Marty Cagan and Jeff Patton argue that product teams should be judged by the outcomes they generate rather than the output they ship. The article offers a practical checklist of questions to diagnose how strong a…
“Listen to this episode on: Spotify | Apple Podcasts In this conversation, Teresa Torres and Petra Wille unpack a pattern they’re seeing again and again in product transformations: teams get trained in continuous discovery, but nothing sticks because leaders haven’t changed how they work. They dig into why “train”
Teresa Torres and Petra Wille examine whether the wave of AI prototyping tools (Replit, V0, Bolt, Lovable, WindSurf) genuinely helps product discovery work. They argue these tools can rapidly produce interactive…
Marty Cagan argues that the concept of a "requirement" is misleading in product work. What stakeholders and customers present as requirements are often untested assumptions or guesses about an underlying problem, while…
Cagan argues that strong products are the foundation of a healthy business: weak products inflate acquisition costs, lengthen sales cycles, pressure prices and burden customer service. The most powerful antidote is a…
Marty Cagan argues that the term minimum viable product is used so inconsistently that it confuses product teams, and proposes a clearer working definition. He defines an MVP as the smallest product that is valuable…
Teresa Torres describes a conversation with the Consider and Contact team at Hemnet about moving their opportunity solution trees from Miro to Jira Product Discovery. The team initially found Miro effective, but as…
A recap of a conversation with Y Combinator Group Partner Gustaf Alströmer, drawing on his work with more than 600 startups and his Airbnb experience. The core argument is that most startups fail because they don't talk…
Teresa Torres argues that a common mistake among teams new to Lean Startup methods is substituting experimentation for judgment, testing options like folders versus tags without first reasoning about which is most…
Teresa Torres argues that product leaders should not be the sole decision-makers on what to build, and that a company should instead empower its whole team to generate and evaluate ideas. She contends that…
Product teams are often flooded with ideas from customers, stakeholders, and their own discovery work, and need a way to capture them without derailing their workflow. In this Tools of the Trade interview, Teresa Torres…
Teresa Torres reflects on 2025 and lays out her 2026 roadmap, framed around the idea of 'just now possible' enabled by generative AI. She describes building AI coaches and tools, sunsetting her cohort-based Deep Dive…
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…
Marty Cagan and Bob Baxley argue that in the Generative AI era, strong product managers and product designers become more essential, not less, but only when those roles are defined by their specific, demanding skill…
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…
Marty Cagan argues that while Lean and Agile are often criticized, their core principles remain valuable, even though most companies practice them poorly. He observes that the best product teams have already moved…
Lenny Rachitsky shares advice, drawn from researcher Matt Gallivan, on which questions to ask users to judge product-market fit. He recommends a survey for 100+ active users and interviews for smaller bases, while…
Teresa Torres argues that product trios (a product manager, designer, and engineer) struggle to agree when they start from individual preferences and jump straight to solutions. Instead, they should first build a shared…
This post, step two of a six-part series on launching consumer businesses, argues that early growth depends on picking an almost comically narrow 'super-specific who' as the first target audience. It draws on examples…
Caitlin Sullivan, a user-research practitioner, explains four recurring ways AI-generated customer analysis goes wrong: invented or blended quotes, generic insights, signal that doesn't guide decisions, and missed…
Former Palantir product leader Adam Judelson shares unconventional product lessons from his seven years at the company, including embedding engineers with customers, hiring top talent, skipping a formal sales team…
Teresa Torres argues that an MVP should be defined by what you need to learn, not by the smallest or easiest feature set to ship. Using a hypothetical SMS-based event tool for soccer teams, she shows how the riskiest…
Lenny Rachitsky curates ten more essays for product builders, spanning problem framing, communication, distribution, market sizing, growth, scaling teams, positioning, and ambitious startup ideas. Each pick is paired…
A founder whose product isn't gaining traction gets seven concrete options: talk to more users, narrow the target audience, rework positioning, try growth 'kickstarts', pivot to whatever shows pull, allow more time, or…