Irecently got temporary access to Lenny’s Newsletter which has some great content regarding product and startups. For those interested in product, his newsletter is awesome! Here are some of my notes on his most popular newsletters.
How to Kickstart and Scale a Marketplace Business
Phase 1: Crack the Chicken-Egg Conundrum
- Marketplace business: connects supply with demand for some financial transaction
- Mostly provdies platform, don’t need to own supply
- Why are marketplaces good businesses?
- Network effects
- High barrier of entry (competitive moat)
- Efficiency: no need to own anything except platform
- Scalability: due to owning only platform
- Flexibility: easier to pivot, because only owning platform
- Note that marketplaces need product market fit
- Past growth tactics don’t always work; look for general first-principles
- The issue with marketplaces is supply won’t come if demand isn’t there, and demand won’t come if supply isn’t there
- First step: constrain the marketplace in some way. Helps reach critical mass faster
- Some companies constrained geographically, others constrained by category of products
- If the supply and demand need to meet in some way, it’s almost always geographical constraints
- Second step: focus on either supply and demand (most do supply)
- Supply growth usually feeds demand growth
- Drive initial supply:
- Usually only a few levers to pull to increase supply. Focus and double down on what works
- Direct sales is the most common lever, followed by referrals and piggy-backing off another network, and then word-of-mouth and subsidizing, use employees as supplies, create a product that doesn’t need demand, performance marketing, focusing on viral loops, events, SEO/content marketing (rare), creating community teams
- Drive initial demand:
- Start driving demand once you feel that supply acquisition is easy and they are now underutilized
- Use: word-of-mouth, supply drives own demand, SEO, performance marketing, press, referrals, viral loops, sales, events, single-player, partnerships
- Lots of things done with no scale in mind
1 Pager and PRD templates
- Try looking at product documents at your current company
- What makes a good 1-pager/PRD:
- Problem-oriented: crystallize the problem at the very top to get everyone thinking on the same page
- Clear success-criteria: clearly define what success looks like. Used to determine if project is worth taking on and helping make decisions throughout the project life
- Just enough direction: gives just enough structure for devs & designers to understand what project will entail but still giving ample room for creativity
- Urgency: clear timeline on speccing and build to ensure project keeps moving
- Short and sweet: keep it brief and put additional details into appendix
- Templates:
- Some other tips:
- Would you be willing to spend $5,000 of your own money on your proposed product bet? Under what conditions? Use this to guide your writing
Favourite PM Templates
- Company strategy template
- Team strategy template
- Product vision template
- Launch template
- Marketing template
- Roadmap template
- SPADE decision template used at Square
- Coinbase decision making process
- Pyramid Principle communication used at McKinsey
- Eigenquestion framework
Getting better at product strategy
- To be good at strategy, you need to be good at”
- Building the strategy
- Articulating the strategy
- Acting on the strategy
- Strategy is simply your plan to win
- What is ‘win’? Depends on your company!
- Creating a strategy is important for creating alignment, clarity, and focus
- Typically, mission and vision are done before you create your strategy. From your strategy, you will derive goals and a roadmap
- Mission: what are you trying to achieve?
- Vision: what would the world look like once you have achieved your mission
- Strategy: how do you plan on achieving your vision
- Goals: how will you measure progress towards achieving your mission?
- Roadmap: what do we need to build to get there?
- Mission and vision should stay stable, but strategy, goals and roadmaps might change every planning cycle
- Tesla strategy:
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- What makes a good strategy?
- Problem-oriented
- Insight-driven
- Actionable
- Focused
- Cohesive
- Things to read when considering strategy building:
- Lenny’s guide on getting better at strategy:
- Spend time understanding your market and competition
- Spend time understanding customers and their needs
- Spend time crafting and understanding strategy
- Study colleagues who are great strategic thinkers
- Read about strategy
- What makes a well-articulated strategy?
