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). 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…

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

👇🧵 (Keep reading for a summary, or bookmark this post for later)
lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-math-for…

Some of my biggest surprises when researching paths to PMF for top B2B companies:

1. If you build it, they *will* come—if you have strong product-market fit. Though it often takes years to find initial PMF, once you do, a common pattern across top startups is strong (and explosive) organic growth—primarily seen as cold inbound and word-of-mouth growth.

This was true for Segment, Loom, Dropbox, Canva, Sprig, Stytch, and most others.

Though there will never be a foolproof formula for finding product-market fit, here’s my best attempt at creating a guide for B2B startups that'll save you much time and pain.

It's based on interviews and research into the PMF journeys of 25 top B2B startups.

Here's a peek: Here's the full post: A guide for finding product-market fit in B2B

Inside:
1. A framework for finding PMF
2. Signs that you’re approaching PMF
3. What to do if you aren’t

It's one of my new all-time favorite posts, and I'm super proud of it.
lennysnewsletter.com/p/finding-prod…

A few of my favorite stories of how founders validated their startup ideas:

1. After 6 ideas that didn't work out, Rujul Zaparde (@rujulz) and Lu Cheng created a 16-point checklist for what a great startup idea needs to hit. "We were very honest with ourselves. We worked on a bunch of terrible ideas before, and if there’s anything we had learned, it’s that today will be the easiest day to kill the idea and do something better. It’ll always be harder tomorrow. ...

4 ways for validate your B2B startup idea:

1. The do-it-manually path

@christinacaci manually created compliance reports for a few companies and noticed (surprisingly) that they all found them very valuable. She then built @TrustVanta (last valued at $1.6B): 2. The listening path: Talk to tons of potential users first, looking for signs of pull and pain—then start building

The founders of @TheZipHQ (last valued at over $1.5B) spoke with 75 potential users before committing to their idea:

One of my biggest surprises from researching the original stories of the best B2B startups is how many of their startup ideas emerged from doing something that's generally discouraged: sitting around and whiteboarding.

But, there’s a wrong way and a right way... As @christinacaci put it (on her path to building @TrustVanta):

"At the whiteboard stage, it makes so much sense. And in reality, zero sense. We recognized that if you can do it on a whiteboard, someone has probably done it. There’s no $20 bills on the sidewalk."

I interviewed the founders of 20+ of today's most successful B2B companies to build a playbook for kickstarting and scaling a B2B business.

Today, I'm releasing part 1: How the most successful B2B startups came up with their original idea: Across all of the origin stories, I found 3 reliable paths for finding a great idea:

Strategy 1. Past pain: Identify a large pain you experienced at a previous company—then build a solution.

Shopify built its own task tracking tool and they call it GSD—"Get Shit Done"

Every project that any team does goes in GSD, which has five phases of review:
1. Proposal
2. Prototype
3. Build
4. Release
5. Results

Here’s what this looks like in an actual screenshot of GSD: They have a system called OK1 and OK2, and for any particular team, there’s a front line of reviewers.

On OK1s, it’s usually the directors from product, UX, engineering, and sometimes data who all have to sign off...

Product templates that the Notion product team uses to build Notion, courtesy of @mlmanapat (CPO/CTO):

1. Annual planning template ➔ notion.so/templates/noti… 2. OKRs ➔ notion.so/e44f459c6e9a4c…

Miro was last valued at $17.5B, is the 8th most valuable US startup, and recently hit 50m MAU. They also have an incredibly unique, and effective, product culture. I sat down with @vparmar230 (CPO) to learn how @MiroHQ builds product.

Some of my biggest takeaways: 1. Their focus on speed

12 ways to use ChatGPT in your PM work

1. Collect and summarize user feedback

https://twitter.com/lucdid/status/1641538521113456644?s=20

2. Come up with product name ideas

https://twitter.com/Bailey_Jennings/status/1640392121533308928?s=20

Standout PLG products like Figma, Airtable, Miro, Snyk, and Zapier disproportionately attract users through two channels:

1. Organic search/SEO
2. Product virality

In other words, the product is doing their marketing.

Here are a ton of examples of this in action via @poyark: 0/ Keep reading for highlights, or jump straight to the full post by guest author @poyark 👇
lennysnewsletter.com/p/product-led-…

A glimpse into the inner workings of how @duolingo builds product—including their unique org structure, design review process, OKR cadence, resource allocation system, team rituals, tool stack, goals, and more: 1/ Product teams are managed by 2-3 “co-leads”

Typically, a PM lead and an Engineering lead head up the team, sometimes joined by a Learning and Curriculum lead (experts in learning science, curriculum design, and educational content creation), Biz Ops lead, or Marketing lead.

Here's a long list of growth ideas.

Get your team together and go through this list with the mindset of “How might we…” 1/ Drive more top-of-funnel (short-term)

Translate your product into other languages

Expand to an additional geo

Do something controversial to get people talking about you

Convince an important (niche) influencer to mention you

Buy lots of billboards in a concentrated area

I’m going to be a dad 🎉 😍💖

Exciting, and scary!

I want to try to take a month off in June, but since I don’t get parental leave (downside of solopreneur life), I’m putting out a call for guest posts.

Have an amazing story to tell? Killer insights to share? Apply below: Many of my most popular posts were guest posts, and I've never put out a public call for submissions. Excited to see what comes in.

No prior writing experience required, but the bar for guest posts is high!

Submit your pitch here👇
forms.gle/dhW34QhsARNxPT…

Last year, Ken Norton (@kennethn) came on my podcast to discuss leadership for PMs.

Many of his insights have lodged in my brain ever since, so thought I'd resurface the episode, and share some of my favorites lessons.

5 important takeaways about leadership from @kennethn 👇 1/ Beware of the 3 common leadership postures that limit your leadership potential:

1️⃣ Needing to be liked
2️⃣ Needing to be right
3️⃣ Needing to be in control

We usually have these postures because they once served us, but they eventually inhabit our ability to deal with others.

The @coda_hq product team has always stood out as one of the most thoughtful, deliberate, first-principled product culture out there.

In part 2 of my series on how the best product teams build product, I interviewed @lshackleton on their approach to product.

A few highlights: Keep reading, or jump straight to the full post 👇
lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-coda-bui…

For anyone recently laid off, a few things to help you get back on your feet:
1. Curated directory of product coaches
2. Talent collective
3. 25% discount off my newsletter
4. 10 select posts to read, on interviewing, influence, strategy, product sense, ideation, more

Read on 1. Check out this directory of product coaches, sourced from the newsletter community ➔
coda.io/@lennysan/coac…

Within one week of publishing, @HilaQu's guide to starting your PLG motion became my tenth most popular newsletter post of all-time.

Today, she shares part two—a guide to setting up your PLG infrastructure, tool stack, and team.

Here's a summary of the main takeaways: BTW, if you haven't read part one, I recommend you start there since it covers the foundations:

Step 1: Map your funnel
Step 2: Pick a starting point
Step 3: Anticipate the most common pitfalls

lennysnewsletter.com/p/five-steps-t…

Five steps to starting your PLG motion

*Read on* At its core, product-led growth (PLG) is about leveraging your product to acquire, activate, convert, retain, and monetize your user base. In PLG, your product is not only the set of features that solve customer pain points but also your go-to-market (GTM) motion, and your...