Lenny Rachitsky's Recent LinkedIn Posts

STATE OF THE PRODUCT JOB MARKET IN EARLY 2026 In spite of the headlines about layoffs and AI taking jobs, we’re actually seeing a lot of promising signs in tech hiring, and some interesting new trends: 1. PM openings are at the highest levels we’ve seen in over three years 2. AI hasn’t slowed the demand for software engineers (at least not yet) 3. AI roles in general are absolutely exploding 4. Design roles have plateaued 5. The Bay Area is increasing in importance 6. Remote work opportunities continue to decline 7. Despite ongoing layoffs, the overall number of tech jobs continues to grow Full report: https://lnkd.in/gHPzuDJa While these numbers are promising, I know a lot of people are having a hard time finding a job right now. And more openings doesn’t automatically mean people are finding jobs more quickly. For anyone in that situation, first of all, I’m sorry. Second, I’m working on ways to help. Until then, check out the end of the post above for a bunch of resources I’ve collected that’ll improve your odds of landing a gig. This analysis is based on data from TrueUp, one of my favorite collaborators and sources of data. They track job openings at tech companies and top startups around the world (over 9,000 companies) and make it easy to browse open gigs. Their data looks at roles at tech companies—the most sought-after and lucrative jobs. (It doesn’t include roles at non-tech companies and consulting agencies.) Browse open roles here: https://trueup.io/jobs

I'm hosting two meetups next month, one in SF and one in NYC. The theme is "Parents in Product," and I'm teaming up with my genius wife Michelle Rial to celebrate the launch of her children's book, Charts for Babies. The event is an opportunity to meet fellow parents working in product—with mingling, a short fireside chat, and Q&A. I've never hosted a meetup like this before, so this will be a rare and special experience. RSVP here: - SF (Tuesday 4/14): https://luma.com/q5lreozo - NYC (Saturday 4/4): https://luma.com/sic77k4r To RSVP, preorder a copy of Michelle's book, select in-store pickup and put "PARENTS IN PRODUCT" in the comments field. See Luma page for the link. See you there!

Marc Andreessen calls him "the best AI CEO nobody knows about." Elad Gil calls his company "the most successful, most quiet company in AI." Qasar Younis is the co-founder and CEO of Applied Intuition—which brings AI to vehicles, like tractors, planes, submarines, mining rigs, cars, and more. The company is valued at over $15B, with 18 of the top 20 global automakers (and the U.S. Department of Defense) as customers. As Qasar shared, "not many people run a $15B+ physical AI company with revenue and free cash flow. And by not many, I think literally zero other people." And Qasar's personal story is wild: Born on a farm in Pakistan. Emigrated to the U.S. and grew up in Detroit managing engine lines at GM. Harvard MBA. Became COO of Y Combinator (during the era that funded OpenAI, Cruise, DoorDash, and Coinbase). Then left to start Applied Intuition in 2017. In a rare and in-depth interview, we discuss: 🔸 The counterintuitive reason he's stayed quiet and built in private 🔸 Why reading old books and cleaning your own office makes you a better founder 🔸 How to build a culture where the best idea wins, not the loudest voice 🔸 Why the best companies show traction early—and what to do if yours doesn't 🔸 How physical AI will transform farming, mining, and construction before it ever reaches your home Listen now 👇 • YouTube: https://lnkd.in/gHzqY9-n • Spotify: https://lnkd.in/gXQgxMvF • Apple: https://lnkd.in/ghm3BEmu Thank you to our wonderful sponsors for supporting the podcast:  🏆 Omni— AI analytics your customers can trust: https://omni.co/lenny 🏆 Vanta — Automate compliance. Simplify security: https://vanta.com/lenny 🏆 Lovable — Build apps by simply chatting with AI: https://lovable.dev/

