Marty Cagan argues that strong product people need both ambition and agency, and that agency depends on ambition: skills alone won't drive action without a desire to improve. He reflects on how some product people…
This essay recounts how Datasite, a SaaS provider for dealmaking, rebuilt its outdated platform under pressure to keep clients from leaving. When the platform failed during a beta launch with an Irish client, the…
“Stepping into your first product leadership role is a major change. As an individual contributor, you’re focusing on your own projects and progress, but as a leader you are now responsible for the team (or teams) that report up to you. You may find yourself less involved in the”
Marty Cagan revisits The Lost Interview with Steve Jobs to answer a question he has struggled with: why do so many product companies remain weak when the best ones are the most valuable in the world? Rather than…
Teresa Torres responds to readers who want to adopt outcome-based product management but face obstacles in their organizations. She identifies four common barriers: fast development cycles that leave no time to evaluate…
Marty Cagan responds to a Product Therapy interview with Shreyas Doshi, which described three product leader archetypes: craftsperson, operator, and visionary. Cagan argues that deep product craft is non-negotiable…
Teresa Torres and Petra Wille rant about how absurd corporate procurement has become for outside experts like speakers and consultants. Torres describes contracts with 80-page ethics policies, 800-question security…
Teresa Torres interviews Hope Gurion, Chief Product Officer at CareerBuilder, about how she built product management, UX, and analytics functions at a company that previously lacked them. Gurion describes shifting her…
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…
Marty Cagan argues that the MBA pathology, the set of habits instilled by many business programs, continues to produce weak product managers and weak products despite claims that it would self-correct. He stresses he is…
Marty Cagan shares his 2024 product predictions in narrative form, framing each as a hope and a worry rather than a forecast, given his track record of overestimating how quickly change arrives. He covers ten recurring…
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…
Teresa Torres profiles Kelsey Terry, former Director of Product at Going, who led a pilot product trio tasked with testing the ideas in Continuous Discovery Habits and spreading them across the company. The story shows…
Stephanie Leue, then Chief Product Officer at Doodle, describes moving a team that had been run as a top-down feature factory toward continuous discovery. Despite good data access, customer feedback channels, and a new…
Marty Cagan argues that integrity is the foundation of trust in empowered product teams, and that trust rests on both competence and character. He acknowledges that integrity is hard to maintain, since product managers…
Teresa Torres and Petra Wille argue that product management is not dead but is changing, as the traditional product trio of PM, design, and engineering blends into a new 'product builder' model. AI raises the baseline…
Teresa Torres and Petra Wille push back on the hype around the 'product builder' trend, arguing that whether product managers should code or vibe code is the wrong starting question. They suggest first asking whether…
Marty Cagan, a longtime admirer of Apple, argues that the first Apple Watch after Steve Jobs is a disappointing product that falls short of Apple's usual standards of value. He criticizes its dependence on the phone…
Marty Cagan argues that product discovery and rapid test-and-learn techniques, which startups use, apply equally to established companies. Startups have no legacy to protect, so they can take big risks cheaply…
Lenny Rachitsky compiles several lightweight decision-making frameworks, ordered from most to least structured, and explains when each fits best. He stresses that frameworks suit only high-stakes, one-way-door choices…
Marty Cagan argues that most tech product companies struggle to find enough very strong product managers, and that strong product teams depend on them. He points to Google's Associate Product Manager program, which…
Cagan argues that feature-list roadmaps often tell teams what to build without explaining the underlying problem, producing waste. He proposes replacing them with shared context: a product vision describing the…
Teresa Torres examines the difference between product managers and product owners, a question many companies ask her as a discovery coach. She traces how the product manager role evolved from traditional…
This essay extends an earlier sports-management analogy about actively managing a team's skills and composition, now using gardening instead. It argues that managers cannot simply hire people and wait for results; they…