Sep 8, 2024 · 1h 9m · lennys-podcast
How LinkedIn became interesting: The inside story | Tomer Cohen (CPO at LinkedIn)
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LinkedIn Chief Product Officer Tomer Cohen shares the strategic frameworks, organizational philosophies, and AI-first product methodologies behind transforming LinkedIn into an engaging daily professional destination. He provides actionable guidance on leading with absolute clarity, executing complex product turnarounds, and prioritizing impact-driven craftsmanship over corporate prestige.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Lenny holds 24.8% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Lenny as informed peer 3.8 Guest teaching 4.9 Guest disagreement 0.7 Lenny pushing back 0.6
speaking balance: gold is Lenny, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 8:15 Rejecting Masked Disagreements
Tomer challenges corporate politeness where people disguise fundamental disagreements as misunderstandings, insisting that teams stop wasting time and directly confront trade-offs.
Hardest push from Lenny ▶ 25:02 Interrogating the Sandbox Metric MechanicsLenny pushes Tomer to clarify the exact operational mechanics of the 2M sandbox and whether other team metrics were truly protected from metric fluctuations.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 22:30 Masterclass in Carving Out Organizational SandboxesTomer educates Lenny on how to bypass internal political gridlock and escalations by isolating a cohort of 2 million members to prove out a turnaround experience.
Lenny holds their own ▶ 16:20 Demonstrating Data-Backed Distribution RealitiesLenny shares his concrete creator metrics to prove that LinkedIn massively outperforms Twitter in high-value newsletter conversions, reinforcing Tomer's thesis with empirical evidence.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Lenny as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Lenny pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Unpacking the Mantra: Wrong but Not Confused | 3 | 4 | 0 | 0 | Lenny kicks off the conversation by bringing up insights gathered from Tomer's colleagues about his signature catchphrase. Tomer elaborates on the philosophical roots of 'wrong but not confused' in early startup alignment. | |
| Sponsor Message: Gamma AI Presentation Platform | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Lenny delivers sponsor reads for Gamma AI and WorkOS. Host monologue with no dialogue dynamics. | |
| Achieving Clarity in Thought, Principles, and Execution | 4 | 5 | 2 | 1 | Tomer details the difference between clarity of thought and execution, sharing how Israeli debate culture values direct disagreement over polite confusion. Lenny synthesizes the concept of psychological safety around being wrong. | |
| Setting Ambitious Goals and Visualizing the Mountain Peak | 5 | 6 | 1 | 1 | Lenny connects Tomer's ambitious goal-setting framework to Brian Chesky's 10x targets at Airbnb and shares his own data proving LinkedIn outperforms Twitter for newsletter reach. Tomer explains how turnaround products ('minus one to one') differ from zero-to-one builds. | |
| Creating the Two-Million User Sandbox and AI Alignment | 4 | 7 | 1 | 1 | Tomer breaks down his tactical move of carving out a 2 million user sandbox to overhaul the feed without causing company-wide metric panics. Lenny listens intently to the organizational workaround. | |
| Defining Downstream Engagement and Value Metrics | 5 | 6 | 1 | 2 | Lenny presses on the technical details of how the 2 million cohort was isolated and how success was tracked. Tomer explains prioritizing downstream, high-value engagements over top-of-funnel vanity impressions. | |
| Leading with Conviction and LinkedIn's Vision to Values | 3 | 5 | 0 | 0 | Tomer explains how personal conviction drives his career bets and references LinkedIn's 'vision to values' process. Lenny inquires about how he carves out time for high-level reflective thinking. | |
| AI as the Matchmaker: Unlocking Real-World Creator Value | 4 | 6 | 1 | 0 | Tomer illustrates the power of AI matching high-value content to niche decision-makers, sharing an anecdote about a professor gaining speaking gigs. Lenny affirms the real-world value exchange of the platform. | |
| Sponsor Message: Merge Unified API Platform | 5 | 6 | 1 | 1 | Following an ad read for Merge, Tomer uses the rafting guide metaphor to emphasize that PMs must directly own algorithmic objectives and data collection. Lenny summarizes the responsibilities PMs traditionally abdicated to ML engineers. | |
| LinkedIn's AI Academy and Shifting from Control to Ingredients | 4 | 6 | 1 | 0 | Tomer describes setting up LinkedIn's internal AI Academy and explains the shift from controlling user experience steps to controlling raw ingredients like a restaurant chef. Lenny introduces a colleague's observation that Tomer was built for this technological moment. | |
| Structuring AI R&D: Balancing Exploration with Top-Down Focus | 5 | 5 | 1 | 1 | Tomer describes giving teams freedom to explore AI before enforcing top-down convergence on five core bets. Lenny connects this approach to Brian Chesky's tactic of introducing deliberate chaos to shake up comfortable teams. | |
| Career Acceleration: Pursuing Impact and Building Over Logos | 4 | 5 | 1 | 1 | Tomer reflects on shifting from choosing prestigious logos to pursuing genuine craft and impact, comparing a PM's portfolio to an artist's discography. Lenny notes the alignment with advice from former Airbnb colleagues. | |
| Diverse Approaches to Building and the Building One Podcast | 4 | 4 | 0 | 0 | Tomer plugs his podcast 'Building One', arguing there is no single archetype for great builders. Lenny enthusiastically agrees with focusing on distinctive individual strengths. | |
| Lightning Round: Foundational Books, Bluey, and Life Mottos | 3 | 4 | 0 | 0 | In the lightning round, Tomer recommends foundational management and psychology books, praises Bluey for its multi-layered product design, and highlights a guitar training setup. | |
| New LinkedIn Features, AI Companionship, and Nomophobia | 4 | 5 | 1 | 1 | Tomer discusses LinkedIn's AI job search coach and introduces nomophobia, predicting future AI attachment anxiety. Lenny connects this to recent companion hardware launches like friend.com. |
Statements from this episode (22)
Cohen: Alignment enables success; confusion leaves outcomes entirely to luck
“Now pulling through in the same direction doesn't mean you're going to be successful, but this gives you a chance of success and that confusion, the system only luck can save you.”