PMs, engineers, and designers are the worst negotiators in tech. Jacob Warwick negotiates comp for Fortune 500 execs, professional athletes, and Hollywood talent. He's helped his clients secure over $1B in additional comp. And he says most product people leave at least 20% on the table—because they're afraid to say one sentence. As someone who's been terrible at negotiating my whole life, this was one of the most valuable conversations I've had on the podcast. Jacob shares his full playbook: 🔸 Why a simple "What's the chance there's a little more here?" often unlocks a 20% bump 🔸 When negotiation actually starts (hint: it's much earlier than you think) 🔸 Why Jacob sees 40% average movement when negotiations are run well 🔸 Why you should never negotiate over email (and what to do instead) 🔸 How to dodge "What's your comp expectation?" without anchoring too low Listen now: https://lnkd.in/g9BvQ9KZ Thank you to our wonderful sponsors for supporting the podcast:  🏆 Orkes — The enterprise platform for reliable applications and agentic workflows: https://www.orkes.io/ 🏆 Mercury — Radically different banking: https://mercury.com/ 🏆 Omni — AI analytics your customers can trust: https://omni.co/lenny Also available on: • Spotify: https://lnkd.in/gMCmEEhV • Apple: https://lnkd.in/gXBAjDHc

Today I'm releasing my entire newsletter archive (350+ posts) and all podcast transcripts (300+ episodes) as AI-friendly Markdown files. Plus an MCP server and GitHub repo. A few months ago I shared my podcast transcripts on a whim, and y'all built the most amazing things—an RPG game, a parenting wisdom site, infographics, a Twitter bot, and 50+ other projects. Let's see what happens when I give you even more data. Grab the data here: LennysData.com. Paid subscribers get all of the data (some 350 posts and 300 transcripts). Free subscribers get a subset. I don’t think anyone’s ever done anything like this before, and I’m excited to give you this excuse to play with that AI tool you've been meaning to try. Check out today's newsletter post by Ben Shih for inspiration on what you could to build: https://lnkd.in/ggUNqEsb Here’s my challenge to you: build something, and let me know about it. I’ll pick my favorite and give you a free 1-year subscription to the newsletter. Just post a link to your project in the comments here: https://lnkd.in/ggUNqEsb. If you’ve already built something, slurp in this new data and submit it, too. I’ll pick a winner on April 15th. LFG.

Over 75,000 signups so far 🤯

Head of Claude Code Boris Cherny: "Everyone's going to be a product manager. Everyone's going to code."

I've teamed up with the team at Maven to put together a series of LIVE workshops centered around the theme of "The AI-Native PM," featuring a stacked lineup of product leaders: Tomer Cohen, Wes Kao, Hamel Husain, Peter Yang, Marily Nika, Ph.D, Tal Raviv, Aman Khan, Hila Qu 曲卉, Ben Erez, Ethan Evans, Caitlin Sullivan, and many more. The workshops are across 3 themes and all totally free: 1. AI workflows 2. Becoming more technical 3. Product sense & influence A few years from now, these skills will be table stakes for PMs. If you want to learn where things are heading in a hands-on way, this is the perfect way

When a team is underperforming, most people's first instinct is to blame the people. That's almost always wrong. After 20+ years at Meta, Google, and Chan Zuckerberg Initiative — and advising leaders at Stripe, Anthropic, OpenAI, and more — this week's beloved guest author Molly Graham has learned that blaming people for structural problems is one of the biggest leadership traps there is. In her powerful post, she shares a simple diagnostic tool she's used since leading wilderness expeditions in Patagonia at age 22: the Waterline Model. The Waterline Model helps you answer one question: What's going on below the surface that's making things harder than they should be? In other words, "snorkel before you scuba." Read it here (and share it with your manager):

This week's post on using AI for your job interview has proven very popular, in particular the AI interview coach that's included in the post. To take this even further, Noam Segal took all of the feedback he's received about the interview coach and made three major improvements: 1. Enhanced memory: It now tracks which questions companies actually ask, what patterns keep showing up, and what's working (or not) for you specifically. 2. Higher challenge: The coach will push back a lot more, stress-test your stories, and give you more hard truths. 3. More guidance: Every command now ends with a specific recommendation for a next step, vs. waiting for you to figure it out. Download v2 of the coach here: https://lnkd.in/gZkCBR34

The new product management

Negotiating your comp isn't greedy

A rare interview with me! By my wife! My brilliant wife Michelle Rial is about to come out with her first children's book, Charts for Babies, and I thought what a fun excuse to have her come on the podcast turns the tables on me. She asked things no one else would think to ask, and many things I've never shared publicly. We chat about the specific moments that pushed me to start the newsletter, how I think about quality, what stresses me out most, the invisible treadmill built into creator businesses, and how a psychedelic experience gave me the confidence to do this work. This was so fun, and so special, and I hope you like it. Listen now: https://lnkd.in/gD8jygHf Also, pre-order her book! It's coming out in a couple of weeks, and makes a great gift: https://lnkd.in/gwNz_xnS Thank you to our wonderful sponsors for supporting the podcast: 🏆 WorkOS — Modern identity platform for B2B SaaS, free up to 1 million MAUs: https://workos.com/lenny 🏆 Metaview — The AI platform for recruiting: https://metaview.ai/lenny 🏆 DX — The developer intelligence platform designed by leading researchers: https://getdx.com/lenny Also available on: • Spotify: https://lnkd.in/gyBX8PkR • Apple: https://lnkd.in/g9XnC4qH

