Marty Cagan argues that Apple's repeated success in redefining consumer markets comes from product discipline rather than marketing. Written around the iPhone's debut, the essay contends that Apple gets the ordering of…
Marty Cagan argues that many product managers, especially in larger companies, get trapped in 'meeting hell': they work constantly yet fail to make progress on the things that matter most. He notes the causes include…
“Listen to this episode on: Spotify | Apple Podcasts Building AI products isn’t just about clever prompts and orchestration—it’s about knowing if what you’ve built actually works. In this episode, Teresa Torres and Petra Wille dive deep into AI evals: how they’re defined, why they’re”
Cagan argues that product optimization, typically A/B testing and iterative tuning, is often confused with product discovery, and that optimization only makes sense after a team has found product/market fit. He…
Marty Cagan argues that a company building its first in-house design team should not simply recreate the old agency model, where designers received specs and produced screens. Modern product designers work continuously…
Teresa Torres argues that product managers often frame their product vision as a specific solution, or mix a solution into a problem statement, which limits their options when the solution fails. Using a Caltrain mobile…
Marty Cagan argues that a startup's central goal is reaching Product-Market Fit, the point where a product has proven demand and justifies investing in sales, marketing and scale. He standardizes on Marc Andreessen's…
Teresa Torres argues that defining the ideal customer profile should not belong to one function but be shared across product, design, engineering, sales, marketing, customer success, and finance. Cross-functional…
Hiten Shah surveyed practitioners about how they measure customer happiness and found that 55% rely on Net Promoter Score, a single-question metric in use since 2003. The article reports other methods, including…
Cagan describes a role that appears in large matrixed companies: the business owner, who represents a business unit (by geography, device, or function) that a central product organization serves. He argues this role can…
Teresa Torres argues that predicting the expected impact of each user story before building it serves two purposes: it helps prioritize the backlog, and it surfaces the hidden assumptions behind what a team is building…
Teresa Torres synthesizes conversations with nine product teams building AI features in production, highlighting recurring patterns across their work. She argues that small cross-functional teams, domain expertise, and…
Marty Cagan argues that commercial software companies should never outsource three core competencies: product definition, user experience design, and the underlying site architecture/engineering that builds the product…
An interview-based post with April Dunford, a positioning consultant, covering how to diagnose positioning problems, her five-step positioning exercise, and how positioning differs from messaging, branding…
Teresa Torres argues that product teams should treat every idea as a testable hypothesis, which requires explaining why a change matters and how much impact it should produce. Ideas from design, sales, and product…
Teresa Torres shares her favorite books from the roughly 60 she read in 2014, spanning music, decision making, mathematics, persuasion, negotiation, time perception, integrative thinking, customer development, and…
Marty Cagan argues that the current resistance to AI products mirrors the denial that greeted the Internet in the mid-1990s. Back then, many organizations insisted their old Waterfall funding, building, and shipping…
Teresa Torres argues that reading about a craft, whether storytelling or product management, does not make you good at it. Just as the Pixar story rules circulated widely without producing new Pixar-caliber…
Behavioral scientist Kristen Berman argues that people often act against their own intentions, and that behavioral design, which blends psychology and economics, can help product teams close the gap between intent and…
Teresa Torres describes how her blog-writing process changed once she began using Claude as a collaborator for outlining, critiquing, researching, and headline work, which lets her write more. She argues that designing…
Martina Lauchengco, a long-time SVPG partner, shares her origin story: an instinct for finding better ways that grew from a childhood shaped by her father's habit of challenging the status quo. She recounts early…
This podcast episode features three leaders from Zencity, a company that helps local governments understand residents by combining survey data, 311 calls, social media, and local news into one platform. The conversation…
Jason Fried argues against the idea that AI will spark a bespoke software revolution where everyone builds their own custom tools. He notes that custom software already exists and is usually bloated because clients pay…