by Marty Cagan | Dec 28, 2009
I don’t think there has ever been a better time to be a product person than right now. In fact, I’m fully expecting the decade about to begin to be far and away the most productive in terms of innovation. There are several reasons for this: First, the devices –...
by Marty Cagan | Nov 30, 2009
More than 20 years ago Fred Brooks published a seminal essay on the nature of software, called “No Silver Bullet: Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering”. If you’ve never read it I’d highly encourage it, as even though it’s ancient by the standards of our...
by Marty Cagan | Nov 13, 2009
I work exclusively with commercial software product organizations. Organizations that must create products and services that thousands or millions of users must make an independent decision to use or buy. This is in contrast to custom software companies that create...
by Marty Cagan | Nov 12, 2009
When product managers and designers move from the very linear, Waterfall-based processes, to the much more iterative and exploratory discovery-based process that I and others advocate, they sometimes take a little while to appreciate and adapt to the fast pace and...
by Marty Cagan | Oct 12, 2009
In my last article, I discussed the situation where Product Discovery is essentially not discovery at all, but rather just a mad dash of just-in-time spec writing so that the engineers can be kept busy. I discussed how important it is that the date not be driving...
by Marty Cagan | Oct 5, 2009
For those that haven’t heard the term before, “feed the beast” refers to one of the most common problems with product teams, and one of the top reasons for failed projects. It’s very easy to spot. If you find a product manager that is scrambling to finish up his PRD...
by Marty Cagan | Sep 27, 2009
For a startup, where there’s typically just one product team, it’s not too hard for the leaders to keep in their heads a holistic view of the product. However, this quickly becomes much tougher as the company grows first to a larger product and soon to multiple...
by Marty Cagan | Sep 8, 2009
As readers of these articles know, I am a big fan of high-fidelity prototyping and user testing on current or prospective customers. These techniques form the basis of Product Discovery; it’s the key to discovering the minimum viable product – a product solution that...
by Marty Cagan | Aug 23, 2009
I need to interrupt my series of articles on product portfolio planning because over the past week I learned of three completely different companies that all had fairly disastrous product results for the same core reason: they delayed talking to customers until it was...
by Marty Cagan | Aug 8, 2009
Over the last several months I have been working with some clients to revisit how they do product portfolio planning. Essentially the process they use to determine where to invest and how much. I’ve discussed the purpose and the common frustrations with how product...
by Marty Cagan | Aug 3, 2009
Several people pointed me to this great little talk by Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon. If you haven’t watched this yet you should. I thought his talk did a great job highlighting a few key points that pertain to my current theme of product portfolio...
by Marty Cagan | Jul 20, 2009
In the last couple articles I discussed product portfolio planning lessons we can learn from the Venture Capital industry. In this article I wanted to discuss a similar but different type of mechanism for managing product portfolio investments, known as business...
by Marty Cagan | Jul 6, 2009
In my last article on “Lessons From the VC Industry” I included some thoughts suggested by a VC friend of mine, Josh Kopelman of First Round Capital. In his thoughts he shared with me he had another insight that I didn’t include because I thought it was so important...
by Marty Cagan | Jun 26, 2009
In earlier articles we discussed the purpose of product portfolio planning and the frustrations with current product portfolio planning. In this article I’d like to look outside the typical world of product companies to a related industry that is in the actual...
by Marty Cagan | Jun 13, 2009
Continuing with the series on product portfolio planning, earlier I enumerated the purpose and objectives of the product portfolio planning process, but in this article I wanted to discuss the common complaints from executives and product leadership alike about the...
by Marty Cagan | Jun 1, 2009
How does your CEO know that every product manager’s efforts are aligned with his business strategy? How does your CEO clearly communicate to your product managers the business priorities? How does your CEO know which product managers are making good decisions and...
by Marty Cagan | May 19, 2009
I have never seen a technology product company that didn’t have more ideas they wanted to pursue, than capacity for pursuing them. So constrained resources is a reality of our world. Sadly, this keeps many companies from pursuing some truly promising products. Product...
by Marty Cagan | Apr 25, 2009
I am in the midst of a series of articles on product planning, but I’ve received several e-mails asking where this fits into the overall product organization, and the product discovery and product development processes, so I thought I’d make sure before proceeding...
by Marty Cagan | Apr 10, 2009
In keeping with my recent theme of product planning, I’d like to focus in this article on an important distinction and source of frustration in many companies, and that has to do with the differences between business strategy and product strategy. Many companies...
by Marty Cagan | Mar 20, 2009
In my last article I began a series on the product planning process. I wanted to start by emphasizing that the most critical aspect to product planning is to have an effective mechanism for separating the good ideas from the bad (see The Seven Deadly Sins of Product...
