“A lot of people are up in arms about a research study that was published in the latest issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). I’m talking about the Facebook social contagion study. But Facebook didn’t do anything wrong. And neither did PNAS by”
Teresa Torres argues that product teams building enterprise software can and should experiment, even though A/B testing is often impractical for them. She points out that experiments are simply procedures for testing a…
Cagan argues that many product managers, especially those coming from engineering, have only a shallow grasp of how their product and company make money. He recommends cultivating a relationship with someone in the…
A guest post from GiveDirectly's team, shared alongside a Giving Tuesday fundraising appeal, walks through the experiments that raised roughly $3 million more in donations per year. It covers winning tests like faster…
Marty Cagan argues that a product team's primary scorecard metric should change depending on the stage the product is in. He describes three stages: MVP, where the only goal is winning several happy, referenceable…
Marty Cagan and Felipe Castro argue that moving from outputs (what we build) to outcomes (the difference we make) is conceptually simple but practically very hard. They contend that most failed attempts stem from trying…
This post is a monthly reading guide for a book club celebrating the fifth anniversary of Continuous Discovery Habits, focused on Chapter 3 about outcomes versus outputs. It frames the chapter's core idea: product teams…
Teresa Torres describes building Product Talk's Interview Coach, an AI tool that gives students feedback on their customer interviews, and how she designed evals to measure its quality. She explains the core idea of…
Teresa Torres argues that 'outcomes over outputs' is easy to state but hard to practice, because many teams still ship features while being asked to deliver impact. She defines outputs as what a team builds and outcomes…
Patrick Campbell, CEO of ProfitWell, argues that pricing is an ongoing strategic lever rather than a one-time number, and that early on the exact price matters far less than the value metric and the customer segments…
Cagan argues that the core goal of product discovery is finding the smallest valuable, usable, feasible product as fast as possible by failing fast. He describes two techniques: disposable user prototypes tested with…
Marty Cagan argues that market research tools such as surveys, analytics, focus groups, site visits and usability testing are valuable but have clear limits in product work. Tensions between marketing and product teams…
Marty Cagan addresses a recurring question from company leaders: should product managers carry P&L responsibility? He traces the idea to consumer packaged goods, where a product manager owned costs, marketing, forecasts…
Teresa Torres and Hamel Husain discuss how to evaluate and debug AI products with a scientist's mindset. Hamel draws on his machine learning background at Airbnb and GitHub, and his consulting work with startups like…
This reading guide kicks off a monthly book club celebrating five years of Continuous Discovery Habits, focused this month on Chapter 10, 'Testing Assumptions.' The guide frames the chapter as a bridge between…
Marty Cagan argues that many teams disband the people who built and launched a product right after release, wasting the period when learning and correction are most valuable. He proposes a dedicated "Rapid Response"…
This is a weekly roundup of product-building reads rather than a single argument. It pulls together a few threads: deciding what to ignore so you can focus on the most critical work, the primacy of conversion strategy…
Teresa Torres argues that confidence in a product idea reflects how coherent a story feels in our heads, not whether the idea is true. She points to Research in Motion and AOL as examples of confident strategies that…
This post is Part 1 of a Phase 2 series on scaling marketplaces, asking how a company can tell whether it is supply-constrained or demand-constrained once it has product-market fit. The author argues the answer is…
Teresa Torres shares four examples from coach Ellen Juhlin of using in-app surveys to sustain customer touchpoints as part of continuous discovery. Across different products, Ellen tried a Mixpanel pop-up, an onboarding…
This Product in Practice piece follows the Simply Business product team as they adopted continuous discovery with coaching from Teresa Torres. Their first chosen opportunity, late customer payments, was a real pain…
Lenny Rachitsky and Noam Segal report on a 1,750-respondent survey of tech workers about AI productivity. The core argument is that AI is overdelivering for most people, with the biggest gains in founders and PMs, while…
Teresa Torres argues that the outrage over Facebook's social contagion experiment is inconsistent with how news outlets and internet companies already operate. She notes that editors and headline writers routinely…
Marty Cagan argues that good product teams must excel at product discovery, which is fundamentally a skill of learning quickly: identifying the right target customer, finding the key problems to solve, and designing…