korrents

Product management

What people on korrents have said about product management, in their own words — 11 claims from 4 people.

Marty Cagan, Melissa Perri, Teresa Torres, Des Traynor

Three viewsour reading; the words are theirs

The bottleneck moved: building got cheap, so deciding what is worth building is the hard part now Much of the product world now recognizes the project model as a turbo-charged feature factory, capable of producing more bad products, faster, than ever before. — Marty Cagan, 2026 Marty Cagan, Teresa Torres 4 claims

Delivery stopped being the constraint; discovering a solution worth shipping is what is left.

Cheap delivery turned the roadmap-of-features model into a feature factory that produces bad products faster.

  1. Marty Cagan Founding partner of Silicon Valley Product Group (SVPG) Much of the product world now recognizes the project model as a turbo-charged feature factory, capable of producing more bad products, faster, than ever before. Build to Learn vs Build to Earnsvpg.com · 16 Apr 2026
    Their wordsMuch of the product world now recognizes the project model as a turbo-charged feature factory, capable of producing more bad products, faster, than ever before.

    ↗Build to Learn vs Build to Earnsvpg.com

    16 Apr 2026

The real bottleneck in product work is discovering a solution worth building, not building it.

Mental modelBottlenecks

  1. Marty Cagan Founding partner of Silicon Valley Product Group (SVPG) Now, it’s clear that the real bottleneck is in discovering a solution that’s worth building. Build to Learn vs Build to Earnsvpg.com · 16 Apr 2026
    Their wordsNow, it’s clear that the real bottleneck is in discovering a solution that’s worth building.

    ↗Build to Learn vs Build to Earnsvpg.com

    16 Apr 2026

An opportunity solution tree exists to resolve the tension between what the business needs and what the customer needs.

  1. Teresa Torres Product discovery coach Opportunity solution trees help product trios: Resolve the tension between business needs and customer needs Opportunity Solution Trees: Visualize Your Discovery to Stay Aligned and Drive Outcomesproducttalk.org · 6 Dec 2023
    Their wordsOpportunity solution trees help product trios: Resolve the tension between business needs and customer needs

    ↗Opportunity Solution Trees: Visualize Your Discovery to Stay Aligned and Drive Outcomesproducttalk.org

    6 Dec 2023

Product discovery is a decision-making process, and good discovery keeps the customer inside that process.

  1. Teresa Torres Product discovery coach Product discovery is a decision-making process. Good product discovery includes the customer throughout that process. Product Discovery Basics: Everything You Need to Knowproducttalk.org · 18 Aug 2021
    Their wordsProduct discovery is a decision-making process. Good product discovery includes the customer throughout that process.

    ↗Product Discovery Basics: Everything You Need to Knowproducttalk.org

    18 Aug 2021

A real product decision is a no, and it costs something to give one I don’t think Product Management is going anywhere, but I do hope the days of hiring Product Owners who just feed developers tasks are done. — Melissa Perri, 2023 Melissa Perri, Des Traynor 4 claims

Saying no to a good idea, not just a bad one, is what the job is.

Product management is not going away, but hiring product owners who just feed developers tasks should stop.

  1. Melissa Perri CEO of Produx Labs; author of Escaping the Build Trap… I don’t think Product Management is going anywhere, but I do hope the days of hiring Product Owners who just feed developers tasks are done. Are We Getting Rid of Product Managers?melissaperri.com · 7 Jul 2023
    Their wordsI don’t think Product Management is going anywhere, but I do hope the days of hiring Product Owners who just feed developers tasks are done.

    ↗Are We Getting Rid of Product Managers?melissaperri.com

    7 Jul 2023

Building a great product means being great at saying no -- not maybe, not later, no.

Mental modelsSay no by default, Less, but better

  1. Des Traynor Co-founder of Intercom If you’re building a product, you have to be great at saying no. Not “maybe” or “later”. The only word is no. Building a great product isn’t about creating tons of tactically useful features which are tangentially related. Product strategy means saying nointercom.com · 3 Jul 2013
    Their wordsIf you’re building a product, you have to be great at saying no. Not “maybe” or “later”. The only word is no. Building a great product isn’t about creating tons of tactically useful features which are tangentially related.

