“Have you ever found yourself in an argument with an engineer about the value of a feature? Take a look at the following exchange: Engineer: I don't think we should let companies message candidates who haven't applied for their jobs. Product Manager: How come? Engineer: It doesn't”
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…
Teresa Torres argues that product managers constantly communicate complex ideas to engineers, designers, sales, and customers, and that visual thinking is one of the most effective ways to do it quickly and accurately…
Hiten Shah argues that building in public began as a risky, honest practice where founders shared unfinished thinking to find like-minded people and sharpen their own conviction. As audiences grew and tools for…
Marty Cagan argues that product evangelism, which he describes as selling the dream, is a core job for founders and product managers alike. Without it, strong teams are hard to assemble at startups, and at larger…
Hiten Shah argues that tech has long misunderstood marketing, treating it as decoration or a growth hack when it is really the translation between what a product does and what it means to customers. He notes that the…
Katie Dill, a design leader who has worked with hundreds of PMs, offers five practical tips for building a strong product management and design partnership. She argues that PMs and designers share the same goal of…
This weekly newsletter answers three reader questions on product work. A guest contributor, Hiten Shah, argues that remote teams suffer from miscommunication and that clarity, written documentation, screenshare-based…
Tara Seshan, a former Stripe and Watershed product leader, shares a playbook for presenting product tradeoffs so leadership actually makes a decision rather than defaulting to "do both." The post covers framing…
Teresa Torres describes rolling out Kindling, a simple idea management app, across her company to make product input more transparent and data-driven. She wanted an easy tool that everyone would use to share and vote on…
Marty Cagan, author of four bestselling product books, shares his process for writing non-fiction books, framing the book as a product whose readers are customers. He argues that the decisive factor is whether the…
Teresa Torres argues that when a whole company is invited to generate product ideas, every idea deserves thoughtful feedback, since that feedback is what keeps people contributing. She walks through common idea types…
Shreyas Doshi describes a counterintuitive lesson he picked up from observing a manager at Stripe: the most persuasive way to win people over is often to stop selling and instead be genuinely candid about tradeoffs…
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…
Melissa Perri interviews Brian Bhuta, CPO at Signify Health, about how product leaders gain trust and influence, especially when joining a team full of resistance. Bhuta argues that influence is an advanced form of…
Marty Cagan addresses a frequent complaint from product managers at large companies: their managers keep shifting direction, producing constant rework and frustration. He acknowledges that such churn is a structural…
Lenny walks through how his Airbnb team turned a problem of rejected booking requests into an 'Instant Book' strategy that grew instant bookings from about 5% to over 80%. He breaks strategy into three steps…
The source text opens by describing a common complaint among product managers: that PMs lack enough influence over product decisions at modern tier 1 software companies. The excerpt is cut off immediately after this…
This weekly Q&A from Lenny Rachitsky covers three reader questions: how to communicate a failed MVP to leadership, how a product manager can persuade a founder to change a core idea under board pressure, and what to…
John Cutler introduces an intended-but-unwritten book about thriving at work when you think too much, framing his years of TBM posts as already containing the material. He describes a recent breakthrough that clarified…
Teresa Torres describes how she rolled out the idea management tool Kindling at AfterCollege so that everyone in the company could contribute to idea generation and evaluation. The approach worked because it had clear…
Lenny Rachitsky offers a three-step process for a product person to say no to a manager while keeping their trust: listen and ask questions, form an independent point of view, then respond constructively using one of…
Marty Cagan argues that as companies shift from sales-driven feature teams to empowered product teams, the way product teams engage customers changes, and customers need to understand why. He frames a set of pledges…
Lenny Rachitsky reflects on serving as juror on a weeklong criminal trial and maps courtroom dynamics onto product management. The post argues that trials offer a useful lens on soft skills like choosing the right…