by Marty Cagan | Nov 28, 2016
Much of product discovery work doesn’t actually require a lot of planning. We need to come up with a solution to a particular problem, and often this is straight forward, and we can proceed quickly to delivery work. But for certain efforts, this is decidedly...
by Marty Cagan | Oct 16, 2016
Recently I gave a keynote address to the Mind The Product Conference in London, and in that talk I wanted to illustrate, by example, the essential role that very strong product managers play for their team and their company. Most people noticed that all six of my...
by Marty Cagan | May 19, 2016
There is a very common fallacy about developers in our industry, and I think it hurts countless companies. Have you ever heard the old accusation that developers only want to solve problems for themselves? They’ll spend countless hours, often on their own time, to...
by Marty Cagan | Sep 7, 2015
I have always loved the General George Patton quote: “Don’t tell people what to do; tell them what you need accomplished, and you’ll be amazed at the results.” Unfortunately, typical roadmaps do just what the General warned against – they tell the team what to do....
by Marty Cagan | Jun 27, 2015
I would argue that two of the most importance competencies in building great product organizations, indeed nearly any significant organizational undertaking, are leadership and management. Yet so few people actually consider what each of these really means. Many...
by Marty Cagan | Jun 5, 2015
NOTE: This article is a narrative version of a talk I’ve given for developers at the Craft Conference and for product managers and designers at Mind The Product. In this article I’d like to discuss the root causes of so many product failures. I see the same basic way...
by Marty Cagan | Dec 12, 2014
One of the tenets of Product Discovery, Lean UX and Lean Startup methodology in general, is to try and avoid or reduce waste. Mostly that means tackling the situation where we design, build, test and deploy a solution that fails to meet its objectives. However, in...
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 | Apr 3, 2011
Recently a friend of mine sent me a link to this short video from totally outside of the technology field. The video is called “Why You Need to Fail” and it’s by Derek Sivers. Even though the examples are from very different domains, I thought that this short video...
by Marty Cagan | Nov 10, 2010
What is a “Big Bang” release? This is when a team works for several months on a project with the intention of pushing it live in one big product creation event. Note that Big Bang is not necessarily the same as Waterfall, but it is an all too common consequence of...
