“You've already learned to stop sending your resume to everyone and anyone. Right? If you haven't already, stop and read, how not to find a product job. This post will build off of that one. We've learned the best way to find a job is to start”
Marty Cagan argues that after filtering out bad ideas, the next key tool for making hard investment choices is a Board of Advisors. Unlike a board of directors, which is shaped by investor duties and CEO oversight, an…
This post is Part 1 of a Phase 2 series on scaling marketplaces, asking how a company can tell whether it is supply-constrained or demand-constrained once it has product-market fit. The author argues the answer is…
Teresa Torres and Hope Gurion argue that many organizational transformations toward the product operating model stall because companies start before they are ready. Driven partly by consultants and the success of big…
This podcast episode introduces "trash can tracking," a technique where teams place trash can symbols on discovery and delivery boards to make the work they deliberately discard as visible as the work they ship. Host…
Marty Cagan argues that most discovery work needs little planning, but larger efforts such as multi-team initiatives call for deliberate framing before diving in. He describes two goals: aligning the team on the…
Lenny Rachitsky and prompt engineer Mike Taylor ran a blind test to see how close AI comes to doing core product manager work. They argue that most headlines saying AI 'can't do X' rely on weak models and basic prompts…
Teresa Torres argues that product discovery, the work of deciding what to build, should be a continuous activity rather than a project-based phase at the start of a initiative. She contrasts it with delivery, the work…
Marty Cagan argues that generative AI will reshape how product teams are built and how they work, drawing on his decades of experience through successive tech disruptions like the PC, the internet, and mobile. He is…
Teresa Torres argues that user story prioritization is a balancing act rather than a formula. She suggests first setting high-level priorities through themes, then ranking stories within each theme by expected impact…
Teresa Torres argues that the MVP is widely misunderstood and that getting it right is critical for product teams. Instead of letting build time drive priorities, she suggests distilling a big, ideal idea into the…
Teresa Torres explains how she decides what to accept and decline as a product coach, teacher, writer and speaker, starting from a clear set of personal priorities: teaching, curriculum design, reading, writing and…
Marty Cagan argues that no single product management model fits every company; the right one depends on context, and it is best chosen by starting from the problems a company is actually experiencing. Drawing on his…
Marty Cagan argues that great products are necessary but not sufficient for a great company, because a company known for strong products attracts predatory investors and executives who strip value for quick financial…
Teresa Torres argues that product managers often wish their leadership, engineers, designers, and sales teams would behave differently, when the more productive move is to change their own behavior first. For each…
Chris Jones argues that enterprise software companies often underinvest in product design because they assume only end users benefit from it, when design also drives buyer decisions. He contends that the product itself…
David Placek of Lexicon Branding outlines a step-by-step naming playbook drawn from decades of work on brands like Swiffer, Pentium and Vercel. He argues that a strong name builds trust, communicates an original idea…
Marty Cagan describes a proposal from Jeff Patton to replace the traditional product roadmap with an "opportunity backlog." The core problem is that roadmap items are often treated as commitments, yet genuine product…
Marty Cagan argues that product evangelism, which he describes as selling the dream, is a core job for founders and product managers alike. Without it, strong teams are hard to assemble at startups, and at larger…
Marty Cagan introduces four thought leaders whose blogs he finds valuable for product people, many of whom were relatively new voices in 2010. He profiles Ben Horowitz, Eric Ries, Steve Blank, and Fred Wilson…
Cagan argues that the common pattern of writing a feature-packed PRD with P1/P2/P3 priorities, then haggling with engineering over schedule and cuts, reliably produces incoherent products that nobody likes. He proposes…
The source text is a single sentence: 'For high-stakes situations, the outcome is paramount.' Because the full essay is not provided, this summary is limited to that claim. The core idea is that when stakes are high…
Lenny Rachitsky argues, in response to anxiety over AI replacing product managers, that PMs are the best-positioned tech role to thrive in an AI-driven world. He contends that AI excels at execution while PMs' soft…
Teresa Torres profiles Chi Phan, a senior PM who was asked to evaluate whether her company should build an API to automate a manual order-fulfillment process between consumers, vendors and her company. Chi used internal…