2026-04-21 23:03:33
👋 Hey there, I’m Lenny. Each week, I answer reader questions about building product, driving growth, and accelerating your career.
My mission with this newsletter (and podcast) is to give you the advice, community, and tools you need to build a world-class product and career. Because things are changing so fast, there’s a growing divide—in terms of career opportunities, financial outcomes, and how much you enjoy your work—between the people who benefit from the transformation we’re living through and those who get left behind. I want to make sure you’re in the first group.
To further that mission, I’m thrilled to announce that Lenny’s Product Pass now includes a free year of six additional incredible premium products:
Cursor* ($240 value): The best way to build software with AI.
Google AI* ($240 value): Higher access to Gemini, NotebookLM, Antigravity, Nano Banana, Flow, 5 TB of cloud storage, and more.
Notion ($240 value): Collaborative AI workspace where teams and agents work together.
Supabase* ($300 value): An all-in-one, easy-to-use, open-source managed Database, Auth, Storage, Edge Functions, Realtime, and Vector search.
Fin + Intercom (5 seats and $100/month in AI outcome credits, $7,140 value): Deliver perfect customer experiences with the #1 AI customer service agent.
Gumloop ($444 value): Build agents across all your apps and share them with your team. No engineering required.
→ Already a paid subscriber? Grab your free products here.
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I’m also super-excited to welcome back Replit and Gamma* to the Product Pass!
This is on top of the 17 premium products already available to subscribers: Canva Pro*, ChatPRD, ElevenLabs*, Factory, Framer, Granola, Linear, Lovable*, Magic Patterns, Manus, Mobbin, n8n*, PostHog, Railway, Stripe Atlas*, Warp, and Wispr Flow.
* These products are available for Insider-tier subscribers only
The total value of the Product Pass is now over $30,000. That’s 25 of the hottest, most important, and most beautifully crafted products in the world, free with your Lenny’s Newsletter subscription.
This all sounds way too good to be true, but it isn’t.
Many readers expense this subscription out of their workplace’s learning and development budget. Here’s an email you can send to your manager.
Step 1: Get an Annual or Insider subscription to Lenny’s Newsletter.
Step 2: Redeem your codes here.
Step 3: Have fun!
The Product Pass is a community-powered collaboration. Many of these companies are brand-new and very excited for our community to try their products. Companies aren’t paying to be in the Product Pass, and I only include tools that I love and recommend. Similarly, my (very small) team is working hard to make this a seamless experience. Things will break, codes will run out, and I promise we’ll do our very best to resolve issues as fast as we can. Ultimately, my core offering is this newsletter, the podcast, and the community. These deals are the cherry on top.
What it is: The best way to build software with AI.
How people use it:
Building a personal OS (while building AI product sense)
Structuring AI workflows to build and ship real products (even as a non-technical builder)
Accelerating PR velocity and code quality at scale
What it is: Get higher access to the newest and most powerful features in Gemini, Flow, and NotebookLM, as well as AI-powered assistance from Gemini directly in the Google apps you know and use. Plus, you get 5 TB of cloud storage to keep photos and files backed up.
How people use it:
Coding beautiful 3D pixel art based on a single image prompt
Building a physics-consistent ocean waves simulator
Using Nano Banana 2 to create video game backgrounds, UI design, home renovations, and highly detailed imagery
What it is: Collaborative AI workspace where teams and agents work together.
How people use it:
Running a Weekly Briefing agent that generates a summary of key updates, what’s coming up, and what needs attention that week
Building out an AI operating system for work, giving everyone at the company a personal Notion agent and cutting productivity-tool costs at Ramp
Using Notion as a lean “OS” where AI answers questions instantly, new hires onboard themselves, and every team builds exactly what they need at Cursor
Building a Scheduling Assistant agent that does meeting prep—automatically creating meeting notes, linking them to a CRM, and updating calendar events with links
What it is: An all-in-one, easy-to-use, open-source managed Database, Auth, Storage, Edge Functions, Realtime, and Vector search.
How people use it:
Building an app to learn English
Crafting a tool to upscale images and generate videos
Hosting the database and analytics for a bulk URL shortener
Creating an open source app for finding a home for your food scraps
What it is: Deliver perfect customer experiences with an AI Customer Service Agent.
