Maven

I’ve been hearing great feedback from students who have taken courses from my "Lenny's List" on Maven, so I'll take this one step further: I’m offering a full scholarship for 5 of the top-reviewed courses (that still have room) ?? Courses you can choose from: 1. Teeing up your Tech Job Search in 2025 with Erika G. (Google): https://lnkd.in/gwKfjSvc 2. AI Product Management with Miqdad Jaffer (OpenAI): https://lnkd.in/gZWcyCjt 3. Uplevel Your Product Thinking with Satish Mummareddy (Meta): https://lnkd.in/gNxmywGQ 4. Technical Foundations for PMs with Colin Matthews (Datavant): https://lnkd.in/ghsKtA94 5. Breaking Through to Executive with Ethan Evans (Amazon): https://lnkd.in/g4m7mSMe To apply, drop a comment on this post with which course you're interested in (and feel free to share why too). Contest details: 1. Winners will be notified by Monday, Nov 11th, by DM. 2. One scholarship per course (5 total). Good luck!

Sprig's very own Tatyana (Ana) Gubin is leading a lesson in partnership with Maven on Wed. Nov. 20th at 10am PT. The lesson will cover when and why AI can be a reliable ally for product managers and look at its most valuable applications for problem discovery, feature prioritization, and full-cycle development. Register now to save your spot!

How do you become a recognized top 1% expert? The type of top 1% that shows up as a guest on Lenny’s podcast or teaches successful courses to thousands of peers? At Maven we have mastered the art of finding top 1% talent to teach the future 1%ers. As such, we have some good insight on who these people are and how to become one: - Most of the top 1% aren’t public. It seems like there’s an explosion of incredible people on social. This creates a status game where others think they need to have an audience to be successful. While it does help to build an audience, remember that the vast majority of successful people do not have one. - Do it quietly for a long time first. The top 1% of experts do not shout from the rooftops in the beginning of their careers. You may see them as overnight successes if you follow them on social - but they often spend over a decade heads down doing the work beforehand. - Build a personal fan base. Don’t build a social audience first. Create a large group of colleagues and bosses who have seen you do great things. Keep up with them via regular coffee chats or an annual newsletter. Then, when you start building your brand you’ll have a strong, loyal base of supporters to kick things off. - Learn storytelling. Compelling experts are able to craft narratives that stick. The best bosses share advice that their employees remember. The best podcast guests have clear, unique insights shared succinctly. Learn to write. - Start sharing. The final step to becoming a recognized top 1% expert is to share your knowledge with others. You can do this on social, in private coaching settings, conference talks, podcasts, or teaching courses. No matter how you do it, start with one medium that comes most naturally to you, then expand. I’ve been fortunate to meet hundreds of people who are at the top of their field. There is no one path, but I do believe that some of it comes down to the ideas above. PS. We’re always looking for more top 1%ers to join us. Right now, we’re curating our next group of instructors for our Product and Design collections launching in Q1. Our top instructors earn between $100K and $2M per year, teaching passionate learners and sharing their expertise with a wider audience. Here’s the link to apply: https://lnkd.in/e-eWxrSn And if you'd like to learn more or discuss your topic, send me a DM—I’d be happy to explore if it’s a good fit.

I received this Whatsapp immediately after the last live session of my first cohort—after 2 weeks with 50+ senior PMs from Amazon, TikTok, Meta, Microsoft, and hypergrowth startup companies from around the ??. Their candid feedback + getting to (somehow) land *my* OG productivity guru Jack Cohen as co-facilitator, has already made the course 250% better. So, thank you to all of you. Jack and I have been implementing the feedback instantly in real-time across the 40 in-depth lessons, 23 projects, 8 modules with 6 live sessions. And we're excited for the next cohort starting ??? December 2nd* on Maven. And it looks like I've convinced Jack to do it again with me ?? For now, I'm going to take a moment ???? and enjoy the feeling of having "built something people want." *To see the syllabus, check out my profile for details.

AI Agents ≠ Chatbot. 2025 will be all about AI Agents. The question I get all the time: "Aren't AI Agents overglorified chatbots?" - ????. Why? AI Agents can now be powerful, and in 2025 we will start seeing glimpses of their full potential. Here's an important mental model for you: ? Chatbots are still a thing. They are designed for basic interactions. I was just on a travel website asking for the customer service phone number, it provided an excellent basic, hard-coded Q&A. ? AI Agents on the other hand can *act* and *think* autonomously. Autonomously being the key concept here, like a Waymo car. ? Multi-agents, that's where the magic is at. Imagine an orchestrator that will work with other agents behind the scenes, towards a shared goal. I have so many insights, tools like droxy or crewai, and content to share about this. I decided to put it all in my next newsletter post: https://lnkd.in/gqxT3ury <><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> Follow Marily Nika, Ph.D for AI Product Management / Agentic AI education/certifications. Best way to support my work is if you like & share ?? my content.