    ↗Product strategy means saying nointercom.com

    3 Jul 2013

Whether a feature is quick to build is a roadmap question, never a reason on its own to build it.

  1. Des Traynor Co-founder of Intercom The main problem with this argument is that the scope of work should never be a reason to include a feature in a product. Product strategy means saying nointercom.com · 3 Jul 2013
    Their wordsThe main problem with this argument is that the scope of work should never be a reason to include a feature in a product.

    ↗Product strategy means saying nointercom.com

    3 Jul 2013

A real product decision says a proposal is a great idea and still turns it down for something else.

Mental modelSay no by default

  1. Des Traynor Co-founder of Intercom Real product decisions aren’t easy. They require you to look at a proposal and say “This is a really great idea, I can see why our customers would like it. Well done. But we’re not going to build it. Instead, here’s what we’re doing.”. Product strategy means saying nointercom.com · 3 Jul 2013
    Their wordsReal product decisions aren’t easy. They require you to look at a proposal and say “This is a really great idea, I can see why our customers would like it. Well done. But we’re not going to build it. Instead, here’s what we’re doing.”.

    ↗Product strategy means saying nointercom.com

    3 Jul 2013

Discovery is not one person's call, and neither is the role's future Ben’s article serves as a great reminder of why the product role is so essential, and is likely to remain essential. — Marty Cagan, 2026 Marty Cagan, Melissa Perri, Teresa Torres 3 claims

The decision belongs to a trio, and the job itself is merging into something bigger rather than disappearing.

The product role remains essential in the AI era, whatever the tools become.

  1. Marty Cagan Founding partner of Silicon Valley Product Group (SVPG) Ben’s article serves as a great reminder of why the product role is so essential, and is likely to remain essential. A Fresh Definition of The Product Rolesvpg.com · 10 Aug 2026
    Their wordsBen’s article serves as a great reminder of why the product role is so essential, and is likely to remain essential.

    ↗A Fresh Definition of The Product Rolesvpg.com

    10 Aug 2026

Product management is merging with the GM role as more companies become software companies, not disappearing.

  1. Melissa Perri CEO of Produx Labs; author of Escaping the Build Trap… As more and more companies become predominately software companies, I believe the Product Management role and GM roles are going to merge. Are We Getting Rid of Product Managers?melissaperri.com · 7 Jul 2023
    Their wordsAs more and more companies become predominately software companies, I believe the Product Management role and GM roles are going to merge.

    ↗Are We Getting Rid of Product Managers?melissaperri.com

    7 Jul 2023

Product discovery belongs to the whole trio -- a product manager, a designer and an engineer -- not the product manager alone.

  1. Teresa Torres Product discovery coach The product trio—comprised of a product manager, design lead, and tech lead—is responsible for product discovery. Product Discovery Basics: Everything You Need to Knowproducttalk.org · 18 Aug 2021
    Their wordsThe product trio—comprised of a product manager, design lead, and tech lead—is responsible for product discovery.

    ↗Product Discovery Basics: Everything You Need to Knowproducttalk.org

    18 Aug 2021

Read togetherour reading of the record — ours, not theirs

Building got cheap, so deciding what to build is the job; they split on whose call it is.

What is a view?

Our reading of what a group of claims have in common. Nobody holds a belief about product management as such; people hold beliefs about the handful of live questions the name stands for, and each view is one of them. The claims are printed under it, so the sentence can be checked against them.

Claims are filed here — never people. Somebody is named on a card because a dated claim of theirs sits under it, and somebody whose claims sit under two views is named on both. There are no counts of who believes what: the people under a view are the names printed there.

One question, view by view

Each one: the views people take on it and who holds which, every name on a dated claim.

On this subject, not yet placed

Matched by wording, not yet read into a view. The archive grows on its own — the watcher adds claims every two hours — so this is where new ones wait for somebody to read them.

