Marty Cagan pays tribute to Bruce Williams, a Silicon Valley marketing leader and close friend who died of pancreatic cancer in May 2016. The essay uses Williams's life to explore two topics important to product people…
“This newsletter just hit a big milestone: one million subscribers. This is both exciting and absurd. No part of me imagined it would reach these heights. What started as an “experiment” just over five years ago is now the world’s largest product newsletter, podcast, and community. I’m feeling very proud. Milestones like these are a great opportunity to pause and reflect, so I put out a call on X and LinkedIn and asked y’all what…”
A guest post by Kyle Poyar compiling 25 low-effort, high-impact quick wins that operators at well-known tech companies used in their first months in a role. The ideas span funnel friction, pricing tweaks, workflow…
Melissa Perri announces the launch of a new podcast, Product Thinking, built around answering questions submitted by the Product Management community. The post previews three example topics: escaping an individual…
Lenny Rachitsky and prompt engineer Mike Taylor ran a blind test to see how close AI comes to doing core product manager work. They argue that most headlines saying AI 'can't do X' rely on weak models and basic prompts…
Teresa Torres recounts a difficult period in 2011 when she was CEO of a struggling startup, dealing with severe anxiety and feeling unable to ask for help. After the company was sold and she stepped away, a master's…
Jason Fried argues that people should not spend much energy thinking about legacy. His core point is to do the best work you can right now, since usefulness later only follows from usefulness today. He challenges the…
Jason Fried defends the continued use of cover letters in hiring, responding to people who think they no longer matter. He argues that a cover letter is the first and most revealing signal of an applicant's effort…
Marty Cagan argues that the most damaging way companies try to scale product management is splitting the PM job across two people, the so-called 'two in a box' anti-pattern. The core problem is that the PM on an…
Teresa Torres and Petra Wille argue that product practitioners should trace frameworks and best practices back to their original creators rather than relying on social-media summaries. Simplified takes often dilute the…
Lenny Rachitsky's annual year-end roundup revisits his past newsletter posts and podcast episodes and reorganizes the best of them by reader job-to-be-done, such as sharpening product skills, growing a product, scaling…
Marty Cagan examines the adage that product managers get blamed for failure but rarely credited for success, and asks whether that is fair. He explains that on empowered product teams the product manager owns value and…
In this podcast episode, Teresa Torres and Petra Wille examine why product leaders underinvest in their own development. They argue the real blockers are less about budget and more about stigma around coaching…
Chris Favorite Interview Question describes a hiring question a PM manager can use: ask candidates to rank four work attributes (execution, creativity, strategy, growth) from strongest to weakest. The exercise reveals…
This podcast episode, hosted by Teresa Torres with guest Petra Wille, argues that product leaders are stretched thin by shrinking headcount, AI disruption, and constant context switching, and that they tend to…
Lenny Rachitsky shares compensation benchmarks for product managers across the U.S., Europe, the U.K., and Canada, using Pave data drawn from over 23,000 PMs. The post breaks down base salary, equity, and total comp by…
Lenny Rachitsky and Noam Segal report results from a survey of over 8,200 tech workers on burnout, optimism, manager effectiveness, work setup, company size, career clarity and AI anxiety. The core argument is that…
This podcast episode features Petra Wille explaining her new Product Leadership Wheel, a self-assessment framework that extends her earlier PM Wheel to senior product leaders. It organizes product leadership around 12…
This podcast episode tackles Product Operations, a role many organizations find ambiguous. Teresa Torres and Petra Wille explore what product ops is and is not, how it overlaps with HR, agile coaching, and the CPO role…
This podcast episode, hosted by Teresa Torres with guest Petra Wille, addresses how product people can stay grounded and still act helpfully when the world feels overwhelming. The conversation argues that coping need…
Teresa Torres announces her 2020 priorities in a public annual letter, continuing a tradition started the previous year to focus her work and filter irrelevant requests. Her core focus is refining her Continuous…
Lenny Rachitsky argues that performance reviews are a secret weapon of strong managers: done well, they improve performance, align expectations, and accelerate a report's career; done poorly, they drive people out. He…
Marty Cagan argues that the VP Product role is difficult to fill and perform well, but when done right it creates major value for a company. He frames the role around four competencies: team development, product vision…
Julie Zhuo writes to people about to become wealthy through an IPO, acquisition, or successful business, framing a sudden liquidity event as a turning point. The essay appears to address how to handle that new reality…