Mihika Kapoor, who helped build FigJam and launched Figma Slides, shares seven lessons for keeping a startup mindset inside a large company. The core argument is that speed, prototypes, open progress-sharing, strong…
Marty Cagan argues that when companies grow, boards often push founders to hand over leadership to professional managers, but the stronger path is to coach founders into strong product leaders. He contrasts two failure…
Marty Cagan argues that product managers should learn the underlying principles behind their practices, since techniques change constantly while principles endure and let people judge new methods. He recommends Ray…
Lenny Rachitsky answers a reader struggling with frequent reorgs, arguing they can accelerate careers and offering five tactical moves to position yourself for bigger roles. He then brings in executive coach Katherine…
Marty Cagan argues that a product manager's core job is discovering products that are valuable, usable and feasible, and that engineering must be involved early to achieve feasibility. Waiting until engineering sees a…
Marty Cagan describes a common failure mode: once a product has customers, the same development team is pulled between urgent fixes and new product work, so both slow to a crawl and everyone becomes frustrated…
Marty Cagan notices that several of the strongest product companies, including Apple, Google and Amazon, have very different cultures yet share a hidden common thread: their founders were coached by Bill Campbell, the…
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…
Marty Cagan argues that the real alternative to dedicated Agile coaches is competent line management: engineering, product, and design managers coaching their people in hands-on skills. He contrasts a 'Team Red' that…
Marty Cagan reviews Reed Hastings' book No Rules Rules and uses Netflix's mantra 'lead with context and not control' to argue for empowering product teams. He recounts Hastings' story of a manager making a seemingly bad…
Marty Cagan argues that 'product' is unclear in Internet companies, where software is intangible and large sites are split into many smaller products largely for internal organizational reasons. He proposes defining…
Marty Cagan argues that while remote product teams can deliver nearly as well as co-located ones, discovery and innovation suffer most when people work apart. He frames discovery as the core challenge, since creativity…
Marty Cagan shares an explicit product manager job description tailored to empowered product teams, where PMs are accountable for outcomes rather than just delivering features. He explains that the PM owns making sure a…
Marty Cagan revisits his earlier argument that the product manager should also be the product owner, admitting he made a strategic mistake by treating the two titles as synonyms. Many people who took short product owner…
Lenny Rachitsky answers the common interview question of what a product manager does, offering a working definition centered on delivering business impact through a team and customer problems. He frames the day-to-day…
“Are you part of a company that has grown through mergers or acquisitions? Does your company have a portfolio of products they’ve built? If there is a horizontal strategy at play, then the executive leadership probably has intentions of integrating the different products to create a competitive advantage with a “best in suite” angle.”
Cagan and Fredell argue that most M&A deals fail to deliver expected results, and that the usual due diligence misses what matters most: whether the acquired organization can keep building successful products under the…
Executive coach Joe Hudson argues that as AI commoditizes knowledge and effort, the scarce advantage becomes emotional clarity. He lays out a "wisdom stack" of four traits (discernment, productive conflict, willingness…
Marty Cagan, a longtime product leader, argues that Google, despite its strong performance and assets, is at risk over the long term for two reasons: weak conversion of product opportunities into finished, integrated…
Marty Cagan argues that as a company scales, the natural sharing of product learnings that happens in a small startup breaks down, so it must be done deliberately. He recommends a recurring, brief update, run by the VP…
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…
In this interview-based essay, Marty Cagan talks with serial entrepreneur Danny Shader about what makes a CEO effective at building products customers love. Shader argues that the CEO's personal attention to product…
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…
Teresa Torres addresses the most common reader question about her book Continuous Discovery Habits: why user researchers, marketers, data analysts and other roles were not named in the product trio. She explains that…