The stream

The same 216 positions as the timeline, threaded — each on the rail of the view it is filed under, and 205 on no rail yet. Tap a view to follow it.

October 2026

David Heinemeier Hansson ·

Much of the work involved in getting the best out of agents consists of product management, project management, and QA.

Kent C. Dodds ·

How people think about product evolution matters

September 2026

Lenny Rachitsky ·

Nobody has figured out how to build products in the AI era yet, and there is no one way to do it.

Lenny Rachitsky ·

As building gets easier, choosing the right thing to build and knowing what good looks like matter more for product teams.

Lenny Rachitsky ·

AI both allows and forces product people to be a lot more ambitious.

Cory Doctorow ·

Being the domain expert on your own needs doesn't make you the expert on how to address those needs.

Geoff Teehan ·

With abundance, you no longer have to debate and prioritize an idea and get approval just to learn whether it is any good; you build it and then you decide.

Thariq Shihipar ·

The right response to more capable models is not more shipped features; it is spending that capability on understanding users and prototyping, so what ships actually works.

Peter Sellis ·

Spiky product managers are like bands: sometimes they put out a dud album, and if you still believe in them as artists you stick with them.

Peter Sellis ·

The way the product management profession is set up, its median practitioner is probably pretty bad.

Peter Sellis ·

Great engineers rarely complain about product managers, because they bend them to their will and do not put up with bad ones.

Peter Sellis ·

Ads are the product-market fit of consumer monetization on the internet.

Peter Sellis ·

It is harder to build performance advertising products around audiences that are hard to measure.

Peter Sellis ·

Almost every consumer product needs to be optimizing for daily active use.

Peter Sellis ·

A product's core value needs both a phrase and a metric: metrics alone mean little to people, and a phrase alone does not get acted on.

Peter Sellis ·

A really good product manager has to be very confident, often to the point of bordering on arrogance.

Thorsten Ball ·

Most software bugs will not be coding bugs but bugs from asking for the wrong thing.

Ray Maker ·

Companies sometimes hold back already-built software features from older hardware to drive sales of new models.

Kent C. Dodds ·

A new feature is a new product.

Tobias Lütke ·

A store that closes on Shopify because it found no product-market fit is not bad churn, because the same entrepreneurs will probably try again.

Jason Snell ·

A feature shipped in a product's official release is fair to judge, regardless of whether the company labels it a beta.

M.G. Siegler ·

A product can be technically impressive yet fail because it launched before a real market for it existed.

Tara Seshan ·

However much theorizing is done before shipping, nothing compares to the evidence of users trying a product and iterating from there.

Tamar Yehoshua ·

The AI builder is a real job: some startups now hire builders instead of product managers or designers.

Robby Stein ·

When almost anything can get built, a product manager's true value lies in judgement and taste.

Geoff Charles ·

AI removes a bottleneck in product development only to move it, and the winning team is the one that finds the next bottleneck fastest and removes it.

Marty Cagan ·

Tools such as agents can help do the job of product, but the job itself is solving customer problems and achieving business outcomes.

Dan Shipper ·

Most customers are unfamiliar with frontier AI and look to the companies building their products to tell them what to do.

Tamar Yehoshua ·

Product roles in the AI era are not only overlapping; they are expanding.

Robby Stein ·

Above all else, the craft of product management is decision-making.

Geoff Charles ·

The bottleneck in product development has shifted to product people, who should be as lazy as engineers.

Marty Cagan ·

Business viability matters far more in product work than his earlier advice made it seem.

Dan Shipper ·

Executing a roadmap and staying at the AI frontier are opposed ways of working, so asking the same people to do both is very hard.

Mike Krieger ·

Faster building has not made the PM role go away; it now demands more operational excellence than before.

Tamar Yehoshua ·

A product manager's job is the same as it always was: finding product-market fit and building products people love.

Claire Vo ·

Clearing out a backlog does not mean meaningful progress for the business or against a customer problem.

Dan Shipper ·

A product organisation should run like a research lab, or at least add research-lab elements.

