Teresa Torres argues that product teams should treat every idea as a testable hypothesis, which requires explaining why a change matters and how much impact it should produce. Ideas from design, sales, and product…
Teresa Torres argues that a lack of web traffic should not stop product teams from learning, even if A/B testing is their only experimentation tool. Using a worked example of testing testimonials on a blog's about page…
Teresa Torres argues that product teams should test ideas with experiments before building them, and that this starts with a well-formed hypothesis. Vague statements like 'a redesign will improve usability' cannot be…
Teresa Torres uses a playful Halloween scenario, planning hot apple cider for neighbors, to illustrate the four levels of product analysis: design, feasibility, feature, and value. Each roadblock the cider plan hits…
Marty Cagan responds to readers stuck in IT-mindset organizations who ask whether they can change their company or must leave for a startup. He argues that established companies can still produce disruptive innovation…
Marty Cagan argues that established companies often lose their capacity for continuous innovation, and that a deeper root cause than the usual focus on scale and execution is an "IT mindset" applied to product work. He…
Teresa Torres argues that many teams run A/B tests without first knowing what they are trying to learn, which produces wasted effort and unclear results. Before testing, a team should define a specific hypothesis and…
Marty Cagan argues that UX designers often work in isolation, going off for days or weeks to produce a polished 'grand reveal,' a pattern he calls the 'internal agency model.' This breaks down because requirements and…
Teresa Torres argues that as product teams adopt experimentation, their tests are only as good as their hypotheses and experiment design, so poor setup wastes money, time, and sprints. She lists fourteen common pitfalls…
Teresa Torres argues that successful products, even giants like Facebook and Google, began by serving a narrow group rather than everyone. Founders who try to sell to everyone end up building for no one, because the…
Teresa Torres recounts meeting a fitness-trainer founder at a startup pitch event whose customer definition was vague and whose validation relied on survey answers about hypothetical future purchases. She argues that…
Marty Cagan addresses a recurring question from company leaders: should product managers carry P&L responsibility? He traces the idea to consumer packaged goods, where a product manager owned costs, marketing, forecasts…
Torres argues that thinking of a product as a collection of features is a trap that quietly undermines product quality. A feature-first mindset pulls teams into competitor-chasing, produces me-too offerings, and invites…
Marty Cagan argues that the project management role, in its many forms, is often poorly performed and sometimes seen as a liability, and that its damaged brand may need a fresh start. He attributes the problems to…
Teresa Torres argues that product builders rarely stop to consider the ethics of the data they collect, even though user tracking has grown far beyond the cookies that alarmed people in the late 1990s. She notes that…
Teresa Torres argues that the outrage over Facebook's social contagion experiment is inconsistent with how news outlets and internet companies already operate. She notes that editors and headline writers routinely…
Teresa Torres defends Facebook's 2014 emotional contagion study, published in PNAS, arguing that experimenting on users is standard practice for internet products and that the backlash is overblown. She contends the…
Marty Cagan contrasts strong product teams with weak ones, drawing on years of working with both top technology companies and struggling ones. He argues the differences are not minor but span leadership behavior, team…
Teresa Torres argues that product leaders need only a basic grasp of statistics to avoid being misled by A/B tests. She explains statistical significance using a conversion example and warns that many web testing tools…
Marty Cagan argues that milestone swarming, where most or all of a dedicated product team (or a virtual team drawn from several teams for an initiative) focuses together on one significant business milestone, can speed…
Teresa Torres recounts how her team at AfterCollege nearly celebrated a false win: a report claimed their new Explore feature beat the old Search, but the funnel had been misread as page-to-page when it was actually a…
Teresa Torres argues that curiosity is a core skill for product managers, especially when facing pressure to build one-off feature requests. Rather than arguing or pleading, PMs should investigate the underlying need…
Teresa Torres argues that product managers and hiring managers often chase breadth, trying to be good at everything and ending up mediocre. She proposes a three-tiered approach: build foundational attributes that make…
Teresa Torres recounts a poorly timed home-page redesign that disrupted a live sales demo, and uses it to examine the tension between continuous deployment and the disruption frequent product change causes. She argues…
Marty Cagan argues that many product teams grind through backlog stories without understanding the customer pain or business impact behind them, and that this is worsened by Kanban-style continuous delivery…
Teresa Torres argues that annual feature-based product roadmaps create false certainty, since release dates routinely slip and features get reshuffled. Product leaders still owe their teams a map, but it should show…
Teresa Torres argues that product teams should start by defining what success looks like, since a clear goal is the ultimate measure that makes alignment and decisions easier. She warns against drowning in dozens of…
Teresa Torres argues that an MVP should be defined by what you need to learn, not by the smallest or easiest feature set to ship. Using a hypothetical SMS-based event tool for soccer teams, she shows how the riskiest…
Marty Cagan argues that product teams often fixate on a single kind of analytics, usually web analytics, and miss the larger picture. He lays out four flavors that matter for product work: user analytics on how real…
Teresa Torres argues that the MVP is widely misunderstood and that getting it right is critical for product teams. Instead of letting build time drive priorities, she suggests distilling a big, ideal idea into the…