“Continuous Discovery Habits turns five this year. And to celebrate we are reading the book together. Each month, I am releasing an in-depth reading guide that includes: * The chapters we will be reading * A preview of the most important concepts we'll be learning about * Short videos you can”
Marty Cagan argues that as more companies move toward the product operating model, political dynamics become central to change, and a well-designed pilot team is the key early step. A pilot acts as a low-cost, fast MVP…
Lenny Rachitsky, with instructor Colin Matthews, offers a practical primer for product managers who want stronger technical fluency. It walks through application architecture (client, server, database), how APIs work…
Lenny answers a reader's question about having separate design and engineering roadmaps, arguing that cross-functional teams should converge on one source-of-truth roadmap. He outlines the core benefits of a shared…
Lenny Rachitsky's early newsletter answers three reader questions: how to motivate engineers to hit arbitrary deadlines, where to find real PM career ladders, and how to get executives to accept more actionable customer…
Teresa Torres and Petra Wille examine the build vs. buy decision, which AI is reshaping. They argue the classic rule of thumb, to avoid building non-core functions, has limits, since vendors may be better positioned…
Marty Cagan describes a growing trend where product teams move from batch-style phases to continuous practices in both delivery and discovery. He traces how continuous integration, testing, and deployment have spread…
Marty Cagan explains why he has largely stopped recommending OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) to most companies: the technique is simple, but organizations rarely have the structure it needs to work. He argues three…
This is a weekly roundup of product-building reads rather than a single argument. It pulls together a few threads: deciding what to ignore so you can focus on the most critical work, the primacy of conversion strategy…
Marty Cagan and Josh Kerievsky argue that outsourcing agencies can apply the product model to custom solution work, even though clients often arrive with a fixed solution in mind and fixed-price contracts. The core…
Marty Cagan argues that the performance-management ideas he learned at Hewlett-Packard, Management by Objectives (later refined as OKRs), remain the foundation of how the best companies operate. The first principle is…
Marty Cagan argues that economic downturns, while painful, can be a productive period for product teams and companies that know how to use them. Beyond the defensive measure of cutting costs to extend runway, he…
Teresa Torres argues that acceptance criteria are often the missing piece of a user story, and that they determine when a story is ready for release. She contends that criteria should be written from the end-user's…
Teresa Torres uses Jia Jiang's story of pursuing a startup dream under a six-month deadline to introduce the idea of tripwires: predefined points where a decision gets reconsidered. She argues that as people invest…
Marty Cagan argues that as teams move to frequent or continuous delivery, releases can surprise customers and internal stakeholders such as sales, service, and product marketing. Most incremental releases are invisible…
Marty Cagan argues that Six Sigma, a quality-control methodology proven in manufacturing, does real damage when applied to software product discovery and development. He observes that once influential innovators such as…
A community roundup from a paid PM newsletter covering threads on sprint cadence for tiny startups, where PM and designer responsibilities overlap, and how to run PM team and leadership meetings. It also touches on…
Teresa Torres argues that the belief that product teams must be co-located is outdated, since many successful companies already run fully remote and global teams, and modern digital tools now provide most of the…
Jason Fried argues that how fast a product is built, how many commits or people went into it, and how many hours were spent are all development metrics about the work, not the product. These measures say nothing about…
Marty Cagan argues that many product releases fail because the product manager role is poorly defined in companies, and that this is often the root cause of wasted release cycles. He defines the product manager as the…
Teresa Torres argues that product people routinely make poor estimates because they produce single-point predictions for uncertain outcomes like build time or conversion rates. Drawing on research summarized in the…
Marty Cagan addresses a recurring question from company leaders: should product managers carry P&L responsibility? He traces the idea to consumer packaged goods, where a product manager owned costs, marketing, forecasts…
Marty Cagan reflects on a virtual conference where he was invited to speak to Agile coaches about managing complexity, and urges coaches to watch the recording despite its uncomfortable critiques. He argues that Agile's…
Marty Cagan argues that many Agile trainers and coaches who work with software teams lack the experience needed for commercial product companies, and that the poor work he has repeatedly cleaned up after is a persistent…