"People don't understand executive calendars. I describe an executive's calendar as like a strobe light going off. You wake up at 8AM, you've already got a huge list of urgent things going on. You go from a meeting with finance on a budget, to an interview for another executive, to a people problem, to a legal problem, to a product review. And the product manager coming to that product review, who's trying to make a pitch thinks I've been prepping for this meeting for two weeks. But the executive coming into that session hasn't thought about you since." — Jessica Fain

A non-technical designer turned 300+ of my podcast transcripts into an RPG game. You explore an 8-bit pixel world, meet guests like Brian Chesky, Nikita Bier, Elena Verna, Dylan Field, compete with them to test your product knowledge, and capture them like Pokémon. SO FUN. And surprisingly educational! Here's the step-by-step story of how Ben Shih built this and what he learned: https://lnkd.in/ggUNqEsb If this doesn't get your vibe-coding juices flowing, I don't know what will. (Play it here: https://www.lennyrpg.fun/)

My biggest takeaways from Qasar Younis, CEO of Applied Intuition: 1. The real AI revolution over the next 5 to 10 years will happen in the physical world, not in software. While everyone obsesses over ChatGPT, Claude and coding agents, the real impact will come from autonomous vehicles, mining robots, and farming equipment. They’ll save lives (over 30,000 die annually in U.S. car accidents), enable mobility for disabled people, solve labor shortages in dangerous industries where nobody wants to work, and much more. 2. AI isn’t replacing jobs in industries like trucking and farming—it’s arriving just in time to fill a labor gap. The average age of a farmer in the U.S. is in the late 50s. Long-haul trucking jobs go unfilled not because people can’t do them but because the tradeoff isn’t worth it anymore; a family can choose DoorDash or Uber so the parent can pick up their kid. Qasar’s view is that physical AI will fill gaps created by demographic shifts and changing preferences, not displace workers who want those roles. He’s careful to say this doesn’t mean there are no downsides, but that the framing of “AI is coming for your job” misses the more immediate reality. 3. Building under the radar can be your competitive advantage. Qasar built Applied Intuition for nearly a decade without a social media presence. One of the company’s early core values was “Our best work is done alone and quietly.” His reasoning: every minute spent on a podcast, a post, or content for public consumption is a minute not spent on customers and the product. Qasar adds an important caveat—he could afford to stay quiet because he was already known in the ecosystem. Founders without an existing network may need the visibility that public presence creates. 4. Successful companies almost always show traction early. If you’re two years in and the market isn’t giving you increasingly specific signals about what to build, consider resetting. The foundation might be wrong—co-founders, market, or life phase. Your first startup is practice; treat it as building the muscle of being a founder, not as your magnum opus. 5. Comparing Chinese AI companies to American AI companies is a category error. Qasar uses Huawei as his example: the company’s name means “China’s ambition,” roughly a quarter of its employees are Communist Party members, and its goal is not to grow profits but to extend the state. So when people say Chinese EVs are outcompeting Detroit, they’re comparing a government-backed entity with no profit constraint to companies like Rivian that get hammered by public investors for losing money. Qasar says that if American companies were freed from profit expectations the same way, they’d field comparable products. The point isn’t that China is incompetent or not a serious competitor; it’s that the comparison framework most people use is wrong. Don't miss our full conversation: https://lnkd.in/gY3DXQzb

How your LinkedIn might be hurting your comp (Don't miss my full chat with negotiation expert Jacob Warwick: https://lnkd.in/g6f-6jFC)

