The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 66 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Cohen: Tech companies will need fewer specialized roles than before
“I think there are system builders that empower full stack builders and then you have people who are specialized, but I don't think we need as many specialized people as we did in the past.”
Cohen: LinkedIn is replacing its APM program with Associate Product Builders
“We used to have our APM program, which this is about it's ending this year. And then starting January, we're going to start having our APB program and they're going to come into LinkedIn. We're going to teach them how to code design and PM at LinkedIn.”
Cohen: LinkedIn introduces formal 'Full Stack Builder' job title internally
“We have a full stack builder title formally inside of the organization and we are gradually putting people in that bucket.”
Cohen: Third-party AI tools never work off the shelf at enterprise scale
“So you can't just go and bring a third party tool. And have it work on the LinkedIn stack. In fact, that's one of our biggest learnings. It never works. Never works.”
Stein: Successful product formats quickly become primitives every app must adopt
“Facebook probably created the modern feed, but there's a feed for every single product, right? And there's a LinkedIn feed and there's a feed for DoorDash. You know, it's not like these things become core primitives quickly and formats. And then at the end of …”
A leading AI data competitor spends tens of millions monthly on ads
“One of the leading players has like, they have like 200 recruiters. It's like unsustainable. There are like 200 people on LinkedIn sending individual messages to acquire these people because there's no brand, there's no trust. They spend, you know, they're spe…”
Cohen: LinkedIn was the first company with a social feed
“We actually were the first company to have a social feed.”
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.”
Hockenmaier: The thesis of unbundling horizontal platforms is overhyped and rarely succeeds
“Broadly though, I think that we overhyped the idea of unbundling. So I think every six months I've seen articles, somebody wrote, this is the unbundling of Reddit, the unbundling of LinkedIn, the unbundling of Facebook. We're going to take All those blue links…”
Cohen: 70% of job skill requirements will change by 2030
“When we look at, like, the skills required to do your job, By 2030, which is literally four years from now, sounds a long time, but 40 years, four years from now, it will change by 70%.”
Cohen: LinkedIn replaced rigid PM trios with quarterly builder pods
“One of the things we've done as an example, we kind of started to do the idea of pods. We're no longer large teams. We assemble a team, ideally a full stack builder is coming together. And, you know, it's less about, can I have an engineer design PM working to…”
Tomer Cohen: AI maintenance agent fixes nearly 50% of LinkedIn's broken builds
“In fact, I think we're close to 50% of all those builds being done by the maintenance agent.”
Cohen: LinkedIn now evaluates AI fluency in hiring and performance reviews
“So when we hire right now, we look for those, and then this upcoming cycle, we do a biannual. It's, that's going to be part of the performance evaluation piece, and we announced it to everybody”
LinkedIn influencer conversion rates are 4x to 5x higher than other platforms
“It's very clear, you know, LinkedIn, the conversion rates are just substantially higher. They're four X, maybe five X higher than other platforms.”
Product mistakes create permanent technical debt; marketing experiments carry zero downside
“If you decide to build a feature in a product, then A, you're taking engineering time, which is the most valuable resource in every company, in my opinion, and B, in some ways, you can never take it back. Like it's complicated your product. Even if one custome…”
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…”
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…”
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.”
Rachitsky: The best people do not spend time posting on social media
“The advice I always share with people is the best people are not spending time tweeting and talking online, sharing on LinkedIn. They're just doing the work. They don't have time for that sort of thing.”
Verna: Seven active users per account is the enterprise PQA threshold
“So one of the biggest PQAs is number of users in the company using your product. By the way, the magic number is usually seven. The more time you have seven or more users in the company, and there's like some weird parallel here to seven friends at Facebook an…”
LinkedIn requires upfront customer budget commitments before productizing new innovations
“That's also what happens in companies like LinkedIn, for instance, when they launch a new innovation, you know, the team has to like book in a credit card or lock in a budget from a customer for pilot POCs and everything else. And if they don't necessarily go …”
Ipsen: Blind LinkedIn outreach fails to find top product talent
“Are you just blindly reaching out to people on LinkedIn? Because that's not going to be the way in which you're going to find the best of the best. Some of the greatest talent, they're not even on LinkedIn.”
