Product has never been louder. Everywhere you look, there’s a hot take, a shiny framework, or someone promising the template that will finally fix your roadmap. The noise is wild, but the real insights, the ones that actually make you better?
Those are harder to find.
So here are the voices that actually matter. From icons like Marty Cagan to rising forces like Leah Tharin, these are the thinkers shaping how product really gets built, without the fluff.
Product strategy & leadership
Marty Cagan
If there were a Mount Rushmore for product management, Marty’s name would be etched into the rock. He started out at HP, shaped early online products at Netscape, and later led product and design at eBay before founding Silicon Valley Product Group. His books ‘INSPIRED’, ‘TRANSFORMED’, and ‘EMPOWERED’ show up in almost every PM reading list for a reason, and with a LinkedIn follower count that sits at around 180k followers, you can see why he’s one of the most trusted and honest voices in product today.
Marty’s known for calling out hard truths and explaining what empowered teams really look like, minus the typical coating of corporate fluff.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cagan/
Melissa Perri
Melissa has become one of the most respected names in product strategy by challenging teams to stop shipping features for the sake of shipping features. Her book, Escaping the Build Trap, helped thousands of PMs rethink how strategy should work in the real world. She’s part consultant, part coach, part advisor; with a rare blend of high-level strategy and practical structure that cements her as a steady voice for those trying to escape the chaos and become more outcome-driven.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melissajeanperri/
Shreyas Doshi
Shreyas is the PMs’ PM. Working at Stripe, Twitter, and Google has given him a front-row seat to decisions and challenges most PMs only ever get to experience secondhand. His writing hits hard because it comes from years of dealing with messy decisions, real trade-offs, and the pressure of high-growth environments. Many senior PMs credit him for sharpening their judgment and leadership instincts. His bright mind and clear thinking make his post the kind of content you never want to skip.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shreyasdoshi/
Gibson Biddle
Gibson is a storyteller at heart, with decades of experience spent behind the scenes of iconic consumer products. His time leading product at Netflix shaped much of what the industry now recognises as modern product strategy. Gibson has a knack for explaining big ideas in a simple, charming way, mixing practical experiments with long-term vision. If you want to understand how great product strategy comes together without losing the customer thread, Gibson is your guide.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gibsonbiddle/
Ken Norton
Ken is the author of one of the most important essays in the field, How to Hire a Product Manager, and it is still required reading for anyone building a PM team. His career spans product leadership at Google and a later role at a major venture fund advising founders. He manages to be both thoughtful and practical, which is why so many teams look to him when they’re trying to build a PM org that actually works.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kennethnorton/
Petra Wille
Petra is who product leaders call when they realize stronger people beat better frameworks. She has coached product managers for over a decade and written STRONG product people, the handbook for growing confident, empowered teams. She focuses on intentional development and communities of practice that let product managers learn together, not alone. Follow if your org needs stronger product people from the inside out.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/petra-wille-b8b1329/
Malte Scholz
Malte operates at the intersection of product leadership, product ops, and decision-making at scale. As the Head of Product and co-founder of airfocus, he’s spent years working directly with product leaders to understand why roadmaps break, prioritization becomes political, and strategy gets diluted as organizations grow.
What makes Malte’s voice stand out is that it’s shaped less by theory and more by pattern recognition across hundreds of real product teams. His writing and talks focus on helping PMs and CPOs build systems that actually support good decisions, from outcome-driven roadmaps to clearer product hierarchies and saner ways of aligning stakeholders.
Malte is especially valuable for senior PMs and product leaders who’ve outgrown beginner frameworks and are wrestling with scale, complexity, and organizational friction. He doesn’t shout, he doesn’t oversimplify; he helps you think more clearly about how product work really functions inside growing companies.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maltescholz/
Dan Lawyer
Dan operates at the sharp end of B2B product leadership, shaping wins at Lucid. With a remarkable background at Adobe, Intercom, and other leading companies, he blends strategy, storytelling, and execution to solve the cross-functional puzzles most PMs only read about. His voice cuts through with human honesty, grounded in daily leadership challenges, not boardroom abstractions. Expect takes on alignment, vision casting, and organizational design that feel immediately applicable. Follow Dan for practical insights when the real work begins beyond the slides.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dan-lawyer-75919b/
Product discovery & customer insights
Teresa Torres
Teresa is the person who made continuous discovery feel achievable, not aspirational. Her book Continuous Discovery Habits transformed how teams talk to customers and make decisions. Teresa has spent years coaching teams to build learning habits into their weekly workflows. She’s blunt in the best way, practical to the core, and focused on how people actually work. If your team needs to step away from guesswork and build real learning habits, follow Teresa.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/teresatorres/
Jeff Patton
Jeff is the mind behind User Story Mapping, a tool that changed how teams plan and build. He’s dedicated years to investigating how people think and work together; then he uses these key insights to connect discovery and delivery in a way that feels effortless. His insights are refreshingly simple, and consistently show that great products come from teams that see the whole story, not just a task list.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/productdesigncoach/
Dan Olsen
If product-market fit had a translator, it would be Dan Olsen. Teams bring him their fuzzy ideas, confusing signals, and half-working prototypes, and he helps them see the path forward with almost unfair clarity. His book, The Lean Product Playbook, has become the manual that PMs reach for when they’re stuck in the haze of discovery or drowning in conflicting feedback.
