“Jim, like many product mangers, spends most of his day with his engineering team. He clarifies requirements, triages bugs, and seeks out hidden dependencies. Sally, on the other hand, spends most of her time with customers. She's understanding their context, uncovering pain points, and identifying opportunities to delight. What’”
John Cutler argues that teams often prioritize better when they pay attention to the underlying tensions they observe and act on daily, rather than focusing mainly on the specific items being prioritized. Those items…
Lenny Rachitsky profiles how Miro builds product, drawing on an interview with its CPO Varun Parmar. The post covers Miro's cross-functional AMPED structure, its three-year vision and annual strategy process, a…
Lenny Rachitsky and Nels Gilbreth argue that annual and quarterly planning is painful for most organizations because it asks many people to imagine futures, agree on one, and plan a path to it. Drawing on dozens of…
Marty Cagan argues that product managers who spend their time prioritizing a laundry list of feature requests are working on the wrong problem. A feature-request roadmap pushes unvalidated features into the plan, skips…
Marty Cagan argues that while Lean and Agile are often criticized, their core principles remain valuable, even though most companies practice them poorly. He observes that the best product teams have already moved…
Melissa Perri argues that when several product teams must deliver a shared cross-team integration, companies need a deliberate coordination model or the work stalls. She describes two strategies: dual responsibility…
Teresa Torres argues that the most important product decision is what to build next, and that common scoring spreadsheets built on customer demand, build time, and stakeholder needs lead to mediocre products. She…
Mihika Kapoor, who helped build FigJam and launched Figma Slides, shares seven lessons for keeping a startup mindset inside a large company. The core argument is that speed, prototypes, open progress-sharing, strong…
Marty Cagan argues that many product teams grind through backlog stories without understanding the customer pain or business impact behind them, and that this is worsened by Kanban-style continuous delivery…
Lenny answers a first-time B2B founder's question about prioritization before product-market fit. He argues that typical frameworks suit large companies, lists common early-stage pitfalls, and proposes a single goal…
Cagan argues that the common pattern of writing a feature-packed PRD with P1/P2/P3 priorities, then haggling with engineering over schedule and cuts, reliably produces incoherent products that nobody likes. He proposes…
Marty Cagan argues against a damaging anti-pattern in which a product organization splits into a discovery team that decides what to build and a delivery team that simply implements it. He notes that good modern…
Cagan argues that a great product comes from pairing a real customer need with a solution that has just become technically possible, which makes the product manager and engineer relationship critical. He frames the two…
Marty Cagan argues that project-based funding, where companies approve discrete projects with business cases, is a poor model for building strong products. Teams cannot know early whether a project is worth pursuing or…
Marty Cagan argues that a core failure in product planning is that weak projects, which should be killed during product discovery before reaching engineering, often are not. He identifies seven recurring reasons for…
Marty Cagan follows up his earlier talk on why product teams fail by describing ten attributes of strong product teams operating under a Continuous Discovery and Delivery model. He argues that empowered, durable…
Marty Cagan argues that Agile methods, such as Scrum and XP, change but do not eliminate the product manager's job, and he offers guidance specific to product software rather than custom or IT projects. The product…
Lenny Rachitsky shares five practical time-management tactics for product managers, who often lack clear deadlines and drown in shallow work. He argues for scheduling protected deep-work blocks, keeping a trusted to-do…
Teresa Torres argues that the MVP is widely misunderstood and that getting it right is critical for product teams. Instead of letting build time drive priorities, she suggests distilling a big, ideal idea into the…
Marty Cagan and Jon Moore argue that a product-led company's engineering practices should rest on three principles: protecting customers, revenue, brand and colleagues; responding quickly to market needs; and earning…
Marty Cagan argues that the simple conceptual model of continuous discovery and delivery running in parallel is useful precisely because it is process-agnostic, and warns against elaborating it into a rigid process…
Marty Cagan describes a proposal from Jeff Patton to replace the traditional product roadmap with an "opportunity backlog." The core problem is that roadmap items are often treated as commitments, yet genuine product…
Marty Cagan responds to readers who argued that any tool or process can be used well or badly, so blaming the process is misplaced, and that culture matters more than process. He agrees culture is central but argues…