by Marty Cagan | Aug 10, 2014
One question that I continue to get from many company leaders is whether or not product managers should be given P&L responsibility for their products. The origin of this question comes from the days when companies had a portfolio of products where each product...
by Marty Cagan | Jul 13, 2014
I have always been interested in taking the holistic view of product teams and understanding and appreciating each and every critical role. In a recent article I wrote about the dynamics of strong teams versus weak teams, and judging from the response to that...
by Marty Cagan | Jun 13, 2014
NOTE: My friend and colleague Jeff Patton is the author of a book on the general topic of User Stories and especially the technique of Story Mapping. I was asked to write a foreword for this new book, and this article is an excerpt from the foreword. I was also a...
by Marty Cagan | May 21, 2014
In my last article, I discussed the power of milestones and I promised I’d talk about one of my favorite techniques for rapidly delivering on milestones. First, as a reminder, by milestone I mean delivering on some significant achievement for your business. This...
by Marty Cagan | Apr 5, 2014
In this article I wanted to talk about a concept that seems to be increasingly missing in product teams. I find too many product teams just pounding away on the product backlog, story by story. Too many members of the team don’t really know how and why the stories...
by Marty Cagan | Mar 10, 2014
In an earlier article (Flavors of Prototypes) I heard from many people about how it helped them to see prototypes in a new and more powerful light. Even though I had written previously about each separately, putting them together can help people get the big picture....
by Marty Cagan | Feb 23, 2014
Prototypes of various forms have been around for as long as we’ve been doing software, since the famous Fred Brooks quote: “plan to throw one away, you will anyway.” However, many things have changed. Not the least of which is that the tools and techniques we have...
by Marty Cagan | Feb 23, 2014
One of the most significant changes in how we do product today is our use of analytics. Any capable product leader today is expected to be comfortable with data, and understand how to leverage analytics to learn and improve quickly. Note: For the purposes of this...
by Marty Cagan | Jan 26, 2014
In earlier articles I’ve discussed various aspects of Minimum Viable Product (which I like to refer to as MVP Tests to avoid any confusion with an actual product). In this article I’d like to say more about the critical concept of Product Market Fit. The term was...
by Marty Cagan | Dec 29, 2013
Much has been written about waste at startups. I started writing about this as far back as 2005 (see Startup Product Management), and this concept is at the core of the Lean Startup movement. Lately there’s been much talk and ink about waste in government technology...
by Marty Cagan | Nov 29, 2013
Product: eBay Seller Tools Pete the Power Seller Background Pete is a 46-year-old male that lives in Fresno and runs a small motorcycle parts business. While he does maintain a small brick-and-mortar shop, almost all of his sales come from eBay, where he sells on...
by Marty Cagan | Nov 22, 2013
Much has been written about how to do product discovery in startups, by me and many other people. There are many challenges for startups, most importantly, survival. But one of the real advantages from a product point of view is that there’s no legacy to drag...
by Marty Cagan | Oct 20, 2013
When I start working with product teams, one of the first things I try to do is to get them to stop thinking of their job as one of gathering and documenting requirements. In fact, I try to get them to stop thinking in terms of requirements at all. Most requirements...
by Marty Cagan | Oct 12, 2013
One of the things I like about a Lean Canvas is it helps to quickly highlight the key assumptions and major risks facing a startup or a significant new product in an existing business. This is a good thing. The idea is to tackle the biggest risks first....
by Marty Cagan | Aug 30, 2013
Our job in the product organization is to create products that can sustain a business. Make no mistake about it: everything depends on strong products. Without these strong products, our marketing programs require customer acquisition costs that are too high; our...
by Marty Cagan | Aug 21, 2013
I should have written this article many years ago. Starting around 2004 and 2005 I began seeing an increasing number of teams moving to Agile, and of course the first thing they needed was training and often some coaching. However, more often than not, I had to go...
by Marty Cagan | Jul 31, 2013
This article is a little bit different, but if you make it to the last paragraph, I’m hoping it will help better explain where I’m coming from. In the spirit of the inspirational This I Believe project, I thought I would share with you the beliefs that...
by Marty Cagan | Jul 21, 2013
I’m always badgering teams about moving faster. Yet I continue to meet people and teams that not only move very slow, they don’t understand the relationship between speed and innovation, or speed and quality. In fact, many people still think those goals...
by Marty Cagan | Jun 25, 2013
Note: This article is a collaboration between myself and my long-time friend and colleague Jeff Patton. We often work together to help product teams. We have both long argued that the best way to evaluate product teams is by their results; the outcome they generate,...
by Marty Cagan | Jun 22, 2013
One question that’s come up several times recently is the difference between an Opportunity Assessment, and a Business Model Canvas (or its popular derivative Lean Canvas). While it is true you could try to use each to serve the purpose of the other, it quickly...
