“Marty Cagan”

The nature of product

Moments That Changed Us - All Things Product Podcast with Teresa Torres & Petra Wille

In this podcast episode, Teresa Torres and Petra Wille trade stories about the formative experiences that shaped their product careers. Teresa recounts running a startup through the 2008 recession, where prioritization…

Evaluating Solutions: The 5 Types of Assumptions that Underlie Our Ideas

Teresa Torres argues that good continuous discovery depends on first surfacing the hidden assumptions behind each idea, since teams can't test beliefs they haven't named. She proposes five assumption categories…

TRANSFORMED

Marty Cagan announces that the next SVPG book, TRANSFORMED, is in progress with Lea, Jon, Christian and Chris as co-authors, targeting early 2024. The book addresses the many established companies that struggle to shift…

Leadership vs. Management

Marty Cagan argues that leadership and management are distinct, both essential competencies that many people wrongly conflate. He draws on an excerpt from Marty Abbott and Michael Fisher's The Art of Scalability to…

The Product Designer Role

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…

The Product Operating Model

Marty Cagan explains that his upcoming book TRANSFORMED needs a name for the way the best tech companies work, and he tentatively settles on the 'product operating model' or 'product model.' He notes that the industry…

The Product Manifesto

Marty Cagan argues that product teams benefit from writing a short manifesto, a public declaration of core principles and beliefs that complements the product vision and strategy. He describes how a manifesto forces a…

Coaching Tools – The Narrative

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…

Moving From Engineering To Product Management

Marty Cagan argues that engineers often make excellent product managers because they understand what is technically possible, and that the move from engineering to product management requires specific mindset and skill…

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…

The Most Important Thing V1

Marty Cagan argues that the single most valuable thing a product manager can do is run face-to-face user tests on prototypes or live products. Each test has two parts in sequence: a usability check to see whether users…

Scaling with Process vs. People

Marty Cagan argues that the root cause of many large companies losing their product innovation is an over-reliance on process over people. He builds on his earlier overview of Product Ops models by focusing on why…

Startup Product Management

Marty Cagan argues that the common startup approach of funding engineers to build a product before validating it is inefficient and causes many good ideas to fail. Founders typically act as product manager, build in…

Platform Product Management

Marty Cagan argues that platform product management, which means building foundation software that other companies use to create end-user solutions, is among the hardest and highest-leverage jobs in product. He first…

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…

My Favorite PM Interview Question

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…

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…

Product Strategy in an Agile World

Marty Cagan argues that product strategy has been an unintended casualty of the move to Agile methods, leaving teams chasing features without direction. He defines product strategy as a persuasive, two-to-five-year…

The CSPO Pathology

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…

Coaching – Integrity

Marty Cagan argues that integrity is the foundation of trust in empowered product teams, and that trust rests on both competence and character. He acknowledges that integrity is hard to maintain, since product managers…

Coaching – Customer-Centricity

Marty Cagan argues that customer-centricity is a core trait for product managers that is shaped heavily by company culture and by what leaders demonstrate. He stresses that the true customer should be defined narrowly…

Devolving From Good To Bad

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…

Funnels vs. Umbrellas

Marty Cagan argues that product managers face a constant flood of requests from well-meaning colleagues, and that a product manager who simply funnels all of them into the roadmap will slowly kill the product. He…

Principles over Process

Marty Cagan reflects on a virtual conference where he was invited to speak to Agile coaches about managing complexity, and urges coaches to watch the recording despite its uncomfortable critiques. He argues that Agile's…

Introducing LOVED

Marty Cagan introduces Martina Lauchengco's book LOVED, which argues that product/market fit has two halves: a strong product and a strong market approach. Building on his earlier work on product discovery, he contends…

Product Manager Job Description

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…

Product Manager Charm School

Marty Cagan describes "Product Manager Charm School," a foundational training program for new product managers covering communication skills and external interaction. Originating at HP and expanded at Netscape, it…

Coaching vs. Mentoring

Marty Cagan distinguishes coaching from mentoring using a distinction he learned from Bill Campbell. Both are valuable, but mentoring is offered as honest opinion the mentee may or may not act on, so the mentor carries…

Focus on Value

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…