“What makes a good product manager? I've been obsessed with this question. It's why I started this blog. As a practitioner, I want to master my craft. As a consultant and coach, I want to help you master your craft. But how do we do that without first”
Executive coach Natalie Rothfels explains why asking for help builds career leverage rather than signaling weakness. The post offers a four-phase method for working through fear of asking, a structured template for…
Lenny Rachitsky shares a guest post by prompt engineer Mike Taylor covering eight prompting techniques, from role-playing and few-shot examples to chain-of-thought, retrieval, and using an LLM as a judge. Each tactic…
Marty Cagan argues that as companies grow, decisions drift toward committee consensus, where the goal shifts from building something great to avoiding blame, and innovation stalls. He proposes keeping product discovery…
Teresa Torres argues that product teams should not commit to specific features by specific dates, because product work is inherently unpredictable and date-based roadmaps tend to create chaos, broken trust, and wasted…
This podcast episode argues that organizational change is exhausting and that individuals usually waste energy trying to fix their companies' people and processes. Teresa Torres and Petra Wille describe a three-part…
This opening post in a planned series argues that a company can only launch a successful product if it builds something customers actually want, which requires deep knowledge of the customer's need, context, and…
Teresa Torres reflects on a live podcast discussion about writing user stories, where co-host Roger Cauvin argued that stories lacking the who and why leave engineers doing only the bare minimum. Torres clarifies that…
Carole Robin, co-creator of Stanford's 'Touchy Feely' course, answers a reader whose co-founder relationship is deteriorating while the business still needs it to work. She argues that co-founder friction, like marriage…
Product Talk's community manager, Welena Villasoto, shows how a non-PM can run a weekly continuous interviewing practice. She practiced story-based interviewing with Teresa Torres first, moving from talking too much to…
Marty Cagan argues that the insights forming the foundation of a product strategy are the hardest but most valuable part of product work, and they cannot be produced by a template or framework. He says strong insights…
Product managers constantly receive requests from sales, executives, support, engineers, and customers, and trying to satisfy all of them can derail a well-defined product. The author argues that you can rarely both…
Teresa Torres argues that product requirements should describe the user opportunity rather than prescribe a solution, since detailed upfront solution specs lead teams to overcommit before validating what works. She…
This Product in Practice story describes how Ellen Juhlin, a senior product director at Orion Labs, brought engineers into continuous discovery. Engineers often see product work as order-taking, but their technical…
Marty Cagan addresses the common question of how organizations move from feature teams to empowered product teams. He argues that Agile delivery methods alone are insufficient and that transformation depends first on…
Cagan argues that product decisions often stall because teams debate options without agreeing on the underlying problem, target user, goals, and priorities. Product decisions are especially contentious since everyone…
Teresa Torres and Hope Gurion argue that a champion such as a CEO can start a product operating model shift, but it stalls without support from leaders and stakeholders across the company. Pilot teams need managers and…
Teresa Torres argues that engineers should be active participants in product discovery rather than only writing code, since they contribute distinct knowledge and skills. She explains that different team members…
Teresa Torres reviews Richard Feynman's memoir-style essays and draws lessons for product work. She argues that confidence in discussing ideas, rather than deferring to status, helps product managers defend their…
This book club post kicks off a monthly reading guide for Teresa Torres's Continuous Discovery Habits on its fifth anniversary. It focuses on Chapter 4, which argues that individuals should draw their own experience…