Marty Cagan argues that product creation is a blend of art and science, though he has long leaned toward the scientific side because of his training. Reading Rick Rubin's book The Creative Act reshaped his view…
Marty Cagan argues that weak products are those that fail to meet their objectives or create new revenue and growth for the company. He lists ten root causes, centered on the absence of a real product vision…
Marty Cagan addresses a recurring question: how Agile relates to the Product Operating Model. He argues Agile is only one of three dimensions of the product model, covering how software is built, tested, and deployed…
Marty Cagan argues that effective product managers need about four uninterrupted hours a day for product discovery: working out valuable, usable, feasible, and viable solutions to hard problems. He observes that many…
Marty Cagan argues that established companies with long-standing non-digital value, such as banks, insurers, retailers and media firms, often split product management into a 'Legacy PM' group that owns the core product…
Marty Cagan examines the Waterfall product development process, which he notes remains the most common way software products are built despite being decades old and widely criticized. He explains its phased structure 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…
Teresa Torres recounts a 90-day, self-directed journey building her first AI product, an Interview Coach that gives feedback on customer interviews, which she built while recovering from a broken ankle. She argues that…
“Listen to this episode on: Spotify | Apple Podcasts Ever feel like your product team is “lost in the woods”? Petra Wille and Teresa Torres borrow a set of “lost person” patterns (what people tend to do when they realize they’re lost) and map them to how teams behave when”
Teresa Torres and Hope Gurion discuss how leaders can hold empowered product teams accountable to outcomes without sliding back into feature-factory control. They describe empowerment as a spectrum: teams get discretion…
Lenny answers a first-time B2B founder's question about prioritization before product-market fit. He argues that typical frameworks suit large companies, lists common early-stage pitfalls, and proposes a single goal…
Marty Cagan announces the second edition of his book INSPIRED, which he describes as essentially a new work rather than an update. He explains that the field has moved past early Lean Startup and Agile ideas, so the new…
Teresa Torres recounts how, starting as a complete AI beginner after an ankle injury in March 2025, she transformed her product-discovery work over about fifteen months. She moved from using ChatGPT as a search engine…
Teresa Torres argues that the popular "We believe... will result in... we will have confidence when..." hypothesis format is quick but insufficient for sound experiment design. She explains that teams should test the…
Marty Cagan highlights a talk by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and draws out four principles that connect to his thinking on product portfolio planning. The core message is that great product companies focus relentlessly on…
Teresa Torres argues that product requirements should describe the user opportunity rather than prescribe a solution, since detailed upfront solution specs lead teams to overcommit before validating what works. She…
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…