Lenny RachitskyHost of Lenny's Podcast | Author of Lenny's Newsletter

The three memes of product development

3 Sept 2026 · 1 min

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Lenny Rachitsky shares three questions OpenAI uses to push product development faster: Is this maximally accelerated? Are you mainlining it yet? Are we being as ambitious as possible? They force teams to iterate quickly, use the product daily themselves, and aim for bold goals.

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I remember Nick Turley was on the podcast. He had this meme internally, is this maximally accelerated? There's like an emoji, I think, inside the Slack.
Is this maximally accelerated is totally an OpenAI meme. The other OpenAI meme that Andrew Ambrosino and I love to ask the team is, are you mainlining it yet? Which is like, are you using this product all day, every day to get your thing done? And I think that in combination with, are we being as ambitious as possible? which is about the scope and the scale of what you're trying to do. Is this maximally accelerated? Are we moving as fast as possible on it? And then, are you mainlining it yet? Are you using it? And are you bringing all your tastes to bear on whether this thing works and is something that people really want and tightening that feedback loop as much as possible? Those to me are like the 3 memes of product development that we just have to spread as much as possible now.