“Listen to this episode on: Spotify | Apple Podcasts In this episode of All Things Product, Petra Wille and Teresa Torres dig into their end-of-year reflection practices — the ones they've refined over decades of product work, personal growth, and plenty of nerdy experimentation. They compare how their processes”
Marty Cagan argues that slow product delivery is usually not caused by weak developers but by organizational and process problems. Drawing on his work with many product teams, he lists the ten most common root causes of…
Jason Fried argues that when we meet a simpler system, idea, or implementation, our instinct is often to dismiss it as insufficient. He suggests a better response is to ask why our own work has become so complicated and…
Marty Cagan pays tribute to Steve Jobs following his death, calling him arguably the greatest figure in the product world. He credits Jobs with tackling very hard problems and producing products that defined their…
Lenny Rachitsky lays out seven practical strategies for earning a promotion, drawing on his own roughly nine promotions over a 16-year career. The core argument is that consistent, impactful work is the foundation, and…
Lenny Rachitsky shares five strategies from his own early career for people in their 20s deciding on roles, quitting jobs, and new ventures. He argues against over-optimizing for resume checkboxes, follows interests…
Marty Cagan argues that the project management role, in its many forms, is often poorly performed and sometimes seen as a liability, and that its damaged brand may need a fresh start. He attributes the problems to…
Marty Cagan argues that deep experience in a specific product domain is usually less important for product managers than people assume. He recounts two cases where a strong PM was doubted for lacking domain experience…
Teresa Torres argues that remote teams are becoming the norm, and that companies focus too much on their benefits while underestimating the challenges. Drawing on her experience with distributed graduate-school teams…
The author, who onboarded fully remotely at Produx Labs during the COVID-19 pandemic, argues that starting a job virtually is daunting but has real upsides. Remote hiring signals the company values the role, offers…
Marty Cagan argues that many feature-team product managers and delivery-team product owners are actually doing project management or backlog administration, and that companies are beginning to recognize this. He calls…
Marty Cagan argues that product teams often fixate on a single kind of analytics, usually web analytics, and miss the larger picture. He lays out four flavors that matter for product work: user analytics on how real…
Teresa Torres follows up her controversial argument that teams should ignore some bugs by explaining why interruptions are so costly. Using a series of escalating analogies about co-writing a paper, she shows how…
Marty Cagan argues that product teams need to move fast, and that many teams still hold a Waterfall-era belief that speed trades off against quality and innovation. He contends that speed is valuable for reasons beyond…
A guest-written post by storyteller Matthew Dicks argues that humor is a learnable skill rooted in surprise, not a fixed talent. It walks through seven practical strategies (nostalgia, exaggeration, o…
Jason Fried argues that owning an independent company is a rare privilege, one that frees leaders to experiment in ways that public companies and businesses forced to justify every move cannot. He encourages owners not…
Marty Cagan explains where the term "product discovery" came from and why he chose it. He argues that software has always faced two core problems: figuring out the right product, and then building it right, which he…
Teresa Torres argues that empathy, the ability to feel what another person feels rather than merely sympathize, is essential for building products that solve real problems or create delight. Sympathy tends to make us…
Lily Smith, Chief Product Officer at BBC Maestro, describes how she set out to add deliberate practice to product learning after realizing that reading and talks were not enough to change how she and her peers work…
Marty Cagan contrasts two ways of organizing product work: project-based feature teams that get reshuffled around a communal roadmap, and dedicated product teams that persist around a business area. He argues that…
Marty Cagan argues that splitting product work across teams is one of the hardest and most recurring organizational questions once a company outgrows its earliest stage, and that there is no quick general answer. He…
Lenny Rachitsky answers a reader who must deliver bad news after inheriting a six-month onboarding overhaul that performed worse on metrics than the old flow. He argues the key is imagining you are the decision-maker…
Lenny answers a reader's question about keeping support for a long-term 'big bet' project at a large company. His core argument is that steady, visible wins (the 80/20 split of incremental work and high-risk work) earn…
Marty Cagan argues that many product teams grind through backlog stories without understanding the customer pain or business impact behind them, and that this is worsened by Kanban-style continuous delivery…