Marty Cagan ·

Problem discovery is not very hard, and product managers who spend a lot of time on it neglect solution discovery, the real work they are paid for.

Claire Vo ·

Roadmaps are probably over, because they have become dangerous.

Tamar Yehoshua ·

Product managers no longer need to take meeting notes, chase action items or tell go-to-market teams when things launch, because tools do that now.

Robby Stein ·

Ranking a product's problems, fixing them and looping again is like running your own training process towards product-market fit.

Claire Vo ·

An AI coding factory combined with an old-style roadmap probably leads teams into the backlog, parity and churn traps at machine speed.

Tamar Yehoshua ·

Whether a product manager should write code or steer the team depends on the type of product and the phase it is in.

Claire Vo ·

AI cannot turn an untested assumption into fact; that takes real customers and real data.

Tamar Yehoshua ·

Product managers should build an agent to write their weekly reports instead of writing them by hand.

Claire Vo ·

Product teams probably need durable convictions but disposable features.

Geoff Charles ·

Product managers are not ambitious while they focus on small things, and should automate their way out of those small loops.

Marty Cagan ·

Roadmaps are not going away; the issue is not whether they exist.

Claire Vo ·

A product team should probably be honest about how firm a commitment each feature it ships is.

Tara Seshan ·

For a product person working with AI research, learning to write good evals is the most important thing.

Robby Stein ·

The product manager's playbook in the AI era is mostly the same work, made possible in a new light by AI.

Marty Cagan ·

A roadmap of someone's feature ideas with dates attached wastes most of a team's time.

Tara Seshan ·

Building exactly for today means being left behind; the ideal horizon is two to three months.

Tamar Yehoshua ·

A large company should help its existing product managers become AI-native rather than only hiring people who already are.

Robby Stein ·

It has probably never been a more important time to be a product manager, and great decision-making has probably never mattered more.

Geoff Charles ·

Product organizations are probably not investing nearly enough in technical product managers who build the internal factory.

Robby Stein ·

Product builders should spend less time on features and technology and more on the people they build for.

Marty Cagan ·

Empowered product teams need not just less management but better management, and product leadership is critical to them.

Dan Shipper ·

A product organisation set up well welcomes new model releases instead of dreading them.

Geoff Charles ·

Product managers will probably expand into general managers who own the business outcome across marketing, sales, growth and operations.

Marty Cagan ·

To get people to switch, a product has to solve problems dramatically better than the competition.

Tamar Yehoshua ·

This is probably the best time to be a product manager, and product managers will probably still be here ten years from now.

Geoff Charles ·

Product leaders should obsess a little less about the product they deliver and a little more about the factory that builds it.

Ami Vora ·

Five overlapping products that work in different ways are better than one over-constrained product, designed from a theory, that never got a chance to meet the market.

Tara Seshan ·

The usual PM craft still applies, but testing things empirically and moving faster matter more than ever.

Marty Cagan ·

In no small part thanks to AI, more companies than ever understand the need for outcomes and not just output.

Tara Seshan ·

Product people should be in direct contact with their users.

Marty Cagan ·

Thanks to AI, the principles of the product model, product strategy and product discovery have never been more important.

Mike Krieger ·

Half of the product job is saying no to another tab or sidebar item, and folding a proven experiment in without killing it too early.

Anish Acharya ·

When every idea can be tried, many product managers will probably find they are not that good at zero-to-one work.

Anish Acharya ·

Nobody has a growth problem these days; they have a product problem.

Evil Rabbit ·

One of the hardest things is to say no to incredible ideas and incredible products.

August 2026

Tara Seshan ·

The most important thinking a product manager does is defining the core hypothesis as pointedly as possible.

Tara Seshan ·

The core of product management has always been finding the most essential question to ask about a product.

Tara Seshan ·

Part of a product manager's job now is to elevate everyone's ambitions.

Tara Seshan ·

Building for where AI models are now and building for where they will be in a year are equally wrong.

Tara Seshan ·

When there is real conviction that a product is transformative, getting it into users' hands is far better than waiting until it is perfect.

