Lenny Rachitsky lays out the four metrics he considers most important for an early marketplace: fill rate, bookings growth, supply growth, and GMV growth. He explains why each matters, shares practitioner perspectives…
Lenny Rachitsky shares advice, drawn from researcher Matt Gallivan, on which questions to ask users to judge product-market fit. He recommends a survey for 100+ active users and interviews for smaller bases, while…
“How do you know that you are doing discovery well? If you want to improve your discovery process, what outcomes help you track your progress? I get asked these questions often. I like that teams are trying to take an outcome-focused mindset to their discovery practice. The good news”
Teresa Torres recounts how her team at AfterCollege nearly celebrated a false win: a report claimed their new Explore feature beat the old Search, but the funnel had been misread as page-to-page when it was actually a…
Teresa Torres argues that A/B testing should follow the scientific method rather than being used for trivial tweaks like button colors or wording. She recommends starting from a real insight about why recipients ignore…
Marty Cagan argues that product teams often fixate on a single kind of analytics, usually web analytics, and miss the larger picture. He lays out four flavors that matter for product work: user analytics on how real…
Torres argues that teams should stop testing ideas at random and instead be strategic about what they experiment on. Rather than prioritizing a list of ideas by gut feel, teams should estimate expected outcomes…
Teresa Torres argues that many product managers run experiments poorly: they struggle to choose what to test, decide how long to run tests, lack scientific training, find tools hard to use, and overgeneralize results…
Teresa Torres argues that product teams should test ideas with experiments before building them, and that this starts with a well-formed hypothesis. Vague statements like 'a redesign will improve usability' cannot be…
Guest authors Michael Kaminsky and Mike Taylor explain how marketers measure incrementality, the true sales caused by spend, using three methods: multi-touch attribution, marketing mix modeling, and conversion lift…
Cagan argues that many companies lack a clear way to tell whether product managers' work actually aligns with business strategy, and that teams drift into chasing feature ideas. He proposes a 'Product Scorecard': a…
John Cutler examines the sudden enthusiasm for measuring "return on tokens" as AI usage grows inside companies. He argues that vendors and executives eager for clean numbers are reaching for yet another proxy, much like…
In this podcast episode, host Teresa Torres and guest Petra Wille examine whether every product outcome must be measurable. Torres revisits her long-held view that outcomes should always be metrics and explains why she…
This paid post explains how to measure retention using cohort analysis, including how to read cohort charts for trends and for signs of flattening that indicate product-market fit. It then previews a framework of seven…
Lenny Rachitsky and Casey Winters surveyed 20 experienced growth practitioners to define what good and great retention looks like across business types. They asked for benchmarks on user retention at six months and net…
Teresa Torres argues that teams use A/B tests poorly, mainly to confirm favored ideas or to blindly try variations, which teaches them little. Drawing on John Dewey's account of reflective thinking, she describes a…
Teresa Torres argues that a lack of web traffic should not stop product teams from learning, even if A/B testing is their only experimentation tool. Using a worked example of testing testimonials on a blog's about page…
Marty Cagan argues that popular product measurement tools, such as product scorecards and Eric Ries's 'innovation accounting', are valuable for focusing on outcomes but are insufficient on their own. Measuring only…
Marty Cagan argues that the true measure of a product manager is the success of their product, but that picking the right success metric is hard. He proposes the Net Promoter Score (NPS), which asks customers how likely…
Sonja Martin, a product manager at tails.com, describes how her cross-functional team repeatedly refined their desired outcome. They began with 90-day retention, a useful North Star but too lagging and noisy to guide…
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…
Teresa Torres argues that predicting the expected impact of each user story before building it serves two purposes: it helps prioritize the backlog, and it surfaces the hidden assumptions behind what a team is building…
A follow-up on activation metrics explaining a three-step method: brainstorm candidate moments from usage data, test them with regression against retention, then run experiments to confirm causality. It adds real reader…
This post sets out what product teams should realistically expect from email metrics: open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and unsubscribes. It explains that open rates are an imperfect approximation…