Marty Cagan and Lea Hickman catalogue the common forms of 'theater' that show up when companies try to transform how they build products. Their core observation is that many transformations stay on the surface…
Marty Cagan argues against a common corporate arrangement that splits the product role between a 'product manager' who handles customers and stakeholders and a 'product owner' who handles the backlog and developers. He…
Marty Cagan argues that the largest source of technology waste is not government projects or startups but large non-tech companies such as banks, insurers, airlines and retailers. These firms, often run by CIOs or CFOs…
“If you’ve ever felt like working as part of a product trio was hard, you’re not alone. We often field questions or comments from people who are skeptical about how this type of collaborative decision-making can work, so we’ve known anecdotally for quite a while that”
Elena Verna argues that a founder's first growth hire is one of the most consequential hires a startup makes, and that many founders begin with avoidable mistakes. She proposes six rules: define a growth model before…
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…
Former Palantir product leader Adam Judelson shares unconventional product lessons from his seven years at the company, including embedding engineers with customers, hiring top talent, skipping a formal sales team…
Teresa Torres argues that product trios, small cross-functional teams of product, design, and engineering, should jointly own both discovery (deciding what to build) and delivery. She contrasts this with waterfall…
An interview with Gong's chief product officer on how the company builds product. It covers two-tier annual and quarterly planning, autonomous multi-skill pods organized around problem areas, the decision to skip OKRs…
Marty Cagan announces the pre-order launch of his new book EMPOWERED, co-written with Chris Jones, and explains how it complements INSPIRED. He argues that many companies can teach product teams strong practices but…
An in-depth look at how Notion builds product, drawn from an interview with its Chief Product and Technology Officer. It covers planning cadences, a four-stage product review process, the small size of the PM team, a…
This podcast episode, hosted by Teresa Torres with Petra Wille, examines the difference between organizations that fund projects and those that fund teams. The conversation argues that project-based funding clashes with…
Teresa Torres, who teaches design-based courses at Northwestern, argues that continuous discovery principles extend beyond product work to broader organizational challenges like engagement, team effectiveness, and…
Marty Cagan argues that UX designers often work in isolation, going off for days or weeks to produce a polished 'grand reveal,' a pattern he calls the 'internal agency model.' This breaks down because requirements and…
This Product in Practice profile follows Eva Spexard, Head of Operations and People at Passion.io, who applies continuous discovery habits to the employee experience rather than to a product. She treats employees as…
Teresa Torres and Hope Gurion, both coaches, examine how resistance surfaces on pilot teams during a product operating model rollout, even among volunteers. They identify three common objections: "we don't have time,"…
The piece argues that organizations asking their teams to find ways to use AI for company benefit are undermining that goal by stripping away the agency people need to experiment and decide. The core claim is that…
This podcast episode examines why companies drift back to command-and-control leadership during uncertain times, because it feels faster and more decisive. Teresa Torres and Petra Wille argue that no single leader can…
This podcast episode asks whether an organization can run a product operating model and a project operating model at the same time. Teresa Torres and Petra Wille contrast the two: project models organize around fixed…
Lenny Rachitsky interviews Duolingo VP of Product Cem Kansu about how the company builds product. The post covers its co-lead team structure, quarterly and yearly OKR cycles, a tiered product review process, weekly…
Cagan argues that remote development teams, whether from outsourcing, acquisitions, or internal centralization, magnify normal communication and execution problems and often frustrate organizations. He offers three…
The authors argue that many companies become efficient feature factories: most roadmap features fail to generate a positive return, often estimated at only 10-20%. The root cause is feature teams that serve internal…
Teresa Torres and Hope Gurion argue that teams new to outcome-oriented product management lack several hard skills, so leaders must deliberately build them for pilot teams to succeed during an organizational…
Marty Cagan argues that leaders often undermine their product organizations even when their intentions are good, and he lists ten common behaviors that stop leaders from actually helping. The behaviors range from…