“It’s easy to be fooled by the Facebooks and the Googles of the world. Everyone uses their products. They make it easy to rationalize why everyone will use your product. But when you draw this conclusion, you skip right from A to Z, ignoring all the steps they took”
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…
Lenny Rachitsky and Kyle Poyar compiled lessons from more than 20 AI product builders on what surprised them about shipping AI features. The post argues that AI products need fresh thinking: prototype to discover what…
Lenny explains how to measure retention using cohort charts, and why a curve that flattens signals product-market fit. He then lays out seven levers for improving retention, ranked by expected impact: improving the…
Teresa Torres announces her 2020 priorities in a public annual letter, continuing a tradition started the previous year to focus her work and filter irrelevant requests. Her core focus is refining her Continuous…
Marty Cagan argues against the view that a technology company is essentially made of engineers who build software and salespeople who sell it, with everyone else treated as overhead. He contends that combining even…
An interview with Gong's chief product officer on how the company builds product. It covers two-tier annual and quarterly planning, autonomous multi-skill pods organized around problem areas, the decision to skip OKRs…
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 argues that 'outcomes over outputs' is easy to state but hard to practice, because many teams still ship features while being asked to deliver impact. She defines outputs as what a team builds and outcomes…
Shreyas Doshi argues that peer-reviewed studies on human psychology and behavior are often over-trusted by smart people. Such research typically reports averages and correlations across populations, which says little…