Marty Cagan argues that many product teams delay validating their ideas with real customers until it is too late, and that this delay is a common cause of disastrous product results. He notes that people often agree in…
“What do your customers care about? This seems like a simple enough question, but many product teams struggle to answer it honestly. Often the first instinct is to frame an answer in terms of what your business cares about. But remember: Your customers don’t care about your business outcomes.”
Lenny Rachitsky argues that three core Buddhist teachings (dukkha, impermanence, and non-self) map well onto product management work. He explains that dissatisfaction is a built-in feature of human psychology, so PMs…
Tal and Aman argue that the fastest way to build intuition for AI products is to use coding agents like Cursor for non-technical product work rather than consumer chat tools. The post walks readers through setup, model…
Teresa Torres argues that generative AI changes many product-management practices (prompt engineering, context engineering, orchestration, and evals) but that core fundamentals still determine whether a product…
Teresa Torres argues that many product managers remain unaware of a fundamental shift toward modern product discovery, despite the Lean Startup and design thinking having been around for years. She observes that many…
Torres argues that teams should stop testing ideas at random and instead be strategic about what they experiment on. Rather than prioritizing a list of ideas by gut feel, teams should estimate expected outcomes…
Teresa Torres argues that reading about a craft, whether storytelling or product management, does not make you good at it. Just as the Pixar story rules circulated widely without producing new Pixar-caliber…
Marty Cagan argues that many product teams still fly blind because they do not instrument their products to collect usage analytics, or collect so little that they cannot see how customers actually use features. He…
This podcast episode, hosted by Teresa Torres with guest Petra Wille, argues that product leaders are stretched thin by shrinking headcount, AI disruption, and constant context switching, and that they tend to…
Cagan argues that product teams need two distinct disciplines: Product Discovery, which uses prototyping and user testing to find new valuable, usable, feasible solutions, and Product Optimization, which improves an…
Marty Cagan argues that 'Product Ops' has become a vague label, with at least six distinct meanings in companies today, making a claim that a company 'has Product Ops' nearly meaningless. He reviews five models he finds…
Teresa Torres addresses the most common reader question about her book Continuous Discovery Habits: why user researchers, marketers, data analysts and other roles were not named in the product trio. She explains that…
Marty Cagan argues that a company growing rapidly from startup to large organization faces stress, and that practices and people who drove early success can later hold it back. He suggests leaders who excel at startups…
Teresa Torres surveys how product teams build and maintain opportunity solution trees, the visual map linking a desired outcome to opportunities and candidate solutions. She interviewed six practitioners about the tools…
Teresa Torres reports on the second part of her inaugural CDH Benchmark Survey, which asked product teams about their discovery habits. She argues that many people doubt that continuous discovery exists in practice…
This podcast episode argues that conflict on a product team is normal and even healthy, while its total absence often signals a psychological safety problem. Petra Wille and Teresa Torres explore how trios should handle…
Marty Cagan reviews Ken Kocienda's memoir Creative Selection, told from the perspective of an engineer who spent about 15 years at Apple and served as tech lead for key efforts, most notably the original iPhone…
This podcast episode examines why companies drift back to command-and-control leadership during uncertain times, because it feels faster and more decisive. Teresa Torres and Petra Wille argue that no single leader can…
Lenny Rachitsky offers a three-step process for a product person to say no to a manager while keeping their trust: listen and ask questions, form an independent point of view, then respond constructively using one of…
Cagan argues that the main purpose of prototyping is to discover a successful solution, not to ship a product. Recent gen-AI prototyping tools have sharply cut the cost of live-data prototypes, changing the economics…