Marty Cagan argues that product managers should learn the underlying principles behind their practices, since techniques change constantly while principles endure and let people judge new methods. He recommends Ray…
Chris Jones argues that the popular slogans "fail fast" and "embrace failure" have outlived their usefulness because they blur risky experimentation with genuinely preventable mistakes. He proposes reserving the word…
This post reports feedback from the first cohort of Teresa Torres's Continuous Interviewing course, which ran for 50 product managers, designers, and UX researchers. It recaps the course's rationale, drawing on…
Marty Cagan revisits his earlier framing of product success as valuable, usable, and feasible, arguing that the single word 'valuable' hid serious business risk and let product managers overweight customer value. He…
Marty Cagan announces the second edition of his book INSPIRED, which he describes as essentially a new work rather than an update. He explains that the field has moved past early Lean Startup and Agile ideas, so the new…
Teresa Torres, a discovery coach, explains that her high-touch coaching is only available to companies willing to invest heavily, so she is designing a lighter-weight course for individual practitioners. She argues that…
Marty Cagan argues that the common belief that great products come from listening to customers is a myth for technology products, because customers often cannot imagine what is possible or what they want until they see…
Teresa Torres recounts a 2008 product story in which her team at an alumni community startup fixed on an engineer's Google Maps idea while the real problem was unwanted spam. She argues teams fall in love with their…
Cagan argues that many product companies have yet to seriously consider data science, even though leading firms are already gaining advantages from it. He distinguishes data science from traditional analytics by its…
Teresa Torres argues that the popular "We believe... will result in... we will have confidence when..." hypothesis format is quick but insufficient for sound experiment design. She explains that teams should test the…
Marty Cagan argues that the simple conceptual model of continuous discovery and delivery running in parallel is useful precisely because it is process-agnostic, and warns against elaborating it into a rigid process…
Marty Cagan recommends Stratechery, Ben Thompson's newsletter on tech strategy, as a valuable resource for product managers and leaders. He argues that a key part of product leadership is understanding markets…
Teresa Torres argues that many product teams believe they already practice discovery, but they run interviews, usability tests, and A/B tests too infrequently and mostly to validate decisions already made. She defines…
Marty Cagan argues that as a company scales, the natural sharing of product learnings that happens in a small startup breaks down, so it must be done deliberately. He recommends a recurring, brief update, run by the VP…
Marty Cagan describes a discovery framing technique for larger product efforts, such as redesigns, where a simple opportunity assessment may not convey enough value. He builds on Amazon's 'working backwards' practice of…
Teresa Torres recaps her favorite moments from the Mind the Product SF 2017 conference, which she considers the best product event she attends. She highlights her own workshop on continuous product discovery habits…
Marty Cagan describes the Group Product Manager (GPM), a hybrid role between an individual contributor and a first-level people manager, which he has seen work well in fast-growing product organizations. A GPM is…
Teresa Torres argues that managing product teams by outcomes rather than outputs is necessary for real autonomy, but it is hard because leaders struggle to trust teams and teams struggle to communicate progress on…
Chris Jones of SVPG argues that many teams believe they practice product discovery but actually misuse it, falling into recurring anti-patterns. These include using discovery to confirm pre-chosen solutions, treating…
Marty Cagan uses the question of whether a product manager is the 'CEO of the product' as a revealing interview prompt. He finds candidates typically fall into three groups: those drawn to the power and influence, those…
Teresa Torres introduces the Ladder of Evidence, a framework for judging how reliable customer feedback is. Asking people what they would do in the future, as focus groups and surveys often do, yields weak signal…
Marty Cagan argues that many product teams spend their discovery effort on usability and performance fixes when the real problem is that users do not see why the product is worth using at all. Polishing a workflow or…
Teresa Torres traces how product discovery has evolved over roughly two decades, from long requirements documents and shipping flops like Windows ME toward experiment-driven, customer-centered practice. She argues that…
Marty Cagan argues that while Lean and Agile are often criticized, their core principles remain valuable, even though most companies practice them poorly. He observes that the best product teams have already moved…
Chris Jones, an SVPG partner, describes the hard transition from being a strong individual-contributor product manager to managing other PMs. He recounts advice from his own manager, Steve Roop, that a new hire should…
Marty Cagan revisits his earlier argument that the product manager should also be the product owner, admitting he made a strategic mistake by treating the two titles as synonyms. Many people who took short product owner…
Marty Cagan argues that established companies with long-standing non-digital value, such as banks, insurers, retailers and media firms, often split product management into a 'Legacy PM' group that owns the core product…
Marty Cagan argues that most discovery work needs little planning, but larger efforts such as multi-team initiatives call for deliberate framing before diving in. He describes two goals: aligning the team on the…
Chris Jones argues that organizational transformation, like product development, should be rolled out incrementally rather than all at once. Because people adopt change at different speeds, a sweeping rollout can…
Marty Cagan, after noticing that more than half of the 'rock star' product managers he knows are women despite women being a small share of the field, offers personal, non-statistical theories about why. He argues that…