Minimum Viable Product

Reflections on a movement

Building minimum lovable products, stories from WeWork and Airbnb, and thriving as a PM

The Politics of Pilot Teams

Marty Cagan argues that as more companies move toward the product operating model, political dynamics become central to change, and a well-designed pilot team is the key early step. A pilot acts as a low-cost, fast MVP…

Tools of the Trade: A Look at the Discovery Tech Stack at 99designs

This Product Talk edition profiles how the Collaboration Group at 99designs, a two-sided design marketplace owned by Vistaprint, is building a continuous discovery practice. Senior PM Matt Richmond and his team treated…

Beyond Lean and Agile

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…

Vision vs. Strategy

Marty Cagan argues that product teams can only be empowered and make good autonomous decisions when they understand the broader context, which starts with a compelling product vision and a clear product strategy. The…

Discovery Sprints

Marty Cagan introduces the discovery sprint, a one-week time-boxed effort to tackle a substantial problem or risk in a product's definition and validate a potential solution with real users. He explains that the…

Know Who You Are Building For and Why

Teresa Torres argues that successful products, even giants like Facebook and Google, began by serving a narrow group rather than everyone. Founders who try to sell to everyone end up building for no one, because the…

Practice Defining Your MVP

Teresa Torres argues that an MVP should be defined by what you need to learn, not by the smallest or easiest feature set to ship. Using a hypothetical SMS-based event tool for soccer teams, she shows how the riskiest…

How You Build Matters. Finding Your MVP.

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…

Improve These 8 Decisions and Build Great Products Faster

Teresa Torres argues that product builders make constant decisions, but human judgment is error-prone, so teams should deliberately design decision-making processes. She identifies eight critical decisions in building…

The Need For Speed

Marty Cagan argues that product teams need to move fast, and that many teams still hold a Waterfall-era belief that speed trades off against quality and innovation. He contends that speed is valuable for reasons beyond…

Developing Strong Product Teams

Marty Cagan and Jeff Patton argue that product teams should be judged by the outcomes they generate rather than the output they ship. The article offers a practical checklist of questions to diagnose how strong a…

Global Product Management Talk: Writing Compelling User Stories

Teresa Torres reflects on a live podcast discussion about writing user stories, where co-host Roger Cauvin argued that stories lacking the who and why leave engineers doing only the bare minimum. Torres clarifies that…

Product Scorecard Stages

Marty Cagan argues that a product team's primary scorecard metric should change depending on the stage the product is in. He describes three stages: MVP, where the only goal is winning several happy, referenceable…

Live-Data Prototypes vs. Production

Cagan distinguishes live-data prototypes, which are real code sent live traffic (usually in A/B tests) to prove an idea works, from production software that the business can run on. Production demands complete critical…

Viable Product vs. Minimal Product

Marty Cagan argues that a product proving it works and is usable is not the same as a product people will actually choose to buy and use. He calls the smallest functional, usable version a 'Minimal Product' and reserves…

Product Management Then and Now

Marty Cagan contrasts the traditional PC-era product manager with the modern Internet-era product manager. He argues that many organizations still operate with the older model, which was often ineffective and poorly…

Great Product Books: Where To Get Started

Teresa Torres argues that great product management means thinking from the whole business's perspective: a product must not only please customers but also earn money from them, which is the hardest part. She recommends…

Turning Big Ideas Into Great Products

Teresa Torres argues that many startups treat product management as little more than turning feedback into a feature list, and that the discipline remains underdeveloped. She notes that teams know valuable research…

Product Market Fit vs. Product Vision

Marty Cagan argues that Product Market Fit and the Product Vision are related but distinct, and that teams often confuse them. The Product Vision describes the services and customers a company intends to serve over…

Lean Thinking

Marty Cagan reviews Eric Ries's book "The Lean Startup" and argues it is one of the best product books in years, relevant to both new and experienced product people and not only early-stage startups. He notes Ries…

Minimum Viable Product

Marty Cagan argues that the term minimum viable product is used so inconsistently that it confuses product teams, and proposes a clearer working definition. He defines an MVP as the smallest product that is valuable…

Product Discovery Diary

Marty Cagan walks through a fabricated three-week product discovery sprint to show what the fast, iterative rhythm of discovery actually looks like compared with linear, Waterfall-style processes. The team sets product…

The Product Discovery Plan

Cagan argues that teams who genuinely value product discovery still waste time when they lack a plan, so they should write a Product Discovery Plan spelling out who is involved, what must be done, what resources are…

Product Discovery vs. Product Optimization

Cagan argues that product teams need two distinct disciplines: Product Discovery, which uses prototyping and user testing to find new valuable, usable, feasible solutions, and Product Optimization, which improves an…

Great Products By Design

Marty Cagan argues that great products are not accidents but follow from a set of consistent principles. He lists ten truths, centered on the primacy of user experience design, the need to test ideas with real users…