“One of the hardest parts of product management is making visible how you evaluate ideas and make decisions about what to build. Everyone has ideas. Rarely are you sitting around dreaming up what to build next. More likely, your wading through feature request after feature request trying to identify what'”
Teresa Torres argues that product managers often feel frustrated when senior stakeholders override discovery-based recommendations with their own preferred solutions. Because organizations are hierarchies rather than…
Teresa Torres and Petra Wille discuss a world where nearly every conversation is recorded and transcribed by AI note-takers and wearable devices. Teresa found, after checking her own Granola transcripts, that her…
Linear CEO @karrisaarinen: "I took a break this summer from paying attention to AI. I thought that when I came back, I'd feel left behind. But when I came back, I realized that nothing has really changed. There's new models, there's new techniques, there's new agents. But in the
Marty Cagan argues that a common reason transformation efforts fail is structural: large management consultancies and IT outsourcing firms are poorly positioned to drive a shift to the product model. Their people are…
Marty Cagan argues that stakeholder management is a frequent pain point for product managers, but it can be substantially improved. He defines stakeholders narrowly as people who hold veto power over launching work…
Shreyas Doshi describes a counterintuitive lesson he picked up from observing a manager at Stripe: the most persuasive way to win people over is often to stop selling and instead be genuinely candid about tradeoffs…
Marty Cagan argues that great product companies require genuine passion for a long-term vision, not just the pursuit of a quick hit. He observes a renewed 'product frenzy' fueled by mobile, where building an app is…
This is an index page from Marty Cagan's SVPG site introducing a series of articles on how a company can transform from merely adequate to truly excellent at product work. It groups the articles into themes…
Marty Cagan explains how SVPG operates: it advises startups and growth-stage companies and runs public and private workshops on how strong product teams work. Demand far exceeds capacity, which he attributes to SVPG's…
Teresa Torres shares the four opening questions she uses when screening candidates for product management roles, drawn from her consulting work recruiting PMs and designers. The questions probe a candidate's mental…
Teresa Torres recounts a early-career design review in which a client dismissed her work as horrible and asked to reuse an existing homepage. Her manager defused the clash by asking her to walk through her reasoning…
Marty Cagan argues that many Agile trainers and coaches who work with software teams lack the experience needed for commercial product companies, and that the poor work he has repeatedly cleaned up after is a persistent…
Marty Cagan argues that product work has two distinct phases: strategy, where you discover what to build through exploration and customer contact, and execution, where you build and ship it. Many teams fail because they…
Lenny's newsletter opens with his own sabbatical experience and then hands the floor to DJ DiDonna, founder of The Sabbatical Project, who has interviewed over 250 people about extended time off. DJ argues that…
Teresa Torres and Petra Wille argue that promotions, while common career targets, can be a poor north star because they are largely outside an individual's control and often tied to salary and status rather than…
Tara Seshan, a former Stripe and Watershed product leader, shares a playbook for presenting product tradeoffs so leadership actually makes a decision rather than defaulting to "do both." The post covers framing…
Lenny Rachitsky answers a reader struggling with frequent reorgs, arguing they can accelerate careers and offering five tactical moves to position yourself for bigger roles. He then brings in executive coach Katherine…
Cagan argues that a fairly standard organizational structure has emerged for product organizations, and that its shape affects behavior even though role definitions matter more. He contends that a CEO/COO or division GM…