- Short & memorable
- Uses some sort of framework/metaphor to explain
- Rule of three
- Easy to find & share
- Example of well-articulated strategy: GitLab
- To write out strategy, try using some company template and expand via Pyramid Principle
- To actually act on strategy, use it as guide to prioritize features and be ready to evolve in light of changing reality
Prioritization
- Keep it simple: list out your ideas, T-shirt size each idea on impact and cost and then sort based on highest impact:cost ratio
- Get your team’s input before finalizing
- Roadmap template
- To inform the T-shirt size for impact and cost, look at all the available data (qualitative and quantitative) and experience → guesstimate
- For impact, look at similar project performance, # of users who will see it, gain of impact that it would have on user
- For cost, estimate and then take it to the builders
- Make sure you prioritize based on a strategy, not the other way around
- How to balance small and big bets
- Strategy often has a few strategic bets and allocated resources
- 80/20 split between low:high risk bets is probably decent within any singular strategic bet
Getting Buy-in
- To get buy-in, you need to show why your idea will solve stakeholder goals
- Getting buy-in fails usually because of:
- Assuming everyone is thinking what you’re thinking
- Feeling time-crunched
- Fear of disagreement
- Three tactics to help:
- Co-creation: team will be more receptive to idea because of IKEA effect
- Usually you get a much better final idea
- Start early when co-creating: as soon as you have some sort of rough proposal ready, ideate and align
- Share your work so that everyone can develop the same context as you
- When people start to push-back, be curious why they are showing opposition
- Presence: change your body and verbal language to show confidence
- People will be more confident in your ideas as a result
- Use storytelling: this helps set the context and why peopel should care
- Co-creation: team will be more receptive to idea because of IKEA effect
Where Great Product Ideas Come From
- Talking to customers
- Talking to employees who talk to customers
- Observing customers through data and research
- Spending time through deep dives and user research
- Using the product yourself
- Thinking in a quiet place
- Teammate discussions
- Working backwards from the long-term vision
- Looking into churn reasons
- Competitors
- Adjacent markets
- Analogous businesses in different markets
- User journey storyboards
- Hackathons
- Technology shifts
It rarely comes from the following:
- Large brainstorms
- Staying heads down for too long
- Copying competition: don’t assume that they know what they are doing!
The Minto Pyramid Principle and the SCR Framework
- Issue with business communication is that we often treat it like a movie, creating suspense and buildup. It should be the opposite: you should give away the answer first
- Minto pyramid principle:
- Start with the recommendation/answer/ask
- Back up the recommendation with supporting arguments
- Back each supporting argument with data
- The reason why we often present by starting with data is because that’s often how we got to the conclusion
- You can think bottom-up, but think top-down
- However, you don’t want to start off every communication with the recommendation and ask upfront. The whole communication should be structured in the following manner:
- Situation → complication → resolution (using Minto pyramid principle)
- You don’t want to spend too much time dwelling on the situation and complication
Becoming a senior Product Manager
- The key differentiators between senior and junior PMs is strategy, autonomy and nuance
- Strategy
- A senior PM is responsible for developing and and evangelizing a strategy that will deliver meaningful success
- This focus on strategy often delivers great products while also moving the business forward in it’s long term goals
- You need to make time for this, but you don’t need a promotion to do it!
- Three parts to strategy: vision, strategic framework and roadmap
- Vision: create a storyboard of the ideal state of your future product, accentuating the painpoints of the present
- Strategic framework: start with target market, their pain points, and strategic bets that you think will win the market
- Lay out alternatives and describe why your method is better
- Roadmap: block off next few years on certain themes and why those themes should be addressed
- Autonomy:
- A senior PM can run a team independently
- Big problem: manager doesn’t know about all the challenges that you have been facing when working independently, so it is harder to develop trust
- Solution: talk about problem and solutions during manager meetings to bring visibility
- Nuance
- A more senior PM will face more answers being ‘it depends’
- They can grapple with complex tradeoffs and serious ambiguity and understand company-wide motivations
- Decisions are more tough, but senior PMs can dictate their approach in a few minutes. They can also defend these decisions in front of senior leaders
- To develop nuanced thinking, think about the tradeoffs that you are making and think through how you decision should change based off different tradeoffs and priorities
Favourite PM Interview Questions
- What’s the most important or impactful product you shipped? What made it so important or impactful?
