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…
Marty Cagan, drawing on a conversation with venture capitalist Josh Kopelman, argues that business plans are wrong almost as soon as they are written. Competition, technology, and market dynamics constantly shift, and…
Lenny Rachitsky and Peter Yang distill tactics from AI-forward companies like Shopify, Ramp, Zapier, Duolingo, Intercom, and Whoop on driving employee AI adoption. The core argument is that the main barrier is…
“I’ve been thinking about the challenges of managing product teams by outcomes. Most leaders want their teams to have the autonomy to go after an outcome, but they struggle with trusting that their teams will do the right things. Most teams want that autonomy, but they struggle with communicating”
Marty Cagan responds to recurring questions about whether SVPG promotes a specific branded process such as 'the INSPIRED process' or 'the EMPOWERED process'. He argues that nearly everything involves some process, and…
The author describes a lunchtime request from a sales director to build a feature that could keep a few at-risk customers, and argues that the framing of 'should we build it or not' is too narrow. Drawing on Chip and…
Teresa Torres argues that teams struggle when they mix up the phases of idea work: generating options and choosing among them need different rhythms and different conversational modes. Drawing on Tim Brown's…
Cagan introduces the idea of a 'line' that separates the two fundamental activities of building software products: deciding what to build (left of the line) and building it (right of the line). Left of the line covers…
This essay recounts how Datasite, a SaaS provider for dealmaking, rebuilt its outdated platform under pressure to keep clients from leaving. When the platform failed during a beta launch with an Irish client, the…
Deb Liu, who led the team behind Facebook Marketplace, recounts how an idea she pitched in 2009 languished for years before a small Groups-based commerce test revealed organic buying and selling behavior. The team's…
Marty Cagan follows up on his critique of SAFe, the scaled-agile framework, by answering reader questions. He argues that process choices are really culture choices, and that adopting a heavy framework signals top-down…
An interview with Shopify's VP of Product, Glen Coates, on how the company plans around annual CEO themes, avoids OKR-style metrics ownership, reviews work through a staged system, and structures teams around merchant…
Marty Cagan contrasts two ways of organizing product work: project-based feature teams that get reshuffled around a communal roadmap, and dedicated product teams that persist around a business area. He argues that…
Teresa Torres argues that great products rest on three pillars: a clear vision, thoughtful processes that support sound day-to-day decisions, and the right team. She admits her own uncertainty about what makes products…
Teresa Torres interviews Hope Gurion, Chief Product Officer at CareerBuilder, about how she built product management, UX, and analytics functions at a company that previously lacked them. Gurion describes shifting her…
Teresa Torres argues that even improvements to a product will trigger resistance, because users must adjust to any change. She contrasts Facebook's rocky rollout of the News Feed and Beacon with its smoother launch of…
Marty Cagan answers the most common questions readers raised after his article proposing an alternative to conventional product roadmaps. He argues that engineers should help decide what to build, that outcome-based…
An interview with Snowflake's Director of Product for its Developer Platform and Ecosystem, describing how the company plans, reviews, and organizes product work. It covers annual 'big boulder' planning, six-page plan…
Teresa Torres and Hope Gurion discuss how leaders can hold empowered product teams accountable to outcomes without sliding back into feature-factory control. They describe empowerment as a spectrum: teams get discretion…
Teresa Torres and Petra Wille discuss the practical pain of global invoicing and EU tax compliance for small international online businesses. They argue that platforms and product teams often miss small regulatory…
Cagan argues that teams who genuinely value product discovery still waste time when they lack a plan, so they should write a Product Discovery Plan spelling out who is involved, what must be done, what resources are…
Marty Cagan asks whether product discovery applies to feature teams, which are handed a list of features rather than problems to solve. At a simple level, discovery is irrelevant there because the solution is already…
Teresa Torres argues that many product managers are so consumed by delivery work (grooming backlogs, triaging bugs, handling schedule slips) that they lack time for discovery, the work of figuring out what to build. Ad…