“This post is part of a series about making better product decisions. As startup founders, product managers, designers, it's often easy for us to come up with all the answers. Should we add this feature? Will users take this action? Will changing this copy increase conversions? And of course,”
Teresa Torres profiles Chi Phan, a senior PM who was asked to evaluate whether her company should build an API to automate a manual order-fulfillment process between consumers, vendors and her company. Chi used internal…
Marty Cagan argues against setting a fixed percentage split between new product development and improving existing products. Instead, every investment, whether new or improvement, should be treated as a product…
Marty Cagan, who popularized the term product discovery, clarifies a common confusion: learning is valuable, but the real goal of discovery is to gain insights, which are learnings a team can act on. He explains that…
Teresa Torres argues that a simple visual structure, the opportunity solution tree, is changing how product teams do discovery. She explains that teams struggled to connect customer research with solution testing, and…
Lenny Rachitsky offers a five-point checklist for deciding when to sunset a product or feature, drawing on his Airbnb experience. The core argument is that a feature failing at least three of the criteria (low usage…
Teresa Torres argues that product teams routinely build on untested assumptions, treating hopes as facts, and that this risks building something nobody wants. Using an imagined Caltrain commuter app, she shows how to…
Marty Cagan argues that product teams often use a predictable set of excuses to avoid doing real product discovery, and that these excuses usually reflect a misunderstanding of discovery rather than a genuine…
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…
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 profiles Gary Clift, a Senior Director of Product for a travel-industry API, who used continuous discovery habits to address why customers were resisting migration to a new version of his company's API…
Marty Cagan answers the most common objections people raise against the idea of empowered engineers, the engineers who take part in product discovery rather than only building what they are handed. He argues that the…
Chris Jones argues that organizational transformation, like product development, should be rolled out incrementally rather than all at once. Because people adopt change at different speeds, a sweeping rollout can…
This Tools of the Trade installment profiles Steve Cheshire, a PM at Pendo, to show how one team runs continuous discovery with a practical tech stack. The core argument is that there is no single correct toolset; the…
Lenny Rachitsky compiles informal Twitter poll results on the software tools product, design, analytics, research, and data teams rely on, plus what early-stage founders buy first and spend most on. The post separates…
Teresa Torres describes rolling out Kindling, a simple idea management app, across her company to make product input more transparent and data-driven. She wanted an easy tool that everyone would use to share and vote on…
Teresa Torres asked members of the Continuous Discovery Habits community to share early mistakes they made when adopting continuous discovery. Three practitioners describe their missteps: a PM who ran discovery without…
This issue of Lenny Rachitsky's newsletter covers three reader questions. The first asks how a bootstrapped founder should offer a late-joining CTO equity without deterring investors; guest Hunter Walk advises common…
Teresa Torres describes a common product dilemma: a few at-risk customers request a feature that doesn't fit the product's strategy and may have more perceived than actual value. She argues that the hardest part is not…
Teresa Torres recounts visiting the Kindling team and recording a podcast-style interview with its founder, Tim Meaney, about innovation. The post frames Kindling, an idea management tool, as a long-time favorite of…
Cagan argues that many companies lack a clear way to tell whether product managers' work actually aligns with business strategy, and that teams drift into chasing feature ideas. He proposes a 'Product Scorecard': a…
Teresa Torres and Hope Gurion analyze free-text answers from a 2022 benchmark survey where many product teams answered 'other' when asked whether their product aims to grow revenue or reduce costs. Using real examples…
Teresa Torres, a discovery coach, shares a case study of a SEEK product team that moved from ad hoc, as-needed discovery to a structured, continuous discovery practice. Before coaching, the team interviewed customers…
Amir Klein, writing via Lenny's newsletter, explains how he built an AI 'second brain' using ChatGPT Projects while launching monday.com's first AI agent. He covers giving the project a defined personality, feeding it…