Product
About this category
Content about building, testing, and iterating on a product or service offering. The primary focus is the *thing being built* — what it is, how to test it, and how to improve it based on what you learn.
Showing 318 articles for Product.
Product-market fit
Podcast
Product lessons from Waymo and a decade of PM experience
Lenny's Podcast Product Career Growth
April 9, 2023
Product-market fit
8
Management
6
Business models
5
Why MVP means something completely different when safety failures kill people
Disrupt your own product before a startup does it for you
How to build rider trust into a driverless car from day one
Iteration & feedback loops
Podcast
How to add a product-led growth motion to your B2B company
Lenny's Podcast Product Career Growth
April 2, 2023
Iteration & feedback loops
9
Growth hacking
8
Business models
7
PLG is data-led growth — free products are worthless without usage analytics.
Activation, not acquisition, is usually the highest-leverage starting point.
Most B2B companies need both PLG and sales; choosing is a false dilemma.
MVP & prototyping
Podcast
Thinking beyond frameworks: how to build judgment as a product leader
Lenny's Podcast Product Career Growth
March 30, 2023
MVP & prototyping
9
Business models
8
Hiring & recruitment
6
PMs conditioned by unlimited resources can't make decisions without data.
How DoorDash disrupted Grubhub's seemingly unassailable network effects.
Consumer subscription retention math almost always leads to a predictable death.
How The Browser Company builds product by optimising for feelings
Lenny's Podcast Product Career Growth
March 19, 2023
User research
9
Culture building
8
Business models
6
In a commodity market, emotional connection is the rational winning strategy
Hiring senior people as ICs signals career-defining work beats fancy titles
Browsers as the future operating system: Arc aims to be the internet's iPhone
Iteration & feedback loops
Podcast
Career growth, experimentation, and selling to developers with Laura Schaffer
Lenny's Podcast Product Career Growth
March 9, 2023
Iteration & feedback loops
9
Growth hacking
7
Productivity & habits
5
Adding signup questions increased conversion 5% — good friction reassures anxious users
80% of experiment hypotheses fail; lower confidence intervals can double your annual wins
Developers skip your marketing site and avoid sales — self-serve must do the selling
Teaching AI thinking and design thinking for the age of AI
EO
March 2, 2023
Design thinking
9
AI strategy & adoption
7
Business models
5
Zero-to-one innovation is the one thing AI cannot replace humans at
AlphaFold solved in two years what humans achieved in decades
Stanford's design thinking gives anyone a repeatable path to innovation
Customer discovery
Podcast
What makes early-stage startups fail, and how to avoid it
Lenny's Podcast Product Career Growth
March 2, 2023
Customer discovery
9
Prospecting & outreach
6
Hiring & recruitment
5
Not talking to users is the root cause of almost every startup failure.
YC can spot failure patterns, but cannot predict the next Airbnb.
Climate tech is now a trillion-dollar business opportunity, not just a mission.
Building product strategy and scaling sales at Calendly
Lenny's Podcast Product Career Growth
February 26, 2023
Roadmapping
9
Business models
7
B2B sales
6
Shift from horizontal PLG to targeted personas drives faster product prioritization and execution
Calendly's three-horizon strategy allocates resources by market maturity, not feature volume
Founder raided 401k, hired Ukrainian firm, and got first 1,000 users through contractor networks
Iteration & feedback loops
Podcast
Building product at CNN under constant change
Lenny's Podcast Product Career Growth
February 23, 2023
Iteration & feedback loops
8
Deep work & focus
6
Communication
5
Stay calm and listen: equanimity beats having all the answers.
News demands rapid pivots; build buffers and embed engineers early.
Meditation and mindfulness are learnable skills that compound in product leadership.
Customer discovery
YouTube
How Speak built an AI English tutor and became Korea's top education app
EO
February 15, 2023
Customer discovery
9
Case studies
8
AI tools & automation
7
Going in-person to watch users unlocked product-market fit in Korea
A commute-mode hack built daily habits that drove retention past 50% on day 30
Off-the-shelf speech recognition seeded the data flywheel that powers their custom AI
Customer discovery
YouTube
How to start a SaaS company: three steps before writing code
TK Kader
February 12, 2023
Customer discovery
9
Niche selection
7
Growth hacking
6
Start with market, not code — most founders get this backwards.
Build a mailing list and real conversations before building anything.
Only a credit card swipe proves your market thesis is correct.
Iteration & feedback loops
Podcast
Onboarding as a growth lever: lessons from Airtable's activation team
Lenny's Podcast Product Career Growth
February 12, 2023
Iteration & feedback loops
9
Retention & loyalty
8
Business models
6
A guided onboarding wizard drove a 20% activation lift at Airtable.
Low activation rates (5–15%) correlate more strongly with long-term retention.
Reverse trials combine freemium and free trials to maximise user growth.
MVP & prototyping
YouTube
How to build a SaaS from scratch in eight simplified steps
Rob Walling
February 6, 2023
MVP & prototyping
9
Business models
8
Customer discovery
7
Network beats audience as SaaS's most valuable unfair advantage.
Validation is probabilistic; realistic ceiling is 50–60% certainty pre-launch.
Phased rollouts of 300–500 users protect momentum and enable iteration.
Iteration & feedback loops
Podcast
How to build innovative product teams: lessons from Stripe and Retool
Lenny's Podcast Product Career Growth
February 2, 2023
Iteration & feedback loops
9
Culture building
8
Customer discovery
6
Process is variance reduction — it lowers your ceiling, not just the floor
Schedule thinking time explicitly; Retool's 'Crazy Ideas' doc ships 3–8 ideas yearly
Run new products like internal startups: small teams, prove ROI before scaling
Building a product strategy stack: mission, roadmap, and PM competencies
Lenny's Podcast Product Career Growth
January 19, 2023
Roadmapping
9
Management
7
Vision & mission
5
Strategy must come before goals — not the other way around
Four goal types reveal where a team's real problem actually sits
12 PM competencies span execution, insight, strategy, and leadership