Cagan argues that many product managers, especially those coming from engineering, have only a shallow grasp of how their product and company make money. He recommends cultivating a relationship with someone in the…
“This post is part of the So You Want To Be a Product Manager series. Now that you have narrowed down a target list of companies, let's focus on how to get the attention of the hiring manager. In a perfect world, you would apply for a job, the”
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…
The author, watching TV ads on a DVR, found that a Palm Pre commercial failed to convey what the phone actually did, while an iPhone ad made the product immediately clear and compelling. She argues that products only…
Teresa Torres recaps her favorite moments from the Mind the Product SF 2017 conference, which she considers the best product event she attends. She highlights her own workshop on continuous product discovery habits…
Christian Idiodi, an SVPG partner and Black leader in tech, writes about the personal weight of racial injustice in America and asks why tech companies, which tackle enormous problems like aging and space colonization…
Hiten Shah responds to critics who call Net Promoter Score (NPS) harmful or overrated, arguing the metric is not the problem but how it is used. He contends NPS is useful only as one input among many feedback methods…
Torres argues that job seekers should treat themselves as a product, defining a few clear value propositions that differentiate them, much as successful products focus on a specific use case. She shows how to map those…
John Cutler argues that AI tools can reduce the cost of gathering and reusing context, which he calls a 'recontextualization tax' that teams pay whenever knowledge has to be re-explained across people, documents, and…
When COVID-19 closed international borders in 2020, Seera Group's Digital Hotels team saw demand shift from hotels to domestic alternative accommodations like chalets and Istrahas. Using opportunity solution trees built…
Teresa Torres argues that continuous customer interviews generate far more learning than teams can hold in their heads, and proposes the interview snapshot as a one-page artifact that captures a single conversation…
Teresa Torres explains how she now records customer research interviews (audio only, with disclosure) while taking handwritten notes that capture structure rather than verbatim quotes. She argues that recording frees…
Cagan argues that marketing success starts with the product itself, so product marketers should help shape a product during planning rather than receiving a finished one to promote. He proposes three tests: whether…
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…
In this end-of-year episode of All Things Product, Petra Wille and Teresa Torres reflect on what they want to be known for in their work. They examine why the word 'legacy' can feel heavy and propose gentler framings…
Teresa Torres argues that product teams often misuse customer interviews by spending time evaluating solution ideas, which yields unreliable feedback because people overestimate their future behavior. Interviews are…
Marty Cagan argues that a product succeeds only when it is solved simultaneously for the customer, the business, and the technology, which he frames as a multiplicative equation: if any one factor is zero, the product…
David Placek of Lexicon Branding outlines a step-by-step naming playbook drawn from decades of work on brands like Swiffer, Pentium and Vercel. He argues that a strong name builds trust, communicates an original idea…
Lenny Rachitsky and Nels Gilbreth argue that annual and quarterly planning is painful for most organizations because it asks many people to imagine futures, agree on one, and plan a path to it. Drawing on dozens of…
Marty Cagan argues that product managers who are forbidden from talking directly with users should push hard to change that policy, and if they cannot, should consider leaving for a company where they can do their job…
Teresa Torres and Petra Wille argue that promotions, while common career targets, can be a poor north star because they are largely outside an individual's control and often tied to salary and status rather than…
Marty Cagan argues that product managers who spend their time prioritizing a laundry list of feature requests are working on the wrong problem. A feature-request roadmap pushes unvalidated features into the plan, skips…
Marty Cagan argues that product strategy has been an unintended casualty of the move to Agile methods, leaving teams chasing features without direction. He defines product strategy as a persuasive, two-to-five-year…
Cagan argues that 'user abuse' happens when product teams ship changes that users didn't ask for, didn't expect, or can't absorb, and that it is largely caused by the natural human resistance to change. He explains that…