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🫶 How Figma builds product

Yūki Yamashita, Chief Product Officer at Figma, shares lessons learned, plug-and-play templates, and fresh insights into how Figma builds product

🏎 The Racecar Growth Framework—expanded and illustrated

🎩 How to get better at influence

The best way to improve your influence skills is to study people who are really good at it. And imho, one of the greatest influencers of all time is Frodo Baggins. Hear me out.

🌅 When to sunset a feature

A handy checklist to help decide when it’s time to sunset a product or feature

🛣 All the ways to grow your product

There are two additional growth levers that I didn’t get to cover in the series because they were neither growth engines nor kickstarting tactics. But before I explore them, let’s quickly review where we stand...

⏫ Layering sales onto a bottom-up self-serve product

“Bottom-up” (or “product-led”) B2B growth is a hot topic in early-stage circles these days, and it makes sense why. A self-serve (“easy-in”) entry motion, that’s later combined with a strong direct sales motion, can make for explosive revenue growth as shown by IPO’d exemplars Zoom...

🎯 Marketing: Positioning

I keep hearing that I need to improve my product’s positioning, but I’m not sure what that means, and how to do this. Where do I start?

👂 Building a referrals program

I love referrals programs so much. While leading the supply growth work at Airbnb, one of the teams I oversaw built and scaled the host referrals program.

🙌 How behavioral science can boost your conversion rates

The field of behavioral science studies these behaviors. It sits at the crossroads of psychology and economics, looking at the effects of cognitive, emotional, and social factors on decisions and, ultimately, actions. The application of behavioral science is typically called behavioral design.

6️⃣ Six rules of hiring for growth

As Paul Graham teaches us, “Startup = growth. The only essential thing is growth. Everything else we associate with startups follows from growth.” Thus, your first growth hire is one of the most important hires you’ll make.

🪄 Magical growth loops

Normally, to grow your business, YOU need to go find every new user or customer. For example, if you’re building Google, you need to go tell people about Google and convince them to use Google. Each additional Google user doesn’t directly drive more Google users.

🏎 The Racecar Growth Framework

If you’re building a consumer business, these are your only three choices for long-term, sustainable growth. But picking the right “lane” is just one of many decisions on the way to building a winning business.

🔍 Winning at SEO

How should early-stage founders overcome the SEO advantages of incumbents? The strategy is actually simple: Create many valuable web pages in a scalable and cheap way.

🌊 Content-driven growth

What are all the ways that content can drive growth? There’s obviously SEO. There are also viral blog posts, user-generated content (UGC), editorially produced blog posts, data-generated pages, and so on. What other strategies are there, and how do they all fit together?

👄 How to increase virality

You should only invest in virality if you are confident that virality will be your primary growth engine for your product. As opposed to (1) performance marketing, (2) content, or (3) sales.

🧠 Strategy and tactics for increasing conversion

Increasing conversion (a.k.a fix the “leaks” in your funnel, get it?) is one of the highest ROI investments a growth team can make, particularly once you’ve got your top-of-funnel growth engines (e.g. paid, SEO, referrals) up and running.

🙆‍♀️ How to increase your product's retention

It'd be great if you can share some advice about increasing retention. Also, please some companies who are doing this very well.

🚀 How to kickstart and scale a marketplace business

Having worked at Airbnb for many years, I’m frequently asked about what Airbnb did right in order to grow into what it is today. While sharing my learnings, I’ve become increasingly wary of teams relying too heavily on a single company’s experience.

🔟 How today's fastest growing B2B businesses found their first ten customers

In the early days of Figma, we talked with practically every designer we knew. In search of more feedback, we turned to Twitter which I realized we could use to determine the most influential designers.

😈 How the biggest consumer apps got their first 1,000 users

Considering every startup confronts this question at some point, I was surprised by how little has been written about it. Particularly anything actionable. So I decided to do my own digging.

🔨 Marketing: Picking a wedge

The wedge metaphor to me is most useful in making sure you’re not a blunt instrument trying to chop into a market by being everything for everyone, but instead the sharp blade with an extraordinary focus on a specific persona/use case to start.

🫵 Breaking into growth

Though the difference between a regular PM and a “growth PM” isn’t as big as you may think—most PMs are responsible for driving business growth one way or another—there are indeed roles where your job is solely to drive growth.

✨ Choosing Your North Star Metric

No matter what stage you’re at as a startup or company with a new product line, expect your North Star Metric to change as your strategy shifts. It will evolve as you learn more about what keeps your team focused, motivated, and building toward the ultimate vision.

🕰 What is a good payback period?

To answer this question, like I did with our look at retention, I brought out the big guns. I polled the smartest growth people I could get hold of and asked them what payback periods they expect when investing in, or advising, startups.

🏷 Pricing your SaaS product

📌 The most important consumer subscription metrics to track

Whether you’re in B2B or B2C, subscription businesses are so hot right now. And it makes sense — recurring revenue is hard to beat. Instead of starting from $0 each month, you start each month essentially at the peak of your previous revenue.

👅 How to develop product sense

Your question implies that it can be developed, and to that point, I 1,000% agree. Contrary to what a lot of PMs believe, product sense is not something you need to be born with. It’s a learned skill, just like any other PM skill.

👐 Finding your distribution advantage

While starting a company has never been easier, and building a great product has become table stakes, getting your product in front of the right people efficiently—getting people to even know you exist—is increasingly what separates the haves from the have-nots.

🫧 The most important bottom-up SaaS metrics to track

With so many tools, potential metrics to track, and perspectives on measuring your progress, it’s no surprise founders often struggle to know where to start.

