Teresa Torres argues that a common mistake among teams new to Lean Startup methods is substituting experimentation for judgment, testing options like folders versus tags without first reasoning about which is most…
Marty Cagan extends his earlier point that product teams must learn fast in discovery while still delivering with confidence, arguing that the balance depends heavily on company culture. He lists the traits of a strong…
Teresa Torres recounts a difficult period in 2011 when she was CEO of a struggling startup, dealing with severe anxiety and feeling unable to ask for help. After the company was sold and she stepped away, a master's…
Teresa Torres argues that product managers often wish their leadership, engineers, designers, and sales teams would behave differently, when the more productive move is to change their own behavior first. For each…
Cagan argues that product teams face two simultaneous goals: learning fast through discovery about what customers need, and delivering robust, scalable, production-quality software they can release with confidence…
Teresa Torres argues that a company's staffing choices reveal its real values. Most companies say they prioritize customer love and data-driven decisions, yet employ far fewer product managers, designers, researchers…
Teresa Torres responds to readers who want to adopt outcome-based product management but face obstacles in their organizations. She identifies four common barriers: fast development cycles that leave no time to evaluate…
Teresa Torres argues that product managers often fall into a throughput mindset, filling backlogs and keeping engineers busy rather than driving outcomes. She identifies three recurring failures: not starting from a…
Marty Cagan answers the most common questions readers raised after his article proposing an alternative to conventional product roadmaps. He argues that engineers should help decide what to build, that outcome-based…
Cagan argues that feature-list roadmaps often tell teams what to build without explaining the underlying problem, producing waste. He proposes replacing them with shared context: a product vision describing the…
Marty Cagan, a longtime admirer of Apple, argues that the first Apple Watch after Steve Jobs is a disappointing product that falls short of Apple's usual standards of value. He criticizes its dependence on the phone…
Marty Cagan argues that leadership and management are distinct, both essential competencies that many people wrongly conflate. He draws on an excerpt from Marty Abbott and Michael Fisher's The Art of Scalability to…
Teresa Torres argues that many product managers run experiments poorly: they struggle to choose what to test, decide how long to run tests, lack scientific training, find tools hard to use, and overgeneralize results…
Marty Cagan argues that the common company process of taking executive or stakeholder ideas, building business cases, prioritizing feature roadmaps, and handing requirements down a line from product to design to…
Teresa Torres recounts visiting the Kindling team and recording a podcast-style interview with its founder, Tim Meaney, about innovation. The post frames Kindling, an idea management tool, as a long-time favorite of…
Marty Cagan examines how product organizations tackle large, multi-team initiatives, such as a usability redesign or a localization push into a new market, that cannot be owned by a single team. He argues that the core…
Teresa Torres argues that product requirements should describe the user opportunity rather than prescribe a solution, since detailed upfront solution specs lead teams to overcommit before validating what works. She…
Cagan extends his series on product team autonomy by examining how code ownership interacts with it. When companies split a codebase among product teams, one team's changes often touch code another team owns, creating…
Teresa Torres argues that product managers and designers should not split the work cleanly into 'PM defines the problem, designer owns the solution.' Problem definition and solution generation form a two-way feedback…
Cagan argues that team autonomy and leadership control are reconciled when leaders supply two inputs: a clear product vision and specific, prioritized business objectives for each team. Teams should then have freedom…
Teresa Torres contrasts two product managers: Jim, who is absorbed in delivery tasks and makes all the team's decisions, and Sally, who has time for customer discovery because her team shares the problem-solving load…
Teresa Torres argues that job titles and disciplinary boundaries matter for advancing each craft, since naming skills lets people debate, invest in, and share them. However, she warns that the same labels become harmful…
Teresa Torres argues that many product managers are so consumed by delivery work (grooming backlogs, triaging bugs, handling schedule slips) that they lack time for discovery, the work of figuring out what to build. Ad…
Marty Cagan argues that while empowered, cross-functional product teams have become the norm and boost motivation and ownership, teams often feel constrained by shared foundations. He frames the core tension as a…
Marty Cagan argues that product teams can find major opportunities by letting customers use their products for purposes the company never planned or officially supports. He describes this as a third path beyond…
Teresa Torres argues that product teams building enterprise software can and should experiment, even though A/B testing is often impractical for them. She points out that experiments are simply procedures for testing a…
Teresa Torres argues that the Lean Startup loop of Build, Measure, Learn starts in the wrong place, and that teams should instead Learn, Build, Measure. Building first means writing code for features that often fail…
Teresa Torres shares her favorite books from the roughly 60 she read in 2014, spanning music, decision making, mathematics, persuasion, negotiation, time perception, integrative thinking, customer development, and…
Marty Cagan argues that a common and avoidable form of waste in product teams is when one member, often a user researcher, learns something important about customers but the rest of the team doesn't absorb it. Findings…
Teresa Torres argues that confidence in a product idea reflects how coherent a story feels in our heads, not whether the idea is true. She points to Research in Motion and AOL as examples of confident strategies that…