Drawer 10 · 131 notes · 24 people · 2005–2026

Product design & UX

Design craft, UX, taste, and working with designers

Q:
Answers from Product design & UX notes, cited
SVPG · Marty CaganNov 23, 2010

Defining Product

Nov 23, 2010 · 3 min

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…

SVPG · Marty CaganOct 22, 2007

Personas for Product Management

Oct 22, 2007 · 5 min

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…

SVPG · Marty CaganDec 3, 2007

The Role of the CEO

Dec 3, 2007 · 4 min

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…

Product Talk · Teresa TorresSep 5, 2013

You Only Prefer It That Way Because It's Familiar

Sep 5, 2013 · 3 min

“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”

SVPG · Marty CaganJan 30, 2005

Agile Development Processes

Jan 30, 2005 · 7 min

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…

Product Talk · Teresa TorresJan 24, 2012

Should You Learn To Code?

Jan 24, 2012 · 4 min

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…

SVPG · Marty CaganJul 31, 2006

Back to Basics

Jul 31, 2006 · 3 min

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…

Lenny’s Podcast68 min

Category creation and brand building

Barbra Gago · Oct 27, 2022
Key learnings
  • Create a new category only when the scope is big enough to matter and you can see signals like emerging budget lines or buyer…
  • Abandon category creation quickly if customers keep calling you by the existing category name, as Greenhouse learned with…
  • A category is only real once competitors and analysts validate it, so welcome new entrants who adopt your category label as proof…
Lenny’s Newsletter♥ 252

Building AI product sense, part 2

Feb 10, 2026 · 18 min
Subscriber post — summary only

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…

SVPG · Marty CaganApr 9, 2008

Eating Dog Food?

Apr 9, 2008 · 3 min

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…

Lenny’s Newsletter♥ 328

How I built LennyRPG

Mar 17, 2026 · 23 min
Subscriber post — summary only

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…

HEY World · Jason FriedOct 13, 2025

The next product

Oct 13, 2025

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…

SVPG · Marty CaganApr 16, 2024

AI Product Management

Apr 16, 2024 · 9 min

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…

SVPG · Marty CaganApr 16, 2008

Product Organizational Structure

Apr 16, 2008 · 4 min

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…

SVPG · Marty CaganMay 29, 2007

The Origins of Agile

May 29, 2007 · 4 min

Marty Cagan argues that Agile methods such as Scrum originated in the custom software world, where software is built for a specific customer under contract, rather than in product software companies. That origin…