Founder of Silicon Valley Product Group (SVPG) and author of Inspired, Empowered and Transformed.
Marty Cagan argues that real collaboration in an empowered product team is very different from how many product managers assume they work. It is not consensus, democracy, artifact-producing requirement handoffs, or…
Marty Cagan argues that the most important trait of a capable product manager is the ability to think, which is distinct from raw intelligence. Product management is fundamentally problem solving under many simultaneous…
Marty Cagan argues that effective product managers need about four uninterrupted hours a day for product discovery: working out valuable, usable, feasible, and viable solutions to hard problems. He observes that many…
Marty Cagan argues that the best product managers think like owners rather than employees, taking responsibility for outcomes instead of merely completing activities. He draws on Jeff Bezos's shareholder letters to…
Marty Cagan notices that several of the strongest product companies, including Apple, Google and Amazon, have very different cultures yet share a hidden common thread: their founders were coached by Bill Campbell, the…
Marty Cagan continues his coaching series by describing how managers can help product managers close specific skill gaps identified in an earlier assessment. He covers product knowledge (users, data, industry, business…
Marty Cagan argues that managers of product managers must actively develop their people, since talented PMs will leave for other companies if they lack growth. He presents a gap-analysis skills assessment as the…
Marty Cagan argues that the written narrative is his favorite coaching tool for turning product managers into exceptional ones. Unlike a spec, a narrative lays out the vision, the customer and business value, and the…
Marty Cagan argues that the weekly one-on-one is the foundation of coaching product managers, and that most managers either never run it well or treat it as optional. The 1:1 exists primarily to build a PM's competence…
Marty Cagan follows up on an earlier list of product manager problem areas with five more common pitfalls. He argues that many teams play defense, acting risk-averse and protecting ground instead of moving forward…
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…
Marty Cagan describes the most common confusions he sees in product teams, drawn from a dinner conversation with product leaders who recognized the same patterns. He argues that product teams should discover solutions…
Marty Cagan argues that most companies fail to get results from product teams not because teams lack discovery skills, but because they are not truly empowered. He contrasts teams that serve the business with strong…
Marty Cagan reviews Ken Kocienda's memoir Creative Selection, told from the perspective of an engineer who spent about 15 years at Apple and served as tech lead for key efforts, most notably the original iPhone…
Martina Lauchengco, a long-time SVPG partner, shares her origin story: an instinct for finding better ways that grew from a childhood shaped by her father's habit of challenging the status quo. She recounts early…
Chris Favorite Interview Question describes a hiring question a PM manager can use: ask candidates to rank four work attributes (execution, creativity, strategy, growth) from strongest to weakest. The exercise reveals…
Marty Cagan responds to readers who argued that any tool or process can be used well or badly, so blaming the process is misplaced, and that culture matters more than process. He agrees culture is central but argues…
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…
Marty Cagan argues that the Agile movement had two parts: frequent small releases, and empowering teams to solve problems rather than execute roadmaps. The first change spread easily, but the second threatened…
Marty Cagan revisits Henrik Kniberg's skateboard-versus-car MVP article and argues it describes what engineering-only teams can do, not what true cross-functional product teams should do. He contends that a skilled…
Marty Cagan revisits his earlier skepticism of the 'CEO of the Product' metaphor and states a clearer position in favor of it, with caveats. He notes the concept's risk of making product managers act like bosses, but…
Marty Cagan argues that many teams claiming to be Agile or Lean still operate with a Waterfall mindset, merely adopting the rituals and buzzwords. He identifies three telltale signs: risks deferred to the end…
Cagan argues that product discovery, the practice of validating ideas with real customers before building, is still essential in heavily regulated industries such as finance and healthcare, even though legal and…
Marty Cagan argues that product managers should learn the underlying principles behind their practices, since techniques change constantly while principles endure and let people judge new methods. He recommends Ray…
Chris Jones argues that the popular slogans "fail fast" and "embrace failure" have outlived their usefulness because they blur risky experimentation with genuinely preventable mistakes. He proposes reserving the word…
Marty Cagan revisits his earlier framing of product success as valuable, usable, and feasible, arguing that the single word 'valuable' hid serious business risk and let product managers overweight customer value. He…
Marty Cagan announces the second edition of his book INSPIRED, which he describes as essentially a new work rather than an update. He explains that the field has moved past early Lean Startup and Agile ideas, so the new…
Marty Cagan argues that the common belief that great products come from listening to customers is a myth for technology products, because customers often cannot imagine what is possible or what they want until they see…
Cagan argues that many product companies have yet to seriously consider data science, even though leading firms are already gaining advantages from it. He distinguishes data science from traditional analytics by its…
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…