Generic product principles are useless without explicit sacrifices
“And the best principles have teeth. So saying that we should build a simple product for me is useless. Who doesn't want to build a simple product, but saying that I'm willing to sacrifice or trade off this. That's when you, that's where I get excited.”
Tomer Cohen: Product teams should set massive goals instead of under-promising
“I actually believe in, especially when it comes to products to really set ambitious goals, but then try to over deliver on them. Like really said, like, what are you trying to, almost like the opposite, right? People are like under, you know, underplaying it a…”
Rachitsky: Most newsletter traffic comes from LinkedIn, not Twitter
“Most of my traffic to my newsletter. Comes from LinkedIn, not Twitter, where people think it's absurdly underappreciated.”
Cohen: Product turnarounds are harder internally than zero-to-one products
“What you find is it's actually most of the time it's internally harder to do because there's so much entrenched flows and processes and metrics that people are using on that on that specific area.”
Cohen: LinkedIn sees 140 hours of learning consumed per minute
“Today we had 140 hours of learning every minute on LinkedIn happening across the feed and LinkedIn Learning.”
Cohen: LinkedIn was the first company with a social feed
“We actually were the first company to have a social feed.”
LinkedIn tested its feed revamp on a secret two-million-user cohort
“So what I did was I carved out two million members. And I said, those are my members. I'm going to focus on building the few that mountain peak. I'm going to build for them full Liberty and doing whatever. It doesn't hurt numbers, giving the scale and really f…”
Cohen: LinkedIn competes on audience relevance rather than Meta-scale volume
“We don't compete for volume. Like it's not, we're not in the same kind of category of meta in terms of the scale there, but we will compete all day long for the right people seeing your content. In fact, I think in many ways, that's the most powerful part of L…”
Cohen: Feed metrics must track downstream high-value engagement, not top-level traffic
“Because the feed is the first thing you land on. I can't just count how many folks engage with the feed because then I'm counting kind of bypassers kind of thing and bystanders that actually coming into the experience. So we actually started to look at the mor…”
Cohen: Product turnarounds require carved-out cohorts unless the CEO accepts companywide metric drops
“I think when you do minus one to one, it's really hard unless the CEO says, I don't care about, you know, how the company performs for the next two years. We're going to go for it. If you want to keep the site, keep growing and the experience keep growing, car…”
Product leaders must lead with strong beliefs, not evidence
“I tend to lead with beliefs versus evidence. I try to prove my beliefs with evidence, but I don't lead with evidence.”
Tomer Cohen: AI is the ultimate matchmaker for marketplace engagement
“So ultimately it came down to AI is the ultimate matchmaker. It's underutilized. It's misunderstood. It's run separate from the team. And in a marketplace, it's all about value exchange. And if I'm able to do value exchange really well, then people will come b…”
Cohen: LinkedIn had no AI product role before he led feed
“When it comes to the feed, I took the role of the AI product leader. It didn't exist in the company. There was no person that was ever from a product perspective, thinking about AI.”
Cohen: Data collection and fine-tuning alone can drive successful product strategy
“In fact, you can build a whole strategy just on a data collection and fine tuning and your product will see tremendous success. Or you can delegate it and it will never happen.”
Cohen: Infrastructure improvements provide bigger product leverage than new UI features
“Literally just changing the infrastructure on top of what you build. That could be the biggest lever than you building another button or experience for your members on the top of it.”
LinkedIn created an internal AI Academy requiring mandatory training for all PMs
“So coming into this role in early to, we basically established an AI academy. Every PM had to go through training, just like we did mobile in 14, we kind of moved the whole organization to be mobile first.”
LinkedIn forced all product teams to scrap their roadmaps in Fall 2022
“And one of the things we've done there was really asking the teams to completely revisit their entire roadmap. This is fall of twenty-twenty-two.”
AI-first PMs no longer control the user experience, only the ingredients
“When you become an AI first kind of leader is that there's a realization that you don't control the experience anymore. You control the ingredients.”
LinkedIn Shared Early AI R&D and Prompt Engineering Learnings With OpenAI and Microsoft
“In fact, a lot of things we've learned so much ahead of the market and even shared with OpenAI and shared with Microsoft”
Cohen: AI will become so intimate that users experience separation anxiety
“Yeah, I think we all, I think we're in for AI of, AI-nophobia at that point, where you're gonna get to a point where AI is gonna feel so intimate, so personal, that it would actually feel concerning to you to be away from it.”