“Thursday’s post, Stop Brainstorming and Generate Better Ideas, got quite the reaction, particularly on Twitter. I’m not surprised. I also reacted strongly when I first learned about the research against brainstorming. Rather than moving on to idea evaluation, I want to first respond to the most common objections.”
Teresa Torres argues that teams use A/B tests poorly, mainly to confirm favored ideas or to blindly try variations, which teaches them little. Drawing on John Dewey's account of reflective thinking, she describes a…
Teresa Torres argues that teams should separate their research questions (what they want to learn) from their interview questions (what they actually ask), because people answer direct questions unreliably due to…
Lenny answers a reader question by unpacking how Airbnb built a strong experimentation culture, using its early data science hires, north-star metric, embedded data scientists, and trustworthy tooling as the core story…
Marty Cagan argues that the pandemic's reduction in commuting gave many people uninterrupted solo time, such as long walks, that is valuable for deep thinking about hard problems. He describes his own experience writing…
Teresa Torres explains how she stopped re-explaining her business to AI tools by giving Claude Code a persistent, file-based memory. Instead of uploading context into chats or web Projects, she stores knowledge in local…
Marty Cagan describes a less common product-team role: subject matter experts (SMEs) or domain experts, who have deep knowledge of the business's particular field, such as tax, payroll regulation, or medicine. He argues…
Lenny Rachitsky compiles favorite life mottos shared by podcast guests, asking them for a motto they return to often. The post is a collection of short inspirational sayings and the reflections behind them, intended as…
Teresa Torres and Hamel Husain discuss how to evaluate and debug AI products with a scientist's mindset. Hamel draws on his machine learning background at Airbnb and GitHub, and his consulting work with startups like…
This reading guide kicks off a monthly book club celebrating five years of Continuous Discovery Habits, focused this month on Chapter 10, 'Testing Assumptions.' The guide frames the chapter as a bridge between…
This book club reading guide introduces Chapter 5 of Continuous Discovery Habits, focused on continuous customer interviewing. Teresa Torres argues that product trios should interview customers on a weekly cadence…
Teresa Torres argues that a lack of web traffic should not stop product teams from learning, even if A/B testing is their only experimentation tool. Using a worked example of testing testimonials on a blog's about page…
Marty Cagan argues that many companies outsource for the wrong reason, namely cost savings, when they should outsource to assemble the right product team. He notes that Silicon Valley's high living costs push talent…
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…
Teresa Torres and Petra Wille discuss moving from Claude in the browser to Claude Code running on a local machine, where it can work directly with files and workflows. They cover practical setup such as project…
Teresa Torres argues that product leaders need only a basic grasp of statistics to avoid being misled by A/B tests. She explains statistical significance using a conversion example and warns that many web testing tools…
Lenny Rachitsky distills roughly seven years of marketplace supply-growth lessons from Airbnb into a catalogue of tactics and strategies, including the value proposition, referral programs, direct sales, piggy-backing…
Jason Fried argues that the excitement around AI agents comes less from the technology itself and more from the psychological experience they create: delegating a task to someone fully competent. He notes that most…
A community digest from Lenny Rachitsky's paid newsletter covering a range of product and growth questions: SEO keyword prioritization and the debate over domain authority versus content, PM career ladder resources…
This episode of Teresa Torres's podcast walks through how Trainline, a 25-year-old rail and coach ticketing platform, built Travel Assistant, an AI-powered companion for travelers facing disruptions and needing…
In this All Things Product podcast episode, Teresa Torres and Petra Wille discuss how product people can handle FOMO around the rapid stream of AI tools. They argue that starting from real problems and friction is more…
Teresa Torres introduces a practical test harness for running AI product evals. Manually running every input through a prompt, saving outputs, scoring them against evals, and repeating for each prompt variant is…
Teresa Torres argues that people feel overwhelmed by AI but can build practical skills by starting with simple, everyday uses of large language models. She presents a graded set of use cases, from basic search…
Teresa Torres describes the problem of sharing AI context files and Claude Code skills across multiple personal devices and with a colleague. She walks through why Dropbox, iCloud and git each fell short, mainly because…