Marty Cagan revisits his earlier essay on the product manager role, arguing that confusion persists and that the role is more critical than ever. He contrasts three working modes: escalating everything to the CEO (a…
Marty Cagan argues that a company building its first in-house design team should not simply recreate the old agency model, where designers received specs and produced screens. Modern product designers work continuously…
Teresa Torres argues that a simple visual structure, the opportunity solution tree, is changing how product teams do discovery. She explains that teams struggled to connect customer research with solution testing, and…
Marty Cagan argues that product teams can only be empowered and make good autonomous decisions when they understand the broader context, which starts with a compelling product vision and a clear product strategy. The…
Marty Cagan extends Marc Andreessen's 'software is eating the world' thesis beyond software itself, arguing that modern product techniques are disrupting entrenched industries such as automotive, animation, and…
Marty Cagan pays tribute to Bruce Williams, a Silicon Valley marketing leader and close friend who died of pancreatic cancer in May 2016. The essay uses Williams's life to explore two topics important to product people…
Marty Cagan argues against a common fallacy in the tech industry: that developers only care about building tools for other developers. He contends that most engineers are passionate about solving real problems for real…
Marty Cagan follows up his earlier talk on why product teams fail by describing ten attributes of strong product teams operating under a Continuous Discovery and Delivery model. He argues that empowered, durable…
Marty Cagan reflects on witnessing gender-based bias early in his career and argues that avoiding discrimination is not enough; leaders must actively work to counter the lingering effects of past inequities. He focuses…
Teresa Torres argues that customer interviews often fail because people describe their ideal behavior rather than what they actually do, and their brains readily invent coherent but false explanations. She draws on…
Teresa Torres argues that many product managers remain unaware of a fundamental shift toward modern product discovery, despite the Lean Startup and design thinking having been around for years. She observes that many…
Marty Cagan argues that many Agile coaches come from delivery backgrounds and lack the product and design experience needed to help teams with discovery. He describes Discovery Coaches as typically former product…
Torres argues that product delivery has matured through Agile, continuous integration, and story mapping, while product discovery, the work of deciding what to build, has lagged behind. She contrasts the traditional…
Marty Cagan introduces the discovery sprint, a one-week time-boxed effort to tackle a substantial problem or risk in a product's definition and validate a potential solution with real users. He explains that the…
Teresa Torres explains how she now records customer research interviews (audio only, with disclosure) while taking handwritten notes that capture structure rather than verbatim quotes. She argues that recording frees…
Cagan argues that product optimization, typically A/B testing and iterative tuning, is often confused with product discovery, and that optimization only makes sense after a team has found product/market fit. He…
Teresa Torres explains how she selects participants for a product management research study that drew 90 responses in 48 hours. She argues that interviewing is qualitative and descriptive, so the statistical idea of a…
Marty Cagan argues that the performance-management ideas he learned at Hewlett-Packard, Management by Objectives (later refined as OKRs), remain the foundation of how the best companies operate. The first principle is…
Teresa Torres, a product coach and course creator, announces she is recruiting product managers and product leaders for customer interviews. She argues that after two years of teaching and coaching, she needs to…
Teresa Torres interviews Hope Gurion, Chief Product Officer at CareerBuilder, about how she built product management, UX, and analytics functions at a company that previously lacked them. Gurion describes shifting her…
Teresa Torres argues that drawing maps and visual models sharpens thinking, and that the Business Model Canvas spread because it makes a business model visible on one page. She draws on cognitive psychology, notably…
Teresa Torres argues that teams use A/B tests poorly, mainly to confirm favored ideas or to blindly try variations, which teaches them little. Drawing on John Dewey's account of reflective thinking, she describes a…
Marty Cagan describes an anti-pattern in which fast-growing, product-successful companies gradually lose their good habits after hiring senior leaders from large, brand-name firms that have stopped innovating. The…
Teresa Torres argues that product managers are essentially designers who solve ill-structured problems, which have no single right answer and several competing solutions. Drawing on educational psychologist David…
Cagan argues that legacy companies in retail, airlines, and financial services must shift from using technology internally to delivering technology directly to customers. Customer-facing technology faces a far higher…
Teresa Torres shares her top picks from the 74 books she read in 2015, grouped into product-management-adjacent titles, books on meaning and happiness, academic reads that shaped her thinking, and favorite fiction. The…
Teresa Torres describes how she turns annual priorities into workable plans: first into measurable product goals and process goals, then into concrete processes that deconstruct each goal, and finally into habits that…
Teresa Torres describes how she dedicates much of December to reflecting on the past year and planning the next. She runs an annual retrospective asking what went well and what did not, and keeps both lists in view to…
Marty Cagan argues that strong product organizations are built on teams of missionaries, people who are engaged, understand the business context, and empathize with customers, rather than mercenaries who simply execute…
Teresa Torres recounts a early-career design review in which a client dismissed her work as horrible and asked to reuse an existing homepage. Her manager defused the clash by asking her to walk through her reasoning…