Arnovitz: Human mock interviews remain indispensable for Meta PM prep
“The biggest game changer for me was doing human mocks. So cold outreaching to people on LinkedIn and having them do actual mocks for me. I think that at the end of the day, especially for the meta PM prep, which is super competitive and difficult. I think ther…”
LinkedIn is re-architecting core platforms so AI can reason over code
“The platform for us as an example is re-architecting all of our core platforms so AI can reason over it. So we're building kind of this composable UI components with server side that we actually build. We're basically building for AI to be ready to bring it in…”
Cohen: LinkedIn's internal AI agent found vulnerabilities missed in original launches
“So we run, we walked that spec from a couple of years ago through the trust agent. Not only was it able to find all the stuff we initiated at the beginning, but all the holes that we did not catch until later.”
Balfour: LinkedIn boosted then throttled organic profile reach to drive ad spend
“And then they recently just did this with personal profiles too, which is they really boosted distribution for individuals to create content for that platform. They then introduced the thought leader ad format, a way to monetize those in those individual posts…”
Baxley: Sharing thoughts publicly is advocating for ideas, not self-promotion
“People need to understand that they're advocating for ideas and not for themselves. And when I talk to a lot of designers, it may be true for PMs. I hear a lot of people say that they're reluctant to post on social media or on LinkedIn or something. Cause like…”
Vohra: A 0.4 viral coefficient is good and 0.7 is elite
“So 0.4 is good for a viral feature. 0.6 is great. Something like 0.7 is absolutely incredible. You're in the stratosphere up with Facebook at that time.”
Vohra: Major decisions must be justified by a single decisive reason
“And the idea here is that for important decisions, you should be able to identify one reason that on its own supports the decision.”
Mullenweg: Internal sentiment analysis showed 52% negative reaction on Twitter
“We ran a sentiment analysis recently. We were kind of like looking at different social networks, analyzing all the comments, and we found actually that the negative, you know, the sort of devil horn fraction on like what was it? Like LinkedIn, Facebook, Instag…”
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…”
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…”
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.”
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: 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.”
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: 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…”
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…”
Davis: LinkedIn ads cost roughly three times more than other channels
“LinkedIn is very expensive in comparison. So just know if you're going into LinkedIn, it's going to look almost three times more expensive than other channels.”
Davis: Ask ad platform reps for anonymized performance data against top competitors
“Every single platform has partners available... If you give me your, the five people you consider to be your top competitors, I will tell you if you are above or below a certain threshold. Now, they can't tell you CAC because they would have to have transparen…”
Davis: Test Google and Meta before advertising on LinkedIn
“I would not recommend getting into LinkedIn and my LinkedIn reps may kill me for this. I would not recommend getting into LinkedIn until you've tested Google and meta first.”
Gerber: Ask podcast hosts if they accept ideas before sending pitches
“Like I'm a big fan of just reaching out on LinkedIn and saying, Hey, love the show. Are you open to guest ideas? I don't even. Mention what, like the client or anything, just like kind of opening the door. I just feel like that's so much more approachable and …”
Srinivasan: Most talent systems reward divisional growth over whole-system thinking
“Those who are able to see the hole and make decisions at the hole, that's kind of rare, actually. I think most talent systems are, hey, how did your division grow or your product grow, your error grow? And we've tried our best to understand that it's not just …”
Srinivasan: Roughly 47% of LinkedIn recruiters use skills to find candidates
“And at this point, roughly 47% of our recruiters will come in and explicitly use skills when they start looking for candidates.”
Srinivasan: PM hiring is trending slightly below software engineering hiring
“And we don't look at the functional data as much, but as you can the PM data seems to be trending just slightly, even maybe below software engineers and that as well, which is maybe a comp for this.”
Srinivasan: Openness to Internal Job Switching Will Lose Its Stigma Over 5-10 Years
“You know, sometimes we like to think five, 10 years out. I think it's going to go on the same journey. I that's kind of one hunch I have that it'll also be an employment, employment driven kind of way internally for people to find their next play.”
Srinivasan: Escalate to decision makers after three emails and 20 call minutes
“If you had three back and forth from an email, you got to pick up the phone. And if you've been on the phone for 20 minutes, it's time to just write the, write that decision maker and go. And that way you can make sure the concept of an hour, you should be abl…”