Marty Cagan follows up on an earlier list of product manager problem areas with five more common pitfalls. He argues that many teams play defense, acting risk-averse and protecting ground instead of moving forward…
“We have long argued that there have always been at least two major ways to develop product. The most common way, even today in the age of AI, is the project model, which is all about output. This is where stakeholders or executives come up with a prioritized roadmap of features and projects, then for... The post Build to Learn…”
Teresa Torres profiles how Edwin Yuen, a product designer at The Times London, uses Vistaly to build opportunity solution trees for his puzzle-focused squad. The piece presents a practical, tool-specific walkthrough of…
Teresa Torres profiles Chi Phan, a senior PM who was asked to evaluate whether her company should build an API to automate a manual order-fulfillment process between consumers, vendors and her company. Chi used internal…
Teresa Torres describes how she used her own continuous discovery methods to shape and test the book that became Continuous Discovery Habits. Rather than writing the whole book upfront and hoping it landed, she turned…
Marty Cagan responds to a debate sparked by Don Norman's essay arguing that big societal innovations are driven by technology first and needs later, which Norman frames against heavy upfront user research. Cagan says…
Marty Cagan argues that product teams should stop framing their work as gathering and documenting requirements, since most so-called requirements are really constraints. He proposes defining products along two…
Cagan argues that product teams face two simultaneous goals: learning fast through discovery about what customers need, and delivering robust, scalable, production-quality software they can release with confidence…
Marty Cagan argues that a common and avoidable form of waste in product teams is when one member, often a user researcher, learns something important about customers but the rest of the team doesn't absorb it. Findings…
Teresa Torres argues that many product managers are so consumed by delivery work (grooming backlogs, triaging bugs, handling schedule slips) that they lack time for discovery, the work of figuring out what to build. Ad…
Cagan argues that product teams need two distinct disciplines: Product Discovery, which uses prototyping and user testing to find new valuable, usable, feasible solutions, and Product Optimization, which improves an…
Marty Cagan revisits Henrik Kniberg's skateboard-versus-car MVP article and argues it describes what engineering-only teams can do, not what true cross-functional product teams should do. He contends that a skilled…
Teresa Torres argues that product teams routinely build on untested assumptions, treating hopes as facts, and that this risks building something nobody wants. Using an imagined Caltrain commuter app, she shows how to…
Teresa Torres addresses the most common reader question about her book Continuous Discovery Habits: why user researchers, marketers, data analysts and other roles were not named in the product trio. She explains that…
Teresa Torres argues that discovery teams should be judged by whether their discovery work actually moves a desired product outcome, tracked as absolute progress quarter over quarter rather than percent of a goal. Since…
Teresa Torres argues that many startups treat product management as little more than turning feedback into a feature list, and that the discipline remains underdeveloped. She notes that teams know valuable research…
Teresa Torres and the Continuous Discovery Habits community explore what a product manager should do after inheriting a large, aging product backlog of feature requests and bugs. The discussion rejects both extremes of…
Marty Cagan describes a growing trend where product teams move from batch-style phases to continuous practices in both delivery and discovery. He traces how continuous integration, testing, and deployment have spread…
Teresa Torres argues that B2B and B2C discovery are less different than people assume, since most consumer products also serve multiple stakeholders such as advertisers or content providers. The key issue in enterprise…
Teresa Torres argues that product teams building enterprise software can and should experiment, even though A/B testing is often impractical for them. She points out that experiments are simply procedures for testing a…
This reading-guide post kicks off a monthly book club around Teresa Torres's Continuous Discovery Habits, focusing on Chapter 9, which covers identifying hidden assumptions. The chapter argues that teams should test the…
Teresa Torres argues that product managers often fixate on having the 'right answer,' presenting finished backlogs and roadmaps that stakeholders then override with their own opinions. Her remedy is to show the…
Teresa Torres, who teaches design-based courses at Northwestern, argues that continuous discovery principles extend beyond product work to broader organizational challenges like engagement, team effectiveness, and…
Teresa Torres and community members address a common problem: a stakeholder, such as a CEO, brings a solution idea that is unconnected to the team's current outcome and discovery work. The article argues against simply…