Leadership & management

Setting goals

Lenny Rachitsky lays out a framework for setting team and company goals, placing goals between strategy and roadmap as the way to measure whether strategy is working. He covers the traits of a good goal, how to pick a…

Coaching – Customer-Centricity

Marty Cagan argues that customer-centricity is a core trait for product managers that is shaped heavily by company culture and by what leaders demonstrate. He stresses that the true customer should be defined narrowly…

Product in Practice: Getting Engineers Involved in Brainstorming

Brainstorming in groups often underperforms because of social loafing, conformity, production blocking, and downward norm setting, yet teams still benefit from the diverse perspectives each member brings. This essay…

Customer Inspired; Technology Enabled

Marty Cagan argues that the common belief that great products come from listening to customers is a myth for technology products, because customers often cannot imagine what is possible or what they want until they see…

How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world

Product Strategy – Actions

Cagan argues that once a product strategy is set, leaders face a fork: hand teams features to build (feature teams and roadmaps) or hand them problems to solve (empowered product teams). The difference is whether teams…

The Humility Trap

The essay challenges the common assumption that publicly expressed vulnerability signals humility. The excerpt, which is cut off early, suggests the author will argue that vulnerability performed with a veneer of…

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…

Transformation Fail

Marty Cagan argues that most digital transformations fail, and draws on two decades of hands-on work helping companies adopt the product operating model to name the root causes. He lists ten recurring mistakes, ranging…

Good Product Coach / Bad Product Coach

Marty Cagan argues that most product coaches and trainers are steeped in the feature-team model, which is the opposite of what companies need when moving to a true product operating model. He frames a good coach through…

Devolving From Good To Bad

Marty Cagan describes an anti-pattern in which fast-growing, product-successful companies gradually lose their good habits after hiring senior leaders from large, brand-name firms that have stopped innovating. The…

Humanizing product development

Stop Brainstorming and Generate Better Ideas

Teresa Torres argues that product leaders should not be the sole decision-makers on what to build, and that a company should instead empower its whole team to generate and evaluate ideas. She contends that…

Moments That Changed Us - All Things Product Podcast with Teresa Torres & Petra Wille

In this podcast episode, Teresa Torres and Petra Wille trade stories about the formative experiences that shaped their product careers. Teresa recounts running a startup through the 2008 recession, where prioritization…

Leading the Change: How Ellen Juhlin Introduced Discovery Habits at Orion Labs

Teresa Torres interviews Ellen Juhlin, a product leader at Orion Labs, about how she introduced continuous discovery habits to a team that had been driven by founder-led outputs, sales-driven feature requests, and…

Why Women Make The Best Product Managers

Marty Cagan, after noticing that more than half of the 'rock star' product managers he knows are women despite women being a small share of the field, offers personal, non-statistical theories about why. He argues that…

Where To Work?

Marty Cagan argues that when looking for a product job, the most important factor is not the company's name but the manager you would report to. Before leaving a current feature-team role, he suggests first trying to…

Becoming a Product Coach

Marty Cagan argues that the product industry needs more skilled product coaches, and that many self-described coaches lack real product experience. He insists that effective product coaching must rest on relevant…

Core Concept: Getting Engineers to Embrace the Product Trio

Teresa Torres argues that engineers should be part of product discovery from the start, and offers three tactics for overcoming their resistance. Many engineers resist customer contact, but they still hold strong…

Coaching – Strategic Context

Marty Cagan argues that empowered product teams can only make good decisions if they understand the broader business context they operate in. He outlines six layers of strategic context that leaders should share and…

Great Products, Bad Companies

Marty Cagan argues that great products are necessary but not sufficient for a great company, because a company known for strong products attracts predatory investors and executives who strip value for quick financial…

Scaling with Process vs. People

Marty Cagan argues that the root cause of many large companies losing their product innovation is an over-reliance on process over people. He builds on his earlier overview of Product Ops models by focusing on why…

Engineers and Sales People

Marty Cagan argues against the view that a technology company is essentially made of engineers who build software and salespeople who sell it, with everyone else treated as overhead. He contends that combining even…