Preparation is the only shortcut to clarity and conciseness ?? ??? Just one of *so many* Wes Kao gems from?last week’s Executive Communication and Influence course. I like to think of myself as a decent communicator, but I learned so much in that course that will change the way I communicate forever. And the best bit is that every idea and framework Wes shared came along with practical advice for how to bring it into our lives right away. Plus, a super friendly and engaged cohort to learn with! Worth getting up at 4:30am two days in a row for? Heck, yeah.

Social headlines make it seem cohort-based courses are in the toilet. Yet Maven’s instructors have 2x’ed their earnings in the last 12 months. What is going on? In the last year: The altMBA shut down. Building a Second Brain shut down. Write of Passage shut down. d/MBA announced a 2x price hike, which I am predicting will lead to a shutdown in 12-24 months. =/ These are OG course businesses run by charismatic creators who built fantastic products and brands. WTF happened? There are a few factors here: - Courses have lifespans. About 5-8 years, rarely longer. This is fine if you plan for it, because they are so damn profitable. Also, courses built from the creator’s audience will slowly exhaust that audience, which results in declining sales if you don't have another marketing channel. - Profit over Revenue. Some of these courses were revenue-maximizing instead of profit-maximizing. They invested in over-the-top value and had $1-2M/year in overhead (2-8 full-time staff). This became a burdensome fixed cost threshold that made these businesses unprofitable when sales slipped. FWIW plenty of creators did not make this mistake and did make significant profits. - External factors. The X algorithm has dramatically devalued “followership” and crushed engagement. Furthermore, the economy has come off its 2021 COVID high which reduced willingness to pay. Demand for creator-led courses declined while supply rose. - Creator’s energy. Creators enjoy freedom and control over their lives. When you hire staff for a course business that starts to change. Some creators partner with operators to manage their businesses (as Seth Godin did with altMBA), but ultimately you still have to manage the operators. By contrast, Maven’s instructors keep their overhead low: 80-90% margins are common for someone making $200K-$3M/year. They charge less, deliver more personalized attention, and don’t rely entirely on their own audience. Having less employees also means maintaining their creative freedom and reducing the “burden” of management. We are forever indebted to these trailblazers for their work. But with all things, times are changing and I thought it was worth talking about this massive trend in our budding industry. Funny enough, the same thing happened to me at Sprig (I’ll post about this another time) so I’ve had a similar trend hurt my own business in the past. Going forward, I believe bespoke course businesses with high overhead will continue to struggle, while experts/creators who build solopreneur course businesses will rake in profits. The industry will continue to grow because customers seem to love these programs and want more depth out of their professional learning.

Last week I completed a course on executive communication and influence taught by Wes Kao. As a senior IC, the right communication is critical to my role. The course was full of insights and actionable tactics to improve the way I communicate and sell ideas. There was an excellent slide that resonated with me showing the delta of what we know (explicitly or intuitively) vs. what we do when speaking or writing. I now have a better grasp of how to close that gap between what I know and what I do. A few of my main takeaways: * A little bit of up-front work can save so much time addressing pushback. One of the biggest missteps in my own communication is not taking a moment to prepare before a meeting or reviewing my written communication. Wes gave a lot of great frameworks to think critically about the language being used that I will absolutely be using. * I often am too polite with the recommendations I want to make. Sharing alternate ideas with the recommendation in case it "won't work" can come across as a lack of confidence. It gives stakeholders fuel to use against me. Be direct and make the ask for the outcome you're looking for. * Answering at the right altitude. I tend to overcommunicate the details when it's unnecessary. It's my default because I think everyone wants the full context. That's not always the case. Crafting a response with the right amount of detail specific to the audience takes thought. Even after just a couple days, I've already found the content helpful. I've successfully rewritten recommendations in Slack to be more direct and concise before sending. I've successfully framed feedback requests to avoid a common problem of solutionizing on the wrong things. https://lnkd.in/dgiEPEKJ

As the head of product for monetization at Duolingo, I spend a lot of time thinking about how to price and package our products. Which is why I'm excited to join Jenny Wanger to discuss what product leaders' roles should be around pricing and packaging. We'll cover: - What my role looks like in relationship to pricing and packaging - How to build financial acumen for product development - Why leveling up in these topics?can help your career Over 300 people have already signed up (it's free!). Join us live on?November 1:?https://lnkd.in/ePJxUj9p Looking forward to seeing you there.

A founder DMed me on Twitter to ask what I thought of Shreyas Doshi’s Product Sense course on Maven and if it would be worth it for him as a busy CEO with 2 kids. This is what I wrote back: