A PM describes inheriting a six-month onboarding overhaul that launched well received but underperformed on metrics, and asks how to deliver that news without losing leadership confidence. The post, a paid preview…
“You’ll often hear Teresa say that there’s no single right way to do continuous discovery. Something she might not say as often (that’s just as true) is that there’s no single wrong way to do discovery, either. Because discovery involves changing the way you work on”
Part three of Lenny Rachitsky's consumer-business series argues that busy audiences ignore ordinary products, so founders need a remarkable 'hook.' It offers four strategies for finding one: spotlighting what's unique…
Lenny Rachitsky answers a reader's request for real-world 1-Pagers and PRDs, explaining why good examples are scarce and listing traits of effective documents: problem focus, clear success criteria, just-enough…
Marty Cagan reflects on a recent article he wrote critiquing the MBA pathology in product management, which he admits backfired. Although the core message was valid, opening the piece with a provocative Elon Musk quote…
Cagan and Jones argue that moving to a product operating model changes not just product teams but the business stakeholders who rely on them. The shift is from shipping feature roadmaps (output) to solving customer and…
Teresa Torres argues that teams struggle when they mix up the phases of idea work: generating options and choosing among them need different rhythms and different conversational modes. Drawing on Tim Brown's…
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…
Teresa Torres argues that annual feature-based product roadmaps create false certainty, since release dates routinely slip and features get reshuffled. Product leaders still owe their teams a map, but it should show…
Melissa Perri argues that a product roadmap is a communication tool, not just a planning artifact, so it deserves deliberate design for each audience. She covers practical choices: consistent color coding, quarterly…
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…
Melissa Perri argues that the sudden shift to distributed work during COVID left many teams disconnected, and that the core problem is missing the informal stories and interactions that build trust and candor. She…
David Spinks argues that community is a structure for creating value by helping people help each other, which can scale a product's impact with a small team. Before investing, founders should align community to a…
Lenny Rachitsky answers a reader's question about what makes product managers great by sharing 14 habits he has observed and refined over years. The core argument is that effective PMs build habits around clear…
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…
Teresa Torres argues that product managers often wish their leadership, engineers, designers, and sales teams would behave differently, when the more productive move is to change their own behavior first. For each…
Cagan and Moore argue that moving to an empowered product-team model is a major cultural shift that must start with senior leaders, who still have legitimate needs to run the business. Their answer is not to simply step…
Marty Cagan argues that large companies are structurally risk averse and rely on shared, matrixed resources, which makes getting a product designed, built, and launched difficult. Rather than fighting the culture, he…
This podcast episode tackles a common trap for internal product teams: gathering requirements through stakeholder meetings instead of observing how real users actually behave. The hosts argue that when colleagues are…
A guest post by former Amazon executive Ethan Evans introducing the Magic Loop, a five-step cycle for growing your career by doing your current job well, offering help to your manager, and asking for work tied to your…
This podcast episode, hosted by Teresa Torres with guest Petra Wille, argues that saying no is a core product management skill rather than an optional extra. The conversation accepts that there is always more work than…
Marty Cagan argues that successful product-model transformations deliberately confront political realities rather than avoiding them, since changing how an organization decides and builds is fundamentally a people…
Teresa Torres observes that many individual contributors who love continuous discovery struggle to get their teammates, stakeholders, and leaders on board, because few people have time to read a book or blog post. To…
April Dunford gives a practical guide to product positioning, using a story about a mispositioned database product to show how context shapes customer assumptions. She argues positioning should be built by starting from…