Marty Cagan argues that product managers should validate a product specification before handing it to engineering, rather than trusting the spec and planning to adjust after beta feedback. Because prototyping costs have…
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…
Lenny Rachitsky and Kyle Poyar compiled lessons from more than 20 AI product builders on what surprised them about shipping AI features. The post argues that AI products need fresh thinking: prototype to discover what…
Cagan asks how much technical competency a product manager really needs, noting that managers and candidates alike are unsure where the bar sits. He argues technology knowledge matters because great products pair a real…
Marty Cagan argues that 'product' is unclear in Internet companies, where software is intangible and large sites are split into many smaller products largely for internal organizational reasons. He proposes defining…
Marty Cagan argues that product management is a series of choices about which problems, customers, and features to pursue, and that personas are one of his favorite tools for making them. A persona is an archetype of an…
In this interview-based essay, Marty Cagan talks with serial entrepreneur Danny Shader about what makes a CEO effective at building products customers love. Shader argues that the CEO's personal attention to product…
“This post is part of a series about making better product decisions. Tell me how many times you've experienced the following: You've just introduced a new concept design - maybe it's a new way of doing an old feature or maybe it's a whole new metaphor for”
Marty Cagan examines how Agile methods, especially Extreme Programming (XP), fit into product management for commercial products. He first outlines the twelve shared Agile principles and XP's core practices, which were…
Teresa Torres, after returning to coding for a product launch following five years away, argues that product managers and designers do not strictly need to code today, but that everyone should learn the basics. She…
Teresa Torres argues that atypical customer stories, the ones that stand out from the rest of an interview set, are valuable rather than something to discard during continuous discovery. Teams often focus only on shared…
Marty Cagan argues that a product must actually work, not just be the right product, and that software quality remains poor across much of the industry. He notes that manual, under-resourced QA is a common failure, even…
This episode of Just Now Possible features the eSpark team discussing how they built Teacher Assistant, an AI feature that helps K–5 teachers align eSpark's supplemental lessons with district-mandated core curricula…
Teresa Torres describes how a weekend of family play turned her from a mobile-game holdout into a heavy user of Words with Friends, Draw Something, and Scramble. She uses a 2012 Journal of Product Innovation Management…
Marily Nika, a former AI PM at Google and Meta, presents a weekly ritual for building AI product sense: probing a model with messy, ambiguous, and difficult inputs to map failure modes before users do. She argues PMs…
Marty Cagan revisits the Silicon Valley slogan "we eat our own dog food," which he once repeated at Netscape, and now calls it meaningless. Using your own product is just another form of QA, not something to brag about…
Designer Ben Shih describes building LennyRPG, a Pokémon-style pixel game where players meet and quiz Lenny's Podcast guests using transcripts from 300+ episodes. The post walks through his AI-assisted workflow…
This podcast episode features Elliot Little and Dan St. Paul of Zero Gravity, a UK platform helping state-school students reach elite careers through mentoring and learning pathways. They describe building an AI career…
This episode of Just Now Possible features Lorikeet, a startup building AI customer support concierge agents for regulated industries. The team describes how months of work on the wrong ideas, such as reflection tools…
Jason Fried argues that a new product does not need to be revolutionary or disruptive to succeed. He describes how whole product categories can drift toward ever-greater complexity, with competitors one-upping each…
Marty Cagan and Marily Nika argue that AI product management means building AI-powered experience products, not AI infrastructure, and that most PMs will soon need these skills just as mobile PM became essential. They…
Cagan argues that a fairly standard organizational structure has emerged for product organizations, and that its shape affects behavior even though role definitions matter more. He contends that a CEO/COO or division GM…
Teresa Torres argues that aspiring product managers can break the 'chicken and egg' problem of needing experience to get a PM job by starting their own side project right away. She notes there is no shortage of unsolved…
Julie Zhuo's short essay looks back at what daily life was like during the early Internet, framing the piece around a nostalgic exercise rather than a product or strategy argument. The source text provided is only a…