David Heinemeier Hansson ·

Software is product management, and those are the skills the agentic era rewards — skills that are not evenly distributed among programmers.

John Bai ·

A strong culture of unshipping helps remove complexity and focus on a product's strengths.

John Bai ·

You can build anything now, but not everything is worth building; what matters is whether ideas take a shape somebody else would want to use.

John Bai ·

Cursor still believes very strongly in user research and data-informed decisions, and uses a wide range of quantitative and qualitative data to inform the roadmap.

Ian Silber ·

Even as roles blur, an excellent product manager who can rally multiple teams still adds a lot of value.

Peter Steinberger ·

Product-market fit shows up as anger when you tell people they cannot have it yet, not as polite interest.

Marty Cagan ·

The product role remains essential in the AI era, whatever the tools become.

Adam Ward ·

A company should define what great looks like for its own role rather than borrow another company's definition.

Michael Lopp ·

A task placed on an engineering backlog is effectively never going to get done.

Tom Verrilli ·

The only real case for product management as a specialist function is that it is a trade, not a qualification — something you get good at by doing.

Tom Verrilli ·

Hiring product managers by ratio infantilizes engineers and designers who were perfectly capable of deciding for themselves.

Tom Verrilli ·

A company should hire a product manager only against a specific need, never by default.

Tom Verrilli ·

Product managers should be assigned to problems, not attached to engineering teams.

Tom Verrilli ·

AI gives an individual contributor so much leverage that one very senior product manager beats three entry-level ones.

Tom Verrilli ·

A whole class of product managers built a career on politics rather than on technical or customer skill, and that skill is now worth nothing.

Tom Verrilli ·

People who manage product managers should still spend almost all of their own time doing individual contributor work.

Tom Verrilli ·

AI data tooling has cut the product manager's need for data scientists while multiplying the time they spend in the data themselves.

July 2026

Charlie Deets ·

If you hold on to a product's values through its life, people will believe in it and trust it.

Blake Scholl ·

You cannot find product-market fit for a supersonic jet by building one and seeing whether anybody likes it; it has to be worked out before anything is built.

Adam Mosseri ·

At three billion users you cannot launch without testing and cannot test without it becoming news, so the communications plan comes before the launch decision.

Adam Mosseri ·

Building a new product on top of whatever is growing fastest is a mistake: momentum is not the same thing as a strong foundation.

Meaghan Choi ·

Sharing responsibility for quality, educating and delegating rather than gatekeeping, helps engineers and product partners feel they own it too.

Meaghan Choi ·

Discernment about what should be built, and how to build it for the product, is the core builder process right now.

June 2026

Mark Pincus ·

The genuinely new idea in a product will probably fail; its job is to give people a reason to try the product at all.

Mark Pincus ·

Being too ambitious and visionary at the outset is how founders miss product-market fit, because it stops them starting somewhere small and humble enough.

Mark Pincus ·

A first-time founder has an advantage over a repeat winner, because past success makes it too easy to raise money and hire against a big vision before there is product-market fit.

Mark Pincus ·

AI should be used as a failure machine that tests many ideas cheaply, not as a way to build one idea faster.

Ron Goldin ·

The usual planning exercises still help when building with AI: defining the product's goal, who it is for and its critical user journeys.

Ron Goldin ·

Designers can no longer be just execution or order takers, because a product manager does not need them for that.

Bill Gurley ·

Someone who is not already product-first almost never becomes good at product afterwards.

Tony Fadell ·

A version 1.0 has no data to be driven by, so one or two people must make the opinion-based decisions and own them.

Tony Fadell ·

You cannot get real feedback on a new consumer product before shipping the whole thing; feedback starts when somebody spends their own money on it.

Tony Fadell ·

What is worth building is found by starting from a long-standing pain and asking which new technology has just made it solvable.

Tony Fadell ·

Technology-led teams talk about what a product is and never about why it matters, and the why is where the whole story lives.

Kelsey Hightower ·

A launch is a party; a landing is customers paying for the thing, and only the landing is worth measuring a career by.

