Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth

Vlad Loktev spent 10 years at Airbnb, where he started as an IC PM and quickly advanced to lead the core Airbnb marketplace business and then GM the entire homes business, managing over 1,000 people and reporting directly to CEO Brian Chesky. He recently left Airbnb and joined Index Ventures as their newest partner. Vlad was my manager at Airbnb for many years, and is the person I credit most for...

Nikita Bier is one of the most in-demand consumer, social, and growth experts in the world. He’s the co-founder of TBH (sold to Meta for more than $30 million) and Gas (sold to Discord for millions more) and has helped more consumer apps that have hit #1 in the app stores than any other person I’ve come across. He currently spends his time advising founders on growth, product, and design and is an...

Deb Liu is the CEO of Ancestry and former longtime VP of Product at Facebook. At Facebook, Deb led the creation of Facebook Marketplace, developed the first mobile ad product for apps, built the company’s games business, and launched Facebook Pay. She’s also held leadership roles at PayPal and eBay, serves on the board of Intuit, and is the author of Take Back Your Power . In our conversation, we...

Kevin Yien leads product for merchant experiences at Stripe. Before that, he meandered his way from being a technical designer to a product manager, built the restaurants business and ecosystem team at Square, and most recently was head of product and design at Mutiny. He also makes ice cream and teaches for fun. In our conversation, we discuss: • Why aspiring PMs should start in engineering, desi...

Evan LaPointe  is the founder of CORE Sciences, which teaches companies and individuals how our brains work and how that translates to improved collaboration, better products, faster decision-making, and more growth. Previously, Evan was the co-founder of Satellite, the fourth-largest analytics product on the internet today (it mostly runs behind the scenes, and pretty much everyone listening will...

Joe Hudson is one of the most sought-after executive coaches in Silicon Valley. He is the founder of Art of Accomplishment, a transformational coaching program that has helped tens of thousands of people, including many tech executives and founders from companies like Apple, OpenAI, and Google. His unique method of transformation comes from over 25 years of exploring neurological, psychological, a...

Brian Tolkin is the Head of Product at Opendoor. Previously, he was one of the early employees at Uber, where he was instrumental in launching and growing UberPool, UberHop, and UberExpress and started one of the first product operations teams in tech. In our conversation, we dive into: • How to enable product and ops to work well together • How to run great product reviews • How to make good deci...

Timothy Davis has led performance marketing for all of Shopify for the past 2.5 years, and as a consultant has helped companies like Pinterest, LinkedIn, Redfin, and Eventbrite kickstart and scale their performance marketing teams. In every one of those cases, he got them so performant at paid growth that they significantly scale spend and investment in these channels. In our conversation, we cove...

Roger Martin is one of the world’s leading experts on strategy and the author of Playing to Win , one of the most beloved books on strategy. He’s written extensively for the Harvard Business Review ; consulted for dozens of Fortune 500 companies, including P&G, Lego, and Ford; and written 11 other books. In our conversation, we discuss: • The five key questions you need to answer to develop an eff...

Rory Sutherland is widely regarded as one of the most influential (and most entertaining) thinkers in marketing and behavioral science. He’s the vice chairman of Ogilvy UK, the author of Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life , and the founder of Nudgestock, the world’s biggest festival of behavioral science and creativity. He champions thinking f...

Jessica Lachs is the global head of analytics and data science at DoorDash, where she’s built one of the largest and most respected data organizations in tech. In her more than 10 years at DoorDash, she has served as the first general manager, responsible for launching new markets; the head of business ops and analytics; and the VP of analytics and data science. Previously, Jessica founded GiftSim...

Jeff Weinstein is a product lead at Stripe, where he helped grow their payment APIs to hundreds of billions in volume and transformed the way founders start companies into a few simple clicks with Atlas. Prior to Stripe, Jeff led several startups and sold companies to Groupon and Box. He’s known for his customer obsession, craft, quality, and building beloved products businesses rely on. In our co...

Mike Maples, Jr. is a legendary early-stage startup investor and a co-founder and partner at Floodgate. He’s made early bets on transformative companies like Twitter, Lyft, Twitch, Okta, Rappi, and Applied Intuition and is one of the pioneers of seed-stage investing as a category. He’s been on the Forbes Midas List eight times and enjoys sharing the lessons he’s learned from his years studying ico...

