Lenny's Podcast / episode intelligence
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
18 published records
01 / recommendation
“My go-to book recommendation for other PMs is inspired by Marty Cagan. I think it's a classic. The other books that I have enjoyed and recommended lately are The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood and The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho.”
02 / recommendation
“I use Asana to run all my meetings and assign pre-reads. So I use the multi-assign feature in subtasks all the time where I make a task with a due date that says, "Read this thing by this date," and then I assign it to a team or a set of individuals like that really quickly.”
03 / belief
“If you can be the person in the room who has watched customers use the product and has a point of view about why one tool is significantly better or worse in a given dimension, and you can do that with confidence and clarity, and you don't need to know the other person's functional domain, and you don't need the expertise in what they're experts at, you can bring insight that makes people curious, and trust you, and just immediately believe that there's an opportunity that you're not advocating for that just is true. But I think that's a really tricky and unique thing is not to pretend like you have more experience than you do, but to be willing to ask great questions, and then be curious enough that you're bringing insight to every meeting that people may or may not have, but you're always willing to share.”
04 / belief
“I think you use a process called the Double Diamond Process at Asana. Okay. Cool.”
05 / belief
“I saw the trailer for that. I think I got to watch that, and I finished The Diplomat.”
06 / belief
“I would say though that the advice, bits and bobs, I gave you earlier are absolutely things that I've been thinking about feeding, but I think the page bot would probably say, "Ship it.”
07 / uncertainty
“I've seen images of this in various places, but I don't know of any company that's actually using it as the process.”
08 / belief
“I think when you're met by someone who doesn't know you, doesn't know your work, your job is to create credibility, and that's where I said bringing the insight is where you can really tip the scales here.”
09 / recommendation
“The thing I would say is bring the insight. Know thy customer. Know thy market. Know thy competitors.”
10 / preference
“We wanted to make sure that we took advantage of what's great about working together as teams, and so it's been the standard. So I would say what's unique about maybe Asana is we knew we would do that from the very beginning instead of hemming and hawing about would we be a remote workplace or not, and what would that mean, and how would we come together, and how would we budget for it.”
11 / preference
“" It's also just how you communicate, looking people in the eye, your body position, your body language. So much of this, I think people forget about because it's really easy to be in a meeting, and looking at your computer, and going through Slack messages.”
12 / preference
“I think trying to make sure that you can be in a place of curiosity and openness because that will make your experience more successful is really important.”
13 / evaluation
“I think the more you try to do things in a joined up way where you have a single target customer with sales and marketing, and you want to make sure that the impact of your releases hit their mark, the more it's important to reflect on it frequently and to be able to pivot quickly because our strategy, even when we think we have a two-year vision, something will change, and then we say, "Wow, we made so much faster progress on this than we thought, and we actually believe that there's a new opportunity or a new technology that we should be leveraging.”
14 / recommendation
“When you take a new role, become best friends with a researcher, and spend time watching customers use the product firsthand because what they maybe report on or are trying to do a study about might be very different from what you observe, but you really just need that front row seat with customers, and so asking, "How do I actually set up time with customers?”
15 / recommendation
“They also have a wonderful manager training program, and I think the biggest thing that I took away from their manager training was really on the feedback slide. So delivering feedback is something that I think everyone benefits from, but for managers, it's so much more critical because if you don't do it, and you don't say what you mean, and you don't do it in a way that it can be internalized and acted upon, you really don't set up your teammates, your teams for growth or success in their careers.”
16 / evaluation
“" Effectively, the question gets that, "When the product failed," When something about the team didn't work," just things that go wrong because that's what happens when you're doing this work, and evaluating people's mindset, and the way they talk about it, and the way they relate to evaluating the situation.”
17 / preference
“You need to be thoughtful about direction and agency. So I would say one of the missteps here is knowing how to give guidance or direction in a way that doesn't feel like micromanagement because what you're trying to do is to teach a repeatable pattern instead of giving a precise instruction that can be used once, and then disposed of.”
18 / recommendation
“" There's this moment of panic, and I would say that being comfortable, saying like, "Go try different things, and see if the problem is interesting to you and if the problem is fun or interesting to you.”