Founder of Silicon Valley Product Group (SVPG) and author of Inspired, Empowered and Transformed.
Marty Cagan argues that the product management field suffers from a widespread problem: many people become product managers after only a Certified Scrum Product Owner course, which teaches delivery-process rituals…
Jon Moore, an SVPG partner, argues that the principles behind empowered, outcome-focused product teams are not new and not tech-specific. He points to Ingvar Kamprad's 1976 essay 'Testament of a Furniture Dealer' as…
Marty Cagan revisits the distinction between product teams and project teams, which he says he should have written about sooner, after hoping the problem had faded. A product team is durable and owns an outcome over one…
Marty Cagan argues that product teams often use a predictable set of excuses to avoid doing real product discovery, and that these excuses usually reflect a misunderstanding of discovery rather than a genuine…
Marty Cagan answers reader follow-up questions after his previous article on the two product worlds he works in. He points readers to books that explain the cultures and product practices of Apple, Amazon, Google and…
Marty Cagan argues there is a wide gap between how the best product companies work and how the majority of companies work, and that many people don't realize how different the two worlds are. He notes that practitioners…
Marty Cagan describes a common remote-work problem in product discovery: teams drift back into passing static artifacts between product manager, designer, and engineers instead of collaborating closely. His proposed fix…
Marty Cagan argues that the pandemic's reduction in commuting gave many people uninterrupted solo time, such as long walks, that is valuable for deep thinking about hard problems. He describes his own experience writing…
Marty Cagan reviews Reed Hastings' book No Rules Rules and uses Netflix's mantra 'lead with context and not control' to argue for empowering product teams. He recounts Hastings' story of a manager making a seemingly bad…
Marty Cagan profiles eight strong product leaders featured in his new book EMPOWERED, spanning product management, design, engineering, and company leadership. Drawing on years of working alongside them, he sketches how…
Marty Cagan argues that empowered product teams depend not on less leadership but on better leadership, and that moving to empowerment is far harder for product leaders than most expect. He splits the role into…
Marty Cagan announces the pre-order launch of his new book EMPOWERED, co-written with Chris Jones, and explains how it complements INSPIRED. He argues that many companies can teach product teams strong practices but…
Marty Cagan shares an explicit product manager job description tailored to empowered product teams, where PMs are accountable for outcomes rather than just delivering features. He explains that the PM owns making sure a…
Marty Cagan argues against a damaging anti-pattern in which a product organization splits into a discovery team that decides what to build and a delivery team that simply implements it. He notes that good modern…
Marty Cagan argues that product discovery depends heavily on judgement, which many product people try to replace with frameworks and templates. He identifies four areas where judgement is required: assessing risk…
Marty Cagan argues that the common split between a 'problem space' (owned by product) and a 'solution space' (owned by engineering) is overly simplistic and kills innovation. Validating that a customer problem is real…
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…
Marty Cagan answers common follow-up questions about product vision, clarifying how it differs from a roadmap and how it should be scoped, owned, detailed and maintained. He argues a vision should describe a desired end…
Cagan argues that many companies confuse a product vision with a mission statement, a slogan of purpose that does not do the work a product vision must do. He also criticizes the practice of each product team inventing…
Lea Hickman and Marty Cagan argue that many company transformations to empowered product teams fail because key conditions are missing. They present ten keys, spanning senior leadership support, reframing technology as…
Christian Idiodi argues that hiring experienced product people is not enough, because even strong hires lack the company-specific context, decision-making knowledge, and relationships needed to succeed. Standard…
Marty Cagan offers a curated starting path for aspiring product managers who are overwhelmed by contradictory online advice. He argues that the product manager role is about ensuring what gets built is both valuable and…
Christian Idiodi, an SVPG partner and Black leader in tech, writes about the personal weight of racial injustice in America and asks why tech companies, which tackle enormous problems like aging and space colonization…
Marty Cagan explains where the term "product discovery" came from and why he chose it. He argues that software has always faced two core problems: figuring out the right product, and then building it right, which he…
Marty Cagan shares a chapter from his book EMPOWERED, written by SVPG partner Jon Moore, describing the digital transformation at The Guardian during a period of industry crisis. Facing collapsing advertising revenue…
Marty Cagan addresses the common question of how organizations move from feature teams to empowered product teams. He argues that Agile delivery methods alone are insufficient and that transformation depends first on…
Marty Cagan responds to a critique of the Spotify model of scaled Agile by arguing that the critic overlooks Spotify's business outcomes and Fitbit's decline after adopting the process the critic favored. He contends…
Marty Cagan answers the most common objections people raise against the idea of empowered engineers, the engineers who take part in product discovery rather than only building what they are handed. He argues that the…
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 if he could change only one thing about how a product organization works, it would be empowering engineers. Engineers work with enabling technology daily, so they are best placed to spot what is…