“Why do you write product requirements? We used to write long product requirement documents to communicate the solution we wanted our engineering teams to build. But over time we learned that outlining every detail of the solution upfront leads to overcommitting to solutions before we know whether or not they”
Teresa Torres describes building AI-generated opportunity solution trees for Vistaly as a product manager stepping into engineering with AI assistance. The core difficulty was updating an existing tree with new…
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…
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…
Marty Cagan argues that as a company scales, the natural sharing of product learnings that happens in a small startup breaks down, so it must be done deliberately. He recommends a recurring, brief update, run by the VP…
In this podcast episode, Teresa Torres and Petra Wille trade stories about the formative experiences that shaped their product careers. Teresa recounts running a startup through the 2008 recession, where prioritization…
Teresa Torres argues that product teams are often held responsible for business outcomes such as revenue, margin, or churn, which they cannot directly control. Business outcomes are lagging indicators that only reveal…
Marty Cagan argues that the founders of many of the world's most successful high-tech companies, such as Gates, Jobs, Bezos and Page, were effectively product managers in the best sense. They identified opportunities…
Teresa Torres argues that successful products, even giants like Facebook and Google, began by serving a narrow group rather than everyone. Founders who try to sell to everyone end up building for no one, because the…
Marty Cagan argues that product managers are fundamentally in the business of managing risk, and that playing it safe by only adding small features and fixes is often the riskiest choice over time. Because innovation…
This episode of Just Now Possible features Aha!'s leadership and PM team discussing Aha! Builder, an AI app builder aimed at product managers rather than engineers. They describe the five-step discovery process that…
Teresa Torres shares the four opening questions she uses when screening candidates for product management roles, drawn from her consulting work recruiting PMs and designers. The questions probe a candidate's mental…
This episode of Just Now Possible features three leaders from Healio, a 125-year-old medical publisher, discussing how they built Healio AI, an assistant helping physicians prepare for patient care. The core argument is…
Teresa Torres argues that a single A/B test rarely settles a question; instead, teams should string related hypotheses together around one underlying insight. Using an email subject-line example about urgency, she shows…
Marty Cagan, a consultant who works mainly with CEOs and product leaders, writes an open letter to designers about common mistakes that undermine their impact on products. He argues that designers should be involved…
Teresa Torres uses the story of a skier who tried to build a snowboard that worked like skis, despite lukewarm feedback, to show how product teams fall into one-idea-at-a-time thinking. Drawing on the Heath brothers'…
Teresa Torres describes her Continuous Discovery Habits (CDH) community, built on the idea that people learn best in community rather than from reading alone. She explains why she shifted from being the expert to…
Marty Cagan argues that the best products often emerge during economic downturns, when companies lack the money to paper over weak products. He contends that many firms, especially those with abundant funding, assume…
Marty Cagan argues that "product sense" is a misleading term because it suggests an innate gift, when in reality it is deep product knowledge built through sustained immersion in a specific product space. He describes…
Lenny Rachitsky surveyed hundreds of product managers, then ran follow-up calls, to collect concrete ways PMs use Perplexity, the AI-powered search engine, in their daily work. The post groups 27 real prompts into six…
Teresa Torres traces how product roadmaps have evolved from feature-and-date lists to theme and outcome-based formats, arguing each fixes some problems while creating others. Feature roadmaps imply false certainty that…
Marty Cagan reflects on his first weeks with the original iPhone to extract product lessons. He argues that breakthrough products cannot come from focus groups or pundits, since users only describe incremental…
Marty Cagan uses General Patton's quote about telling people what to do rather than how to do it to argue that product managers should specify outcomes, not implementations. He identifies two failure modes: customers…
Teresa Torres and Petra Wille challenge the popular claim that AI has made software delivery free, arguing that while building a single feature is far cheaper, producing a real, production-quality product is not. They…