“Why do you write product requirements? We used to write long product requirement documents to communicate the solution we wanted our engineering teams to build. But over time we learned that outlining every detail of the solution upfront leads to overcommitting to solutions before we know whether or not they”
Lenny Rachitsky interviews Duolingo VP of Product Cem Kansu about how the company builds product. The post covers its co-lead team structure, quarterly and yearly OKR cycles, a tiered product review process, weekly…
Marty Cagan examines the Waterfall product development process, which he notes remains the most common way software products are built despite being decades old and widely criticized. He explains its phased structure of…
Marty Cagan argues that many teams disband the people who built and launched a product right after release, wasting the period when learning and correction are most valuable. He proposes a dedicated "Rapid Response"…
Teresa Torres argues that an MVP should be defined by what you need to learn, not by the smallest or easiest feature set to ship. Using a hypothetical SMS-based event tool for soccer teams, she shows how the riskiest…
This podcast episode, hosted by Teresa Torres with guest Petra Wille, argues that saying no is a core product management skill rather than an optional extra. The conversation accepts that there is always more work than…
Teresa Torres argues that every member of the product trio (product manager, designer, engineer) is jointly responsible and accountable for all five risk areas: desirable, viable, feasible, usable, and ethical…
Tara Seshan, a former Stripe and Watershed product leader, shares a playbook for presenting product tradeoffs so leadership actually makes a decision rather than defaulting to "do both." The post covers framing…
Marty Cagan argues that slow product delivery is usually not caused by weak developers but by organizational and process problems. Drawing on his work with many product teams, he lists the ten most common root causes of…
Marty Cagan argues that milestone swarming, where most or all of a dedicated product team (or a virtual team drawn from several teams for an initiative) focuses together on one significant business milestone, can speed…
Teresa Torres and Petra Wille challenge the popular claim that AI has made software delivery free, arguing that while building a single feature is far cheaper, producing a real, production-quality product is not. They…
Cagan argues the traditional product spec is broken: it takes too long to write, is rarely read, leaves hard questions unresolved, and gives false comfort that the product is on track. He proposes replacing it with a…
Jason Fried argues that teams don't need a prioritized backlog to know what to work on next. Choosing the next task is just a series of yes/no decisions, and those can be made as you go, using what you currently know…
This podcast episode examines how capacity planning, a common quarterly ritual of allocating team time to fixed deliverables, fits within outcome-driven and discovery-first product organizations. The hosts argue that…
Cagan argues that once leaders decide which problems product teams should tackle, the mechanics of assigning objectives matter a great deal. Leaders own the decision of which team takes which problem, guided by product…
Lenny Rachitsky profiles how Coda's product organization plans, reviews, and builds product, drawing on an interview with CPO Lane Shackleton. The post covers Coda's evolving planning cadence, OKR philosophy, review…
Teresa Torres argues that most product requirements are poor because teams finish writing them too early and start building before the solution has been iterated on. She recommends treating requirements like writing…
John Cutler argues that visual maps of product work, such as value streams, dependency diagrams, or process flows, can create a false sense of clarity and hide real problems. When the underlying system is incoherent, a…
Cagan argues that the friction around commitments in Agile product teams stems from making them too early, before the team knows whether a solution is feasible, valuable, and viable. Because product ideas often fail or…
Marty Cagan argues that product work has two distinct phases: strategy, where you discover what to build through exploration and customer contact, and execution, where you build and ship it. Many teams fail because they…
Melissa Perri argues that a product roadmap is a communication tool, not just a planning artifact, so it deserves deliberate design for each audience. She covers practical choices: consistent color coding, quarterly…