Marty Cagan argues that many product teams grind through backlog stories without understanding the customer pain or business impact behind them, and that this is worsened by Kanban-style continuous delivery…
“Hi friends! As a break from our regularly scheduled programming, I’ve got a new long-form essay out, in collaboration my good friend Nels (who led finance and then global revenue strategy for many years at Eventbrite). In it, we share everything we’ve both learned about running a yearly (and quarterly) planning process — including plug-and-play templates, common pitfalls, and some fun stories. Check it out, and let me know what you…”
Cagan argues that the common pattern of writing a feature-packed PRD with P1/P2/P3 priorities, then haggling with engineering over schedule and cuts, reliably produces incoherent products that nobody likes. He proposes…
Marty Cagan argues against a damaging anti-pattern in which a product organization splits into a discovery team that decides what to build and a delivery team that simply implements it. He notes that good modern…
Cagan argues that a great product comes from pairing a real customer need with a solution that has just become technically possible, which makes the product manager and engineer relationship critical. He frames the two…
Marty Cagan argues that project-based funding, where companies approve discrete projects with business cases, is a poor model for building strong products. Teams cannot know early whether a project is worth pursuing or…
Marty Cagan argues that a core failure in product planning is that weak projects, which should be killed during product discovery before reaching engineering, often are not. He identifies seven recurring reasons for…
Marty Cagan follows up his earlier talk on why product teams fail by describing ten attributes of strong product teams operating under a Continuous Discovery and Delivery model. He argues that empowered, durable…
Marty Cagan argues that Agile methods, such as Scrum and XP, change but do not eliminate the product manager's job, and he offers guidance specific to product software rather than custom or IT projects. The product…
Mihika Kapoor, who helped build FigJam and launched Figma Slides, shares seven lessons for keeping a startup mindset inside a large company. The core argument is that speed, prototypes, open progress-sharing, strong…
Lenny answers a first-time B2B founder's question about prioritization before product-market fit. He argues that typical frameworks suit large companies, lists common early-stage pitfalls, and proposes a single goal…
Teresa Torres argues that the MVP is widely misunderstood and that getting it right is critical for product teams. Instead of letting build time drive priorities, she suggests distilling a big, ideal idea into the…
Marty Cagan and Jon Moore argue that a product-led company's engineering practices should rest on three principles: protecting customers, revenue, brand and colleagues; responding quickly to market needs; and earning…
Marty Cagan argues that the simple conceptual model of continuous discovery and delivery running in parallel is useful precisely because it is process-agnostic, and warns against elaborating it into a rigid process…
Marty Cagan describes a proposal from Jeff Patton to replace the traditional product roadmap with an "opportunity backlog." The core problem is that roadmap items are often treated as commitments, yet genuine product…
Marty Cagan responds to readers who argued that any tool or process can be used well or badly, so blaming the process is misplaced, and that culture matters more than process. He agrees culture is central but argues…
Teresa Torres and Petra Wille argue that a giant, messy product backlog is a symptom of unclear filtering rather than a ranking problem. They question whether scoring frameworks like ICE and RICE help when hundreds of…
Marty Cagan describes a common failure mode: once a product has customers, the same development team is pulled between urgent fixes and new product work, so both slow to a crawl and everyone becomes frustrated…
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…