“It’s Halloween week! The pumpkins are carved, the candy bowl is full, and the neighborhood is about to be crawling with princesses, ninja turtles, and pirates. You’ve only got one last thing to do before the fun begins. You promised your neighbors hot apple cider - with rum, of”
Marty Cagan describes a discovery framing technique for larger product efforts, such as redesigns, where a simple opportunity assessment may not convey enough value. He builds on Amazon's 'working backwards' practice of…
Marty Cagan argues that product teams should design for specific personas rather than vague generic users. Using eBay seller tools as an example, he sketches three detailed fictional people with different backgrounds…
Teresa Torres and Petra Wille discuss a trend on LinkedIn of generating Opportunity Solution Trees with AI, including tools that promise instant user insights from synthetic personas. They argue that product teams…
Marty Cagan argues that customer-centricity is a core trait for product managers that is shaped heavily by company culture and by what leaders demonstrate. He stresses that the true customer should be defined narrowly…
Teresa Torres announces a second run of the Continuous Discovery Habits (CDH) Benchmark Survey, aimed at measuring how many product teams have adopted a continuous cadence to discovery work. She argues that the…
Marty Cagan argues against a common fallacy in the tech industry: that developers only care about building tools for other developers. He contends that most engineers are passionate about solving real problems for real…
Teresa Torres argues that API teams need product discovery because customer-facing APIs are products, and gaps in them cost adoption. She identifies six recurring usability problems developers hit when learning a new…
The article argues that the old advice to ignore competitors no longer holds, since new SaaS competitors appear constantly and may encroach from adjacent markets. Competitor research, done properly, is a way to learn…
Marty Cagan argues that product teams doing discovery often move far too slowly, risking wasted time and money on unvalidated ideas. He distinguishes time-boxing (fixed work period followed by reflection) from…
Marty Cagan argues that many Agile coaches come from delivery backgrounds and lack the product and design experience needed to help teams with discovery. He describes Discovery Coaches as typically former product…
Cagan distinguishes market discovery, which identifies worthwhile opportunities or markets, from product discovery, which determines whether a specific product is valuable, usable, and feasible. He argues the two are…
Teresa Torres describes how her course business was drowning in manual admin work across several tools, and how a mistake-prone admin process led her to automate using APIs. She explains her approach: pick a single…
The author argues that many companies reach an early beachhead of customers, assume product/market fit, and then stall because they neglected market fit. Market fit means discovering 'market pull': what makes customers…
Marty Cagan argues that prototyping is not one thing: teams often narrow the term to whichever prototype type they first encountered, and then misuse it. He lays out four main flavors: feasibility prototypes that answer…
Marty Cagan introduces the discovery sprint, a one-week time-boxed effort to tackle a substantial problem or risk in a product's definition and validate a potential solution with real users. He explains that the…
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…
Teresa Torres announces an expanded partnership with Vistaly to bring AI-assisted discovery tools into its opportunity solution tree platform. The core problem she describes is that many teams conduct customer…
Cagan argues that the main purpose of prototyping is to discover a successful solution, not to ship a product. Recent gen-AI prototyping tools have sharply cut the cost of live-data prototypes, changing the economics…
Teresa Torres surveys eleven real-world teams using Lovable and similar AI prototyping tools to speed up product discovery. Across stories from design sprints, navigation tests, side projects, job applications and…
This podcast episode introduces "trash can tracking," a technique where teams place trash can symbols on discovery and delivery boards to make the work they deliberately discard as visible as the work they ship. Host…
Teresa Torres recounts a founder who received contradictory feedback from buyers about whether sellers should pay for a pre-sale information platform. Digging into the context of each conversation revealed that the…
Marty Cagan argues that high-fidelity prototypes are one of the most powerful tools for discovering a product that is valuable, usable and feasible. He lists ten benefits, including testing ideas with users before major…
Lenny Rachitsky compiles a list of fifteen practical sources for product roadmap ideas, drawn partly from community suggestions. The core argument is that strong ideas come from direct customer contact, observing…