“There's been a lot of confusion around brainstorming these days. First, there was the New Yorker article by Jonah Lehrer claiming that brainstorming doesn't work. Scott Berkun wrote a rebuttal arguing Lehrer's logic was flawed. Twitter exploded with comments. I'm going to try to make sense”
Lenny Rachitsky and Louise Beryl analyze over 5,000 survey responses from newsletter subscribers to benchmark U.S. product manager salaries by level. The headline finding is the rise of the individual contributor path…
Marty Cagan argues that product teams can only be empowered and make good autonomous decisions when they understand the broader context, which starts with a compelling product vision and a clear product strategy. The…
Marty Cagan argues that product teams often conflate empowerment and autonomy, and that the two should be considered separately. Empowerment means a team can choose how to solve a problem, while autonomy means it can…
Teresa Torres argues that hiring for product management should hinge on demonstrated ability rather than credentials. As a hiring manager and consultant, she says she cares about none of the usual gatekeepers, such as…
Marty Cagan argues that product discovery depends heavily on judgement, which many product people try to replace with frameworks and templates. He identifies four areas where judgement is required: assessing risk…
Marty Cagan describes a common failure mode: once a product has customers, the same development team is pulled between urgent fixes and new product work, so both slow to a crawl and everyone becomes frustrated…
Jason Fried argues that teams don't need a prioritized backlog to know what to work on next. Choosing the next task is just a series of yes/no decisions, and those can be made as you go, using what you currently know…
Teresa Torres and Petra Wille question whether the technology industry they have built their careers in is net positive for the world. They reflect candidly on contributing to the internet, social media, and now AI, and…
Marty Cagan argues that product teams often use a predictable set of excuses to avoid doing real product discovery, and that these excuses usually reflect a misunderstanding of discovery rather than a genuine…
Jason Fried argues that the common hiring requirement of 'years of experience' is a weak signal, since time spent doing something doesn't guarantee anything was actually produced or learned. He proposes evaluating…
Torres uses a made-up exchange between a product manager and an engineer to show how a feature disagreement is often really an implementation concern. Both people select different data and draw different conclusions, a…
Jason Fried argues that how fast a product is built, how many commits or people went into it, and how many hours were spent are all development metrics about the work, not the product. These measures say nothing about…
Teresa Torres announces the launch of her book Continuous Discovery Habits, presenting it as a guide for product trios to run a structured, sustainable discovery practice. She frames it as the distillation of eight…
Teresa Torres describes a period of struggle as a startup CEO, realizing that her work was interesting to her but not meaningful. Interest fades when products get hard or go wrong, while meaning sustains effort. She…
The article argues that remote work during the pandemic has, paradoxically, created room for product managers and leaders to invest in professional development. Without commutes and in-person meetings eating their days…
Lenny Rachitsky answers a reader weighing a move from software engineering to product management after three years. He describes his own switch and lays out the daily work of PMs across shaping, shipping, and…
Marty Cagan argues that milestone swarming, where most or all of a dedicated product team (or a virtual team drawn from several teams for an initiative) focuses together on one significant business milestone, can speed…
Jason Fried argues that people should not spend much energy thinking about legacy. His core point is to do the best work you can right now, since usefulness later only follows from usefulness today. He challenges the…
Teresa Torres describes how she dedicates much of December to reflecting on the past year and planning the next. She runs an annual retrospective asking what went well and what did not, and keeps both lists in view to…
A guest-authored paid guide from a full-time executive negotiation coach who presents GAINS, a five-step framework (Gather, Align, Influence, Navigate, Secure) for negotiating senior compensation. The core argument is…
Teresa Torres opens 2024 by departing from her usual annual plan, explaining that a sabbatical-style 2023 was derailed by her husband's surgery and a difficult platform migration, leaving her facing burnout. Rather than…
Teresa Torres shares a list of lesser-known blogs she follows, inspired by Daniel Pink's year-end recommendations. Rather than product blogs, she highlights writers covering learning, decision making, happiness…
Jason Fried describes almost washing his hands with a tiny fly sitting by the drain. Turning on the tap would have sent it down, but a moment of hesitation let the fly escape on its own. The essay uses this small moment…