Pete Kazanjy argues that bottom-up, self-serve B2B products should eventually layer in a direct sales motion, since waiting too long creates large opportunity costs and lets competitors capture enterprise segments. He…
Marty Cagan profiles eight strong product leaders featured in his new book EMPOWERED, spanning product management, design, engineering, and company leadership. Drawing on years of working alongside them, he sketches how…
Marty Cagan argues that empowered product teams depend not on less leadership but on better leadership, and that moving to empowerment is far harder for product leaders than most expect. He splits the role into…
Lenny Rachitsky catalogs over thirty examples of 'magical growth loops,' where new users come mainly from existing users rather than paid acquisition. He groups them into four types: supply driving demand, demand…
Lenny Rachitsky answers a reader moving from a solo startup PM role to a large company, arguing that communication, influence, and data-driven decision-making matter most in that shift. He also notes the shared core of…
Marty Cagan announces the pre-order launch of his new book EMPOWERED, co-written with Chris Jones, and explains how it complements INSPIRED. He argues that many companies can teach product teams strong practices but…
Marty Cagan shares an explicit product manager job description tailored to empowered product teams, where PMs are accountable for outcomes rather than just delivering features. He explains that the PM owns making sure a…
A reader asks how to manage up with a difficult manager, and the post answers with five practical tactics. The core argument is that managing up is a core skill at every level: communicate proactively, set realistic…
Marty Cagan argues against a damaging anti-pattern in which a product organization splits into a discovery team that decides what to build and a delivery team that simply implements it. He notes that good modern…
Patrick Campbell, CEO of ProfitWell, argues that pricing is an ongoing strategic lever rather than a one-time number, and that early on the exact price matters far less than the value metric and the customer segments…
Lenny Rachitsky answers a reader's question about which metrics early-stage bottom-up SaaS founders should track beyond MRR, which tools they use, and how they visualize results. He draws on crowdsourced input and…
Lenny Rachitsky crowdsources and researches which metrics early-stage bottom-up SaaS founders should track, before and after revenue, and which tools and dashboards teams use to visualize them. The post ranks core…
Teresa Torres examines the difference between product managers and product owners, a question many companies ask her as a discovery coach. She traces how the product manager role evolved from traditional…
The post, written by a former senior PM turned PM manager, explains how the role shifts from doing product work directly to multiplying a team's output through leverage. It outlines the unexpected responsibilities of…
A companion post to a First Round Review essay, built around an interview with Booking.com's former CMO Arthur Kosten. It lays out five lessons from Booking's early growth: letting performance marketing shape supply…
Lenny Rachitsky asked founders of about two dozen well-known companies when they first knew they had product-market fit. Every company had a recognizable moment, but many only saw it after months or years of compounding…
Lenny answers a reader question by unpacking how Airbnb built a strong experimentation culture, using its early data science hires, north-star metric, embedded data scientists, and trustworthy tooling as the core story…
Lenny Rachitsky argues that good PMs make product teams better, and that the core PM jobs (shaping, shipping, and synchronizing) must be covered by someone regardless of hiring. He outlines three signs it's time to hire…
Marty Cagan argues that product discovery depends heavily on judgement, which many product people try to replace with frameworks and templates. He identifies four areas where judgement is required: assessing risk…
Teresa Torres interviews product coach Petra Wille about her path from computer science and concept work at SAP and XING to becoming a general manager and then a coach. Wille argues that product leaders, who often come…
Lenny walks through how his Airbnb team turned a problem of rejected booking requests into an 'Instant Book' strategy that grew instant bookings from about 5% to over 80%. He breaks strategy into three steps…
Marty Cagan argues that the common split between a 'problem space' (owned by product) and a 'solution space' (owned by engineering) is overly simplistic and kills innovation. Validating that a customer problem is real…
Marty Cagan, who popularized the term product discovery, clarifies a common confusion: learning is valuable, but the real goal of discovery is to gain insights, which are learnings a team can act on. He explains that…
Marc McCabe, an experienced angel investor who has helped dozens of startups raise money from pre-seed to Series C, argues that fundraising is best treated as a structured, trust-building process rather than a scramble…
This paid post explains how to measure retention using cohort analysis, including how to read cohort charts for trends and for signs of flattening that indicate product-market fit. It then previews a framework of seven…
Lenny explains how to measure retention using cohort charts, and why a curve that flattens signals product-market fit. He then lays out seven levers for improving retention, ranked by expected impact: improving the…
Melissa Perri interviews two product leaders, Alicia Hurst (Group PM at JW Player, hiring for an NYC team) and Vibhor Chhabra (VP of Product at TaxJar, a company that has always been fully remote), about hiring…
Lenny answers a reader's question about how to build a business 'flywheel,' a visual model of which business elements reinforce each other to accelerate growth. He explains how to brainstorm one from assets, actions…
The article argues that remote work during the pandemic has, paradoxically, created room for product managers and leaders to invest in professional development. Without commutes and in-person meetings eating their days…
Sonja Martin, a product manager at tails.com, describes how her cross-functional team repeatedly refined their desired outcome. They began with 90-day retention, a useful North Star but too lagging and noisy to guide…