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Lenny Rachitsky Profile picture
@lennysan
Sep 15, 2020 • 9 tweets • 4 min read • Read on X
This week's post (for paid subscribers): When to hire your first product manager 🥇

Inside:
1. Why PMs are great
2. Signs you need a full-time PM
3. What to look for in your first PM
+ much more

See thread for some nuggets 👇
lennyrachitsky.com/p/when-to-hire…
1/ The evolution of the Product Manager function at most startups Image
2a/ The 3 jobs of a Product Manager:

1. Shape the product: Harness insights from customers, stakeholders, and data to prioritize and build a product that will have optimal impact on the business

2. Ship the product: Ship high-quality product on time and free of surprises
... Image
2b/ ...

3. Synchronize the people: Align all stakeholders aligned around one vision, strategy, goal, roadmap, and timeline to avoid wasted time and effort
3/ Signs you may need a full-time product manager:
🐌 Frequent bottlenecks
⚔️ Frequent misalignment
💡 A burning need to go deep on a problem (post-PMF)
4/ When companies hired their first Product Manager Image
5/ Tips for being successful as a first Product Manager
lennyrachitsky.com/p/joining-as-t…
6/ What to look for in your first Product Manager

growth.eladgil.com/book/chapter-7… by @eladgil

medium.com/@gokulrajaram/… by @gokulr

medium.com/@jgolden/when-… by @jpgg
7/ How to get into Product Management
lennyrachitsky.com/p/how-to-get-i…

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More from @lennysan

Lenny Rachitsky Profile picture
Aug 12
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 👇Image
1. Building Products, by @joulee
medium.com/the-year-of-th…Image
2. Communication Is the Job, by @boztank
boz.com/articles/commu…Image
Read 10 tweets
Lenny Rachitsky Profile picture
Jul 15
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.)Image
1. Who’s Got the Monkey? by William Oncken, Jr. and Donald L. Wass
med.unc.edu/uncaims/wp-con…Image
2. Strategies for learning, by @AndyMasley
andymasley.substack.com/p/strategies-f…Image
Read 9 tweets
Lenny Rachitsky Profile picture
Sep 24, 2024
New data on the state of the product job market 🧵

1. Remote jobs are shrinking fast (down 35% from peak) Image
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.Image
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. Image
Read 7 tweets
Lenny Rachitsky Profile picture
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: Image
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.
Read 4 tweets
Lenny Rachitsky Profile picture
Feb 27, 2024
In most hiring processes, you’re lucky to get 45 minutes to chat with a candidate before having to make a thumbs-up or thumbs-down decision.

How do you use that precious time to get the most important information about the candidate?

For over a year now, I’ve been asking my illustrious podcast guests to share their favorite interview questions (nearly 150 guests now!), and the collection of questions that’s emerged is like nothing I’ve seen elsewhere. These are not just great questions—they are exceptionally good at pulling out the essential insights about the candidate in the least amount of time.

Below, I'll share some of my favorite high-signal-to-noise interview questions, including what to look for in a great answer, grouped by theme. To see the full list, don't miss today's newsletter post (link below).Image
How to learn the most about a candidate from a single interview question—High-signal-to-noise interview questions inspired by my 150+ podcast guests

Keep reading for some of my favorites 👇
lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-learn…
Theme: How do they handle the hard stuff?

Question 1: Talk me through your biggest product flop. What happened and what did you do about it?

“I look for people being brutally honest about how bad it was and why it failed. The rest of the interview, they’re trying to tell you all the wonderful things they did and all the accomplishments they had. And so I think the rawer the answer in terms of how bad it was and why, the better.”

—Annie Pearl, corporate vice president at @Microsoft, ex-CPO at @Calendly
Read 13 tweets
Lenny Rachitsky Profile picture
Jan 16, 2024
Every startup can be distilled into a simple equation.

And until you can express yours as one, you don’t fully understand your business.

Having this equation gives you a map for understanding your biggest growth drivers, your key inputs and output, and once your teams are aligned behind it, and the equations operationalized, you’ll experience a huge force multiplier—because every team will be focusing their energy on the same (high-leverage) levers.

I teamed up with @danhockenmaier to collect the detailed equations for the eight most common tech business models:

1. Bottom-up B2B SaaS with seat-based pricing
2. Bottom-up B2B SaaS with usage-based pricing
3. Top-down B2B SaaS
4. B2C subscription
5. B2C free (ads)
6. B2C marketplaces
7. B2B marketplaces
8. DTC/e-commerce

👇🧵Image
(Keep reading for a summary, or bookmark this post for later)
lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-math-for…
1. Bottom-up B2B SaaS with seat-based pricing

Examples: @Figma, @SlackHQ, @Zoom, @Adobe Creative Cloud, @Asana, @Jira

ARR = New ARR + Expansion ARR + Reactivation ARR – Churned ARR – Contraction ARRImage
Read 22 tweets

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