Marty Cagan argues that organizations must shift from measuring success by shipping output on fixed dates to achieving customer and business outcomes. He frames this as moving from time-to-market to time-to-money and…
Marty Cagan argues that for product companies at scale, he knows of no reliable alternative to strong product leadership. He explains that founders who act as head of product eventually stop scaling, and that the common…
Lenny Rachitsky profiles how Coda's product organization plans, reviews, and builds product, drawing on an interview with CPO Lane Shackleton. The post covers Coda's evolving planning cadence, OKR philosophy, review…
Marty Cagan argues that 'The Innovator's Dilemma' describes a symptom of large-company decline rather than its root cause. Drawing on Ben Horowitz's 'Peacetime CEO/Wartime CEO' framing, he contends that startups are…
Marty Cagan argues that the product model, a way of organizing companies around discovering and delivering valuable solutions, is the key capability for responding to major opportunities and threats. He points to the…
Marty Cagan argues that the common company process of taking executive or stakeholder ideas, building business cases, prioritizing feature roadmaps, and handing requirements down a line from product to design to…
Marty Cagan argues that the project management role, in its many forms, is often poorly performed and sometimes seen as a liability, and that its damaged brand may need a fresh start. He attributes the problems to…
Marty Cagan responds to a CTO's question about whether a strong product designer and technical lead still need a product manager, arguing the PM's contribution is often invisible or poorly done. He frames the discussion…
“Have you ever felt like a complete weirdo in your company? Like there are only a handful of people who “get you”? Or have you gone to a conference and gotten a little confused because suddenly it seems like you have a lot more in common with everyone? Then you return to work, and somehow the weirdness comes back.”
This edition of Lenny Rachitsky's newsletter answers two reader questions. First, with input from Jackie Bavaro, it argues that early-career PMs should prioritize shipping wins, learning best practices, building…
Marty Cagan argues that empowered product teams depend not on less leadership but on better leadership, and that moving to empowerment is far harder for product leaders than most expect. He splits the role into…
Shreyas Doshi argues that many behaviors large companies encourage, such as answering support tickets, talking to many customers, and responding instantly to email and Slack, are designed to keep average performers…
Teresa Torres and Petra Wille discuss the gap many product teams feel between modern, outcome-driven practices like continuous discovery and experimentation and the realities of organizations that do not support them…
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…
New product leaders often struggle with the shift from doing discovery and delivery themselves to leading teams and stakeholders. Two leaders from the Continuous Discovery Habits community share how they handled this…
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…