Lenny Rachitsky
@lenny-rachitsky
Creator of Lenny's Newsletter & Podcast. Former Airbnb PM. Helping product people do their jobs better.
"A good strategy is, in the end, a hypothesis about what will work." — Michael Porter
This PM salary data is based on actual comp from over 23,000 product managers globally across 7,500+ top companies.
You can evaluate PM communication through all the other interview questions — no special question needed. Just look for clarity, conciseness, and convincingness throughout.
AI prototyping introduces a new fidelity level: medium-fi. Better than a napkin sketch, not as polished as Figma. Choosing the right fidelity for the context — and setting clear expectations — is as important as the prototype itself.
People judge the quality of your thinking by the quality of your writing and speaking. Effective communication is the most fundamental PM skill.
Less than 10% of the 200+ startups I worked with were confident they were measuring the right performance metrics. Defining KPIs correctly is a skill most humans get wrong — and AI is catching up fast.
Donothingfor2minutes.com — the precursor to Calm — got 2M+ unique visits and 100,000+ email captures in just 10 days. It turned distraction into a fun challenge.
Over two-thirds of my biggest angel investing winners were "hot" deals at the time. And over two-thirds of the hot deals I invested in went on to do very well. Access matters more than picking.
"You don't necessarily need to start with SEO as a small company, but as a huge free traffic source, you want to make sure you are positioning yourself to get that traffic as you grow." — Nate Moch, Zillow
The median starting base salary for a PM in the U.S. is $112,000 at a public company and $96,000 at a private company.
"The bar is surprisingly low for actually being value-add. If you help a founder find and hire an engineer, you're already in the top 0.01% of investors for them in terms of value-add." — Charley Ma
Normally, to grow your business, YOU need to find every new user. With a magical growth loop, your existing users do it for you. That's the whole game.
When someone stops using your product, it means they no longer find enough value in it. So the real question is: what would it take to make them want it badly enough to keep coming back?
I have zero video editing skills and I'm constantly making and editing video and audio. I wouldn't be able to do this without Descript. It's been my tool of choice for over five years now.
Burnout conquerors overcommunicate boundaries, not just deliverables. When people know what to expect from you, they're comfortable letting you take the wheel.
For founders stuck at a crossroads: write down your leap of faith assumptions, pick metrics to test each one, then brainstorm MVPs scored by speed-to-learning. Most people can't find their MVP because they're not clear on what they actually want to learn.
When you join a new team, write two docs immediately: (1) a mind map of how the business works — inputs, outputs, key levers; (2) a clear doc on the team's highest priorities. Forces alignment and proves you understand the space.
Don't ask 'what cool new things could AI do?' Ask 'what's the thing our users do 100 times a day that AI could make better?' For Incident.io: auto-generating incident summaries. Now 75% of summaries are AI-generated. —Stephen Whitworth
Copy first, then innovate. The app marketplace is basically a genetic algorithm — winning concepts get more users and inspire the next generation. Your MVP is not the time to be clever.
The average lifetime value of a recurring GiveDirectly donor is 12x that of a one-time donor.
Canva didn't build a real sales org until around $120M ARR. For most of their life, they weren't sales-led — or even marketing-led.
Build AI products to ride model improvements, not fight them. If built right, your product automatically gets better overnight when the underlying model improves — like moving from GPT-4 to GPT-5. Assume models keep getting stronger. —Dan Siroker, Limitless
There's a mismatch between what science knows and what business does. In that gap sits dysfunction. Science knows minus what your business does equals dysfunction.
Most disagreements between managers and their teams aren't about judgment — they're about having different information. Before overruling your team, ask: what do they see that you don't?
The #1 way to annoy your teammates as a PM: obsessing over the "right way" of building product and treating a framework you read about on Twitter as gospel. Not everything you read will work for your team.
When you're asked to do something new: first determine its priority (slot it into your existing priorities), then communicate that priority to the person. Both steps are essential to set accurate expectations.
"If you can do it on a whiteboard, someone has probably done it. There's no $20 bills on the sidewalk." —Christina Cacioppo, founder of Vanta
The 'But We Have a Framework' Trap: frameworks order relative priority but can't substitute for diving into specifics. They're not laws of physics. Reference the framework as a start — then elaborate on details that don't fit it, especially with new data.
Your launch goal isn't to get press or go viral. It's to create something worth remarking about — something people have to share with their friends.
"Most businesses actually get zero distribution channels to work. Poor distribution — not product — is the number one cause of failure." — Peter Thiel
Just 7 strategies account for every consumer app's early growth. And most startups found their first users from a single strategy. No one found success from more than three.
I was so concerned about the under-recognized nature of manager-to-manager transitions that for years I personally signed off on every case of a line manager becoming a manager of managers. It was seen as overkill. It wasn't.
At Linear, we don't measure activation. If we don't believe a metric is making us build a better product in the long run, we shouldn't focus on it. Forcing an artificial activation metric can make your team miss the forest for the trees. — Karri Saarinen, CEO of Linear
"Pay particular attention to things that chafe you." — Paul Graham
A flywheel isn't a strategy doc — it's an alignment tool. Of all the things you *can* work on, it tells you which investments actually accelerate growth and which ones don't matter.
There are 4 ways to charge B2B customers: flat monthly fee, per-seat monthly fee, usage-based fee, or transaction fee. Most fast-growing companies use per-seat, sometimes combined with flat or usage-based.
Organic search and product virality represent 56% of new users for the average PLG company. Start there before spending on paid ads, marketplace listings, or outbound.
People can't read your mind. Neither can AI. The more specific guidance you give it, the better results you'll get.