Cagan argues that while most team objectives should be aspirational, some situations require high-integrity commitments: deliverables with dates leaders can rely on, driven by trade shows, contracts, tax deadlines…
This piece profiles Datasite, formerly Merrill Corporation, a financial-document printer that had to reinvent itself as cloud demand grew. The company was slow, hierarchical and risk-averse, so it reframed its culture…
Marty Cagan argues that product management should not sit inside marketing or engineering, the two most common homes for it. Marketing tends to confuse listening to customers with product discovery and merges product…
“Are you committed to creating a great user experience? Do you believe in data-driven product development? Are you motivated to create products that your customers love? I’m guessing most of you answered yes to all three of those questions. Let me ask you a different set of questions.”
The essay argues that frustration with time to market often comes from unrealistic expectations, where executives assume that turning an idea into a shipped product should take less time than generating the idea itself…
Teresa Torres and Hope Gurion, both product discovery coaches, walk through the eight most common mistakes teams make when defining product outcomes. They argue that outcomes often get mislabeled as outputs…
Marty Cagan argues that Hewlett-Packard was Silicon Valley's greatest product company because its founders built a culture and structure for continually breeding new products and businesses. By splitting growing…
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…
Teresa Torres argues that product teams are sliding back into feature-factory habits as AI tools make shipping faster, and that stakeholders often arrive with solutions rather than problems. Her core advice is to stop…
Melissa Perri argues that the sudden shift to distributed work during COVID left many teams disconnected, and that the core problem is missing the informal stories and interactions that build trust and candor. She…
Lenny Rachitsky answers a reader's question about team speed by compiling a list of roughly fifteen tactics drawn from founders, his own experience, and community input. The core argument is that velocity matters…
Amol Avasare, who runs B2B growth at MasterClass, recounts a traumatic brain injury from a sparring session and the year-long recovery that followed. He argues the experience sharpened his approach to energy, emotions…
Marty Cagan follows up on an earlier list of product manager problem areas with five more common pitfalls. He argues that many teams play defense, acting risk-averse and protecting ground instead of moving forward…
Marty Cagan argues that setting team objectives for a quarter is not enough; product teams must actively track and manage progress throughout the period. He explains that ongoing 'keep the lights on' work can crowd out…
John Cutler argues that teams often prioritize better when they pay attention to the underlying tensions they observe and act on daily, rather than focusing mainly on the specific items being prioritized. Those items…
Marty Cagan argues that the pandemic's reduction in commuting gave many people uninterrupted solo time, such as long walks, that is valuable for deep thinking about hard problems. He describes his own experience writing…
Julie Zhuo argues that the expertise that made you valuable, such as a specialized craft or deep procedural skill, may be the very thing AI erodes first, leaving some professionals more exposed than others. The source…
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…
Marty Cagan argues that while empowered, cross-functional product teams have become the norm and boost motivation and ownership, teams often feel constrained by shared foundations. He frames the core tension as a…
Marty Cagan offers a curated starting path for aspiring product managers who are overwhelmed by contradictory online advice. He argues that the product manager role is about ensuring what gets built is both valuable and…
Lenny Rachitsky shares high-level structures from 20+ large companies' product management career ladders, including titles by level, evaluated competencies, and where IC and manager tracks split. He argues career…
Hiten Shah argues that many workplace problems are simple to solve once they reach the people directly involved, but they become costly when routed indirectly through intermediaries. Drawing on experiences at…
Cagan argues that a great product comes from pairing a real customer need with a solution that has just become technically possible, which makes the product manager and engineer relationship critical. He frames the two…
Lenny Rachitsky answers a reader moving from a solo startup PM role to a large company, arguing that communication, influence, and data-driven decision-making matter most in that shift. He also notes the shared core of…