How people use it:
Transforming support operations for Anthropic
Supporting 50M users with 20 agents and Fin for Gamma
Involving Fin in 90% of support queries and resolving 50% over email, chat, and Slack for Clay
What it is: An AI agent-building platform that makes it effortless for anyone on your team (not just engineers) to collaborate on and deploy agents. Describe exactly what tasks you want the agent to perform, when, and with which apps, and the agents will build themselves.
How people use it:
Using Gumloop agents to coach sales reps, prepare for renewal meetings, and monitor for clients at risk of churning at Gusto
Instantly answering data analytics questions and making visualizations with an agent that any team member can @ in Slack
Building a sales agent that can update your CRM and research and schedule meetings with customers
Creating an automated personal assistant agent integrated with Granola MCP that can draft its own emails, Slack messages, and Linear tickets
Running an entire global support operation by giving two humans a team of interconnected, specialized AI agents
For each product, you must be a new customer to take advantage of the free year. If you’ve already paid for one of the products yourself (monthly or yearly) or redeemed a code from one of our previous bundles, you won’t be able to get a free additional year of that specific product.
You must get an Annual or Insider subscription to Lenny’s Newsletter to be eligible for this offer. Monthly subscribers aren’t eligible.
Both existing and new subscribers of Lenny’s Newsletter are eligible for this deal. Existing subscribers can redeem the offer here.
We may run out of codes for a product at any time. Your code is only secured once you claim it. You need to claim each code individually, so hop on the products you are most excited about.
Your access to the Product Pass is contingent on your subscription remaining active. If you cancel or don’t renew your paid subscription at any time, your codes and active trials may be deactivated.
Your one free year of the product begins when you redeem the deal on the partner’s website, not when you purchase this newsletter subscription or claim your code.
All sales are final once you redeem your first code. We won’t issue refunds if a couple of products are out by the time you claim them. The deal is already so good, even if a couple of products are missing. If you request a chargeback for your subscription, all of your codes will be deactivated. We need to do this to avoid fraud.
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This growing collection of premium tools
It’s everything you need to build a world-class product and career.
* These products are available for Insider-tier subscribers only
** Google AI Pro’s $239.88 value is based on monthly recurring subscription price. Redeem the offer by December 31, 2026, at 11:59 p.m. PT. Cancel anytime. Gemini in Google AI Pro and Gemini for Gmail, Docs, and more are only available for ages 18+. Gemini for Gmail, Docs, and more is available in select languages. Existing Google One users can redeem this offer, but this free trial period cannot be added to an existing free trial. Users can only use one trial at a time, and promotion lengths are not stackable. If a user has an existing trial and redeems a new trial, their existing trial or subscription plan will be revoked and their new trial will begin, regardless of how much time they have left on their existing offer. The offer is not available to: Google One users subscribed to an add-on, Google One users subscribed to a higher-tier plan than the one being offered, Google One users on a family plan who are not the plan manager, Google One users who have a Google One subscription through a third party or affiliate. See full terms.
If you’ve already got a subscription, consider gifting a subscription to a colleague or purchasing a group subscription for your team.
Sincerely,
Lenny 👋
2026-04-20 23:33:11
Listen now on YouTube • Spotify • Apple Podcasts
Brought to you by:
Brian Scanlan, Senior Principal Engineer at Intercom, breaks down how the company doubled engineering throughput in just nine months by going all-in on Claude Code. He shares how custom skills, deep telemetry, and a culture of permission turned AI into a true force multiplier.
Treat your engineering org like a product, and instrument everything. Intercom tracks skill invocations in Honeycomb, stores anonymized Claude Code sessions in S3, and built custom dashboards that show engineers how they compare to peers. This isn’t surveillance—it’s the same product thinking you’d apply to customer-facing features. You can’t improve what you don’t measure, and you can’t scale AI adoption without visibility into what’s working and what’s breaking.
The 2x velocity gain is real, but only if you prepare your foundation. Intercom doubled their merged PRs per R&D employee in nine months, but they already had mature CI/CD, comprehensive test coverage, and a high-trust culture. AI magnifies your strengths and weaknesses—if your deployment pipeline is broken or your code review process is manual chaos, AI will just help you ship broken code faster. Fix your fundamentals first, then pour gasoline on the fire.
Custom skills with hooks enforce quality at the point of creation, not after the fact. Intercom’s “Create PR” skill blocks Claude Code from using the GitHub CLI directly and forces it to write context-rich PR descriptions instead of just regurgitating code. Build guardrails that make the golden path the only path.
