“Have you ever found yourself in an argument with an engineer about the value of a feature? Take a look at the following exchange: Engineer: I don't think we should let companies message candidates who haven't applied for their jobs. Product Manager: How come? Engineer: It doesn't”
Teresa Torres describes how she rolled out the idea management tool Kindling at AfterCollege so that everyone in the company could contribute to idea generation and evaluation. The approach worked because it had clear…
Teresa Torres and Petra Wille use search-and-rescue research on how lost people behave as a metaphor for product teams that have lost their way. They describe five recurring moves: freezing, chasing shortcuts, following…
Teresa Torres argues that teams should adopt continuous discovery through small, sustainable habits rather than attempting a full transformation at once, which often leads to frustration. She adapts Nisha Vora's SPICEY…
Marty Cagan and Stacey Langer argue that the product model, though born in commercial product companies, fits government technology work because government also aims to create value and achieve outcomes, just measured…
Cagan extends his series on product team autonomy by examining how code ownership interacts with it. When companies split a codebase among product teams, one team's changes often touch code another team owns, creating…
Marty Cagan and Chris Jones examine whether the product operating model, originally designed for product organizations building technology products, applies to traditional IT departments. They argue it can help when IT…
Marty Cagan contrasts strong product teams with weak ones, drawing on years of working with both top technology companies and struggling ones. He argues the differences are not minor but span leadership behavior, team…
In this podcast episode, Teresa Torres and Petra Wille examine the hard decision of when and how to sunset products that are profitable and liked but no longer growing. They argue that this mediocre middle ground is…
Teresa Torres addresses a common problem in continuous discovery: weekly customer interviews surface valuable opportunities that fall outside the team's current outcome. She argues against forcing conversations back on…
Teresa Torres profiles how Sören Weber and the Search & Flow team at trivago adopted continuous discovery habits on a mature hotel metasearch product. Despite existing user-focus rituals, the team tended to jump to…
Teresa Torres argues that choosing product themes is not enough; teams also need a way to predict and measure how each user story moves the product goal. Using an event-site example with the goal of increasing the…
Teresa Torres argues that the Lean Startup loop of Build, Measure, Learn starts in the wrong place, and that teams should instead Learn, Build, Measure. Building first means writing code for features that often fail…
Marty Cagan argues that product organizations focused on team autonomy still need deliberate forms of collaboration around objectives. He describes two patterns: shared objectives, where several teams co-own a goal such…
Marty Cagan argues that the title "Product Manager" means very different things across companies and industries, a symptom of how young high-tech product development still is. Rather than wait for standardized titles…
Marty Cagan and Joakim Sundén argue that Spotify's enduring success comes from the product operating model rather than the popular idea of 'The Spotify Model' (squads, tribes, and similar org labels). They walk through…
Marty Cagan, writing with Chuck Geiger, argues that a product manager's success depends heavily on the working relationship with the head of product development, often called the CTO. The essay defines the scope of that…
Teresa Torres argues that opportunity solution trees, a simple visual map linking a desired business outcome to customer opportunities, solutions, and assumption tests, help product trios make better product decisions…
Cagan argues that product portfolio planning should be treated like financial portfolio planning: each product effort is an investment whose returns depend on where the company places its bets. Many companies either…
The author analyzed 51 Silicon Valley tech job postings, ranging from startups to large companies like Uber, Visa, and Amazon, to see what companies actually expect Product Managers to own. The findings show PMs are…
Torres argues that many good ideas begin as seemingly infeasible or bad ideas, and that their value often emerges through hard work and reframing. She proposes evaluating ideas first against the team's vision and…
In the season opener of this podcast, hosts Teresa Torres and Petra Wille reflect on the 2025 Product at Heart conference theme of curation. They argue that curation, choosing what to build, prioritize, and serve, is…
Marty Cagan argues that the concept of a "requirement" is misleading in product work. What stakeholders and customers present as requirements are often untested assumptions or guesses about an underlying problem, while…
Marty Cagan answers common follow-up questions to his earlier argument that builders should distinguish between building to learn (product discovery) and building to earn (product delivery). He argues that as delivery…