“So, you’re feeling pretty good about your product discovery habits. You are interviewing customers, iterating on prototypes, running sound experiments, and your team is gaining confidence that you are on a path to reach your desired outcome. It feels like you’ve reached product team nirvana. There’s only”
Teresa Torres argues that product managers struggle to show stakeholders how they decide what to build, so people assume ideas just appear. Her remedy is radical transparency: define the problem, name the current…
Teresa Torres recounts a early-career design review in which a client dismissed her work as horrible and asked to reuse an existing homepage. Her manager defused the clash by asking her to walk through her reasoning…
Marty Cagan argues that as companies shift from stakeholder-driven feature teams to empowered product teams, the relationship between product teams and stakeholders must change on both sides. Creating a solution…
Teresa Torres argues that the handoff from product managers to engineers is harder than it looks, because the two groups hold different knowledge and often view the same problem from different angles. Drawing on…
This podcast episode features Teresa Torres and Petra Wille discussing how they build conference talks from scratch and how new speakers can get started. They share their distinct processes: Petra works with mind maps…
Executive coach Jack Cohen introduces GAIN, a framework for giving feedback by framing it around the gain people can achieve rather than the pain to avoid. It walks through each element (Goal, Actions, Impacts, Next…
Teresa Torres argues that product managers often make quick, gut-based calls when colleagues ask for features or details, and that the way decisions are made matters as much as the decisions themselves. Drawing on…
This podcast episode argues that conflict on a product team is normal and even healthy, while its total absence often signals a psychological safety problem. Petra Wille and Teresa Torres explore how trios should handle…
Marty Cagan argues that stakeholder management is a frequent pain point for product managers, but it can be substantially improved. He defines stakeholders narrowly as people who hold veto power over launching work…
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…
Lenny Rachitsky marks his newsletter reaching 500,000 subscribers by sharing ten lessons from building it. His core argument is that quality and consistency matter far more than design, branding, or growth tactics. He…
Torres uses a made-up exchange between a product manager and an engineer to show how a feature disagreement is often really an implementation concern. Both people select different data and draw different conclusions, a…
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…