Even in small companies, getting decisions made is often time-consuming and frustrating. Every product company needs a mechanism to get the key stakeholders and decision makers together to make timely and informed product decisions. My favorite way to ensure this...
Recently I’ve written about reinventing the product spec, and the reasons to move from a heavy-weight PRD to a light-weight high-fidelity prototype as the basis for your product spec. But where do these ideas come from, and how do you...
It’s funny how often I’m asked whether I am a “strategy guy” or an “execution guy.” I completely understand the reason for the question, as I think it’s true that most people prefer one or the other; in fact, they...
The single most frequent question I get from product leaders in companies both large and small, is where should product management live? The choices are most often engineering or marketing. While if you have the right personalities, it can work...
The New Year always gets me thinking bigger picture. For some that means reviewing the company mission statement. For others, it means coming up with your annual or quarterly objectives. For me, I’m partial to the Manifesto. A Manifesto is...
“Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do, and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.” – General George S. Patton, Jr. Patton was quite a character. From what I know of him, it sounds like...
What do the following people all have in common? – Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape – Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon – Steve Case, co-founder of AOL – Michael Dell, founder of Dell – Larry Ellison, co-founder of Oracle –...
By Marty Cagan and Felipe Castro Marty’s Note: My co-author for this article is the product coach Felipe Castro. I have known Felipe for many years, and he has collaborated with me on the outcome and OKR-related content in each...
At this point, many people have heard about, and/or shared their thoughts on the “founder mode” discussion kicked off by the Paul Graham essay. I weighed in on this myself earlier in the article Coaching Founder Mode. But after reading...
Continuing on the theme of sharing more of the lessons learned from companies that are embarking on transformations to the product model, in earlier articles we discussed transformation regrets, the problem of managing the transformation as a project, and then...
In this article I’d like to highlight an anti-pattern that my partners and I have witnessed at several companies that are embarking on transformations to the product model. It’s an understandable anti-pattern, but it’s also more than a little bit...
Sometimes naming an important but nuanced concept can give that concept real power. I would argue that’s what happened when we named the concept of product discovery, and I’m seeing the same thing now with the product operating model. The...
I was speaking to someone recently that had just finished reading the new book TRANSFORMED, and a question she asked caught me by surprise. She was saying how her favorite part of the book was reading the case studies about...
Overview Since the first edition of INSPIRED was released in 2008, there have been occasional groups and book clubs that have reached out asking for some suggested discussion topics. These requests have gradually increased, but with the release of TRANSFORMED,...
By Lea Hickman and Marty Cagan Recently we’ve been writing about two very common and very problematic forms of theater: product management theater, and product leadership theater. We’ve been intentionally trying to shine a bright light on these behaviors, as...
