Lenny Rachitsky addresses the tension managers face between incorporating team input and making firm decisions themselves. He argues that managers must often overrule their teams, and offers five strategies to balance…
Marty Cagan follows up on his earlier critique of 'process people' hijacking product ops. He notes that 'product ops' has no settled definition, and he has identified at least six different versions in his work with…
Marty Cagan argues against a damaging anti-pattern in which a product organization splits into a discovery team that decides what to build and a delivery team that simply implements it. He notes that good modern…
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…
Marty Cagan argues that strong product organizations are built on teams of missionaries, people who are engaged, understand the business context, and empathize with customers, rather than mercenaries who simply execute…
“I was scrolling through my LinkedIn feed and a post caught my eye. It read: “Marketing owns defining the ideal customer profile.” And then went into details on why. A quick scan through the comments showed that not everyone agreed with this statement. Some people argued a different role owned”
Marty Cagan argues that many companies outsource for the wrong reason, namely cost savings, when they should outsource to assemble the right product team. He notes that Silicon Valley's high living costs push talent…
Marty Cagan answers reader follow-up questions after his previous article on the two product worlds he works in. He points readers to books that explain the cultures and product practices of Apple, Amazon, Google and…
Marty Cagan examines how product organizations tackle large, multi-team initiatives, such as a usability redesign or a localization push into a new market, that cannot be owned by a single team. He argues that the core…
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…
An interview with Shopify's VP of Product, Glen Coates, on how the company plans around annual CEO themes, avoids OKR-style metrics ownership, reviews work through a staged system, and structures teams around merchant…
This podcast episode tackles Product Operations, a role many organizations find ambiguous. Teresa Torres and Petra Wille explore what product ops is and is not, how it overlaps with HR, agile coaching, and the CPO role…
Lenny Rachitsky profiles how Miro builds product, drawing on an interview with its CPO Varun Parmar. The post covers Miro's cross-functional AMPED structure, its three-year vision and annual strategy process, a…
Melissa Perri argues that the sudden shift to distributed work during COVID left many teams disconnected, and that the core problem is missing the informal stories and interactions that build trust and candor. She…
Marty Cagan argues that 'Product Ops' has become a vague label, with at least six distinct meanings in companies today, making a claim that a company 'has Product Ops' nearly meaningless. He reviews five models he finds…
Marty Cagan examines the adage that product managers get blamed for failure but rarely credited for success, and asks whether that is fair. He explains that on empowered product teams the product manager owns value and…
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…
Marty Cagan argues that established companies with long-standing non-digital value, such as banks, insurers, retailers and media firms, often split product management into a 'Legacy PM' group that owns the core product…
Hiten Shah argues that many workplace problems are simple to solve once they reach the people directly involved, but they become costly when routed indirectly through intermediaries. Drawing on experiences at…
Marty Cagan argues that many product releases fail because the product manager role is poorly defined in companies, and that this is a root cause of wasted release cycles. He defines the product manager as the single…
Lenny Rachitsky opens a series on how top product teams work, using Figma's CPO Yuhki Yamashita as the first case. The post walks through Figma's planning cadence, its shift from OKRs to narrative 'headlines' and…
Cagan argues that legacy companies in retail, airlines, and financial services must shift from using technology internally to delivering technology directly to customers. Customer-facing technology faces a far higher…
Marty Cagan argues that commercial software companies should never outsource three core competencies: product definition, user experience design, and the underlying site architecture/engineering that builds the product…
This interview with Siamak Khorrami, Product Operations and Governance Lead at ATB Financial, a government-owned Canadian bank, describes how the bank built a product management capability during a multi-year digital…