“Continuous discovery is for everyone. You don’t have to be building a consumer-facing app or website to enjoy the benefits of this way of working. But we understand there’s reluctance about adopting discovery outside of traditional business to consumer (B2C) digital products. Whether it’s hard to”
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…
The author analyzed 51 Silicon Valley tech job postings, ranging from startups to large companies like Uber, Visa, and Amazon, to see what companies actually expect Product Managers to own. The findings show PMs are…
Cagan argues that many companies confuse a product vision with a mission statement, a slogan of purpose that does not do the work a product vision must do. He also criticizes the practice of each product team inventing…
Teresa Torres recounts visiting the Kindling team and recording a podcast-style interview with its founder, Tim Meaney, about innovation. The post frames Kindling, an idea management tool, as a long-time favorite of…
Cagan argues that the friction around commitments in Agile product teams stems from making them too early, before the team knows whether a solution is feasible, valuable, and viable. Because product ideas often fail or…
Lenny answers a new PM's question about how to judge day-to-day performance by proposing three priority-ordered checks: whether the team delivers business impact, whether the individual contributes to strategy and team…
Teresa Torres argues that curiosity is a core skill for product managers, especially when facing pressure to build one-off feature requests. Rather than arguing or pleading, PMs should investigate the underlying need…
Teresa Torres argues that product builders rarely stop to consider the ethics of the data they collect, even though user tracking has grown far beyond the cookies that alarmed people in the late 1990s. She notes that…
Hiten Shah argues that a company's external surface area has expanded dramatically, from a few channels decades ago to dozens of channels and hundreds of instances today. This growth fragments coordination, measurement…
Teresa Torres talks with Petra Wille about how she and co-organizer Arne design experiences rather than mere events at Product at Heart and related leadership gatherings. Petra explains that intentional sensory details…
Marty Cagan argues that as companies grow, product organizations often drift into serving internal stakeholders, documenting requirements, mediating conflicts, and allocating developer time, which crowds out customer…
Cagan argues that product discovery, the practice of validating ideas with real customers before building, is still essential in heavily regulated industries such as finance and healthcare, even though legal and…
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…
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 software buyers face an overwhelming marketplace, with tens of thousands of apps and thousands of solutions per category, so simply building a product no longer guarantees adoption. To win…
This podcast episode between Teresa Torres and Petra Wille argues that product teams are flooded with data but that not all evidence carries the same weight. Low-effort signals like support tickets and app reviews are…
Teresa Torres, a product discovery coach, shares the standout books from her 2013 reading list of roughly 50 titles. She recommends a mix of sales, energy management, luck versus skill, analytics, presentation…
Teresa Torres and Petra Wille discuss how product people can deliberately build communities of practice to support long-term learning. Teresa describes an introvert-friendly approach centered on a personal learning…
Lenny Rachitsky's early newsletter answers three reader questions: how to motivate engineers to hit arbitrary deadlines, where to find real PM career ladders, and how to get executives to accept more actionable customer…
Torres argues that many good ideas begin as seemingly infeasible or bad ideas, and that their value often emerges through hard work and reframing. She proposes evaluating ideas first against the team's vision and…
Marty Cagan follows up his article on product management theater by arguing that where PM theater exists, product leadership theater usually exists too. Product leaders often blame senior executives, such as non-product…
Teresa Torres shares a list of lesser-known blogs she follows, inspired by Daniel Pink's year-end recommendations. Rather than product blogs, she highlights writers covering learning, decision making, happiness…
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…