My north star metric is getting texts like this from students

This took me 10 months to write, so it means a lot for Lenny to introduce today's newsletter as a post that "will change how many of you operate at work." (We made this one free so anyone can access it)

To every PM who feels behind on AI: no, you didn't miss the boat. Let me tell you my embarrassing story of how I started using AI at work: Even though I was building AI products used by tens of thousands of people, I was a proud Luddite up until 10 months ago: - I didn't think

The main thing that made me more effective as a PM wasn't a hack, it was designing my day with the same creativity as I would a product. I think we all know the standard PM productivity advice. Block your calendar etc etc. But the gap between knowing what to do and actually

I've been thinking about how AI makes prototyping so much easier, but it's not always what I need. I'm noticing how AI prototyping might reinforce a trap I've fallen into before. When I build a beautiful, functional prototype - however small in scope - I get this illusion that

On my first day as an intern at a manufacturing plant, my manager gave me a tour of the floor: "See all those offices in the corner?" she asked. "That's where the senior managers with fancy diplomas are." OK. "If you wanna know how things work, don't ask them. Ask the

Had a fascinating chat with a course alumna that reminded me why I'll never stop evangelizing for PMs screensharing their notes during meetings. (You don't need anything special: a text file, the description field of a Jira ticket, or Slack message draft.) She told me that

Don't want to think how much better my PM performance reviews would've been if I'd invested in "AI stakeholder meeting rehearsals." In hindsight I would: ⮑ Set up a project in Claude/ChatGPT/Gemini with product and company context ⮑ Prompt the AI to simulate an actual

An under-appreciated part of AI prototyping is knowing WHEN it's the right tool for the job. (TLDR: AI speeds up how we prototype, but doesn't change why or when.) Let's zoom out: prototyping goes WAY beyond UX design. Pre-AI, we PMs prototyped all the time: 💻 API product?

I know it's cliche to say "PMs are storytellers," but every time I get asked what PM skills will be most relevant in an AI world... ....I say storytelling. And yes, I literally mean: "What's the Pixar plot of your initiative?" When you talk about a feature, do people walk

I confused "being needed" with "being valuable" as a PM and it was killing my effectiveness. After 12 years as an IC product manager, I finally learned that my leverage comes from striving to make myself obsolete (key word striving, it's a moving target). It really helped to

Every PM I know who uses AI regularly feels the same frustration of hitting chat limits. I've been experimenting with a prompt to help: When you hit your chat limit, replace your last chat bubble (using the ✏️ icon on any LLM) with the following: ❮❮❮ This conversation has

Make product management fun again with AI agents via @talraviv If you’re like me, you’ve heard the promises and proclamations about how agents will reshape productivity, but your workday hasn’t changed at all yet. It’s not you—operationalizing AI agents for product work is

My favorite posts I write are those that help me process something I don't understand. My guest post today on Lenny's Newsletter is one of those. I started making this comparison table for myself: I could never really wrap my mind around all the different semantics and

I'm starting to think that "creating an AI prompt" is the fastest way of transferring knowledge as a product leader. When I use the ✏️ edit button and do 5-10 iterations on a prompt to get the result I want.... AI is squeezing me to extract my "taste" in ways traditional docs or

3 takeaways from the excellent @talraviv's workshop on building your PM AI copilot: 1. context is everything 2. there really are no 'best practices'; tinkering is the best way to learn 3. context is everything thanks for organizing @MarcBaselga!

I planned a small AI workshop and ended up with an accidental survey of 127 product execs. Compare this to Shopify's CEO AI memo: (How this happened: When I opened applications for an AI workshop for people managers, I was flooded with responses from Directors, VPs, and Heads

I dismissed "AI synthetic users" until a Stanford + Google paper showed they're 85% accurate (using plain ChatGPT) I originally imagined synthetic users meant a stereotypical one-line prompt, "Stacy is a 35-year-old female teacher from Ohio." 🤦‍♂️ To get to 85% accuracy, the

As a PM, it feels like every stakeholder thinks they can do my job better than me. // How I use AI simulation to get out the heebie jeebies: I anticipate stakeholder meetings with baggage: ⮑ Feeling defensive before the conversation starts ⮑ Worrying about power dynamics

Product managers: "Your gut is the world's most sophisticated machine learning ever created." -David Lieb (creator of Google Photos & YC Partner) And if our gut (i.e. product intuition) is machine learning, then the quality of our decisions depends on the quality of the

Sharing the recording for "Build 6 PM AI Agents in 56 minutes" where we built these agents: Zapier: 🧑‍💻 Prep me for upcoming customer calls 🧑‍💻 Live-prioritize my features for me Lindy AI: 🧑‍💻 UXR session recorder that can then answer any follow up question 🧑‍💻 UXR session