Marty Cagan's ten product management reversals
In an essay he published on September 11, based on a keynote he gave at the Lenny & Friends Summit, Marty Cagan took on a question most of us would find a way to dodge if someone asked it in public: "In light of all that has changed, what are the things that you used to argue were true, that you no longer believe?" He answered with ten of them, and two weeks later, on September 25, he published a follow-up that reads to us like an eleventh.
We’ve read the list several times now and we think it's one of the most useful things he has written, partly because it takes real courage for the author of the field's reference books to walk back his own positions in public, and partly because so many of the ten land hardest on people who never get to make these decisions in the first place. Cagan writes mostly for product leaders, which makes sense, but most of the people we work with at Sense & Respond Learning are product managers, designers, team leads and middle managers who implement someone else's decisions while managing someone else's teams, so we want to read each reversal from their point of view.
P.S. — If you’ve followed our work over the years whether it’s here at Sense & Respond Learning or on Jeff or Josh’s individual posts and blogs, you’ll notice many familiar themes in these reversals. If some of these sound familiar to you and you’re looking for a team to help you make these ways of working a reality, drop us a note.
1. Business viability matters far more than he said
Cagan writes that he "completely understated the importance of business viability," and that his early framing left it buried beneath value, usability and feasibility. Makes sense, you can build the greatest product ever but if the business strategy around it is flawed, you’re building it for yourself and your teammates.
If you don't control the roadmap, this is your opening, because the fastest way to be taken seriously by the people who do is to talk about the business the way they do. This means learning how your product makes money, what it costs to serve a customer, and which of your team's ideas would impact those numbers.
2. Teams guard the problem for too long
He argues that practitioners have come to see themselves as gatekeepers of whether a problem is worth solving, and that "when a product fails, it's almost always because the solution the team came up with just wasn't good enough." From the middle, the problem often arrives pre-approved by someone above you anyway, so the time you would have spent re-litigating it is better spent testing several solutions against it, cheaply and early, before one of them quietly becomes the plan.
3. The why that matters most
The "why" he now wishes he had emphasized is why people use your product and why they stop. He points out how infrequently companies look into the reasons customers leave. You rarely need anyone's permission to call five customers who cancelled last quarter. What they tell you can be the evidence that changes a roadmap conversation you weren't initially invited to.
4. Humility belongs in the job
He admits that his "CEO of the product" framing was "not exactly a message of humility," and that the missing humility, knowing what you can't know and admitting what you don't, is the cause of a lot of failed products. For people in the middle of the org this is more a relief than a burden, because "we don't know yet, and here's how we'll find out" is the most useful sentence a team lead can bring to a stakeholder meeting.
5. Predictability runs deeper than he thought
He underestimated how deeply rooted the desire for predictability is, in practitioners and leaders alike, and now writes that "predictability has its place, but not at the expense of outcomes or trust." This is fascinating because this is exactly why so many organizations brought Agile in to their teams. And, even with perfect, textbook deployments, they never got that kind of predictability. Why? Because software development is complex and unpredictable.
You probably can't make your organization stop asking for dates, but you can pair every date you give with the outcome it is supposed to produce,. This way when the date arrives the conversation includes whether anything changed for customers and not only whether the thing shipped.
6. Ignoring politics was naive
"I tried to ignore the importance of politics, hoping that strong product work would be enough to carry the day. That was naive." Anyone who has spent more than a year inside a large company knows this already, and the useful move from the middle is to map it, writing down who has to say yes for your work to survive, what each of those people is measured on, and where your outcome helps or hurts their number. Then, craft a compelling story to connect the dots for them between your work and their success.
7. Empowered teams need better management
We were very happy to finally hear this. In his earlier work, Cagan focused on teams and gave leadership too little attention. Companies took that to mean empowered teams need less management when, in his words, "empowered product teams don't require less management, they require better management." If you manage people who manage product work, that sentence is your job description. Turn the strategy you inherited into context your teams can act on without coming back to you every time.
8. Governance decides more than he credited
He used to treat products derailed by leadership misalignment as unfortunate victims. He now coaches leaders to work with the CEO on a governance structure and culture durable enough to succeed. From the middle you won't be redesigning corporate governance, but you can make the misalignment visible early by writing down the two conflicting goals you've been handed and asking the people above you, in writing and before the quarter starts, which one wins.
9. Product is a full-contact sport
"Product is not as genteel as I made it sound in my books," he writes, calling it "a full-contact blood sport." For a practitioner that raises the bar on evidence, because solving a real customer problem stops being enough the moment a competitor solves it better, so your research and your success metrics have to include whatever customers use today instead of you.
10. People will go a long way to avoid thinking
The reversal he treats as the most fundamental is how far people will go to avoid thinking. One culprit for outsourcing thinking is process. Teams will often cite process failure as a way to disperse blame for a failed effort. And, of course the biggest risk we’re all facing now is the risk that "people will use LLMs as an alternative to thinking, rather than as a thought partner." Nobody can mandate thinking and nobody can stop you from doing it, which makes this the one reversal entirely within your control.
The eleventh: the managers are coming back
On September 25 Cagan followed up with an essay about the managers who went back to hands-on building when AI made building accessible again, some by choice, some not, and some simply tired of leading,. He notes that companies which were early to announce cutting managers "have started to reverse that action." His reasoning is that as the cost of building falls, product, design and engineering leadership responsibilities "become only more important, not less." We read that as the natural sequel to reversal number seven, and as good news for the middle layer, because the job coming back is the one that translates strategy into context for teams.
So what do you do with eleven reversals?
Pick the one that is costing your team the most right now and change one habit this sprint, whether that means calling the customers who left, pairing your next date with the outcome it's meant to produce, or writing down who has to say yes before your work survives the next planning cycle. If the one you picked is predictability, outcomes or the management gap, that is the ground our Objectives & Key Results and Lean Product Management workshops cover, and we'd be glad to help your teams work through it.
Which of the eleven is your organization furthest from, and who in the room would have to agree before you could change it?
Sources: Marty Cagan, Strong Opinions, Loosely Held, SVPG, September 11, 2026, and Experts Lead Experts, SVPG, September 25, 2026.