Jessica Fain's best product ideas kept dying, and she couldn't figure out why. So at eight and a half months pregnant, she pitched Slack's CPO April Underwood on becoming her Chief of Staff. She wanted to see how executive decisions actually get made from the inside. What she learned changed everything she knew about influencing execs. People don't realize that an executive's calendar is like a strobe light going off. Budget meeting, a people problem, a legal issue—then your product review. You've been prepping for three weeks. They haven't thought about you since the last meeting. They may not have gone to the bathroom today. And most people walk into that meeting chasing a quick yes. Instead, she learned to treat execs like she treats her users—with the same curiosity and empathy. Jessica has since led product teams at Slack, Box, brightwheel, and now Webflow. In our tactical conversation she shares: 🔸 The 60-second meeting opener most PMs skip 🔸 Why "that's so interesting, what led you to believe that?" can help you disarm an exec 🔸 How to align your pitch with what your exec is actually scared about 🔸 "Stewart plus two more"—her playbook for responding to a CEO's feedback 🔸 Why killing your own project is the ultimate trust-building move Listen now: https://lnkd.in/gRxck6zh Thank you to our wonderful sponsors for supporting the podcast:  🏆 Omni — AI analytics your customers can trust: https://omni.co/lenny 🏆 Lovable — Build apps by simply chatting with AI: https://lovable.dev/ 🏆 Vanta — Automate compliance, manage risk, and accelerate trust with AI: https://vanta.com/lenny Also available on: • Spotify: https://lnkd.in/gJff2_Bm • Apple: https://lnkd.in/g8YvAAn5

Claude design lead: The classic design process is dead. Here's what's replacing it. Jenny Wen leads design for Claude at Anthropic, was previously director of design at Figma, and a designer at Dropbox, Square, and Shopify. In our in-depth conversation, we discuss: 🔸 Why the classic discovery → mock → iterate design process is becoming obsolete 🔸 What a day in the life of a designer at Anthropic looks like, including her AI tool stack 🔸 Whether AI will eventually surpass humans in taste and judgment 🔸 Why Jenny left a director role at Figma to return to IC work 🔸 The three archetypes Jenny is hiring for now This conversation changed how I think about the future of design. Listen now: https://lnkd.in/gXH8vmM9 Thank you to our wonderful sponsors for supporting the podcast:  🏆 Mercury — Radically different banking: https://mercury.com/ 🏆 Orkes — The enterprise platform for reliable applications and agentic workflows: https://www.orkes.io/ 🏆 Omni — AI analytics your customers can trust: https://omni.co/lenny Also available on: • Spotify: https://lnkd.in/gaeTW3Hg • Apple: https://lnkd.in/gUBY2Nt3

I'm really excited about what Casey Winters is building at SuperMe. It's not just a product—it's a living system of collective intelligence, made up of the wisdom of hundreds of seasoned operators and all of their collective wisdom. -> Try it here: https://www.superme.ai/ Why it's so rad: 1. You can ask a business question you could use some advice on and get synthesized insights from multiple people who've actually navigated your challenges before. 2. They've already brought on some of my most popular podcast guests, like Elena Verna, Nikhyl Singhal, Brian Balfour, and many others. 3. Every individual on SuperMe sees what you ask their profile, and can chime in to add more context. If you are an operator looking for battle tested advice on toughest problems, take a look at what SuperMe is doing. You can also pick my brain here anytime: https://lnkd.in/gGsx8fJT

My biggest takeaways from Jenny Wen (Claude design lead at Anthropic): 1. The traditional design process is breaking down. The classic discover-diverge-converge loop that designers have relied on for years doesn’t work when engineers can spin up seven coding agents and ship a working version before a designer finishes exploring options. 2. Design work is splitting into two distinct modes. The first is supporting execution: consulting with engineers as they build, giving feedback, polishing in code. The second is setting short-range vision, now scoped to three to six months instead of multi-year roadmaps. The vision work is still critical because when everyone can build anything fast, someone needs to point the team in a coherent direction. 3. Build trust through speed, not perfection. Anthropic ships products early, labels them research previews, and then iterates publicly based on real feedback. Jenny argues that what actually degrades a brand isn’t launching something rough; it’s launching something rough and then going silent. If you ship fast, respond to feedback visibly, and keep improving, users will trust you more, not less. 4. The most overlooked hire in design right now is the cracked new grad. Most companies are hiring senior designers with deep experience. Jenny argues that early-career people with blank slates, fast learning curves, and no attachment to legacy processes may be uniquely suited to this moment. They don’t carry baked-in rituals that are now obsolete, and their lack of expectations can actually be an advantage. 5. Chat as an interface isn’t going away. Despite expectations that chatbots were a temporary stop on the way to richer UIs, Jenny sees chat as a permanently valuable interface because it offers infinite flexibility. But she expects a hybrid future where models increasingly generate UI elements on the fly for specific tasks (like the interactive widgets Claude recently shipped) while chat remains the connective tissue between them. 6. Jenny went from design director (12 to 15 reports) back to IC. She questioned whether middle management had a safe future and wanted hands-on time during a period of rapid change. The IC time is giving her hard skills she wouldn’t have gained while managing. 7. AI will likely get better at taste and judgment. Jenny says designers may be holding onto “taste” as a moat too tightly. But someone still has to be accountable for what ships, the same way an engineer is accountable for AI-generated code. 8. Figma is still essential, but for different reasons. Jenny says Figma remains the best tool for rapidly exploring 8 to 10 different design directions on a canvas, something that coding tools handle poorly because they’re too linear and create investment bias toward one direction. For micro-level visual and interaction decisions, spatial exploration still beats sequential iteration. Watch our full conversation: https://lnkd.in/gunZXqq8

