Cagan argues that shipping updates to an established user community requires care, because users dislike change and today's connected internet lets them punish bad releases quickly. He calls the disciplined approach to…
Cagan argues that cost estimation in software stays confusing because management needs cost figures very early, while engineering can only produce accurate estimates after the solution is detailed. This mismatch leads…
Cagan argues that much of the confusion about product management comes from lumping together two very different team types that both get called 'product teams.' He distinguishes delivery teams (essentially re-packaged…
Cagan argues that the 'Business Analyst' role, common in IT and custom-software shops where it gathers requirements for developers, becomes a problem when transplanted into a product organization. There it duplicates…
Marty Cagan argues that no amount of marketing can rescue a genuinely bad product; asking marketing to make the best of a 'pig' produces 'lipstick on a pig.' He uses Macromedia's Flex as a case study. Flash was a great…
Marty Cagan argues that the rapid rise of generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Midjourney and GPT-4 is a disruptive technology wave comparable to personal computers, the Internet, and the iPhone. He notes that disruptions…
Marty Cagan uses an anecdote about Apple, Xerox PARC, and the graphical desktop computer to explain what a product vision and a 'visiontype' (a vision prototype) are for. He argues that a compelling visiontype helps…
Marty Cagan and Joakim Sundén argue that Spotify's enduring success comes from the product operating model rather than the popular idea of 'The Spotify Model' (squads, tribes, and similar org labels). They walk through…
Marty Cagan lays out the product operating model, in which a product manager sits on a small cross-functional team alongside a designer, a tech lead and engineers, and is accountable for solving customer problems that…
This is an index page from SVPG (Silicon Valley Product Group) curating its articles on product discovery, the work of deciding what to build before handing it to delivery. The page is organized into four groups…
Marty Cagan argues that product work has two distinct phases: strategy, where you discover what to build through exploration and customer contact, and execution, where you build and ship it. Many teams fail because they…
Marty Cagan argues that many feature-team product managers and delivery-team product owners are actually doing project management or backlog administration, and that companies are beginning to recognize this. He calls…
Marty Cagan revisits the distinction between product teams and project teams, which he says he should have written about sooner, after hoping the problem had faded. A product team is durable and owns an outcome over one…
Marty Cagan argues that the foundation of a strong empowered product team is unencumbered, direct access to four constituencies: customers and users, product data, business stakeholders, and engineers. He explains that…
This essay, the third in a series on meaningful transformation, argues that companies must change how they choose which problems to solve, not just how they build or solve them. It moves beyond feature roadmaps toward…
Marty Cagan and Jon Moore argue that a product-led company's engineering practices should rest on three principles: protecting customers, revenue, brand and colleagues; responding quickly to market needs; and earning…
Marty Cagan reviews Tony Fadell's book "Build," written from a CEO's perspective, and argues it is a standout guide to what the best product companies do. Cagan notes that Fadell's advice is deliberately old-school…
Marty Cagan argues there is a wide gap between how the best product companies work and how the majority of companies work, and that many people don't realize how different the two worlds are. He notes that practitioners…
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…
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…
Marty Cagan follows up on his earlier argument that product organizations often degrade into service teams that merely document others' decisions. He offers ten practical moves for reclaiming influence: deep customer…
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…
Marty Cagan argues that commercial software companies should never outsource three core competencies: product definition, user experience design, and the underlying site architecture/engineering that builds the product…
Marty Cagan argues against a damaging anti-pattern in which a product organization splits into a discovery team that decides what to build and a delivery team that simply implements it. He notes that good modern…
Marty Cagan examines what business incubators, from independent startup accelerators to corporate labs like HP Labs and Yahoo's Brickhouse, teach about turning product ideas into successful companies or products. He…
Marty Cagan argues that a product must actually work, not just be the right product, and that software quality remains poor across much of the industry. He notes that manual, under-resourced QA is a common failure, even…
Marty Cagan, drawing on a conversation with venture capitalist Josh Kopelman, argues that business plans are wrong almost as soon as they are written. Competition, technology, and market dynamics constantly shift, and…
Marty Cagan and Richard Russell use the origin story of Amazon Prime to show how Amazon's approach to building technology products mirrors the product operating model used by the strongest product companies. The article…
Lea Hickman and Marty Cagan argue that many company transformations to empowered product teams fail because key conditions are missing. They present ten keys, spanning senior leadership support, reframing technology as…
Marty Cagan and Josh Kerievsky argue that outsourcing agencies can apply the product model to custom solution work, even though clients often arrive with a fixed solution in mind and fixed-price contracts. The core…