This essay recounts how Datasite, a SaaS provider for dealmaking, rebuilt its outdated platform under pressure to keep clients from leaving. When the platform failed during a beta launch with an Irish client, the…
Deb Liu, who led the team behind Facebook Marketplace, recounts how an idea she pitched in 2009 languished for years before a small Groups-based commerce test revealed organic buying and selling behavior. The team's…
Marty Cagan follows up on his critique of SAFe, the scaled-agile framework, by answering reader questions. He argues that process choices are really culture choices, and that adopting a heavy framework signals top-down…
An interview with Shopify's VP of Product, Glen Coates, on how the company plans around annual CEO themes, avoids OKR-style metrics ownership, reviews work through a staged system, and structures teams around merchant…
Marty Cagan contrasts two ways of organizing product work: project-based feature teams that get reshuffled around a communal roadmap, and dedicated product teams that persist around a business area. He argues that…
“Do you know what it takes to build great products? Are you so confident in your approach that you know that your product will be a success? I’m not. I’m often filled with doubt. Even when things are going well, I wake up at night worried that it’”
Teresa Torres interviews Hope Gurion, Chief Product Officer at CareerBuilder, about how she built product management, UX, and analytics functions at a company that previously lacked them. Gurion describes shifting her…
Teresa Torres argues that even improvements to a product will trigger resistance, because users must adjust to any change. She contrasts Facebook's rocky rollout of the News Feed and Beacon with its smoother launch of…
Marty Cagan answers the most common questions readers raised after his article proposing an alternative to conventional product roadmaps. He argues that engineers should help decide what to build, that outcome-based…
An interview with Snowflake's Director of Product for its Developer Platform and Ecosystem, describing how the company plans, reviews, and organizes product work. It covers annual 'big boulder' planning, six-page plan…
Teresa Torres and Hope Gurion discuss how leaders can hold empowered product teams accountable to outcomes without sliding back into feature-factory control. They describe empowerment as a spectrum: teams get discretion…
Teresa Torres and Petra Wille discuss the practical pain of global invoicing and EU tax compliance for small international online businesses. They argue that platforms and product teams often miss small regulatory…
Cagan argues that teams who genuinely value product discovery still waste time when they lack a plan, so they should write a Product Discovery Plan spelling out who is involved, what must be done, what resources are…
Marty Cagan asks whether product discovery applies to feature teams, which are handed a list of features rather than problems to solve. At a simple level, discovery is irrelevant there because the solution is already…
Teresa Torres argues that many product managers are so consumed by delivery work (grooming backlogs, triaging bugs, handling schedule slips) that they lack time for discovery, the work of figuring out what to build. Ad…
Scaling product teams is hard. Delivering consistent outcomes while keeping things simple is even harder. Mark Rosenberg, VP of Product at @Workday shares how revamping ProdOps reduced complexity, aligned teams, and delivered better outcomes at scale. 🎧
This is a curated index of Lenny Rachitsky's best newsletter posts from his first two and a half years, organized into nine topics such as growth strategy, product management work and career, product-market fit…
Lenny answers a reader's question about keeping support for a long-term 'big bet' project at a large company. His core argument is that steady, visible wins (the 80/20 split of incremental work and high-risk work) earn…