“Internal Products Are Hard; Commercial Products Are Harder We have spent a lot of time trying to convince product people and especially product leaders of the importance of internal products. We’re talking about services or solutions that are used by our own employees to take care of our customers (e.g. customer-enabling tools and services), or... The post Commercial vs Internal…”
This podcast episode, hosted by Teresa Torres with guest Petra Wille, examines whether product discovery differs fundamentally between B2B and B2C products. The hosts argue the core principles are largely consistent…
Marty Cagan, author of INSPIRED, EMPOWERED, TRANSFORMED and LOVED, shares discussion guides for book clubs and product teams. The guide recommends an order for reading the books, starting with TRANSFORMED for an…
Teresa Torres argues that B2B and B2C discovery are less different than people assume, since most consumer products also serve multiple stakeholders such as advertisers or content providers. The key issue in enterprise…
Lenny Rachitsky opens with a note on the war in Ukraine and ways to help, then answers a reader question about waitlist conversion. Drawing on founder input, he shares rough conversion benchmarks for free sign-ups, paid…
Guest authors Michael Kaminsky and Mike Taylor explain how marketers measure incrementality, the true sales caused by spend, using three methods: multi-touch attribution, marketing mix modeling, and conversion lift…
Teresa Torres introduces a new series, Conversations with Claude, showing how she uses Claude Code for real work. Her first example is a content audit of Product Talk, which she delegated to Claude with a task file and…
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 recounts a poorly timed home-page redesign that disrupted a live sales demo, and uses it to examine the tension between continuous deployment and the disruption frequent product change causes. She argues…
Jason Fried describes an experiment for a free in-person Basecamp event in Chicago: attendees pay a $100 refundable deposit at registration and get the cash back at the door if they show up. The problem is that free…
Lenny Rachitsky argues that product differentiation is essential, drawing on Michael Porter's view that winners either operate better or perform differently from rivals. The post lays out seven practical differentiators…
This Product in Practice feature profiles Lisa Orr, a former data scientist turned product manager at Airship, who leads discovery for the orchestration product area with coaching from Teresa Torres. It shows how a…
Teresa Torres interviews the founders and CTO of Snapbar, a 14-year-old company that started as a wedding photo booth business, pivoted to a virtual product when COVID eliminated its events, and then rebuilt itself…
Marty Cagan argues that product innovation is no longer confined to Silicon Valley and that talent in developing markets is moving through a clear progression. The industry began with outsourcing, moved to US companies…
Lenny explains when a product should be free and how to choose between freemium and a free trial, based on an analysis of about 50 SaaS pricing models. He frames free as an acquisition strategy, either disrupting a…
Teresa Torres and Petra Wille rant about how absurd corporate procurement has become for outside experts like speakers and consultants. Torres describes contracts with 80-page ethics policies, 800-question security…
Crazy Egg's team tested 19 AI website builders by generating 51 pages (product, course, and local service pages) and scoring them against 60 criteria covering usability, conversion design, and SEO. The author finds AI…
Jason Fried announces Fizzy, a new kanban-style card-and-column tool from the team behind Basecamp. He argues that popular issue-tracking tools like Trello, Jira, and Asana have grown bloated and complicated, drifting…
Jason Fried reports the results of an experiment where a free event charged a refundable $100 admission, returned at the door to attendees who showed up. Of 55 paid signups, 50 attended, a 90% show rate, compared with…
A guest-written post by storyteller Matthew Dicks argues that humor is a learnable skill rooted in surprise, not a fixed talent. It walks through seven practical strategies (nostalgia, exaggeration, o…