product management

Ken Norton is an executive coach based in San Francisco, CA. He specializes in helping senior product leaders grow their authentic leadership capacity so they can meet the complexity of their roles.

The Strategic Rejection Challenge: When incentives sabotage product strategy and what you can do about it — Age-of-Product.com

I spoke with a company recently that discovered that 20 teams had built business cases around moving the same metric. If ALL of those teams realized their "case," the metric would have increased by 500% (which was impossible, governed by physics). This was a failure in context, capturing Intent, a theory around investment, and likely a mismatch between reality and how the company perceived collaboration.

Between 60-80% of all large enterprises I speak to have brought in Marty Cagan and/or SVPG at one point in the last couple of years. That is an outstanding achievement for the SVPG mission. The positive impact is undeniable, even just based on my (admittedly biased) sample.

Companies update their apps all the time. This one annoyed customers, cratered the stock and cost the CEO his job.

Build new skills & connections at a product management conference—here are the product management events you can't miss this year!

This practical guide presents tested AI/LLM prompts to assist product owners through all phases of the product life cycle.

I’m not sure why I haven’t written specifically on this topic before because it comes up as an issue with so many teams.  For many product managers, managing stakeholders is probably the least favorite part of their job. I don’t want to suggest that this can always be easy, but it can usually be substantially...

It's time to overcome the enemy that crashes our souls. Shall we?

Sunsetting features is rarely a celebrated milestone in product, but it’s often one of the most critical. In this episode, Roni Ben Aharon CPO and CTO of Craft.io, joins Lily and Randy to share how his team made the tough call to retire a key feature—and what they learned in the process.

The Most Damaging Anti-Pattern: No Theory at All Of all the issues, the most damaging might be this: not even forming a basic theory of investment and value for each team. I'm amazed by how many companies can't articulate why a team exists—what kind of bet they represent, what value they create, or even what would happen if they stopped working. Even a blunt thesis like "we pay their salaries to build what we want them to build" is better than nothing. Sometimes, I'll give teams a few baseline financial metrics and ask: "Imagine your team did nothing for six months—what might change here?" You'd hope for an answer like: We're a platform team deep in the stack, so the impact wouldn't be immediate. However, teams would experience a 10–15% drop in velocity over time due to a lack of support and growing maintenance debt. Onboarding new services would slow. Our infrastructure costs might creep up 5–10% without active tuning. It wouldn't appear this quarter, but next year's roadmap would be at risk. The details aren't the point. What matters is the ability to form a reasonable hypothesis. But too often, teams default to silence or vague generalities—usually out of fear that whatever they say will be weaponized or misunderstood. It's easier when a team owns a distinct SKU or revenue line—the answer tends to come faster. But even then, there's often confusion about what stage the team is in, what kind of bet it represents, and how it contributes to the top or bottom line.

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AI Interview Analysis: How to Use AI to Analyze Interviews from Teammates, Stakeholders, and the Management — Age-of-Product.com

Learn some of the most common mistakes that occur when organizations attempt to move to outcomes without adopting the product model.

This isn’t surface-level advice like “use AI for this task.” We’re walking you through live, in-depth examples, showing exactly how to do it. So by the end, you’ll be ready to build your own AI PM

In today’s fast-paced, fiercely competitive world of commercial new product development, speed and flexibility are essential. Companies are increasingly realizing that the old, sequential approach to developing new products simply won’t get the job done. Instead, companies in Japan and the United States are using a holistic method—as in rugby, the ball gets passed within […]

Marty Cagan discusses the potential impact of generative AI on the roles on a product team and the team topologies of product organizations.

From Overwhelmed to Empowered: A Candid Conversation with Tal Raviv

Product reviews shouldn't be an exam where you hope the right stuff comes up

I tracked every time I used AI in a work week - here are the 17 stand-out use cases

What actually empowers a team? Despite all the talk about empowered teams in tech, there's often confusion about what real empowerment looks like. At its core, an empowered product team is given…

Objectives and Key Results (OKR) is a thinking framework and goal setting methodology that helps to align goals and ensure people are working collaboratively on goals that matter.

Succeeding with OKRs - download free chapters now! OKRs are about goals bigger than the next story, or even epic. OKRs prioritise purpose and strategy over backlogs. Objectives are big goals. Key results are smaller goals that build towards the objective. Introducing OKRs - excerpt in Method & Tools journal, March 2021 OKRs and agile

NEWSLETTER — join more than 42,000 peers: https://age-of-product.com/subscribe/SPEAKER: David PereiraYOUR HOST: Stefan WolpersMEETUP — join more than 6,000 ...

Scoping and Shaping For Success By John Cutler 2024 https://cutlefish.substack.com/ Want to support my writing? Subscribe to one of my newsletter paid plans. Unlocking, Unblocking, and Shifting Drivers, Limiting Constraints, Floats, Enabling Constraints The Basic Idea—What Do You Do With This? ...

A week in to my new role a Toast, I took some time to clarify my own principles when it comes to operations, enablement, and generally helping others. These may or may not become my team's principles, but it was a good exercise. Transitioning between jobs/roles is always a great time to reassess.

We designed the Empathy Map at XPLANE many years ago, as part of a human-centered design toolkit we call Gamestorming.