“In April I visited Tim Meaney and the rest of the Kindling team. For long-time Product Talk readers, you already know that I’m a big fan of idea management software and of Kindling specifically. (See related posts below.) While I have met Tim several times on his recent”
Teresa Torres and Petra Wille argue that AI, which makes generating ideas and building products faster, does not remove the need for product managers because the core of product work is relationship work. Aligning…
Teresa Torres argues that many product managers run experiments poorly: they struggle to choose what to test, decide how long to run tests, lack scientific training, find tools hard to use, and overgeneralize results…
Teresa Torres and Hope Gurion argue that when shifting to a product operating model, companies should start with a small set of pilot teams rather than training everyone at once, which tends to produce chaos and…
Teresa Torres argues that product teams should test ideas with experiments before building them, and that this starts with a well-formed hypothesis. Vague statements like 'a redesign will improve usability' cannot be…
Teresa Torres describes a design problem with a job posting form's location options, where combining multiple location types and telecommute rules created excessive complexity. Instead of designing from scratch, her…
Marty Cagan argues that the coming decade will be among the most productive for product innovation. He points to four converging forces: ubiquitous connected mobile devices, powerful platforms that give apps instant…
Teresa Torres interviews product coach Petra Wille about her path from computer science and concept work at SAP and XING to becoming a general manager and then a coach. Wille argues that product leaders, who often come…
Kristen Berman walks through the four main quantitative willingness-to-pay methods (Van Westendorp, Becker-DeGroot-Marschak, multiple price list, and discrete choice), comparing their strengths and biases. She argues…
Teresa Torres describes building Product Talk's Interview Coach, an AI tool that gives students feedback on their customer interviews, and how she designed evals to measure its quality. She explains the core idea of…
Marty Cagan argues that stakeholder management is a frequent pain point for product managers, but it can be substantially improved. He defines stakeholders narrowly as people who hold veto power over launching work…
This podcast episode features Teresa Torres and Petra Wille discussing how they build conference talks from scratch and how new speakers can get started. They share their distinct processes: Petra works with mind maps…
Teresa Torres and Petra Wille address how product managers can choose a coach in a crowded market where thousands of self-described product coaches compete for attention. They argue that red flags such as overpromising…
Teresa Torres argues that most product requirements are poor because teams finish writing them too early and start building before the solution has been iterated on. She recommends treating requirements like writing…
Torres argues that the standard job-hunt routine of polishing a resume and mass-applying to postings rarely works, even for strong candidates. Instead, she proposes treating yourself as a product and applying the…
Teresa Torres and Petra Wille argue that confident predictions about AI-driven change are often wrong, and that betting everything on one forecast is risky. Humans are poor at forecasting, and early adopters' experience…
Teresa Torres argues that job seekers should treat themselves as a product and, like any good product, target a narrow market rather than trying to appeal to everyone. A broad search across trendy tech companies leaves…
The author describes a lunchtime request from a sales director to build a feature that could keep a few at-risk customers, and argues that the framing of 'should we build it or not' is too narrow. Drawing on Chip and…
Teresa Torres argues that user stories communicate product requirements more effectively than traditional Product Requirement Documents. Long PRDs tend to be read once and then abandoned, while a set of user stories…
Cagan argues that the build-versus-buy question, long familiar in IT and product teams, is being reshaped by generative AI and user-programming tools like Lovable and Bolt. Despite hype that everyone will build and SaaS…
Marty Cagan recalls his early-1980s work at HP Labs, where research head Joel Birnbaum asked why most people dislike their computers, and proposed the idea of a 'domesticated computer' that adapts to people rather than…
Cagan argues that cost estimation in software stays confusing because management needs cost figures very early, while engineering can only produce accurate estimates after the solution is detailed. This mismatch leads…
Marty Cagan argues that the products most PMs will build in the coming years are "intelligent products" that blend deterministic and probabilistic behavior. He traces the history of AI from 1980s expert systems, whose…