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How the best product managers and leaders make decisions. Frameworks, mental models, and real-world examples from Lenny's Podcast.
“One of the big reasons why I think curiosity loops are really useful is that it really fights the fact that there's a lot of bad advice out there. And it's not bad because it's not well-intentioned, but it's bad because it's not contextual.”
“When you are working on algorithmic heavy products, your job is figuring out what the algorithm should be responsible for, what people are responsible for and the framework for making decisions.”
“The adjacent possible is a set of actions that you can do. They are right in front of you that if you do them, they would almost certainly work. And in the tech industry in particular, we default assume that the adjacent possible is like this and then flying leap to something. And in reality, the adjacent possible is quite small. It's within arm's reach.”
“You don't want to come to a product review for every single decision. Instead, what you want is to come to a product review with one decision, but the goal of that decision is to walk out with principles about how to make these decisions in the future so that you don't have to come to product review.”
“Be a historian. When I joined Rubrik, I tried to understand what happened in the past. What products weren't successful? Why? What was the perception of different people? I constructed this past knowledge so I could better understand how to make decisions going forward and learn from mistakes I didn't personally live through.”
“It's so incredibly necessary in improving decision quality to take what's implicit and make it explicit. It's not that intuition is crap, your intuition is sometimes right. If you don't make it explicit, then you don't get to find out when it's wrong.”
“We have a meeting called OPA, which stands for opportunity/problem assessment. It's a meeting for PMs to really debate and discuss with each other and spar around either areas and problems that they want to go investigate or deciding whether we actually want to move forward and go try to develop a solution.”
“I really truly believe in the power of three. So I actually ask my teams to write three press releases, alternative and divergent. What if we... Suppose you're launching a membership program. Instead of two tiers, let's do three tiers. Let's say within these three, and they all need to be fully thought-through.”
Use curiosity loops to fight bad advice - gather structured input from 5-10 people who know you well or have subject matter expertise, then look for surprises and disagreements rather than following what they say.
Ada Chen RekhiWhen building algorithmic products, PMs must define what algorithms should handle versus what requires human judgment -- algorithms optimize but lack understanding of long-term effects and user intent.
Adriel FrederickBeing strategic means two things: articulating a compelling why behind decisions, AND championing hard changes that are best for the long term - having one without the other doesn't count.
Anneka GuptaMake implicit thinking explicit - intuition is sometimes right and sometimes wrong, but you can't improve it unless you surface and examine your assumptions through structured processes
Annie DukeMarketing technology is fundamentally a product management discipline focused on systems and platforms -- not just picking third-party tools, but architecting solutions that combine bought and built components.
Austin HaySuccess is a series of small hard decisions that compound - break psychologically from sunk costs and make the next good decision even when it's difficult
Ben HorowitzWriting crystallizes your thinking - Brandon figured out his famous PM frameworks through the writing process itself, not before it
Brandon ChuProduct and operations teams function best as a twin turbine engine — they need mutual respect and a strong bidirectional feedback loop to maximize efficiency
Brian Tolkin