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…
A community roundup from a paid PM newsletter covering threads on sprint cadence for tiny startups, where PM and designer responsibilities overlap, and how to run PM team and leadership meetings. It also touches on…
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…
“Product teams should be co-located. This is an often-repeated “truth” in our industry. Today, in response to COVID-19, many companies are instituting mandatory work-from-home policies. This is making co-location impossible for many teams. Thankfully, this “truth” was already on its way to being retired.”
Jason Fried argues that how fast a product is built, how many commits or people went into it, and how many hours were spent are all development metrics about the work, not the product. These measures say nothing about…
Marty Cagan argues that many product releases fail because the product manager role is poorly defined in companies, and that this is often the root cause of wasted release cycles. He defines the product manager as the…
Teresa Torres argues that product people routinely make poor estimates because they produce single-point predictions for uncertain outcomes like build time or conversion rates. Drawing on research summarized in the…
Marty Cagan addresses a recurring question from company leaders: should product managers carry P&L responsibility? He traces the idea to consumer packaged goods, where a product manager owned costs, marketing, forecasts…
Marty Cagan reflects on a virtual conference where he was invited to speak to Agile coaches about managing complexity, and urges coaches to watch the recording despite its uncomfortable critiques. He argues that Agile's…
Marty Cagan argues that many Agile trainers and coaches who work with software teams lack the experience needed for commercial product companies, and that the poor work he has repeatedly cleaned up after is a persistent…
Marty Cagan, drawing on a conversation with venture capitalist Josh Kopelman, argues that business plans are wrong almost as soon as they are written. Competition, technology, and market dynamics constantly shift, and…
Lenny Rachitsky and Peter Yang distill tactics from AI-forward companies like Shopify, Ramp, Zapier, Duolingo, Intercom, and Whoop on driving employee AI adoption. The core argument is that the main barrier is…
The most important idea that most product people forget somewhere along the way: Everything you do with your product originates in your thinking, so the best (and really the only) path to consistently build successful products is to greatly improve the quality of your thinking.
Teresa Torres argues that managing product teams by outcomes rather than outputs is necessary for real autonomy, but it is hard because leaders struggle to trust teams and teams struggle to communicate progress on…
Marty Cagan responds to recurring questions about whether SVPG promotes a specific branded process such as 'the INSPIRED process' or 'the EMPOWERED process'. He argues that nearly everything involves some process, and…
The author describes a lunchtime request from a sales director to build a feature that could keep a few at-risk customers, and argues that the framing of 'should we build it or not' is too narrow. Drawing on Chip and…
Teresa Torres argues that teams struggle when they mix up the phases of idea work: generating options and choosing among them need different rhythms and different conversational modes. Drawing on Tim Brown's…
Cagan introduces the idea of a 'line' that separates the two fundamental activities of building software products: deciding what to build (left of the line) and building it (right of the line). Left of the line covers…