Marty Cagan walks through a fabricated three-week product discovery sprint to show what the fast, iterative rhythm of discovery actually looks like compared with linear, Waterfall-style processes. The team sets product…
“In this short video, I walk through what decision-making looks like in a product trio. If you missed the first video in this series, be sure to check that out first: What’s a product trio? You can watch the video or read a lightly edited transcript below. Do”
Teresa Torres argues that many product teams believe they already practice discovery, but they run interviews, usability tests, and A/B tests too infrequently and mostly to validate decisions already made. She defines…
Cagan argues that once a product strategy is set, leaders face a fork: hand teams features to build (feature teams and roadmaps) or hand them problems to solve (empowered product teams). The difference is whether teams…
Teresa Torres recounts a 2008 product story in which her team at an alumni community startup fixed on an engineer's Google Maps idea while the real problem was unwanted spam. She argues teams fall in love with their…
Marty Cagan argues that if he could change only one thing about how a product organization works, it would be empowering engineers. Engineers work with enabling technology daily, so they are best placed to spot what is…
Teresa Torres addresses a common confusion: how OKRs relate to outcomes. She explains that an OKR pairs an inspiring objective with measurable key results, while an outcome is the change that results from actions…
Teresa Torres wraps a 3-month blog series inspired by Chip and Dan Heath's book Decisive, connecting its decision-making research to product work. Her posts argue that product teams should be prepared to be wrong, ask…
This Product in Practice piece follows the Simply Business product team as they adopted continuous discovery with coaching from Teresa Torres. Their first chosen opportunity, late customer payments, was a real pain…
Marty Cagan argues that empowered product teams need hard problems to solve, and product strategy is the discipline of deciding which problems matter. He observes that many companies have plenty of features and projects…
Marty Cagan argues that as companies shift from sales-driven feature teams to empowered product teams, the way product teams engage customers changes, and customers need to understand why. He frames a set of pledges…
Aman Khan argues that writing evaluations is becoming a defining skill for AI product managers, since evals measure how each part of a system affects quality. The post explains what evals are, compares human, code-based…
Teresa Torres explains how she decides what to accept and decline as a product coach, teacher, writer and speaker, starting from a clear set of personal priorities: teaching, curriculum design, reading, writing and…
Teresa Torres shares the personal productivity, reading, product-building, and collaboration tools she relies on as a product manager, startup builder, and graduate student. She opens with a caveat that she once…
Marty Cagan argues that product teams learn most when they put early, rough ideas in front of real users, and that they should do so faster than feels comfortable. He notes that polishing ideas in private mostly deepens…
This third installment of a marketplace growth series examines how leading marketplaces bootstrapped their initial supply, which is the side that most marketplaces remain constrained on. Drawing on interviews with…
Cagan argues that team autonomy and leadership control are reconciled when leaders supply two inputs: a clear product vision and specific, prioritized business objectives for each team. Teams should then have freedom…
Teresa Torres argues that discovery teams should be judged by whether their discovery work actually moves a desired product outcome, tracked as absolute progress quarter over quarter rather than percent of a goal. Since…
Teresa Torres and Hope Gurion continue their series arguing there is no single right way to run product discovery, while holding teams to shared principles. This session covers two principles of continuous discovery…
Marty Cagan argues that product discovery depends heavily on judgement, which many product people try to replace with frameworks and templates. He identifies four areas where judgement is required: assessing risk…
Teresa Torres interviews Ellen Juhlin, a product leader at Orion Labs, about how she introduced continuous discovery habits to a team that had been driven by founder-led outputs, sales-driven feature requests, and…
Teresa Torres argues that product discovery, the work of deciding what to build, should be a continuous activity rather than a project-based phase at the start of a initiative. She contrasts it with delivery, the work…
Marty Cagan and Felipe Castro argue that moving from outputs (what we build) to outcomes (the difference we make) is conceptually simple but practically very hard. They contend that most failed attempts stem from trying…