Code quality improves when you ship twice as fast because you finally have capacity for tech debt. Intercom’s partnership with Stanford researchers shows their code quality metrics are going up, not down. When the cost of fixing flaky tests, improving developer experience, and tackling technical debt compresses to near-zero, you can actually do those things instead of just talking about them in retros. The business constraint on internal projects disappears when agents can execute them in hours instead of quarters.
The most important job of technical leadership in the AI era is giving permission and taking accountability. Brian’s framework is simple: Tell people they can do things, and if anything goes wrong, blame me. Engineers don’t need more tutorials or documentation; they need permission to connect Claude Code to Snowflake, to ship code from their phone on the subway, to build a CLI that bypasses email verification. The activation energy for experimentation is cultural, not technical.
Make your product agent-friendly or watch customers build it themselves. Brian built an Intercom CLI that can autonomously sign up for Fin, verify email addresses by accessing Gmail, and complete installation without human intervention. If you don’t build this, your customers’ agents will just brute-force your website, burn more tokens, get frustrated, and eventually press escape and build it themselves. The switching cost is literally one keystroke. Your conversion funnel is now invisible, and your drop-off point is “forget it, let’s do this a different way.”
All work will become agent-first, and you should set a deadline for it. Brian’s vision is that by the end of any given month, the first response to an alarm, a planning meeting, or a customer question should be an agent doing the basic work. This isn’t aspirational—it’s a realistic expectation given the current state of models and harnesses. The bottleneck isn’t the technology; it’s organizational willingness to reimagine workflows from first principles and give people permission to experiment.
How Intercom Doubled Engineering Output: Brian Scanlan’s 4 AI Workflows for Claude Code: https://www.chatprd.ai/how-i-ai/how-intercom-doubled-engineering-output-brian-scanlan-ai-workflows-for-claude-code
Design an Agent-Friendly CLI to Automate SaaS Product Onboarding: https://www.chatprd.ai/how-i-ai/workflows/design-an-agent-friendly-cli-to-automate-saas-product-onboarding
Build a Self-Improving AI Agent to Automatically Fix Flaky Tests: https://www.chatprd.ai/how-i-ai/workflows/build-a-self-improving-ai-agent-to-automatically-fix-flaky-tests
Automate High-Quality Pull Request Descriptions with a Custom AI Skill: https://www.chatprd.ai/how-i-ai/workflows/automate-high-quality-pull-request-descriptions-with-a-custom-ai-skill
If you’re enjoying these episodes, reply and let me know what you’d love to learn more about: AI workflows, hiring, growth, product strategy—anything.
Catch you next week,
Lenny
P.S. Want every new episode delivered the moment it drops? Hit “Follow” on your favorite podcast app.
2026-04-20 20:03:25
Brian Scanlan is a senior principal engineer at Intercom, where he’s led the company’s transformation to AI-first engineering. In just nine months, Intercom doubled their R&D throughput while maintaining code quality, with 100% of engineers—plus designers, PMs, and TPMs—now shipping code via Claude Code.
Listen or watch on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts
How Intercom doubled their merged PRs per R&D employee in just nine months using Claude Code
The telemetry infrastructure they built to measure AI adoption and quality across hundreds of engineers
Why they built a skills repository with hooks that enforce engineering standards automatically
How they’re preparing their product for an agent-first world with CLIs, MCPs, and ephemeral APIs
The permission and accountability framework that enabled rapid AI adoption
Why backlog zero is now achievable and what that means for engineering culture
Celigo—Intelligent automation built for AI
Cursor—The best way to code with AI
(00:00) Introduction to Brian Scanlan
(02:40) Why Intercom went all-in on AI for both product and engineering
(05:01) The breakthrough moment with Opus 4.6 and Christmas break 2025
(07:02) Demo: Intercom’s merged PRs per R&D head
(12:50) Agent-first work as a fundamental reimagining of technical workflows
(14:27) The cost tradeoff: treating AI spend as an investment
(16:47) Measuring quality
(21:22) Demo: Shipping a redirect in the Rails monolith with Claude Code
(24:03) Creating a custom PR skill
(26:33) Building a software factory with predictable quality standards
(30:15) Telemetry infrastructure: Honeycomb for skill usage tracking
(32:10) Session data collection and personalized usage insights
(36:08) Quick overview
(39:20) Walking through Intercom’s skills repository
(42:16) Deep dive: The flaky spec skill and how it reached 100x capability
(46:44) The “and then” workflow for building comprehensive skills
(52:31) The live website and overview of workflows
(53:32) How internal AI experience informs customer product decisions
(56:18) Making SaaS products agent-friendly with CLIs and helpful hints
(01:03:49) Why conversion drop-off is invisible in agent-driven workflows
(01:05:28) Lightning round and final thoughts
• Claude Code: https://claude.ai/code
• Cursor: https://cursor.com/
• Honeycomb: https://www.honeycomb.io/
• Snowflake: https://www.snowflake.com/
• Fin AI: https://www.intercom.com/fin
• Vercel: https://vercel.com/
• Intercom GitHub Repo: https://github.com/intercom
• Google API Go Client Repo: https://github.com/googleapis/google-api-go-client
X: https://x.com/brian_scanlan
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scanlanb/
Company: https://www.intercom.com
ChatPRD: https://www.chatprd.ai/
Website: https://clairevo.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clairevo/
Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].
