OKRs

Lessons from scaling Stripe

Mastering product strategy and growing as a PM

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

How Notion builds product

An in-depth look at how Notion builds product, drawn from an interview with its Chief Product and Technology Officer. It covers planning cadences, a four-stage product review process, the small size of the PM team, a…

How Ramp builds product

An interview-based deep dive into how Ramp's product org works, centered on a culture of velocity: planning only as far out as needed, anchoring strategy to the financial model, organizing teams around business…

How Duolingo builds product

Lenny Rachitsky interviews Duolingo VP of Product Cem Kansu about how the company builds product. The post covers its co-lead team structure, quarterly and yearly OKR cycles, a tiered product review process, weekly…

An inside look at how Miro builds product: Lessons on outmaneuvering competitors, team structure, product quality, and moving fast

Inside TikTok: Culture, strategy, monetization, and more

How Miro builds product

Lenny Rachitsky profiles how Miro builds product, drawing on an interview with its CPO Varun Parmar. The post covers Miro's cross-functional AMPED structure, its three-year vision and annual strategy process, a…

The Product Model at Google

Marty Cagan and Elias Lieberich describe how the product model shows up at Google, a company with nine products that each exceed one billion monthly users. The article frames the model around three parts: leaders…

Shifting from Outputs to Outcomes: Why It Matters and How to Get Started

Teresa Torres argues that a clear desired outcome sets the scope, latitude, and success measure for product discovery, yet many teams struggle to define one. She distinguishes outcomes (the impact of work on customers…

Product in Practice: All It Took Was One Product Trio to Inspire Change—The Hemnet Story

This Product in Practice piece profiles how Hemnet, Sweden's largest property portal, adopted continuous discovery through a grassroots start. A User Research Director and a Chief Product Officer describe how one…

Executive Engagement

Cagan and Moore argue that moving to an empowered product-team model is a major cultural shift that must start with senior leaders, who still have legitimate needs to run the business. Their answer is not to simply step…

Inspiring Strong Product Leaders: A Conversation with Petra Wille

Teresa Torres interviews product coach Petra Wille about her path from computer science and concept work at SAP and XING to becoming a general manager and then a coach. Wille argues that product leaders, who often come…

Discovery – Learning vs. Insights

Marty Cagan, who popularized the term product discovery, clarifies a common confusion: learning is valuable, but the real goal of discovery is to gain insights, which are learnings a team can act on. He explains that…

Product in Practice: Iterating to an Actionable Outcome at tails.com

Sonja Martin, a product manager at tails.com, describes how her cross-functional team repeatedly refined their desired outcome. They began with 90-day retention, a useful North Star but too lagging and noisy to guide…

Why Product Leaders Need Product Operations

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…

Team Objectives – Summary

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…

Scaling Agile FAQ

Marty Cagan follows up on his critique of SAFe, the scaled-agile framework, by answering reader questions. He argues that process choices are really culture choices, and that adopting a heavy framework signals top-down…

Planning Product Discovery

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…

Establishing a True Product Culture

Marty Cagan responds to readers stuck in IT-mindset organizations who ask whether they can change their company or must leave for a startup. He argues that established companies can still produce disruptive innovation…

Good Product Team / Bad Product Team

Marty Cagan contrasts strong product teams with weak ones, drawing on years of working with both top technology companies and struggling ones. He argues the differences are not minor but span leadership behavior, team…

How to get your marketing team to drive more impact

Emily Kramer, who led marketing at Asana, Carta and other companies, argues that much marketing work wastes time because teams lack alignment before work begins. She introduces GACCS (Goals, Audience, Creative…

Fostering a culture of experimentation

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…

Twitter’s former Head of Product opens up: being fired, meeting Elon, changing stagnant culture, building consumer product, more

Nickey Skarstad (Airbnb, Etsy, Shopify, Duolingo) on translating vision into goals, operationalizing product quality, second-order decisions, brainstorming, influence, and much more