“Listen to this episode on: Spotify | Apple Podcasts In this episode of All Things Product, hosts Petra Wille and Teresa Torres dive into a common challenge faced by internal product teams—relying on stakeholder meetings instead of proper discovery practices. Why do so many teams collect requirements through meetings rather”
Teresa Torres argues that user researchers have a vital place in continuous discovery, even though most product trios don't include one by default because companies rarely have enough researchers. She outlines three…
Lenny Rachitsky and Noam Segal report results from a survey of over 8,200 tech workers on burnout, optimism, manager effectiveness, work setup, company size, career clarity and AI anxiety. The core argument is that…
Marty Cagan argues that the best product managers think like owners rather than employees, taking responsibility for outcomes instead of merely completing activities. He draws on Jeff Bezos's shareholder letters to…
This podcast episode features Petra Wille explaining her new Product Leadership Wheel, a self-assessment framework that extends her earlier PM Wheel to senior product leaders. It organizes product leadership around 12…
Marty Cagan argues that product leaders should not be dismissed because of their youth, noting that outstanding product people exist across all ages. He points out that anyone 24 or older has grown up alongside the…
Marty Cagan argues that as companies shift from stakeholder-driven feature teams to empowered product teams, the relationship between product teams and stakeholders must change on both sides. Creating a solution…
Marty Cagan argues that many Agile coaches come from delivery backgrounds and lack the product and design experience needed to help teams with discovery. He describes Discovery Coaches as typically former product…
Melissa Perri announces the launch of a new podcast, Product Thinking, built around answering questions submitted by the Product Management community. The post previews three example topics: escaping an individual…
John Cutler argues that visual maps of product work, such as value streams, dependency diagrams, or process flows, can create a false sense of clarity and hide real problems. When the underlying system is incoherent, a…
Saumil Mehta, former CPO of Square, argues that the "skip lead" (the manager of managers) is pivotal to organizational health, since most manager problems trace back to how the skip leads hires, reviews, and coaches…
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…
Chris Favorite Interview Question describes a hiring question a PM manager can use: ask candidates to rank four work attributes (execution, creativity, strategy, growth) from strongest to weakest. The exercise reveals…
In this podcast episode, Teresa Torres and Petra Wille examine the hard decision of when and how to sunset products that are profitable and liked but no longer growing. They argue that this mediocre middle ground is…
John Cutler, writing in his newsletter The Beautiful Mess, reflects on starting a new job and the intensive effort of learning how the product, workflows, history, people, and artifacts all fit together. Rather than…
Teresa Torres argues that the engineer in a product trio should be the one with the most authority over technical feasibility, but that the word "lead" causes confusion because it conflates seniority, management, and…
Marty Cagan announces the second edition of his book INSPIRED, which he describes as essentially a new work rather than an update. He explains that the field has moved past early Lean Startup and Agile ideas, so the new…
Marty Cagan compares working at small startups versus large companies, a question he is often asked by people weighing career moves. He draws on experience across company sizes from brand-new startups to firms with over…
Marty Cagan argues that the public debate over Paul Graham's 'founder mode' essay has largely missed its point. He reframes the idea as a style of leadership rather than a switchable mode, one that combines deep product…
Marty Cagan revisits his earlier skepticism of the 'CEO of the Product' metaphor and states a clearer position in favor of it, with caveats. He notes the concept's risk of making product managers act like bosses, but…
This article profiles Sling TV, the streaming service that positioned itself as an early OTT provider, and argues that continuous reinvention and speed are central to its growth. Its SVP of Strategy and Technology…
Marty Cagan describes a less common product-team role: subject matter experts (SMEs) or domain experts, who have deep knowledge of the business's particular field, such as tax, payroll regulation, or medicine. He argues…
Marty Cagan argues that the gap between the best product companies and the rest comes from a misunderstanding of technology's role. He recalls Marc Andreessen's warning that software is eating the world and notes that…
This issue of Lenny Rachitsky's newsletter answers three reader questions. The first addresses impostor syndrome in product management, with a guest contribution from executive coach Kate Hosie reframing it through…