficult decisions and drive meaningful change.

"The risk that you take on (of failing, of slowing down your career by being bogged down on a sub-par team) is also the fuel that catapults your career forward if you can pull this off. My advice is to..."

Effective diagnosis of team failure requires a period of neutral observation and data gathering to distinguish between symptoms and actual root causes.

"Start by collecting facts. Ask questions, listen and observe the team. Come in with an open mind, and focus on getting crystal clear on what’s working with the team, and what isn’t."