🐾 Product management career ladders

Career ladders (a.k.a. leveling frameworks, career tracks, competencies, etc.) have long been secretive and mysterious. I’m not totally sure why. I don’t see how sharing these publicly gives anyone a competitive advantage...

🐝 Generating buzz

Your goal is to create something worth remarking about. Something people will stop and pay attention to, and have to share with their friends. Seth Godin explores this idea further.

👯‍♀️ A founder’s guide to community

Community—so hot right now. Ask any founder if they’ve thought about building a community and 9 out of 10 times you’ll get an immediate yes. And for good reason.

🛞 Flywheels, flywheels, flywheels

What makes your business grow? Which elements of your business feed off of each other to accelerate growth? A flywheel is simply a way to describe these ideas visually...

🧪 Fostering a culture of experimentation

🤕 Why marketplaces fail

Marketplace businesses are HARD. You could argue they are 2x as hard as a non-marketplace because you have to find Product/Market TWICE, for your supply AND for your demand...

🪢 Differentiating your product

Michael Porter, one of the most cited authors in business and economics and generally seen as the godfather of business strategy, spent decades studying what it takes to build a durable business. He found that there are only two paths to winning a market...

🏃 GTM motions of 30 B2B SaaS companies

🧐 Why now

Having a strong “why now” certainly gives you a better shot at building a large and enduring business (for the reasons I cover below), but it isn’t absolutely essential. Companies like SpaceX, Airbnb, Pinterest, DoorDash, Instacart, Facebook, and Netflix had little if any why now.

🏙 Marketplace city expansion strategy

Most of the marketplaces I looked at took 8 to 12 months post-launch to expand into their next market. A few marketplaces, like Caviar and OpenTable, launched their second and third markets at essentially the same time...

⚛️ The Atomic Network

Earlier this week, Andrew Chen (GP at a16z, ex-Uber Growth, ex-founder, prolific blogger) published his long-awaited book, The Cold Start Problem. In it, Andrew explores the powerful role of “network effects” in kickstarting and scaling some of Silicon Valley’s most successful companies.

🔬 Evaluating a (marketplace) business idea

After looking at 100+ marketplace businesses over the past few years, I’ve learned one important lesson: First, forget about the marketplace part. Start by looking at the business...

👁 How people discover new products

To help you develop your strategy and inspire your thinking, below I’ll explore each of these seven channels, with examples, suggestions, and advice as to which channel is right for you.

⏳ What is good waitlist conversion

To get you a concrete answer, I asked a bunch of founders (over Twitter, email, and IRL) who have direct experience with long waitlists, and broadly here’s what I’ve learned...

🍳 Skills PMs need to build

Instead of pontificating, let’s get real. There’s no better way to know what skills matter most in your role than by looking at how your company evaluates your performance.

🙋 A comprehensive survey of Product Management

What skills do companies look for in a PM? What do PMs need to get right to get promoted? How much influence do PMs have at different companies? There’s surprisingly little information out there about the differences in the PM role across the industry.

🤕 Surviving as the first product manager

I’ve been getting this question often recently, so I’m excited to dive in. Since I personally haven't been the first PM at a company, I used this as an excuse to do some new research. I reached out to a bunch of smart friends and friends of friends who have been first PMs, along with putting out...

⏫ Prioritizing

Judging by the sea of SEO thirst-trap blog posts about prioritization, you aren’t a PM blogger (or PM SaaS tool) if you haven’t shared your perspective on prioritization. So here’s my advice: In most situations, ignore most of these frameworks and just keep it simple.

🤔 Getting better at product strategy

A few years into my time at Airbnb, the founders were becoming increasingly alarmed that a large percentage of booking requests were being rejected (or worse ignored) by hosts. Guests across all demographics, geographies, and languages were putting in their credit card information...

👩‍💻 The top 5 things PMs should know about engineering

There’s an old debate about how technically minded product managers should be. On the one hand, understanding your developers, their process, and their work is part and parcel of shipping products effectively.

🤠 14 habits of highly effective Product Managers

Great PMs take pride in the clarity and conciseness of their documents, emails, presentations, and meetings. They know that people judge the quality of their thinking by the quality of their writing/speaking and that effective communication is the most fundamental PM skill.

❓ My favorite PM interview questions

The answer is you just do it. Building on last month’s post where I dissected the ten jobs of a product manager—based on reviewing 20+ PM career ladders at some of today’s biggest tech companies—in this post I’m going to share my favorite interview questions for PMs, one question per PM “job”.

🤟 Becoming a Senior Product Manager

The PM career is unnecessarily shrouded in mystery. We all know you start as an individual contributor, and eventually, you can become a CPO or a VP of Product. But what happens in the middle?

💭 Should I become a product manager

To help you in your decision-making process, let’s first make sure you understand what you actually do day-to-day as a PM, and then I’ll share my advice for thinking through your decision.

🚪 How To Get Into Product Management (And Thrive)

The role of product manager (PM) is the most fascinating role within tech teams right now. PMs are closest to the center of the action, have a disproportionate amount of influence over key decisions, and often go on to start their own companies.

🌀 What is product management?

I generally avoid meta questions like this, since they’re rarely actionable or useful. But because this is such a common PM interview question and because I’ve gotten this question from readers enough times and never found a definition that I like elsewhere, I’m going to tackle it this week.

💪 What is good retention?

Great retention is THE scalable way to grow a product. It's the best indicator of product-market fit, it is the most important factor in a user’s lifetime value, and high retention drives all of the best acquisition strategies. It's growth's equivalent to the triple-word score.