Teresa Torres examines the public debate sparked by Jonah Lehrer's claim that brainstorming does not work, which followed Scott Berkun's rebuttal. She traces brainstorming to Alex Osborn, an advertising executive whose…
Teresa Torres shares the four opening questions she uses when screening candidates for product management roles, drawn from her consulting work recruiting PMs and designers. The questions probe a candidate's mental…
Marty Cagan argues that companies often confuse product roles, and that one person can legitimately cover more than one role. He focuses on a combination he increasingly recommends: a strong engineering lead or CTO who…
Teresa Torres describes how a weekend of family play turned her from a mobile-game holdout into a heavy user of Words with Friends, Draw Something, and Scramble. She uses a 2012 Journal of Product Innovation Management…
Marty Cagan shares a curated list of favorite product and leadership mantras he has collected while visiting companies, explaining what each one reveals about good product practice. Many of the quotes are attributed to…
Teresa Torres argues that reading about a craft, whether storytelling or product management, does not make you good at it. Just as the Pixar story rules circulated widely without producing new Pixar-caliber…
Teresa Torres argues that the rapid user decline of BranchOut, a Facebook-based social recruiting app, was predictable because its core assumption failed. Her team had built a similar product and, through interviews…
Teresa Torres reviews Richard Feynman's memoir-style essays and draws lessons for product work. She argues that confidence in discussing ideas, rather than deferring to status, helps product managers defend their…
Marty Cagan argues that a product team's primary scorecard metric should change depending on the stage the product is in. He describes three stages: MVP, where the only goal is winning several happy, referenceable…
The essay opens with a launch scenario where marketing and product management drift apart, producing mixed-up press releases, inaccurate website copy, and misplaced confidence. Cagan argues that product marketing is a…
Teresa Torres argues that user stories communicate product requirements more effectively than traditional Product Requirement Documents. Long PRDs tend to be read once and then abandoned, while a set of user stories…
Marty Cagan responds to a common challenge: why are products like Facebook, Amazon, and Google so successful if they seem poorly designed? He argues that product people often confuse their own tastes with the target…
Cagan distinguishes live-data prototypes, which are real code sent live traffic (usually in A/B tests) to prove an idea works, from production software that the business can run on. Production demands complete critical…
Teresa Torres argues that the handoff from product managers to engineers is harder than it looks, because the two groups hold different knowledge and often view the same problem from different angles. Drawing on…
Marty Cagan responds to a CTO's question about whether a strong product designer and technical lead still need a product manager, arguing the PM's contribution is often invisible or poorly done. He frames the discussion…
This opening post in a planned series argues that a company can only launch a successful product if it builds something customers actually want, which requires deep knowledge of the customer's need, context, and…
Marty Cagan argues that a product proving it works and is usable is not the same as a product people will actually choose to buy and use. He calls the smallest functional, usable version a 'Minimal Product' and reserves…
Marty Cagan uses the social contract that Stanford's d.school Launchpad course requires of its students as a lens on what strong product leaders must commit to. The contract centers on not complaining about workload…
Teresa Torres describes a period of struggle as a startup CEO, realizing that her work was interesting to her but not meaningful. Interest fades when products get hard or go wrong, while meaning sustains effort. She…
Teresa Torres, after returning to coding for a product launch following five years away, argues that product managers and designers do not strictly need to code today, but that everyone should learn the basics. She…
Marty Cagan contrasts the traditional PC-era product manager with the modern Internet-era product manager. He argues that many organizations still operate with the older model, which was often ineffective and poorly…
Teresa Torres argues that product managers constantly communicate complex ideas to engineers, designers, sales, and customers, and that visual thinking is one of the most effective ways to do it quickly and accurately…
Teresa Torres argues that product teams should talk to customers every day, even though famous quotes from Henry Ford and Steve Jobs seem to dismiss customer research. The key distinction is that customers can't…
Teresa Torres recounts a founder who received contradictory feedback from buyers about whether sellers should pay for a pre-sale information platform. Digging into the context of each conversation revealed that the…
Teresa Torres argues that product managers often frame their product vision as a specific solution, or mix a solution into a problem statement, which limits their options when the solution fails. Using a Caltrain mobile…
Marty Cagan argues that popular product measurement tools, such as product scorecards and Eric Ries's 'innovation accounting', are valuable for focusing on outcomes but are insufficient on their own. Measuring only…
Marty Cagan argues against a common corporate arrangement that splits the product role between a 'product manager' who handles customers and stakeholders and a 'product owner' who handles the backlog and developers. He…
Teresa Torres argues that great product management means thinking from the whole business's perspective: a product must not only please customers but also earn money from them, which is the hardest part. She recommends…
Teresa Torres argues that product teams routinely build on untested assumptions, treating hopes as facts, and that this risks building something nobody wants. Using an imagined Caltrain commuter app, she shows how to…
Teresa Torres argues that many startups treat product management as little more than turning feedback into a feature list, and that the discipline remains underdeveloped. She notes that teams know valuable research…