Cagan argues that while most team objectives should be aspirational, some situations require high-integrity commitments: deliverables with dates leaders can rely on, driven by trade shows, contracts, tax deadlines…
Marty Cagan argues that team objectives should empower product teams by assigning them a hard problem to solve rather than a feature to build, along with the strategic context needed to make good decisions. Handing over…
Marty Cagan and Lea Hickman catalogue the common forms of 'theater' that show up when companies try to transform how they build products. Their core observation is that many transformations stay on the surface…
Tara Seshan, a former Stripe and Watershed product leader, shares a playbook for presenting product tradeoffs so leadership actually makes a decision rather than defaulting to "do both." The post covers framing…
“Listen to this episode on: Spotify | Apple Podcasts In this episode of All Things Product, Petra Wille and Teresa Torres dive deep into a question from a listener: What’s the real difference between organizations that fund projects and those that fund teams? It’s a deceptively simple question that”
Marty Cagan argues that strong project management is a hidden driver of successful product organizations, using eBay's Lynn Reedy as the example. He contends that project management is distinct from product management…
Lenny Rachitsky interviews Duolingo VP of Product Cem Kansu about how the company builds product. The post covers its co-lead team structure, quarterly and yearly OKR cycles, a tiered product review process, weekly…
Teresa Torres argues that product requirements should describe the user opportunity rather than prescribe a solution, since detailed upfront solution specs lead teams to overcommit before validating what works. She…
Marty Cagan examines the Waterfall product development process, which he notes remains the most common way software products are built despite being decades old and widely criticized. He explains its phased structure of…
Marty Cagan argues that many teams disband the people who built and launched a product right after release, wasting the period when learning and correction are most valuable. He proposes a dedicated "Rapid Response"…
This podcast episode, hosted by Teresa Torres with guest Petra Wille, argues that saying no is a core product management skill rather than an optional extra. The conversation accepts that there is always more work than…
Teresa Torres argues that an MVP should be defined by what you need to learn, not by the smallest or easiest feature set to ship. Using a hypothetical SMS-based event tool for soccer teams, she shows how the riskiest…
Teresa Torres argues that every member of the product trio (product manager, designer, engineer) is jointly responsible and accountable for all five risk areas: desirable, viable, feasible, usable, and ethical…
Marty Cagan argues that slow product delivery is usually not caused by weak developers but by organizational and process problems. Drawing on his work with many product teams, he lists the ten most common root causes of…
Marty Cagan argues that milestone swarming, where most or all of a dedicated product team (or a virtual team drawn from several teams for an initiative) focuses together on one significant business milestone, can speed…
Teresa Torres and Petra Wille challenge the popular claim that AI has made software delivery free, arguing that while building a single feature is far cheaper, producing a real, production-quality product is not. They…
Jason Fried argues that teams don't need a prioritized backlog to know what to work on next. Choosing the next task is just a series of yes/no decisions, and those can be made as you go, using what you currently know…
Cagan argues the traditional product spec is broken: it takes too long to write, is rarely read, leaves hard questions unresolved, and gives false comfort that the product is on track. He proposes replacing it with a…
Cagan argues that once leaders decide which problems product teams should tackle, the mechanics of assigning objectives matter a great deal. Leaders own the decision of which team takes which problem, guided by product…
This podcast episode examines how capacity planning, a common quarterly ritual of allocating team time to fixed deliverables, fits within outcome-driven and discovery-first product organizations. The hosts argue that…
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…
Cagan argues that the friction around commitments in Agile product teams stems from making them too early, before the team knows whether a solution is feasible, valuable, and viable. Because product ideas often fail or…
Marty Cagan argues that product work has two distinct phases: strategy, where you discover what to build through exploration and customer contact, and execution, where you build and ship it. Many teams fail because they…
Melissa Perri argues that a product roadmap is a communication tool, not just a planning artifact, so it deserves deliberate design for each audience. She covers practical choices: consistent color coding, quarterly…