Dylan Field is the co-founder and CEO of Figma, the collaborative design platform that has revolutionized how product teams work. In my first-ever live podcast, recorded at Figma Config, Dylan and I dig into: • How intuition and product taste drive Dylan’s decision-making • The challenge of keeping things simple • Dylan’s thoughts on the future of product management • Lessons from Figma’s early da...

Jessica Livingston is a co-founder of Y Combinator, the first and most successful startup accelerator. Y Combinator has funded over 5,000 companies, 200 of which are now unicorns, including Airbnb, Dropbox, DoorDash, Stripe, Coinbase, and Reddit. Jessica played a crucial role in YC’s early success, when she was nicknamed the “social radar” because of her uncanny ability to quickly evaluate people—...

Ami Vora is the Chief Product Officer of Faire, which connects independent retailers and brands around the world. Before Faire, Ami spent over 15 years at Meta, including as VP of Product and Design for WhatsApp (2B+ users), VP of Product for Facebook’s ads system (now $130B of annual revenue), and director at Instagram. She began her career working on developer tools at Microsoft. In our conversa...

Tanguy Crusson is the product lead for Jira Product Discovery at Atlassian. In his more than 10 years at the company, he has been instrumental in taking several new products from zero to one, including HipChat, Statuspage, and Jira Product Discovery. In this episode, we dive deep into the struggles of innovating and building new products inside a large company. Tanguy shares candid stories about w...

Jeffrey Pfeffer teaches the single most popular (and somewhat controversial) class at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business: The Paths to Power. He’s also the author of 16 books, including 7 Rules of Power: Surprising—But True—Advice on How to Get Things Done and Advance Your Career . He has taught at Harvard, the London Business School, and IESE and has written for publications like Fortune and...

Uri Levine is the co-founder of Waze, the world’s largest community-based traffic and navigation app, acquired by Google for over $1 billion. He’s also founded nine other companies, been on the board of 20 companies, and advised more than 50 companies. He’s most recently the author of Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution: A Handbook for Entrepreneurs , hailed by Steve Wozniak as the “Bi...

Cameron Adams is the co-founder and chief product officer of Canva. Canva is one of the world’s most valuable private software companies, used by 95% of Fortune 500 companies. Since its launch in 2013, Canva has grown to over 150 million monthly users in more than 190 countries, generating $2.3 billion in annual revenue. Prior to Canva, Cameron ran a design consultancy, worked at Google on Google...

Matt Dixon is one of the world’s foremost experts in sales and the author of The Challenger Sale , which sold over a million copies worldwide and was a #1 Amazon and Wall Street Journal bestseller. His most recent book, The JOLT Effect , focuses on overcoming customer indecision—one of the biggest challenges to closing deals. Outside of writing, Matt co-founded DCM Insights, a boutique consultancy...

Bangaly Kaba was an early growth PM at Facebook, head of growth at Instagram, and VP of Product at Instacart and is currently Director of Product at YouTube overseeing a global team working on creator monetization. Bangaly has also been a growth advisor to dozens of companies, including Twitter, on the board of multiple companies, and is an active angel investor. In our conversation, we discuss: •...

Kenneth Berger coaches startup leaders on how to prevent burnout, advocate for their desired lifestyle, and make a meaningful impact on the world. He’s spent more than 20 years in the tech industry, is a former founder backed by top investors, and was the first product manager at Slack. Kenneth’s core mission is to help startup leaders change the world by learning to ask for what they want, living...

Jag Duggal is chief product officer at Nubank, a decacorn neobank founded in Brazil. It’s valued at over $30 billion, is bigger than Coinbase, Robinhood, Affirm, and SoFi combined, has 100 million customers (more than Bank of America!) while only operating in three countries in Latin America, and 80% to 90% of its growth comes through word of mouth. Prior to Nubank, Jag was a director of product m...

Vikrama Dhiman heads all things product at Gojek, including product management, design, program management, and research, across Indonesia, Singapore and India. He has over 16 years of experience building internet products, consults with Fortune 500 companies, and is among the most well-known and respected product leaders in all of Asia. In our conversation, we discuss: • The most common traits am...