Mark Pincus ·

Great consumer products work because they answer a human instinct or need that was already being felt but was unexpressed and unmet.

May 2026

Jennifer Pahlka ·

Being skilled at tracking project requirements doesn't make someone skilled at product management.

Dax Raad ·

Before product-market fit, coding faster does not help: it is better to think a lot than to swing a lot, and AI does not speed up the thinking.

Dax Raad ·

Answering every problem, competitor and user request with one more shipped feature does not add up to a good product; it adds up to a horrible one.

Dax Raad ·

Shipping ten times as much is not an advantage, because the moment you ship something you are stuck supporting it forever and every later feature has to interact with it.

Dax Raad ·

Get the positioning right and the world keeps handing you wins you never predicted, because well-funded rivals will all use a neutral party to advance their own interests.

Dax Raad ·

You probably only have one good idea in your whole product, and the job is getting the user to experience it as fast as possible.

Dax Raad ·

The job of product is not to ship the immediate solution to a problem but to absorb all the problems and find the one solution that fixes fifty of them.

Dan Shipper ·

Product managers are the AI era’s big winners: coding models are now good enough to pair a lightly technical PM’s product sense with actually shipping.

Tommy Geoco ·

Internal tools spread the way any product does: they are useful, someone tries one, and it starts to spread.

Jason Liu ·

A recurring AI workflow improves more through ongoing user feedback than by being fully specified upfront.

Katarina Batina ·

Any redesign of an incumbent product, such as an onboarding flow, almost always loses at first; it takes the confidence and agreement to begin below the status quo baseline in order to beat the incumbent.

Katarina Batina ·

The most enduring skill in this era is shaping great products, not just executing: designers come for craft work and leave as great product thinkers.

April 2026

Evan Spiegel ·

Distribution, not product-market fit, is the hard part of consumer technology, and almost nobody spends enough time on it.

Evan Spiegel ·

You have to talk to customers and share your ideas as early and as often as possible, even though you need not take their advice.

Evan Spiegel ·

Designers, not product managers, should own product direction, and a company can go a long way with designers doing the PM work themselves.

Marty Cagan ·

Cheap delivery turned the roadmap-of-features model into a feature factory that produces bad products faster.

Marty Cagan ·

The real bottleneck in product work is discovering a solution worth building, not building it.

Luke Wroblewski ·

Without the handoff, everyone builds: designer, developer and product manager can all work in the codebase at once, and that changes everything.

Brian Lovin ·

A PM who can design around their spec to see if it holds up to reality is what you want, and so is an engineer who really cares about building great visual component systems.

David Heinemeier Hansson ·

Designers should find what the spec should be and build it in HTML and CSS themselves, not make a product manager's spec look pretty.

Ian Silber ·

The best systems thinkers think not just about their feature but about how it extends the system.

Ian Silber ·

It is better not to spend time crafting the exact perfect solution until you know it works; getting an early version you can play with in the product is a really good milestone.

March 2026

Luis Ouriach ·

Teams should hang out together more and build rituals for collaborating, instead of each role owning its own artifact.

Luis Ouriach ·

Even when a product manager can contribute to prototypes, the designer is still doing something specific to a designer's role.

February 2026

Naval Ravikant ·

Vibe coding is the new product management.

January 2026

Jason Cohen ·

Every question about stalled growth reduces to whether the customer is actually getting the value you promised.

Jason Cohen ·

A/B testing cannot touch anything that actually decides a company: not strategy, not vision, not insight.

Arvid Kahl ·

Direct communication with customers matters more than small, incremental product tweaks.

Ken Norton ·

Companies should offer dual career tracks so product managers can advance without becoming people managers.

Jason Lemkin ·

The way to find where AI belongs in your company is to go through your own product anonymously and see which part makes you cry.

October 2025

Frank Chimero ·

AI has become a way for engineers, designers and product managers to wish each other away instead of working together.

Andrej Karpathy ·

Getting from a demo to a product is a march of nines, and each additional nine costs the same amount of work as the one before it.

Dylan Field ·

Fun can be a product's differentiator, even when the team thinks that is an absurd thing to compete on.