- Tell me about a time you disagreed with an engineer on your team, and how you resolved it
- Share a time you shipped a product that failed. Why did it fail and what did you learn?
- Tell me about a time when your team didn’t gel. What was the issue, and how did you deal with it?
- Pick a project you’re proud of that took 3-9 months. Walk me through it from beginning to end. I’ll ask questions along the way. [Give this ~7-10 mins]
- Pick a product you worked on in the past year—talk me through your product strategy for it.
- Tell me about a time you did user research on a product/feature, and that research had a big impact on the product.
- Tell me the vision for one of your recent projects or teams.
- How do you get your team to commit to a deadline?
- What’s the biggest one-way-door product decision you’ve ever had to make?
14 Habits of Highly Effective Product Managers
- First off, not every PM is expected to be a master of all 14 habits immediately. It will take time and effort. Focus on one, improve over 2 weeks and reflect. Rinse and repeat
- Habit #1: Great PMs take pride in clarity and conciseness of their artifacts
- They know that people judge the quality of their thinking by their quality of writing
- How to build this habit:
- Ask your manager or trusted peer to give you brutally honets feedback on your artifacts
- Leverage the Minto + SRC framework
- Start a ‘swipe’ folder where you store exceptional artifacts that you can store for a later day
- Habit #2: Great PMs build an aura of “I’ve got this”
- They rarely drop balls, come prepared and always get their stuff done
- How to build this habit:
- Be very selective on what you take on, but spend more time than anybody else on the things that you do take on
- Prioritize asks and communicate the priority of new asks to the requester
- Keep a list of ‘Waiting For’ to remind yourself to close any threads
- Habit #3: Great PMs hold a high bar for themselves and their team
- They push themselves and their teams to perform at their best
- How to build this habit:
- When you see sub-par performance, don’t ignore it. Address in a nice manner
- When you are sharing a product brief, ask yourself: what’s one thing you can do to make the doc more succinct
- Make sure to review all the work that your team is outputting to the org (docs, meetings, presentations)
- Habit #4: Great PMs hunt for misalignment and quickly push everyone back into alignment
- Team dysfunction is usually because of competing and contradicting priorities and motivations. Removing misalignment is one of the highest-leverage things a PM can do
- How to build this habit:
- When reviewing new designs, always ask: “What problem are we really trying to solve here”
- When you see a hint of misalignment (using data not everyone has seen, misintrepretation, different goals or priorities), address it
- Create and always come back to the source of truth document that clearly outlines the problem, assumptions and key decisions
- Habit #5: Great PMs always have an opinion, but it is loosely held
- A PM is not there just to coordinate. A PM is there for novel ideas and to push the team. They need to have a POV, but should be ready to change given arguments
- How to build this habit:
- Keep this question in mind: if someone were to ask your opinion on this right now, what would you say?
- When you don’t have an opinion on something, just develop a pro-con list
- When your POV shifts due to new data, make that public
- Habit #6: Great PMs ruthlessly prioritize their team’s work and their own
- They know that the greatest gift you can give your team is focus
- How to build this habit:
- Say no or not yet more often
- Always have a singular source of truth with your roadmap
- Habit #7: Great PMs endlessly look for blockers and unblock
- How to build this habit:
- Always prioritize the tasks that are blocking your team
- Ask your team often: what is slowing them down?
- Look around corners and try to prevent would-be blockers
- How to build this habit:
- Habit #8: Great PMs build a great leadership triad with their EM and DM
- How to build this habit:
- Sit next to your EM and DM if possible
- Have a weekly meeting to discuss priorities and unblock
- Spend time outside of work to connect as human beings
- How to build this habit:
- Habit #9: Great PMs frequently remind their team how their work will impact the company mission
- How to build this habit:
- Include your team’s mission into every strategy doc
- Tie back to the team’s mission during kick-offs
- Include your team’s mission in roadmaps
- How to build this habit:
Couldn’t finish :(