2026-04-19 20:31:44
Nikhyl Singhal is the founder of The Skip, a community for senior product leaders; a former product exec at Meta, Google, and Credit Karma; and a many-time founder. He’s also one of the most honest, unfiltered voices on what’s actually happening in product management right now.
Listen on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts
Why the next two years will be the most chaotic period in product management history
Why half of current product managers are at risk, and what separates those who’ll do well
Why you need to find your “moments of joy” with AI
The “smiling exhaustion” he’s seeing across the product community
The psychological barriers that prevent people from reinventing themselves
Why your resume’s fancy logos matter less than ever, and what matters now
His prediction that companies will shed 30,000 people and rehire 8,000—all AI-first
WorkOS—Modern identity platform for B2B SaaS, free up to 1 million MAUs
Vanta—Automate compliance, manage risk, and accelerate trust with AI
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikhyl
• X: https://x.com/nikhyl
• Podcast & Newsletter: https://skip.show
• Skip Community: https://skip.community
• Skip Coach: https://skip.coach
• Skip.help: https://skip.help
• Building a long and meaningful career | Nikhyl Singhal (Meta, Google): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/building-a-long-and-meaningful-career
• COBOL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBOL
• United Airlines: https://www.united.com
• State of the product job market in early 2026: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/state-of-the-product-job-market-in-ee9
• Head of Growth (Anthropic): “Claude is growing itself at this point” | Amol Avasare: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/anthropics-1b-to-19b-growth-run
• Demis Hassabis on X: https://x.com/demishassabis
• Sam Altman on X: https://x.com/sama
• Dario Amodei on X: https://x.com/DarioAmodei
• Cross on Prime Video: https://www.amazon.com/Cross-Season-1/dp/B0D6X7ZZHC
• Jack Ryan on Prime Video: https://www.amazon.com/Tom-Clancys-Jack-Ryan/dp/B0CNDCMN8R
• 24 on Prime Video: https://www.amazon.com/24-Season-1/dp/B000HPF85A
• Claude Code: https://code.claude.com
• Codex: https://chatgpt.com/codex
• Lovable: https://lovable.dev
• Sonos: https://www.sonos.com
• “There are only four jobs” on X: https://x.com/yrechtman/status/2039012253341495462
• Paradise on Hulu: https://www.hulu.com/series/paradise-2b4b8988-50c9-4097-bf93-bc34a99a5b4f
• Lioness on Paramount+: https://www.paramountplus.com/shows/lioness
• Tesla: https://www.tesla.com
• Albert Einstein’s quote: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/115696-genius-is-1-talent-and-99-percent-hard-work
• James: https://www.amazon.com/James-Novel-Percival-Everett/dp/0385550367
• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: https://www.amazon.com/Adventures-Huckleberry-Finn-Unabridged-Uncensored/dp/195483943X
Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].
Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed.
2026-04-19 02:38:18
👋 Hello and welcome to this week’s edition of ✨ Community Wisdom ✨ a subscriber-only email, delivered every Saturday, highlighting the most helpful conversations in our members-only Slack community.
2026-04-15 11:45:04
If you’re a premium subscriber
Add the private feed to your podcast app at add.lennysreads.com
In this episode, you’ll learn:
Why prioritizing AI agent initiatives is so hard, and why familiar planning tools like impact-effort matrices break down
The three architectural categories every agent falls into
How to choose the right platform for each category
Success metrics and ROI frameworks tailored to each architectural type
How to quickly course-correct when you’ve picked the wrong architecture