Dylan Field ·

AI cannot get a product to the quality bar on its own, because it still works in the realm of averages.

Dylan Field ·

Striking down the boring blockers one by one moves retention and activation as visibly as any new feature does.

Dylan Field ·

A minimum viable product is not enough: the first release still has to contain something a little bit awesome that shows people where it is going.

Dylan Field ·

AI prototyping ends the era of product managers asking designers to draw an idea, which frees designers for deeper work and lets anyone join the first conversation.

Dylan Field ·

Teams building AI products coast on vibes for too long: trusting the vibes gets you somewhere, but it is not rigorous.

Albert Cheng ·

Only 30 to 50 percent of product experiments win, because consumer behaviour is too unpredictable to be predicted from a hypothesis.

Albert Cheng ·

A freemium product's free tier should sample everything the paid product can do, because a limited free experience teaches users the product is limited.

Albert Cheng ·

For a product you install rather than open, activation is the decisive moment and it carries the user for years.

Albert Cheng ·

Growth is not metrics hacking: the job is to connect users to the value of the product.

Albert Cheng ·

You cannot manufacture virality, but you can find the moments users already screenshot and make those moments far better.

Albert Cheng ·

Doing PR before you have evidence customers want the thing is risky, because the publicity creates a sunk cost that makes the team see a failing product through.

September 2025

Julie Zhuo ·

AI has made individuals capable enough that the boundaries between engineer, designer, researcher and product manager should be dissolved.

Julie Zhuo ·

Putting a product manager on a team invites everyone else to delegate the product thinking away, which is why she does not hire them.

Julie Zhuo ·

You cannot A/B test your way into a really great product.

Tobias Lütke ·

Companies that constantly retune their pricing cheapen the product, because customers learn to wait for the next discount.

Colin Percival ·

Shipping a half-baked product permanently damages customer trust, even after it is later fixed.

August 2025

Jason Evanish ·

The skills needed to make customers feel heard are different from the skills needed to understand what they actually need.

Jason Evanish ·

When customers feel heard, they churn less and become advocates who help improve the product.

July 2025

Jason Evanish ·

As AI makes building faster and cheaper, choosing the right thing to build matters more than ever, because a competitor will get it right if you don't.

Jason Evanish ·

Customers often request solutions that are not actually what should be built.

June 2025

Jacob Falkovich ·

With AI handling routine tasks, the high-value human work of understanding client needs and trade-offs can be done by a smaller, more proactive team.

Ken Norton ·

Listening is arguably a product manager's most important skill.

Ken Norton ·

The most human aspects of product management are the least likely to be automated by AI.

David Crawshaw ·

Most software has too few users or too short a lifespan for long-term maintenance costs to matter.

April 2025

Ken Norton ·

A product leader's position at the intersection of every function in the C-suite comes at the cost of belonging to any one group.

March 2025

Rahul Vohra ·

Everything a company can build is either solution deepening or market widening, and doing one means not doing the other.

Rahul Vohra ·

A company that looks to its users as though it has stopped shipping is usually widening its market, and grinding through that is worth it.

Rahul Vohra ·

The best-known brands each stand for one clear thing, so a startup has to occupy a position that is unique, still available, and a reinforcement of its product strategy.

Rahul Vohra ·

Product-market fit can be measured, optimised and numerically increased, and an algorithm can write the roadmap that increases it.

Rahul Vohra ·

Reaching product-market fit requires deliberately not acting on the feedback of many of your early users, at the same time as listening intensely.

Rahul Vohra ·

Ignore both the users who love your product and the ones who are indifferent to it; the only feedback that raises product-market fit comes from the somewhat disappointed.

Rahul Vohra ·

Pricing cannot be worked out before positioning: what you are able to charge follows from where you have decided to sit in the market.

Rahul Vohra ·

Which AI features users will love is genuinely unpredictable, and the ones a founder is most confident about are the ones that get used least.

Jakob Nielsen ·

Deciding what software should do and why is still a human job: vibe coding changes the implementation phase far more than the planning phase.

