An interview with Gong's chief product officer on how the company builds product. It covers two-tier annual and quarterly planning, autonomous multi-skill pods organized around problem areas, the decision to skip OKRs…
Marty Cagan uses General Patton's quote about telling people what to do rather than how to do it to argue that product managers should specify outcomes, not implementations. He identifies two failure modes: customers…
Once leaders assign a problem to a product team, they must also signal how ambitious the team should be in its discovery work. Cagan frames objectives as bets that spread risk across a portfolio, ranging from low-risk…
“If you’re getting this post, that means my wife’s due date is very near (😮💨), or our kid was just born (🥹). To give my new family my undivided attention, I’ll be taking a month or so of parental leave. To make sure you continue to receive exceptional value from the newsletter during this period, a few months back I put out a call for guest posts. Out of 500+ pitches, I whittled it down to six extraordinary posts. Today’s post is…”
Marty Cagan argues that during and after the pandemic, teams are sliding back into heavy requirements documents (PRDs) because remote collaboration is tiring. He reframes the core of strong product work as three things…
Teresa Torres draws on the 2022 CDH Benchmarks survey of roughly 2,000 people to examine why product trios (PM, designer, engineer) often fail to collaborate effectively. Although most respondents worked in trios, about…
Teresa Torres argues that product managers make dozens of decisions daily and tend to feel confident about them, yet decision research shows people often make poor choices while believing they are sound. Our minds are…
Teresa Torres and Petra Wille examine the blurred line between product and engineering, where product managers drift into owning bugs, tech debt and architecture. They argue this starts as helpfulness but leads to PM…
This reading guide introduces the June installment of a book club around Continuous Discovery Habits, centered on Chapter 7, which argues that product strategy belongs in the opportunity space rather than the solution…
Marty Cagan argues that as more companies move toward the product operating model, political dynamics become central to change, and a well-designed pilot team is the key early step. A pilot acts as a low-cost, fast MVP…
Lenny answers a reader's question about having separate design and engineering roadmaps, arguing that cross-functional teams should converge on one source-of-truth roadmap. He outlines the core benefits of a shared…
Lenny Rachitsky, with instructor Colin Matthews, offers a practical primer for product managers who want stronger technical fluency. It walks through application architecture (client, server, database), how APIs work…
Lenny Rachitsky's early newsletter answers three reader questions: how to motivate engineers to hit arbitrary deadlines, where to find real PM career ladders, and how to get executives to accept more actionable customer…
Teresa Torres and Petra Wille examine the build vs. buy decision, which AI is reshaping. They argue the classic rule of thumb, to avoid building non-core functions, has limits, since vendors may be better positioned…
Marty Cagan explains why he has largely stopped recommending OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) to most companies: the technique is simple, but organizations rarely have the structure it needs to work. He argues three…
Marty Cagan describes a growing trend where product teams move from batch-style phases to continuous practices in both delivery and discovery. He traces how continuous integration, testing, and deployment have spread…
This is a weekly roundup of product-building reads rather than a single argument. It pulls together a few threads: deciding what to ignore so you can focus on the most critical work, the primacy of conversion strategy…
Marty Cagan argues that the performance-management ideas he learned at Hewlett-Packard, Management by Objectives (later refined as OKRs), remain the foundation of how the best companies operate. The first principle is…
Marty Cagan and Josh Kerievsky argue that outsourcing agencies can apply the product model to custom solution work, even though clients often arrive with a fixed solution in mind and fixed-price contracts. The core…
Marty Cagan argues that economic downturns, while painful, can be a productive period for product teams and companies that know how to use them. Beyond the defensive measure of cutting costs to extend runway, he…
Teresa Torres argues that acceptance criteria are often the missing piece of a user story, and that they determine when a story is ready for release. She contends that criteria should be written from the end-user's…
Teresa Torres uses Jia Jiang's story of pursuing a startup dream under a six-month deadline to introduce the idea of tripwires: predefined points where a decision gets reconsidered. She argues that as people invest…