Execution, roadmaps & process

This will make you a better decision-maker

The Delivery Manager Role

Marty Cagan argues that the project management role, in its many forms, is often poorly performed and sometimes seen as a liability, and that its damaged brand may need a fresh start. He attributes the problems to…

Gentle Deployment

Cagan argues that shipping updates to an established user community requires care, because users dislike change and today's connected internet lets them punish bad releases quickly. He calls the disciplined approach to…

User Stories Are Better Than PRDs

Teresa Torres argues that user stories communicate product requirements more effectively than traditional Product Requirement Documents. Long PRDs tend to be read once and then abandoned, while a set of user stories…

Global Product Management Talk: Writing Compelling User Stories

Teresa Torres reflects on a live podcast discussion about writing user stories, where co-host Roger Cauvin argued that stories lacking the who and why leave engineers doing only the bare minimum. Torres clarifies that…

TBM 433: The Border Collie Faustian Bargain

John Cutler's essay uses the image of a border collie, a dog bred to be intensely focused and productive, to examine the trade-offs organizations make when they optimize hard for a single drive or output. The argument…

Lessons from scaling Stripe

Transformation in Action

Marty Cagan shares a chapter from his book EMPOWERED, written by SVPG partner Jon Moore, describing the digital transformation at The Guardian during a period of industry crisis. Facing collapsing advertising revenue…

Coaching – Collaboration

Marty Cagan argues that real collaboration in an empowered product team is very different from how many product managers assume they work. It is not consensus, democracy, artifact-producing requirement handoffs, or…

This Week #13: Balancing outcome-thinking with design and technical requirements ⚖️

Lenny Rachitsky answers a reader question about how Airbnb balanced outcome-oriented thinking with design and engineering requirements that don't directly drive a target metric. He argues that outcome-oriented…

Principles of Product Portfolio Planning

Marty Cagan argues that most software companies handle product portfolio planning poorly, and that while no single process fits every company because culture and leadership matter, a set of overarching principles can…

Avoid This Common Organizational Transformation Mistake (And What to Do Instead)

Teresa Torres and Hope Gurion argue that a common mistake in organizational transformation, such as shifting to outcome-driven teams or a product operating model, is training everyone at once. Such broad mandates rarely…

Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Writing User Stories

This piece is a curated index of Teresa Torres's earlier series on user story writing, pointing readers to posts ordered from foundational to advanced. It frames user stories as the main way product and engineering…

Vibe Coding Best Practices: Avoid the Doom Loop with Planning and Code Reviews

Teresa Torres walks through her experience vibe coding production software over six months, from early failures to a reliable workflow. She explains what vibe coding is, compares popular apps and agents, and identifies…

How to get into product management

Lenny Rachitsky, who moved from engineering into product at Airbnb, lays out how to decide whether product management suits you, which of four common entry paths to pursue, and which seven core skills to build. He…

An inside look at Mixpanel’s product journey

Big Bang Releases

Cagan describes a "Big Bang" release as a project built for months and then launched all at once, a common outcome of Waterfall but also possible under Scrum. He argues it almost never goes well: dates slip or features…

Help Prevent User Abuse

Cagan argues that 'user abuse' happens when product teams ship changes that users didn't ask for, didn't expect, or can't absorb, and that it is largely caused by the natural human resistance to change. He explains that…

Succeeding With Remote Development

Cagan argues that remote development teams, whether from outsourcing, acquisitions, or internal centralization, magnify normal communication and execution problems and often frustrate organizations. He offers three…

How Gong builds product

An interview with Gong's chief product officer on how the company builds product. It covers two-tier annual and quarterly planning, autonomous multi-skill pods organized around problem areas, the decision to skip OKRs…

The Product Operating Model: An Introduction

Marty Cagan introduces the product operating model as a set of first principles that leading product companies use to consistently create technology-powered solutions that deliver customer value and business results…

This Question Will Let You Own Your Roadmap Again

Product teams often face a flood of feature requests from support and sales, and it is hard to tell which ones deserve engineering time. Perri argues that a single question, asking how much revenue a request will…

Patton’s Advice for Product Managers

Marty Cagan uses General Patton's quote about telling people what to do rather than how to do it to argue that product managers should specify outcomes, not implementations. He identifies two failure modes: customers…