Execution, roadmaps & process

Team Objectives – Ambition

Once leaders assign a problem to a product team, they must also signal how ambitious the team should be in its discovery work. Cagan frames objectives as bets that spread risk across a portfolio, ranging from low-risk…

Discovery vs. Documentation

Marty Cagan argues that during and after the pandemic, teams are sliding back into heavy requirements documents (PRDs) because remote collaboration is tiring. He reframes the core of strong product work as three things…

12 Hurdles to Effective Product Trio Collaboration

Teresa Torres draws on the 2022 CDH Benchmarks survey of roughly 2,000 people to examine why product trios (PM, designer, engineer) often fail to collaborate effectively. Although most respondents worked in trios, about…

How To Make Better Product Decisions

Teresa Torres argues that product managers make dozens of decisions daily and tend to feel confident about them, yet decision research shows people often make poor choices while believing they are sound. Our minds are…

Boundaries Between Product & Engineering - All Things Product Podcast with Teresa Torres & Petra Wille

Teresa Torres and Petra Wille examine the blurred line between product and engineering, where product managers drift into owning bugs, tech debt and architecture. They argue this starts as helpfulness but leads to PM…

Ch. 7: Prioritizing Opportunities, Not Solutions

This reading guide introduces the June installment of a book club around Continuous Discovery Habits, centered on Chapter 7, which argues that product strategy belongs in the opportunity space rather than the solution…

The Politics of Pilot Teams

Marty Cagan argues that as more companies move toward the product operating model, political dynamics become central to change, and a well-designed pilot team is the key early step. A pilot acts as a low-cost, fast MVP…

Become a more technical product manager

Lenny Rachitsky, with instructor Colin Matthews, offers a practical primer for product managers who want stronger technical fluency. It walks through application architecture (client, server, database), how APIs work…

One team, one roadmap - Issue 30

Lenny answers a reader's question about having separate design and engineering roadmaps, arguing that cross-functional teams should converge on one source-of-truth roadmap. He outlines the core benefits of a shared…

This Week #4: Motivating engineers to hit deadlines, PM career ladders, and aligning with execs

Lenny Rachitsky's early newsletter answers three reader questions: how to motivate engineers to hit arbitrary deadlines, where to find real PM career ladders, and how to get executives to accept more actionable customer…

Build vs. Buy - All Things Product Podcast with Teresa Torres & Petra Wille

Teresa Torres and Petra Wille examine the build vs. buy decision, which AI is reshaping. They argue the classic rule of thumb, to avoid building non-core functions, has limits, since vendors may be better positioned…

Continuous Discovery

Marty Cagan describes a growing trend where product teams move from batch-style phases to continuous practices in both delivery and discovery. He traces how continuous integration, testing, and deployment have spread…

Team Objectives – Overview

Marty Cagan explains why he has largely stopped recommending OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) to most companies: the technique is simple, but organizations rarely have the structure it needs to work. He argues three…

Weekend Reading: A/B Testing Is Hard, To Pivot Or Not, And More

This is a weekly roundup of product-building reads rather than a single argument. It pulls together a few threads: deciding what to ignore so you can focus on the most critical work, the primacy of conversion strategy…

The Product Model in Outsourcing

Marty Cagan and Josh Kerievsky argue that outsourcing agencies can apply the product model to custom solution work, even though clients often arrive with a fixed solution in mind and fixed-price contracts. The core…

When Performance Is Measured By Results

Marty Cagan argues that the performance-management ideas he learned at Hewlett-Packard, Management by Objectives (later refined as OKRs), remain the foundation of how the best companies operate. The first principle is…

Product Management in Economic Downturns

Marty Cagan argues that economic downturns, while painful, can be a productive period for product teams and companies that know how to use them. Beyond the defensive measure of cutting costs to extend runway, he…

Writing Acceptable Acceptance Criteria

Teresa Torres argues that acceptance criteria are often the missing piece of a user story, and that they determine when a story is ready for release. She contends that criteria should be written from the end-user's…

Don't Overcommit to a Bad Idea

Teresa Torres uses Jia Jiang's story of pursuing a startup dream under a six-month deadline to introduce the idea of tripwires: predefined points where a decision gets reconsidered. She argues that as people invest…

Anthropic’s CPO on what comes next

Inside monday.com’s transformation: radical transparency, impact over output, and their path to $1B ARR

Assessing Customer Impact

Marty Cagan argues that as teams move to frequent or continuous delivery, releases can surprise customers and internal stakeholders such as sales, service, and product marketing. Most incremental releases are invisible…

How To Kill Innovation

Marty Cagan argues that Six Sigma, a quality-control methodology proven in manufacturing, does real damage when applied to software product discovery and development. He observes that once influential innovators such as…