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…
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Marty Cagan argues that while Lean and Agile are often criticized, their core principles remain valuable, even though most companies practice them poorly. He observes that the best product teams have already moved…
The source text opens by describing a common complaint among product managers: that PMs lack enough influence over product decisions at modern tier 1 software companies. The excerpt is cut off immediately after this…
Marty Cagan reviews Tony Fadell's book "Build," written from a CEO's perspective, and argues it is a standout guide to what the best product companies do. Cagan notes that Fadell's advice is deliberately old-school…
Marty Cagan argues that leadership and management are distinct, both essential competencies that many people wrongly conflate. He draws on an excerpt from Marty Abbott and Michael Fisher's The Art of Scalability to…
Marty Cagan argues that the simple conceptual model of continuous discovery and delivery running in parallel is useful precisely because it is process-agnostic, and warns against elaborating it into a rigid process…
Teresa Torres argues that handing discovery findings from a product trio to the rest of the delivery team recreates the old waterfall 'game of telephone', losing context and distorting customer needs. Discovery should…
Marty Cagan argues that the most important thing a product manager coach brings is the right mindset, not just the right tools. Techniques like 1:1s can backfire if the manager uses them to assign tasks rather than…
Lenny Rachitsky follows up his tech worker sentiment survey by investigating how people who avoid or effectively manage burnout do it. Drawing on open-ended video surveys and interviews, he introduces ARMOR, a five-part…
Marty Cagan argues that product leaders must actively develop their product managers, since strong teams are essential and people leave managers rather than companies. He presents a gap-analysis tool for ongoing skills…
This edition of Lenny Rachitsky's Q&A newsletter answers three reader questions about early-stage product and team building. It lays out five tactics for solving the marketplace cold-start problem, mostly centered on…
Teresa Torres profiles Lisa Orr, a product manager who carried her continuous discovery habits from Airship to a new Senior PM role at Human API. The central argument is that good discovery is wasted unless stakeholders…
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…
An interview with Snowflake's Director of Product for its Developer Platform and Ecosystem, describing how the company plans, reviews, and organizes product work. It covers annual 'big boulder' planning, six-page plan…
Teresa Torres argues that engineers should be active participants in product discovery rather than only writing code, since they contribute distinct knowledge and skills. She explains that different team members…
Marty Cagan argues that team objectives are the mechanism for assigning work to empowered product teams in a way that still executes the company's product strategy. Product leadership chooses which problems matter and…
Marty Cagan argues that great product managers are rare but identifiable, and that the best way to find them is to screen for a specific set of traits and skills. He stresses that traits like product passion, customer…
Cheryl Michael, CPO of CentralReach, argues that product leaders who want to act with confidence need a structured, data-driven approach to product operations rather than relying on intuition alone. She frames product…
Lenny answers a reader question by unpacking how Airbnb built a strong experimentation culture, using its early data science hires, north-star metric, embedded data scientists, and trustworthy tooling as the core story…
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…
Marty Cagan argues that in many startups the CEO is the most effective head of product, especially in consumer companies, because the CEO best understands the market, customer and company and is fully committed. He…