Teresa Torres argues that product managers struggle to show stakeholders how they decide what to build, so people assume ideas just appear. Her remedy is radical transparency: define the problem, name the current…
Marty Cagan argues that as teams move to frequent or continuous delivery, releases can surprise customers and internal stakeholders such as sales, service, and product marketing. Most incremental releases are invisible…
Product managers constantly receive requests from sales, executives, support, engineers, and customers, and trying to satisfy all of them can derail a well-defined product. The author argues that you can rarely both…
Teresa Torres argues that a product should be built around doing one thing exceptionally well. Such focus helps customers understand when and why to use it, gives the team a realistic chance of being the best at that…
Marty Cagan describes a growing trend where product teams move from batch-style phases to continuous practices in both delivery and discovery. He traces how continuous integration, testing, and deployment have spread…
Teresa Torres reflects on a live podcast discussion about writing user stories, where co-host Roger Cauvin argued that stories lacking the who and why leave engineers doing only the bare minimum. Torres clarifies that…
Teresa Torres marks the one-year anniversary of Steve Jobs's death by reflecting on her mixed feelings about him. She credits Jobs with an extraordinary record of beautiful, usable products and a rare dedication to…
Marty Cagan describes "Product Manager Charm School," a foundational training program for new product managers covering communication skills and external interaction. Originating at HP and expanded at Netscape, it…
This piece is a curated index of Teresa Torres's earlier series on user story writing, pointing readers to posts ordered from foundational to advanced. It frames user stories as the main way product and engineering…
Teresa Torres argues that acceptance criteria are often the missing piece of a user story, and that they determine when a story is ready for release. She contends that criteria should be written from the end-user's…
Teresa Torres argues that user story prioritization is a balancing act rather than a formula. She suggests first setting high-level priorities through themes, then ranking stories within each theme by expected impact…
Teresa Torres argues that predicting the expected impact of each user story before building it serves two purposes: it helps prioritize the backlog, and it surfaces the hidden assumptions behind what a team is building…
Teresa Torres argues that choosing product themes is not enough; teams also need a way to predict and measure how each user story moves the product goal. Using an event-site example with the goal of increasing the…
Marty Cagan argues that Agile product teams often suffer from poorly defined backlog items, slow velocity, rework, and unvalidated ideas. He proposes Dual-Track Agile, which runs a Discovery track to quickly validate…
Teresa Torres argues that user-story backlogs tend to grow into disorganized collections that lose connection to the product's purpose. Her remedy is to define a small set of strategic goals as themes before writing…
Teresa Torres extends her earlier post on user stories by walking through the INVEST criteria (Independent, Negotiable, Valuable, Estimatable, Small, Testable) with concrete examples. She argues that stories should be…
This piece is a curated index of the author's earlier posts on breaking into product management. Its premise is that people arrive at product roles from many backgrounds, so there is no single path, and the most common…
Marty Cagan argues that most tech product companies struggle to find enough very strong product managers, and that strong product teams depend on them. He points to Google's Associate Product Manager program, which…
Teresa Torres, drawing on her experience screening and interviewing product managers, outlines the most common mistakes candidates make. She argues that product management is not about personal opinion alone, that…
Torres argues that cold-applying for product roles rarely works, because large companies filter resumes by keyword and smaller ones have busy reviewers who skim them in seconds. Her remedy is an inside referral, ideally…
Teresa Torres argues that a product manager job search should start with self-assessment rather than a list of who is hiring. Companies differ in what they need: technical products favor engineers, market-creating…
Marty Cagan argues that product teams doing discovery often move far too slowly, risking wasted time and money on unvalidated ideas. He distinguishes time-boxing (fixed work period followed by reflection) from…
Teresa Torres argues that public portfolios are a poor fit for product professionals, since they encourage over-claiming credit for team work and expose proprietary or employer-owned material. Hiring managers still want…
Teresa Torres interviews Laura Klein, who moved from interaction design and user research into a product role at a small company. Laura argues the transition felt natural because good designers and researchers already…
This interview-style post profiles Zaz Harris, a software engineer who moved into a product management role at her own company after her supervisors noticed her interest in product work and needed to fill a gap. The…
Teresa Torres interviews Colin Murphy, a former account manager who moved toward product management and shares lessons from his job search. His core argument is that career switchers must actively sell their applicable…
Teresa Torres interviews Oded Korczyn, who moved into his first formal product management role at AfterCollege despite never having held one. Oded draws on his anthropology background and startup experience, where he…
Teresa Torres argues that aspiring product managers can break the 'chicken and egg' problem of needing experience to get a PM job by starting their own side project right away. She notes there is no shortage of unsolved…
Teresa Torres argues that hiring for product management should hinge on demonstrated ability rather than credentials. As a hiring manager and consultant, she says she cares about none of the usual gatekeepers, such as…
Marty Cagan describes a proposal from Jeff Patton to replace the traditional product roadmap with an "opportunity backlog." The core problem is that roadmap items are often treated as commitments, yet genuine product…