What’s in your stack: The state of tech tools in 2025Insights from 6,500 tech professionals on their favorite and least favorite tools👋 Welcome to this month’s ✨ free edition ✨ of Lenny’s Newsletter. Each week, I tackle reader questions about building product, driving growth, and accelerating your career. If you’re not a subscriber, here’s what you missed this month: For more: Lennybot | Podcast | Swag | Hire your next product leader | My favorite courses I’ve always been fascinated by what tools people choose to use in their work. What started as a casual survey of PMs on Twitter has grown into something much bigger. Today, with insights from over 6,500 of you (thank you! 🙏), I’m excited to share the results of my first-ever large-scale “What’s in your stack?” survey. The results are both surprising and telling. We’re seeing AI already transforming people’s jobs, watching the methodical disruption of incumbents by beautifully crafted alternatives, and witnessing a few seismic shifts in how teams collaborate. To help me design and run this survey, I pulled in my former colleague Noam Segal, who’s been a UXR leader at Meta, X, Intercom, Airbnb, Wealthfront, Upwork, and, most recently, Zapier. I’m delighted to collaborate with him on this and, hopefully, many more surveys. Let’s get into it. The evolution of tech tools: A five-year journeyIn 2020, Lenny conducted his first (informal) survey of technology tool preferences, gathering responses from hundreds of people on Twitter and LinkedIn. Surprises included Slack coming in first, Notion beating Google Docs, and Linear becoming a fast-growing up-and-comer. When Lenny revisited the PM tool stack in 2022, he noted the continuing dominance of tools like Slack and Notion and the rise of Figma, Zoom, and Loom, signaling a shift toward more collaborative and async workflows. Today, with Lenny’s Newsletter reaching nearly 1,000,000 subscribers, we present our most comprehensive analysis anywhere of the tools shaping modern tech workplaces. What we asked and who respondedThe survey covered 13 categories, from AI assistants to project management to CRM. Beyond just asking, “What do you use?” we asked people what tools they most love, what tools frustrate them, and what they’d change if they could. Of the respondents, 50% work in product, 11% are engineers, 10% are founders, and the rest work in other cross-functional roles, including marketing, design, and growth. Based on prior research, the breakdown of company size among Lenny’s community is as follows:
If we define sub-1,000-employee companies as “not enterprise,” about 70% of Lenny’s community work in startups or midsize companies. You could say this is the early-adopter crowd. The big 10 headlines 🗞️Before we get into the details, here are 10 key themes that emerged:
Now, let’s break down what’s happening in each space. ChatGPT has a commanding leadThe most striking shift |