Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
belief 19commitment 5preference 5recommendation 3uncertainty 2prediction 1evaluation 1
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
The useful parts, with receipts.
36 published records
“I'll start by saying the type of book by volume that I read and get the most joy from are autobiographies and memoirs. It is just the ultimate cheat code to spend time with people that you respect, are interested by, or want to learn from. Could you imagine what it would take in real life to sit down with Albert Einstein for 50 hours and just have him talk to you about his life? Impossible. But you can read and pretty much get the same thing. So anyways, strong requirement or a strong suggestion, go read autobiographies and memoirs of people that you respect, mostly for their mental model and way to approach thinking, less about specific things. But the one book that I read without fail every year has a very misleading title. It's called The Courage to Be Disliked. I think it's been mentioned previously on the podcast, but it covers... It's a very Socratic method style, so it's about a philosopher and a young person, and it tries to teach you the ways of Adlerian psychology, which is sort of counter to Jungian theory. The reason I really like it is because it makes me uncomfortable. So the whole premise, in my opinion, behind the book and other in psychology is focus on what you control. That's the one line. Don't worry about everything else. Don't worry about what other people think. Don't worry about what other people do. You cannot control those. You focus on yourself and you focus on the actions you can take. And be the person that you think will attract other people, that you want to be around. There's some really pointed notes in there that I'm like, "Ha-ha-ha-ha. I don't fully agree with that one," but it always pushes me to question something about what I believe. And so in every physical copy of a book I have, I write the date that I started reading it again. The front inside cover of this book, I think it's been seven or eight years at this point that I've read it every single year.”
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- Lenny's Podcast
“The front inside cover of this book, I think it's been seven or eight years at this point that I've read it every single year.”
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- Lenny's Podcast
“Actually along the lines of write how you talk, there's this concept of cadence that I think is really important when it comes to internal writing.”
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- Lenny's Podcast
“" I think you actually shared a template of one of these emails in one of your blog posts.”
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- Lenny's Podcast
“" You do it by putting your sneakers at the foot of your bed unless you take your shoes off inside, then you put it at the front door, you have your shorts ready to go and you're like, "I commit to putting on my shorts.”
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- Lenny's Podcast
“I think there's so many lessons here for people in so many ways, life and work and parenting.”
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- Lenny's Podcast
“I don't know how many pounds that is, but it's too much meat for a human to consume.”
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- Lenny's Podcast
“I think sales also gets not a bad rep, but a misrepresented reputation in tech where all they care about is quota, it's just about numbers, et cetera.”
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- Lenny's Podcast
“I think that also applies a lot to interviewing. A lot of times you interview, don't get the job, and you exactly feel like, "Oh, I'm just not good enough.”
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- Lenny's Podcast
“Yep. And I think a lot of people are going to hate hearing that because like, "Oh my god, I have so many meetings already.”
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- Lenny's Podcast
“Pull their email, put that into a sequence, drop in my Calendly" and you just have interviews showing up automatically on your calendar. I will say I cannot take credit for this.”
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- Lenny's Podcast
“I think some companies have shifted on that, where recruiters and salespeople are compensated sometimes in similar ways in terms of quota and whatnot.”
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- Lenny's Podcast
“I think the starting engineers and designers on that team really cared about the quality of what they built too.”
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- Lenny's Podcast
“I think we'll probably find ourselves on interesting detours to the lightning round, so let's roll in.”
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- Lenny's Podcast
“I think there's another element of that, SNAP actually is another example where they waited, I think, until they had 200 people before they hired their first PM.”
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- Lenny's Podcast
“To elaborate on that, I think the broader point is that truly not every team needs a product manager, but the activities, the outcome that one would drive needs to get done no matter what.”
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- Lenny's Podcast
“The best explanation I've heard of this is actually from your new boss, Patrick Collison, boss's boss's boss, I don't know how far away you're from him, where he talks about user research and where it fits in.”
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- Lenny's Podcast
“I will say so one on that, the CEO at Mutiny, Charlie, she always repeated to me nonstop, "Keep the main thing the main thing" and would just say it ad nauseum, and I'm really glad that she did.”
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- Lenny's Podcast
“I definitely don't think it was obvious to everyone, and I can definitely say that because we were given a pretty strict deadline that we needed to launch by and I pushed it out three times. That's not because of this one animation, but it's because of a series of decisions where we said, "This is what we believe we need to ship, and this matters much more than hitting some artificial external GA date.”
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- Lenny's Podcast
“I learned a lot by finding specific voices back in the day on Twitter, and it wasn't always what they were posting on Twitter, but if they wrote an essay or a post, that would be their crispus thinking.”
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- Lenny's Podcast
“I think people may probably think, "If I'm an okay writer, I can probably be really successful PM.”
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- Lenny's Podcast
“" I think I carry that theme forward where there's this weird transition we all go through from childhood to adulthood where we no longer receive homework, we're responsible for defining the work that we do.”
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- Lenny's Podcast
“I think there is a temptation and incentive structure to create conflict intention.”
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- Lenny's Podcast
“I think some of the best companies actually do have a practice around this where they have a 6, 12, 18 month check-in on new hires and they then compare their performance against level hired at and then review against the scorecards.”
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- Lenny's Podcast
“I think there was a lot of confusion from my team specifically when I joined them.”
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- Lenny's Podcast
“Could be all genes. Could be completely unrelated to anything you've done entire life, I suspect.”
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- Lenny's Podcast
“The meta point around that is you need to be really invested in the candidates. This probably does change at a certain scale, like if you're "organization" is hiring a hundred engineers or whatever, you have process around it, you have pipelines, there's a machine at that point, but I do think the direct hiring managers have a responsibility to be really involved in every individual, because there's no one who's directly hiring a hundred people.”
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- Lenny's Podcast
“Every PM has their definition of what is product management, and I have one that I'm trying to find exactly what I wrote, but essentially, it's to marshal the resources of your team to solve customer problems and drive business impact most efficiently, something like that.”
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- Lenny's Podcast
“" I know PM should settle for looking through bent glass in my opinion because whether it's a research report, whether it's something a salesperson is telling you, whether it's market research, don't care, it's been processed by someone, and PMs need direct exposure to raw material.”
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- Lenny's Podcast
“The one thing that I might tack on there, because this could lead to a negative perception, is, "Well, I'm never going to be a world-class engineer, world-class designer or et cetera, and so let me settle for being a PM.”
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- Lenny's Podcast
“" Or, "Can you send it at the very beginning?" And my answer is no, because I don't know what they're afraid of yet.”
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- Lenny's Podcast
“How do I prevent this?" And the reason it's bad is not just because they feel surprised, but because then, either one, they decide to leave, two, they're not performing because it's not the right role or environment for them, or three, maybe the company is still good, but that role isn't.”
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- Lenny's Podcast
“I will say not novel, the Bear holds a very special place in my heart right now, both because I worked in restaurants and I got to build for them.”
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- Lenny's Podcast
“In this case, broadcasting it out, but then having that be a mechanism for it making its way back to me to actually better understand why did they make the decision versus what I thought, because the reasons were a little bit different, but the outcome was the same.”
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- Lenny's Podcast
“" I think you can't use the effort required to do that as an excuse to not be talking to your customers more frequently.”
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- Lenny's Podcast
“"I know I'm good," because I think I'm good, "and I am going to prove the hell out of that" mainly to myself, but ideally to other people too.”
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- Lenny's Podcast