Marty Cagan argues that product teams need to move fast, and that many teams still hold a Waterfall-era belief that speed trades off against quality and innovation. He contends that speed is valuable for reasons beyond…
Marty Cagan argues that many teams claiming to be Agile or Lean still operate with a Waterfall mindset, merely adopting the rituals and buzzwords. He identifies three telltale signs: risks deferred to the end…
Marty Cagan and Jeff Patton argue that product teams should be judged by the outcomes they generate rather than the output they ship. The article offers a practical checklist of questions to diagnose how strong a…
Marty Cagan argues that the largest source of technology waste is not government projects or startups but large non-tech companies such as banks, insurers, airlines and retailers. These firms, often run by CIOs or CFOs…
Marty Cagan argues that many product managers, especially in larger companies, get trapped in 'meeting hell': they work constantly yet fail to make progress on the things that matter most. He notes the causes include…
Marty Cagan argues that setting team objectives for a quarter is not enough; product teams must actively track and manage progress throughout the period. He explains that ongoing 'keep the lights on' work can crowd out…
Marty Cagan argues that when engineering demands a halt to features for a full rewrite, the root cause is usually product management, which has pushed teams to ship features while neglecting infrastructure until the…
“When I work on a product, I think about it all day long. I obsess over it. I love exploring the long view. What will this product look like next year? Five years from now? Ten years from now? I love the challenge of identifying the very next step on”
Cagan argues that product decisions often stall because teams debate options without agreeing on the underlying problem, target user, goals, and priorities. Product decisions are especially contentious since everyone…
Lenny Rachitsky recounts a failed Airbnb 'social travel' launch, arguing that the core mistake was misunderstanding the real problem (travelers want high-quality non-touristy things to do, not to meet other travelers)…
Marty Cagan argues that Agile product teams often suffer from poorly defined backlog items, slow velocity, rework, and unvalidated ideas. He proposes Dual-Track Agile, which runs a Discovery track to quickly validate…
Cagan argues that product decisions in most companies stall because the right people are never in the same room, and proposes a Product Council: a small cross-functional group of senior managers whose sole job is to…
Former Palantir product leader Adam Judelson shares unconventional product lessons from his seven years at the company, including embedding engineers with customers, hiring top talent, skipping a formal sales team…
Teresa Torres argues that user story prioritization is a balancing act rather than a formula. She suggests first setting high-level priorities through themes, then ranking stories within each theme by expected impact…
Teresa Torres argues that product managers and designers should not split the work cleanly into 'PM defines the problem, designer owns the solution.' Problem definition and solution generation form a two-way feedback…
Marty Cagan argues that team objectives are the mechanism for assigning work to empowered product teams in a way that still executes the company's product strategy. Product leadership chooses which problems matter and…
Marty Cagan argues that the typical product portfolio planning process used by companies past the startup stage is deeply frustrating, and that few organizations are satisfied with how they choose projects and allocate…
Teresa Torres recounts a poorly timed home-page redesign that disrupted a live sales demo, and uses it to examine the tension between continuous deployment and the disruption frequent product change causes. She argues…
Teresa Torres argues that most managers claim to manage by outcomes but in practice still manage by outputs, dictating features, projects, and fixed roadmaps. The root cause she identifies is a trust problem: managers…
Marty Cagan describes the "feed the beast" problem, where product teams feed a hungry development organization with specs just to keep engineers busy, regardless of whether the products are worth building. He argues…
Teresa Torres extends her earlier post on user stories by walking through the INVEST criteria (Independent, Negotiable, Valuable, Estimatable, Small, Testable) with concrete examples. She argues that stories should be…
Marty Cagan and Lea Hickman catalogue the common forms of 'theater' that show up when companies try to transform how they build products. Their core observation is that many transformations stay on the surface…
Teresa Torres describes how she turns annual priorities into workable plans: first into measurable product goals and process goals, then into concrete processes that deconstruct each goal, and finally into habits that…
Cagan argues that while most team objectives should be aspirational, some situations require high-integrity commitments: deliverables with dates leaders can rely on, driven by trade shows, contracts, tax deadlines…