Shreyas Doshi argues that clear thinking underpins everything product people do, yet most of us have significant gaps in how we reason. In this year-end essay he offers ten ideas for 2026, framed explicitly as useful to…
“You find yourself in a conference room with your product team. The white board is covered with sketches. You have an idea that everyone is excited about. You mapped it out. You have a plan. Your engineering team is anxious to get started. This is what makes building products fun”
Marty Cagan argues that the product model, a way of organizing companies around discovering and delivering valuable solutions, is the key capability for responding to major opportunities and threats. He points to the…
Hiten Shah traces how Square went from a 2009 idea born of a lost glassblowing sale to a company valued in the billions, by solving the costly problem of card acceptance for small businesses. He highlights the simple…
An interview-based deep dive into how Ramp's product org works, centered on a culture of velocity: planning only as far out as needed, anchoring strategy to the financial model, organizing teams around business…
Lenny Rachitsky previews Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky's upcoming book Click and their new two-day Foundation Sprint for launching big projects. The post traces the origin of the approach to the Google Meet story and…
Marty Cagan contrasts the traditional project model, where IT builds specific features by fixed dates, with the product model, where durable teams own business outcomes. He argues projects are slow, costly, and produce…
Marty Cagan argues that ethics deserves its own explicit place in product decisions, proposing a fifth risk alongside value, usability, feasibility and business viability: 'Should we build it?' He notes ethics often…
Marty Cagan argues that the best products often emerge during economic downturns, when companies lack the money to paper over weak products. He contends that many firms, especially those with abundant funding, assume…
Marty Cagan revisits his earlier essay on the product manager role, arguing that confusion persists and that the role is more critical than ever. He contrasts three working modes: escalating everything to the CEO (a…
The essay argues that as AI makes execution cheaper and faster, the scarce skill for product managers becomes product sense: the judgment to decide what is worth building and why. Mechanical PM tasks like writing specs…
This case study traces how Pieter Omvlee built Sketch, a lightweight vector drawing app for Mac, into a serious alternative to Adobe's Illustrator and Photoshop. Omvlee started with a student project, charged for it…
Marty Cagan responds to a common challenge: why are products like Facebook, Amazon, and Google so successful if they seem poorly designed? He argues that product people often confuse their own tastes with the target…
Marty Cagan argues that the head of product management, typically a Director or VP, is one of the most consequential roles in a high-tech company, because a great product can redefine a business and a few failed…
Marty Cagan argues that the gap between the best product companies and the rest comes from a misunderstanding of technology's role. He recalls Marc Andreessen's warning that software is eating the world and notes that…
Marty Cagan revisits his earlier framing of product success as valuable, usable, and feasible, arguing that the single word 'valuable' hid serious business risk and let product managers overweight customer value. He…
Cagan and Moore argue that 'transformation' is often described with labels like Agile or product-led, which fail to capture what actually changes. They propose defining transformation by three concrete shifts: how a…
Marty Cagan argues that platform product management, which means building foundation software that other companies use to create end-user solutions, is among the hardest and highest-leverage jobs in product. He first…
Marty Cagan reflects on his first weeks with the original iPhone to extract product lessons. He argues that breakthrough products cannot come from focus groups or pundits, since users only describe incremental…
Marty Cagan argues that great brands come from great products rather than from marketing alone, and that Silicon Valley companies often err by fixating on technology. He notes HP's brand was stronger when built on…
This is an index page from Marty Cagan's SVPG site introducing a series of articles on how a company can transform from merely adequate to truly excellent at product work. It groups the articles into themes…
Marty Cagan argues that product opportunities are far from exhausted, pointing to three reasons: products that frustrate users always invite better alternatives, what is technically feasible keeps shifting, and today's…
Jason Fried responds to the recurring criticism that Basecamp makes 'yet another' to-do list, chat, or messaging product. He admits the pull toward grander missions in tech is real, but argues it looks odd when applied…
Marty Cagan argues against setting a fixed percentage split between new product development and improving existing products. Instead, every investment, whether new or improvement, should be treated as a product…