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Lenny Rachitsky

@lennysan

Dec 23, 2025

What exactly AI is doing for people, function by function

Results from a large-scale AI productivity survey of my 1m+ newsletter subscribers (with @noamseg)

1. PMs are seeing the most value from AI tools to (1) write PRDs, (2) create mockups/prototypes, and (3) improve their communication across emails and presentations.

Not so much to help them come up with roadmap ideas, run meetings, GTM, or user research synthesis.

AI is helping PMs produce, but so far it lags in helping them think.

2. Designers are finding AI most helpful with user research synthesis, content and copy , and design concepts ideation. Visual design ranks #8.

AI is helping designers with everything around design (research synthesis, copy, ideation), but pushing pixels remains stubbornly human.

Meanwhile, compare prototyping: PMs have it at #2 (19.8%), while designers have it at #4 (13.2%). AI is unlocking skills for PMs outside of their core work (at least in the case of prototyping), whereas designers aren’t seeing the marginal improvement benefits from AI doing their core work.

3. Founders lean heavily toward productivity and decision support, product ideation, and vision/strategy.

Unlike others, founders are using AI to think, not just to produce. The top three jobs are all strategic: decision support, ideation, and vision/strategy. That’s a stark contrast to PMs (whose top jobs are documents and prototypes) and designers (research synthesis and copy).

And look at that #1 category: “productivity/decision support,” at 32.9%, is unlike anything else in the survey. No other role has a single use case this dominant. Founders are treating AI as a thought partner and sounding board, not just a tool for specific deliverables.

This pattern may explain why founders report the highest satisfaction throughout the survey—they’ve figured out how to use AI for higher-leverage strategic work, not just production tasks.

Read 5 tweets

Lenny Rachitsky

@lennysan

Oct 14, 2025

Everyone should be using Claude Code more

PMs, marketers, designers, founders, parents. Everyone.

The trick is to forget that it’s called Claude Code and instead think of it as Claude Local or Claude Agent. It’s essentially a super-intelligent AI running locally, able to do stuff directly on your computer—from organizing your files and folders to brainstorming domain names, summarizing customer calls, to enhancing image quality, creating Linear tickets, and so much more.

Here are 50 creative ways non-technical people are using Claude Code in their work and life, to inspire your own thinking. This list includes my own favorite use cases, and many examples y’all shared with me 👇

1. Clearing space on my computer.

Prompt: “How can I clear some storage on my computer?”

Then, discuss your options.

2. Improving the image quality of screenshots

Prompt: “Improve the image quality of [filename]”.

I used this many times for the screenshots in this thread.

Read 14 tweets

Lenny Rachitsky

@lennysan

Aug 12, 2025

Less than a month ago I published part 1 of my essential reading series, and it’s already my 9th most popular post of all time. There’s a growing need for curated, thoughtful content as an antidote to the endless slop filling our feeds and inboxes.

To continue building the highest-signal-to-noise library for product builders, I’ve picked 10 additional timeless reads that you probably haven’t read but should. The pieces below cover a wide spectrum of advice around growth, leadership, communication, entrepreneurship, and more.

I’m not including books here—that list is yet to come. If you have suggestions for essays I’m still sleeping on, please share them in the comments.

List below 👇

1. Building Products, by @joulee
medium.com/the-year-of-th…

2. Communication Is the Job, by @boztank
boz.com/articles/commu…

Read 10 tweets

Lenny Rachitsky

@lennysan

Jul 15, 2025

There’s so much content flying at us these days, it’s hard to separate the “this sounds smart!” from the “this is genuinely correct, helpful, and timeless.”

Below are seven essays that have had the most impact on my product career—that I find myself quoting from, sharing with people, and coming back to most often, even though most are decades old.

I’d love your help building out this list. What’s missing? Share a link in the comments. Bonus points for sharing stuff people may not have heard of.

(P.S. I’m not including books—yet. This is the beginning of an essential and timeless reading library specifically for product leaders.)

1. Who’s Got the Monkey? by William Oncken, Jr. and Donald L. Wass
med.unc.edu/uncaims/wp-con…

2. Strategies for learning, by @AndyMasley
andymasley.substack.com/p/strategies-f…

Read 9 tweets

Lenny Rachitsky

@lennysan

Sep 24, 2024

New data on the state of the product job market 🧵

1. Remote jobs are shrinking fast (down 35% from peak)

2. There’s been a shift to hiring more senior candidates

The chart below shows the proportion of open PM jobs by level over time.

If you look at the light blue and dark blue segments below (i.e. Senior and Lead/Senior++ roles), you can see they have definitely grown from early 2023 in the percentage of PMs being hired. In particular, Lead/Senior++ roles are growing their percentage of open roles the fastest. And the share of Entry/Mid-level roles (the pink segment) has decreased the most since early 2023.

3. More than one in five open PM roles is based in the San Francisco Bay Area. The share grew from 15.4% to over 20% in the past two years, and it appears to be growing further.

Read 7 tweets

Lenny Rachitsky

@lennysan

Jul 23, 2024

The rise of product management over the past 25 years.

Huge growth for 20+ years, followed by a plateau over the past couple of years.

This tells us the PM role isn’t going through the hypergrowth it saw earlier this decade, but it’s also not shrinking. This seems like a good and healthy thing all around.

Numbers-wise, there are about 450,000 active PMs in the U.S. right now, and 2,500 to 4,500 are being hired each month.

Here are the top hirers of PM roles over the past few years:

As a comparison, here’s the engineering role over that same time frame—similar growth trajectory, also a bit of a slowdown in the past one or two years, though not as much of a slowdown as PMs. Again, this seems right and healthy.

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