The best $150 you can spend as a product person looking to grow: Lenny’s Newsletter (and the extended Lennyverse)
Lenny Rachitsky has, over the past 5+ years built what I consider to be the best community and content around "Product" writ large - covering various aspects of the craft of product management, strategies for product growth and finally, and often most interesting to me, valuable perspectives on the psychology of being a product manager/product leader.
It all started with a great subscription newsletter and a subscriber-only Slack community. The subscription only costs $150 per year and if being a PM is your job, you should be able to expense it (Rachitsky even makes it easy to an expense request template you can share with your boss :)
Community growth must be strong because he's recently rolled out a couple of partnerships that are delivering meaningful value for his subscribers including two recent deals where subscribers get a year of Perplexity Pro for free and $1,395 in free credits to products like Superhuman, Linear, Sprig, Dovetail and Gamma when you take just one of the Maven product course he recommends.
For me, by far the most valuable piece of the ecosystem has been Lenny's Podcast (hat tip for that sweet sweet top of funnel) - a growing collection of over 200 podcasts (Apple | Spotify | YouTube) that are each an interview with a different person, usually only a little more than an hour and are packed with insights and anecdotes from their personal experiences. As for former product manager and startup founder, Lenny's a great, earnest, interviewer who balances questions that allow his guests to tell their stories with a desire to ensure that his audience gets clear, actionable, takeaways from each episode.
Almost all of the episodes offer something that any person who builds products would benefit from (even non-product managers). If you've never listened, some of my faves are:
- Crafting a compelling product vision | Ebi Atawodi (YouTube, Netflix, Uber)
- Vision, conviction, and hype: How to build 0 to 1 inside a company | Mihika Kapoor (Product at Figma)
- Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead)
- The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”)
- Unorthodox PM wisdom: Automating user insights, unselling job candidates, logging every decision, more | Kevin Yien (Stripe, Square, Mutiny)
- Land your dream job in today’s market: negotiation tactics, job search councils, and more | Phyl Terry (Author, “Never Search Alone”)
- Lessons from scaling Stripe | Claire Hughes Johnson (former COO of Stripe)
- When enough is enough | Andy Johns (ex-FB, Twitter, Quora)
(side note: in going through the archive its really impressive to see how many wildly insightful top performers have come through Stripe)
Finally, over the summer Lenny announced he was going to try his hand at curating a one day conference Thursday October 24th in SF - the Lenny & Friends Summit - which I'm very excited to be headed to. As you can see below the speaker lineup is insane and if the other things he's built over the years are any indication, I expect a thoughtfully curated experience with a focus on providing value and a sense of community. (ps: they're still accepting applications)