Marty Cagan argues that a successful move to the product model depends on the product organization earning the trust of the rest of the company, which is a race to win over executives before they lose confidence. Senior…
“Leading a product team (or several teams) comes with its own set of challenges that’s often similar to but distinct from the hurdles individual product contributors face. There’s pressure coming from all directions—your company leaders expect you to deliver business results while your product teams may be”
Marty Cagan argues that integrity is the foundation of trust in empowered product teams, and that trust rests on both competence and character. He acknowledges that integrity is hard to maintain, since product managers…
This Product in Practice story from Ramsey Solutions explains how the company got engineers to take part in product trios, despite their reluctance. Engineers feared falling behind technically and saw the tech lead role…
Marty Cagan argues that beyond the business case for the product model, there is a moral case: empowered teams are happier, more fulfilled, and proud of improving customers' lives or society. He notes that organizations…
Jackie Bavaro, drawing on research for her book Cracking the PM Career, argues that the hardest career step for many product managers is progressing from entry-level to senior PM, typically taking around three years…
Marty Cagan reflects on his personal regrets from coaching companies through product transformations, prompted by a reader's question about whether every transformation in the book TRANSFORMED succeeded. He admits that…
Christian Idiodi, an SVPG partner and Black leader in tech, writes about the personal weight of racial injustice in America and asks why tech companies, which tackle enormous problems like aging and space colonization…
Marty Cagan shares his 2024 product predictions in narrative form, framing each as a hope and a worry rather than a forecast, given his track record of overestimating how quickly change arrives. He covers ten recurring…
Marty Cagan argues that the MBA pathology, the set of habits instilled by many business programs, continues to produce weak product managers and weak products despite claims that it would self-correct. He stresses he is…
Marty Cagan argues that product organizations contain three kinds of contributors rather than two: makers (designers, engineers, researchers), managers, and a growing group he calls process people. Process roles like…
Lenny Rachitsky shares results from a survey of nearly 1,000 responses across more than 600 companies, aiming to show how the product manager role differs across the industry. The survey covers which skills companies…
Marty Cagan introduces the core competencies that a product operating model requires, framing product teams as responsible for solving hard customer and business problems rather than delivering features on request. He…
Teresa Torres and Hope Gurion continue their series on adopting the product operating model, focusing on resistance from leaders and stakeholders rather than pilot teams. They argue that transformation is…
Teresa Torres and Hope Gurion argue that a champion such as a CEO can start a product operating model shift, but it stalls without support from leaders and stakeholders across the company. Pilot teams need managers and…
Lenny Rachitsky compiles several lightweight decision-making frameworks, ordered from most to least structured, and explains when each fits best. He stresses that frameworks suit only high-stakes, one-way-door choices…
Jules Walter, a product leader at Google formerly of YouTube and Slack, lays out five tactics for building influence as a PM: gathering intel on how stakeholders decide, framing proposals from their point of view…
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…
Marty Cagan argues that team objectives are the mechanism for assigning work to empowered product teams in a way that still executes the company's product strategy. Product leadership chooses which problems matter and…