Lenny Rachitsky answers a reader's question about team speed by compiling a list of roughly fifteen tactics drawn from founders, his own experience, and community input. The core argument is that velocity matters…
Marty Cagan examines how Agile methods, especially Extreme Programming (XP), fit into product management for commercial products. He first outlines the twelve shared Agile principles and XP's core practices, which were…
“Do you have a bug management system with thousands of bugs? Do you have meetings to review high priority bugs? Do you argue over how to use priority and severity? Why? Bug management is a waste of time. Bugs fall into three categories: Bugs that need to interrupt work. These”
Marty Cagan argues that many companies wrongly merge product management with project management, a habit inherited from shipped-software companies like Microsoft. That model breaks down for internet services, where many…
This podcast episode asks whether an organization can run a product operating model and a project operating model at the same time. Teresa Torres and Petra Wille contrast the two: project models organize around fixed…
The essay argues that frustration with time to market often comes from unrealistic expectations, where executives assume that turning an idea into a shipped product should take less time than generating the idea itself…
Marty Cagan examines top-down deadlines, where management sets a date for a major outcome such as a trade show debut or a startup's runway limit. He acknowledges that such deadlines can create a powerful sense of…
Cagan argues that cost estimation in software stays confusing because management needs cost figures very early, while engineering can only produce accurate estimates after the solution is detailed. This mismatch leads…
Torres argues that good product goals start from the user's success rather than vanity product metrics like page views or time on site. She recommends defining a success funnel by comparing successful users with…
Marty Cagan argues that no single product management model fits every company; the right one depends on context, and it is best chosen by starting from the problems a company is actually experiencing. Drawing on his…
Teresa Torres argues that user-story backlogs tend to grow into disorganized collections that lose connection to the product's purpose. Her remedy is to define a small set of strategic goals as themes before writing…
This podcast episode tackles Product Operations, a role many organizations find ambiguous. Teresa Torres and Petra Wille explore what product ops is and is not, how it overlaps with HR, agile coaching, and the CPO role…
Marty Cagan argues that a product must actually work, not just be the right product, and that software quality remains poor across much of the industry. He notes that manual, under-resourced QA is a common failure, even…
Marty Cagan examines how product organizations tackle large, multi-team initiatives, such as a usability redesign or a localization push into a new market, that cannot be owned by a single team. He argues that the core…
Marty Cagan argues that Agile methods such as Scrum originated in the custom software world, where software is built for a specific customer under contract, rather than in product software companies. That origin…
Teresa Torres answers a reader's question about how often product teams should ship customer value, concluding that weekly or biweekly delivery is an ideal benchmark rather than an immediate requirement. She explains…
Marty Cagan argues that large companies are structurally risk averse and rely on shared, matrixed resources, which makes getting a product designed, built, and launched difficult. Rather than fighting the culture, he…
Teresa Torres follows up her controversial argument that teams should ignore some bugs by explaining why interruptions are so costly. Using a series of escalating analogies about co-writing a paper, she shows how…
Teresa Torres and Hope Gurion argue that teams new to outcome-oriented product management lack several hard skills, so leaders must deliberately build them for pilot teams to succeed during an organizational…
Marty Cagan argues that product managers are fundamentally in the business of managing risk, and that playing it safe by only adding small features and fixes is often the riskiest choice over time. Because innovation…
Shreyas Doshi argues that many behaviors large companies encourage, such as answering support tickets, talking to many customers, and responding instantly to email and Slack, are designed to keep average performers…