Articles by Lenny Rachitsky
Leading a PM team meetingLenny walks through the typical goals of a PM team meeting (understanding, alignment, and connection), how often to meet, how to collaborate on the agenda, and how to make it fun.
- The Power of Performance Reviews: Use This System to Become a Better Manager
Lenny provides a comprehensive 3-step performance review system that he used at Airbnb: 1. Prepare: Gather direct feedback, capture their accomplishments, describe their “superpower”, write a short high-level summary of their performance, identify 1-2 development areas, share a career milestone timeline 2. Deliver: Schedule it, prep the narrative, bring paper copies, share their rating, walk through the details, share compensation, create a follow-up plan, leave time for discussion 3. Follow-up: Schedule a one-hour monthly coaching chat, review action items together, adjust as things progress, capture and share examples of what’s going well and isn’t throughout the year
- The Secret to a Great Planning Process — Lessons from Airbnb and Eventbrite
Lenny provides a process that navigates difficult planning touch-points between executive leadership and individual teams. Importantly, Lenny and Nils share templates used at Airbnb and Eventbrite which help with each step of the process. This is also the longest and most-in-depth article in this learning guide.
- A Three-Step Framework For Solving Problems 👌
Lenny provides a process for how to construct problem statements, with examples for good and bad versions. He then provides insights on how to build alignment across teams around the problem statements, and how to make sure you continuously pay attention to the problem and whether you're solving it.
- What is good retention?
Lenny worked with Casey Winters to reach out to twenty of the most experienced growth practitioners and had them two questions: • What do you consider GOOD and GREAT user retention (at 6 months)? • What do you consider GOOD and GREAT net revenue retention (at 12 months)?
- What it feels like when you've found product-market fit
Lenny interviewed the founders of 25 iconic technology companies, and discovered that there are 3 ways that PMF can be "felt": 1. Sudden and significant pull by the market 2. Gradual but compounding pull from the market 3. Hitting a milestone that proves it's working