Gibson Biddle ·

Product strategy is developed through an iterative combination of top-down and bottom-up work.

Gibson Biddle ·

Well-run product organizations still get their strategic decisions right less than half the time.

Gibson Biddle ·

Average-based proxy metrics tend to obscure important variation in underlying data.

February 2025

Thiago Costa ·

Customer feedback that reads well on the surface can wreck a product once applied; it is very hard to say no to a good idea for the product's long-term good.

January 2025

Elena Verna ·

"Simplify onboarding" is an action, not a problem, and a roadmap line written that way will not work.

Gibson Biddle ·

Developing a company's product strategy is an iterative, top-down/bottom-up process where the leader's work and the team's work eventually converge.

October 2024

Tren Griffin ·

Product-market fit can be lost as unpredictably and suddenly as it was gained, often through word of mouth.

August 2024

Pieter Levels ·

The hard part of building a product in a month is working out what not to build.

Tobias Sjösten ·

Generating a list of potential problems is worthless unless it is followed by validating and prioritizing them.

March 2024

Seth Godin ·

No business has everyone as its customer, so the goal is the smallest viable audience rather than the biggest possible one.

David Heinemeier Hansson ·

A company captured by ideology will produce useless products

February 2024

Andrew Chen ·

Product/market fit ultimately matters more for a company's growth than its distribution strategy.

January 2024

Charity Majors ·

What sets a company’s velocity is spending its time on the right things, not how much code it produces.

December 2023

Teresa Torres ·

An opportunity solution tree exists to resolve the tension between what the business needs and what the customer needs.

July 2023

Melissa Perri ·

Product management is merging with the GM role as more companies become software companies, not disappearing.

Melissa Perri ·

Product management is not going away, but hiring product owners who just feed developers tasks should stop.

May 2023

David Heinemeier Hansson ·

People who manage product managers should still spend almost all of their own time doing individual contributor work

March 2023

David Heinemeier Hansson ·

Angry customers provide valuable feedback

December 2022

Matthew Green ·

Nobody chose cloud backup: a handful of Silicon Valley executives made the choice for everyone in pursuit of adoption metrics.

November 2022

David Heinemeier Hansson ·

A company needs someone with a product vision to recover

June 2022

Steve Coast ·

Talking to customers about your product risks discovering that you are wrong.

May 2022

Gibson Biddle ·

Companies create long-term customer and shareholder value by pursuing product strategies that delight customers in ways that are hard to copy and improve the business.

March 2022

Gibson Biddle ·

A product leader must always be able to say what comes after the current strategy, not just execute it.

Gibson Biddle ·

A new feature's near-term value is improved retention; its longer-term value is the ability to raise prices.

Gibson Biddle ·

The best leaders don't just fit into an existing company culture — their own skills and behavior actively define what that culture is.

November 2021

David Heinemeier Hansson ·

Build the product for yourself first: if it truly serves you, plenty of other people like you will want it too.

August 2021

Teresa Torres ·

Product discovery is a decision-making process, and good discovery keeps the customer inside that process.

Teresa Torres ·

Product discovery belongs to the whole trio -- a product manager, a designer and an engineer -- not the product manager alone.

November 2018

Tren Griffin ·

People who set Key Results often mistake completing a task for delivering an outcome that benefits customers.

Tren Griffin ·

A Key Result measured over just one week is too short a time horizon to be a good Key Result.

January 2016

Ken Norton ·

Empathy is essential to leading a team, especially for product managers, who have responsibility without authority.

c. 2000–2014

Steve Krug ·

Testing one user early in a project is better than testing 50 near the end

July 2013

Des Traynor ·

Building a great product means being great at saying no -- not maybe, not later, no.

Des Traynor ·

Whether a feature is quick to build is a roadmap question, never a reason on its own to build it.

Des Traynor ·

A real product decision says a proposal is a great idea and still turns it down for something else.

May 1998

Steve Jobs ·

It is really hard to design products by focus groups, because people often do not know what they want until they are shown it.

The same record, other ways: every position as a chronology, or person by person.