“In the previous post, we focused on how product managers share customer knowledge with engineers. We discussed how user personas are an effective way of telling the customer's story. We also looked at how some teams share artifacts (videos, audio, written reports) from usability tests to help communicate customer”
Teresa Torres reflects on a live podcast discussion about writing user stories, where co-host Roger Cauvin argued that stories lacking the who and why leave engineers doing only the bare minimum. Torres clarifies that…
John Cutler's essay uses the image of a border collie, a dog bred to be intensely focused and productive, to examine the trade-offs organizations make when they optimize hard for a single drive or output. The argument…
Marty Cagan shares a chapter from his book EMPOWERED, written by SVPG partner Jon Moore, describing the digital transformation at The Guardian during a period of industry crisis. Facing collapsing advertising revenue…
Marty Cagan argues that real collaboration in an empowered product team is very different from how many product managers assume they work. It is not consensus, democracy, artifact-producing requirement handoffs, or…
Lenny Rachitsky answers a reader question about how Airbnb balanced outcome-oriented thinking with design and engineering requirements that don't directly drive a target metric. He argues that outcome-oriented…
Marty Cagan argues that most software companies handle product portfolio planning poorly, and that while no single process fits every company because culture and leadership matter, a set of overarching principles can…
Teresa Torres and Hope Gurion argue that a common mistake in organizational transformation, such as shifting to outcome-driven teams or a product operating model, is training everyone at once. Such broad mandates rarely…
This piece is a curated index of Teresa Torres's earlier series on user story writing, pointing readers to posts ordered from foundational to advanced. It frames user stories as the main way product and engineering…
Teresa Torres walks through her experience vibe coding production software over six months, from early failures to a reliable workflow. She explains what vibe coding is, compares popular apps and agents, and identifies…
Lenny Rachitsky, who moved from engineering into product at Airbnb, lays out how to decide whether product management suits you, which of four common entry paths to pursue, and which seven core skills to build. He…
Cagan describes a "Big Bang" release as a project built for months and then launched all at once, a common outcome of Waterfall but also possible under Scrum. He argues it almost never goes well: dates slip or features…
Cagan argues that 'user abuse' happens when product teams ship changes that users didn't ask for, didn't expect, or can't absorb, and that it is largely caused by the natural human resistance to change. He explains that…
Cagan argues that remote development teams, whether from outsourcing, acquisitions, or internal centralization, magnify normal communication and execution problems and often frustrate organizations. He offers three…
An interview with Gong's chief product officer on how the company builds product. It covers two-tier annual and quarterly planning, autonomous multi-skill pods organized around problem areas, the decision to skip OKRs…
Marty Cagan introduces the product operating model as a set of first principles that leading product companies use to consistently create technology-powered solutions that deliver customer value and business results…
Product teams often face a flood of feature requests from support and sales, and it is hard to tell which ones deserve engineering time. Perri argues that a single question, asking how much revenue a request will…
Marty Cagan uses General Patton's quote about telling people what to do rather than how to do it to argue that product managers should specify outcomes, not implementations. He identifies two failure modes: customers…
Amol Avasare, who runs B2B growth at MasterClass, recounts a traumatic brain injury from a sparring session and the year-long recovery that followed. He argues the experience sharpened his approach to energy, emotions…
Once leaders assign a problem to a product team, they must also signal how ambitious the team should be in its discovery work. Cagan frames objectives as bets that spread risk across a portfolio, ranging from low-risk…
Marty Cagan argues that during and after the pandemic, teams are sliding back into heavy requirements documents (PRDs) because remote collaboration is tiring. He reframes the core of strong product work as three things…
Teresa Torres draws on the 2022 CDH Benchmarks survey of roughly 2,000 people to examine why product trios (PM, designer, engineer) often fail to collaborate effectively. Although most respondents worked in trios, about…
Teresa Torres argues that product managers make dozens of decisions daily and tend to feel confident about them, yet decision research shows people often make poor choices while believing they are sound. Our minds are…
Teresa Torres and Petra Wille examine the blurred line between product and engineering, where product managers drift into owning bugs, tech debt and architecture. They argue this starts as helpfulness but leads to PM…