“Opportunity solution trees are a simple way of visually representing the paths you might take to reach a desired outcome. The root of the tree is your desired outcome—the business need that reflects how your team can create business value. Next is the opportunity space. These are the customer”
Lenny's paid guest post by April Dunford, a positioning expert who has worked with 300+ B2B companies, covers four advanced roadblocks that derail positioning work. It argues that disagreement over competitors, product…
Teresa Torres argues that defining the ideal customer profile should not belong to one function but be shared across product, design, engineering, sales, marketing, customer success, and finance. Cross-functional…
Marty Cagan argues that Imposter Syndrome is real and healthy when understood correctly: it is a signal that you have not prepared enough. Rather than trying to push past the fear, he uses it as motivation to study…
Melissa Perri describes how a typical remote staff meeting can waste the chance to connect and align a team, and argues that remote work mainly amplifies existing meeting problems. She interviews product leaders at…
Julie Zhuo's short essay, titled "I am an idiot," reflects on intellectual humility in an era when AI systems can seem to know more than we do. The piece is framed as personal notes rather than a formal argument, using…
John Cutler critiques the recurring pattern of slides that wrap AI into old SDLC diagrams with logos, claiming the 'bottleneck has moved' and that the answer is settled, even as new methods appear weekly. The essay…
John Cutler argues that AI tools remove not only wasteful friction but also 'positive friction': the productive struggle, debate, and slow sense-making that builds shared understanding and sound judgment in product…
Teresa Torres profiles product manager Helena Jeret-Mäe at Singularity Creations, who moved from building speculative features on request to a continuous discovery practice. Early on, she built an unused field a…
Julie Zhuo's personal essay traces how she came to see herself as an "ice queen": someone who learned to suppress emotion and present a composed, controlled surface. The piece frames emotional guardedness as a…
Teresa Torres argues that even improvements to a product will trigger resistance, because users must adjust to any change. She contrasts Facebook's rocky rollout of the News Feed and Beacon with its smoother launch of…
Lenny Rachitsky shares seven more practical productivity tactics following his popular time management post. The core argument is that small, concrete habits, such as arbitrary deadlines, physical to-do lists, graceful…
Teresa Torres argues that product builders make constant decisions, but human judgment is error-prone, so teams should deliberately design decision-making processes. She identifies eight critical decisions in building…
Teresa Torres profiles Gary Clift, a Senior Director of Product for a travel-industry API, who used continuous discovery habits to address why customers were resisting migration to a new version of his company's API…
This piece is a curated index of Teresa Torres's earlier series on user story writing, pointing readers to posts ordered from foundational to advanced. It frames user stories as the main way product and engineering…
The author analyzed 51 Silicon Valley tech job postings, ranging from startups to large companies like Uber, Visa, and Amazon, to see what companies actually expect Product Managers to own. The findings show PMs are…
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…
Teresa Torres recounts visiting the Kindling team and recording a podcast-style interview with its founder, Tim Meaney, about innovation. The post frames Kindling, an idea management tool, as a long-time favorite of…
Cagan argues that the friction around commitments in Agile product teams stems from making them too early, before the team knows whether a solution is feasible, valuable, and viable. Because product ideas often fail or…
Lenny answers a new PM's question about how to judge day-to-day performance by proposing three priority-ordered checks: whether the team delivers business impact, whether the individual contributes to strategy and team…
Teresa Torres argues that curiosity is a core skill for product managers, especially when facing pressure to build one-off feature requests. Rather than arguing or pleading, PMs should investigate the underlying need…
Teresa Torres argues that product builders rarely stop to consider the ethics of the data they collect, even though user tracking has grown far beyond the cookies that alarmed people in the late 1990s. She notes that…
Hiten Shah argues that a company's external surface area has expanded dramatically, from a few channels decades ago to dozens of channels and hundreds of instances today. This growth fragments coordination, measurement…
Teresa Torres talks with Petra Wille about how she and co-organizer Arne design experiences rather than mere events at Product at Heart and related leadership gatherings. Petra explains that intentional sensory details…