Jeetu Patel leads 30,000 people as President & CPO at Cisco—a $300B giant at the heart of the biggest infrastructure buildout in history—making him one of the most consequential and least talked-about leaders in tech right now. In our in-depth conversation, we discuss: 🔸 Why large companies don’t fail at innovating—they fail at going all-in 🔸 The easiest way to spot a megatrend vs. a hype cycle 🔸 His communication framework for preventing “packet loss” across an organization 🔸 His “right to win” strategy framework 🔸 Much more Listen now 👇 • YouTube: https://lnkd.in/gHkxPzp7 • Spotify: https://lnkd.in/ge7QwugA • Apple: https://lnkd.in/gc-cQcsT Thank you to our wonderful sponsors for supporting the podcast:  🏆 Sentry — Code breaks, fix it faster: https://sentry.io/lenny 🏆 Framer — Build better websites faster: https://framer.com/lenny 🏆 Samsara — Saving lives with AI built for physical operations: https://samsara.com/lenny

My biggest takeaways from expert comp negotiator Jacob Warwick: 1. A very soft pushback can materially change your offer. Jacob’s simplest line is “What’s the chance there’s a little more here?” He says he often sees roughly 20% movement from that alone, across everything from earlier-stage roles to seven-figure roles. 2. Jacob typically looks for around 40% movement when a negotiation is run well. Most candidates are negotiating far too narrowly because they’re reacting to the first number, the first band, or the first title they hear instead of building leverage throughout the process. 3. Product leaders, engineers, and designers often negotiate worse than louder functions. Jacob’s observation is that thoughtful, introverted, highly competent people tend to over-index on being reasonable and under-index on testing the ceiling. Meanwhile, more extroverted functions are often more comfortable treating negotiation as part of the job. 4. Great negotiation is collaborative, not adversarial. This came up repeatedly, and it is probably the biggest misconception the episode corrects. Jacob is not teaching people to beat companies. He is teaching them to better understand the value at stake and structure a deal that reflects it, sometimes through salary, sometimes through equity, and sometimes through more creative mechanisms like milestone-based compensation. 5. Your first comp number often becomes your ceiling. This may have been the most useful tactical point in the whole conversation. The danger of naming your number too early is that you are anchoring before you understand the actual scope of the job. By the time you’ve gone through the interview loop, you may realize the company is really hiring for a much bigger role than the original job description suggested. But if you already gave a number, that old number can get used against you. 6. Information + timing create power. This is the backbone of his whole system. Slow the process down. Ask better questions. Create more surface area for understanding what the company needs, who the internal champions are, and where the actual constraints sit. The more rushed you feel, the weaker your position usually is. Don't miss our full conversation: https://lnkd.in/g6f-6jFC

As AI makes it trivial to build and launch products, the biggest challenge for product teams is quickly becoming distribution: getting people to pay attention to your product in the increasing cacophony of launches. One of the most powerful tools to cut through that noise is positioning. Strong, specific positioning grabs people’s attention and helps them instantly understand why your product is for them. April Dunford is the world’s leading expert on positioning, and today's in-depth guest post, she offers a guide to advanced B2B positioning—four lessons for getting past the trickiest and most common roadblocks that teams run into: 1. Disagreement about what to position against 2. Product pessimism blinds the team to product strengths 3. The differentiated value is poorly defined 4. The company doesn’t know what they are positioning As April says, “a single shift in positioning can mean the difference between a product that flops and one that breaks through.” Don't miss this one: