Teresa Torres recounts advising a junior designer who wanted to grow in user experience design. She argues that hands-on learning matters more than reading or talking, and that the designer's best growth opportunity is…
Teresa Torres argues that empathy, the ability to feel what another person feels rather than merely sympathize, is essential for building products that solve real problems or create delight. Sympathy tends to make us…
Marty Cagan argues that stakeholder management is a frequent pain point for product managers, but it can be substantially improved. He defines stakeholders narrowly as people who hold veto power over launching work…
Marty Cagan argues that many product teams, both in startups and established companies, spend most of their effort capturing value (pricing tests, ad optimization, cost cutting) rather than creating it. Startups often…
Teresa Torres proposes a draft list of seven foundational traits that underlie strong product management, arguing that developing these core abilities would fuel progress across the many specific skills PMs need. She…
Teresa Torres argues that even improvements to a product will trigger resistance, because users must adjust to any change. She contrasts Facebook's rocky rollout of the News Feed and Beacon with its smoother launch of…
Teresa Torres argues that most product requirements are poor because teams finish writing them too early and start building before the solution has been iterated on. She recommends treating requirements like writing…
Teresa Torres argues that a single A/B test rarely settles a question; instead, teams should string related hypotheses together around one underlying insight. Using an email subject-line example about urgency, she shows…
Marty Cagan argues that product teams relying on long, pre-negotiated roadmaps repeatedly fail to deliver business results because of two unavoidable realities. First, at least half of ideas won't work, whether…
Teresa Torres argues that A/B testing should follow the scientific method rather than being used for trivial tweaks like button colors or wording. She recommends starting from a real insight about why recipients ignore…
This post sets out what product teams should realistically expect from email metrics: open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and unsubscribes. It explains that open rates are an imperfect approximation…
Teresa Torres argues that a well-designed email template is not enough; product teams must also manage deliverability, the process of getting messages past ISP and client spam filters into real inboxes. She outlines how…
Teresa Torres argues that product emails only help if they are designed to convert, and recommends building a reusable email template rather than designing each message from scratch. A template lets teams user-test and…
Teresa Torres argues that email remains a powerful channel for products despite claims it is dead. She counters common myths: that young users avoid email, that spam has ruined it, and that users will be annoyed by…
Teresa Torres argues that teams struggle when they mix up the phases of idea work: generating options and choosing among them need different rhythms and different conversational modes. Drawing on Tim Brown's…
Marty Cagan argues that the word "pivot" is overused in product teams and that teams too often abandon their product vision far too early. He separates two kinds of pivots: vision pivots, which change the underlying…
This is a weekly roundup of product-building reads rather than a single argument. It pulls together a few threads: deciding what to ignore so you can focus on the most critical work, the primacy of conversion strategy…
Torres uses a made-up exchange between a product manager and an engineer to show how a feature disagreement is often really an implementation concern. Both people select different data and draw different conclusions, a…
Teresa Torres argues that teams who set incremental goals get incremental results, and that big wins require exponential goals. She recommends focusing on a single metric chosen for its impact on the business…
Marty Cagan examines top-down deadlines, where management sets a date for a major outcome such as a trade show debut or a startup's runway limit. He acknowledges that such deadlines can create a powerful sense of…
Teresa Torres's weekend roundup highlights three posts she found useful for building great products. She opens with Brad Feld's observation that startups often lack a clear owner of the overall user experience, which…
Teresa Torres describes rolling out Kindling, a simple idea management app, across her company to make product input more transparent and data-driven. She wanted an easy tool that everyone would use to share and vote on…
This weekly roundup by Teresa Torres curates readings on building better products, grouped around experimentation, skill development, and influence. Her central point is that experiments only produce value when they are…
Teresa Torres argues that communication is a core product skill and adapts Paul Grice's conversational maxims into four guidelines for product managers: be truthful, be concise, be relevant, and be clear. She urges PMs…
Teresa Torres reflects on her first year of blogging at Product Talk, which she started in November 2011. She found that writing sharpened her own thinking, often surprising her with conclusions she hadn't expected, and…
Cagan argues that the friction around commitments in Agile product teams stems from making them too early, before the team knows whether a solution is feasible, valuable, and viable. Because product ideas often fail or…
Teresa Torres argues that product teams often fixate on competitors' funding, press coverage, and launches, when they should focus on what customers actually do. She suggests competitors only deserve attention once…
Teresa Torres follows up her controversial argument that teams should ignore some bugs by explaining why interruptions are so costly. Using a series of escalating analogies about co-writing a paper, she shows how…
Teresa Torres argues that elaborate bug-management systems, with endless triage meetings and debates over priority and severity, waste product teams' time. She sorts bugs into three buckets: those that must interrupt…
Teresa Torres argues that when a whole company is invited to generate product ideas, every idea deserves thoughtful feedback, since that feedback is what keeps people contributing. She walks through common idea types…