Execution, roadmaps & process

Dylan Field live at Config: Intuition, simplicity, and the future of design

This Week #12: Expanding your business internationally 🌏

Lenny Rachitsky answers a reader's question about taking a marketplace business international, drawing on advice from two former Airbnb leaders who built its European business. The piece argues that expansion…

Ch. 6: Mapping the Opportunity Space

This reading guide introduces Chapter 6 of Continuous Discovery Habits, the monthly book club installment marking the book's fifth anniversary. It argues that product teams should stop reacting to every customer need…

Claude Code: What It Is, How It's Different, and Why Non-Technical People Should Use It

Teresa Torres introduces Claude Code, a terminal-based version of Claude that can read and act on local files, and contrasts it with browser chats, Projects, and the desktop app. Using a competitive analysis example…

Why Most Product Teams Don't Define a Clear Vision

Teresa Torres argues that most product teams lack a clear, written vision even though everyone agrees one is important. She identifies five reasons teams skip it: unclear ownership, the discomfort of saying no, the…

AI Prototyping - All Things Product Podcast with Teresa Torres & Petra Wille

Teresa Torres and Petra Wille examine whether the wave of AI prototyping tools (Replit, V0, Bolt, Lovable, WindSurf) genuinely helps product discovery work. They argue these tools can rapidly produce interactive…

Knives and battleships

Jason Fried responds to the recurring criticism that Basecamp makes 'yet another' to-do list, chat, or messaging product. He admits the pull toward grander missions in tech is real, but argues it looks odd when applied…

Coaching – Thinking

Marty Cagan argues that the most important trait of a capable product manager is the ability to think, which is distinct from raw intelligence. Product management is fundamentally problem solving under many simultaneous…

Getting buy-in

Shivani Berry, a former PM turned leadership coach, argues that buy-in comes from showing teammates how your idea advances their goals. She explains three common failure modes: assuming others think like you, feeling…

Don't Use Generative AI to Replace Discovery with Real Humans

Teresa Torres argues against generative AI tools that try to replace real discovery work, such as synthetic customer interviews, auto-generated opportunity solution trees, or AI-drafted artifacts. She explains that…

How to Improve Your Experiment Design (And Build Trust in Your Product Experiments)

Teresa Torres argues that the popular "We believe... will result in... we will have confidence when..." hypothesis format is quick but insufficient for sound experiment design. She explains that teams should test the…

Product Discovery for Non-Technology Products

Marty Cagan reflects on whether product discovery techniques built for software apply to non-technology products. He tested them while writing a book, using customer research, a small group of charter customers…

Lead with Context not Control

Marty Cagan reviews Reed Hastings' book No Rules Rules and uses Netflix's mantra 'lead with context and not control' to argue for empowering product teams. He recounts Hastings' story of a manager making a seemingly bad…

Measure What Matters

Teresa Torres recounts advising a junior designer who wanted to grow in user experience design. She argues that hands-on learning matters more than reading or talking, and that the designer's best growth opportunity is…

The 14 Most Common Hypothesis Testing Mistakes Product Teams Make (And How to Avoid Them)

Teresa Torres argues that as product teams adopt experimentation, their tests are only as good as their hypotheses and experiment design, so poor setup wastes money, time, and sprints. She lists fourteen common pitfalls…

The Best Product Management Model?

Cagan argues that companies often ask how they can copy the product management model of Google or Apple, but this usually backfires. Those models fit their specific founders, cultures, and products, and Apple's in…

My Team of Agents: How I Get Claude to Do Tasks While I'm Away from the Computer

Teresa Torres describes a personal 'team of agents' built on Claude that works for her while she is away from the computer: a podcast manager, a sales admin, and a coding manager. Each agent prepares tasks, reports, or…

Grinding It Out

Teresa Torres argues that good design comes from deliberately generating many ideas rather than waiting for a single flash of insight. She notes that the effortless-seeming "a-ha" moment rests on a lot of prior work…

My favorite PM interview questions

Lenny Rachitsky shares his favorite interview questions for product managers, one per core PM responsibility, with notes on what strong answers look like and which red flags to watch for. He also includes a set of…

Gain Product Management Experience By Starting Right Now

Teresa Torres argues that aspiring product managers can break the 'chicken and egg' problem of needing experience to get a PM job by starting their own side project right away. She notes there is no shortage of unsolved…

What I’m Saying Yes to in 2020 (With 2 Big Announcements)

Teresa Torres announces her 2020 priorities in a public annual letter, continuing a tradition started the previous year to focus her work and filter irrelevant requests. Her core focus is refining her Continuous…

Ask Teresa: How Do You Get Your First Product Job Without Experience?

Teresa Torres addresses the catch-22 of landing a first product role when employers want experience. Her core argument is that aspiring PMs can manufacture credible experience through self-directed side projects, even…

Looking Back On The First Year of Product Talk

Teresa Torres reflects on her first year of blogging at Product Talk, which she started in November 2011. She found that writing sharpened her own thinking, often surprising her with conclusions she hadn't expected, and…