Founder of Silicon Valley Product Group (SVPG) and author of Inspired, Empowered and Transformed.
Marty Cagan recommends Stratechery, Ben Thompson's newsletter on tech strategy, as a valuable resource for product managers and leaders. He argues that a key part of product leadership is understanding markets…
Marty Cagan argues that as a company scales, the natural sharing of product learnings that happens in a small startup breaks down, so it must be done deliberately. He recommends a recurring, brief update, run by the VP…
Marty Cagan describes a discovery framing technique for larger product efforts, such as redesigns, where a simple opportunity assessment may not convey enough value. He builds on Amazon's 'working backwards' practice of…
Marty Cagan describes the Group Product Manager (GPM), a hybrid role between an individual contributor and a first-level people manager, which he has seen work well in fast-growing product organizations. A GPM is…
Chris Jones of SVPG argues that many teams believe they practice product discovery but actually misuse it, falling into recurring anti-patterns. These include using discovery to confirm pre-chosen solutions, treating…
Marty Cagan uses the question of whether a product manager is the 'CEO of the product' as a revealing interview prompt. He finds candidates typically fall into three groups: those drawn to the power and influence, those…
Marty Cagan argues that many product teams spend their discovery effort on usability and performance fixes when the real problem is that users do not see why the product is worth using at all. Polishing a workflow or…
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…
Chris Jones, an SVPG partner, describes the hard transition from being a strong individual-contributor product manager to managing other PMs. He recounts advice from his own manager, Steve Roop, that a new hire should…
Marty Cagan revisits his earlier argument that the product manager should also be the product owner, admitting he made a strategic mistake by treating the two titles as synonyms. Many people who took short product owner…
Marty Cagan argues that established companies with long-standing non-digital value, such as banks, insurers, retailers and media firms, often split product management into a 'Legacy PM' group that owns the core product…
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…
Chris Jones argues that organizational transformation, like product development, should be rolled out incrementally rather than all at once. Because people adopt change at different speeds, a sweeping rollout can…
Marty Cagan, after noticing that more than half of the 'rock star' product managers he knows are women despite women being a small share of the field, offers personal, non-statistical theories about why. He argues that…
Marty Cagan revisits his earlier essay on the product manager role, arguing that confusion persists and that the role is more critical than ever. He contrasts three working modes: escalating everything to the CEO (a…
Marty Cagan argues that a company building its first in-house design team should not simply recreate the old agency model, where designers received specs and produced screens. Modern product designers work continuously…
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…
Marty Cagan extends Marc Andreessen's 'software is eating the world' thesis beyond software itself, arguing that modern product techniques are disrupting entrenched industries such as automotive, animation, and…
Marty Cagan pays tribute to Bruce Williams, a Silicon Valley marketing leader and close friend who died of pancreatic cancer in May 2016. The essay uses Williams's life to explore two topics important to product people…
Marty Cagan argues against a common fallacy in the tech industry: that developers only care about building tools for other developers. He contends that most engineers are passionate about solving real problems for real…
Marty Cagan follows up his earlier talk on why product teams fail by describing ten attributes of strong product teams operating under a Continuous Discovery and Delivery model. He argues that empowered, durable…
Marty Cagan reflects on witnessing gender-based bias early in his career and argues that avoiding discrimination is not enough; leaders must actively work to counter the lingering effects of past inequities. He focuses…
Marty Cagan argues that many Agile coaches come from delivery backgrounds and lack the product and design experience needed to help teams with discovery. He describes Discovery Coaches as typically former product…
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…
Cagan argues that product optimization, typically A/B testing and iterative tuning, is often confused with product discovery, and that optimization only makes sense after a team has found product/market fit. He…
Marty Cagan argues that the performance-management ideas he learned at Hewlett-Packard, Management by Objectives (later refined as OKRs), remain the foundation of how the best companies operate. The first principle is…
Marty Cagan describes an anti-pattern in which fast-growing, product-successful companies gradually lose their good habits after hiring senior leaders from large, brand-name firms that have stopped innovating. The…
Cagan argues that legacy companies in retail, airlines, and financial services must shift from using technology internally to delivering technology directly to customers. Customer-facing technology faces a far higher…
Marty Cagan argues that strong product organizations are built on teams of missionaries, people who are engaged, understand the business context, and empathize with customers, rather than mercenaries who simply execute…
Marty Cagan extends his earlier point that product teams must learn fast in discovery while still delivering with confidence, arguing that the balance depends heavily on company culture. He lists the traits of a strong…