Dan’s real magic is his ability to strip away the noise. He takes sprawling product problems and turns them into clean, testable steps; the kind that make you wonder why you didn’t see it sooner. If you want to stop looping and start learning, Dan’s thinking is a shortcut worth taking.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danolsen98/
Roman Pichler
Roman is one of the most trusted voices on strategy and roadmapping for good reason. His templates are basically industry currency at this point, used by everyone from scrappy founders to enterprise giants. He’s even created a GO product roadmap template for airfocus users to manage their goals and opportunity backlogs, aligning strategy and action. Explore the template here.
Roman’s mastered the tricky balance between vision and execution, and his clear, steady style helps teams turn planning from a headache into something manageable.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/romanpichler/
Des Traynor
As an Intercom co-founder, Des redefined how products talk to customers through in-app messaging and onboarding. He distills fuzzy ideas, such as jobs-to-be-done and messaging-market fit, into insights that land instantly. Des combines product instincts with GTM reality, perfect for positioning as you scale beyond product-market fit. His talks reveal how customer truth powers both strategy and storytelling that converts. Read his content if you want to gain a deeper understanding of customers and translate that into products that stick.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/destraynor/
Growth, PLG & scaling specialists
Lenny Rachitsky
Lenny didn’t just start a newsletter. He accidentally built the closest thing the product world has to a universal handbook. What began as side notes from a former Airbnb PM is now the place operators go when they want answers that cut through the noise. His essays and interviews pull apart how real companies grow, how teams make decisions, and what actually moves the needle. The magic of Lenny’s work is that he makes the complicated feel oddly simple. He translates messy operator wisdom into clear steps you can apply the same day. If you’ve ever read one of his breakdowns and thought, “Finally, someone said it plainly,” that’s exactly why so many PMs treat his writing like a cheat code.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/
Brian Balfour
After scaling HubSpot's CRM as VP of Growth, Brian now teaches thousands of tech leaders through Reforge's growth systems. He frames growth as engineered product work – models, loops, experiments – not scattershot hacks. His frameworks reveal how compounding long-term decisions consistently beat quarterly tactics. PMs and founders bookmark his essays for the clarity on what actually drives revenue. Take his insights to design systems that scale growth sustainably.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bbalfour/
Elena Verna
Elena Verna is the closest thing growth has to a superhero. She has advised some of the world’s most product-led comp
anies, from Miro to Notion, but her most jaw-dropping work came at Lovable. Her ability to architect monetization systems, shift user behaviour at scale, and turn PLG into predictable revenue has earned her cult status among growth and product teams. Elena teaches PMs something many never learn: Growth is not magic, it is an engineered system, and she knows how to build it.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elenaverna/
Hiten Shah
Hiten Shah co-founded Crazy Egg, KISSmetrics, and Nira, navigating pivots, traction, and exits in the public eye. His stark honesty on experiments, incomplete data, and high-stakes decisions feels like battle-tested wisdom. Hiten shares what sustainable growth actually demands from product teams over multiple ventures. He goes beyond the hype to uncover the real mechanics of shipping, iterating, and knowing when to change course.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hnshah/
Aakash Gupta
Aakash Gupta writes the world’s #1 AI PM newsletter and podcast with over 201,000 subscribers, making him the top authority for PMs, product leaders, and aspiring talent. After rising to VP of Product at unicorn Apollo.io ($1.2B valuation), he shifted to sharing deep dives on PLG, growth, product strategies, and job hunting.
Beyond growth, Aakash’s content also focuses on AI product management, leadership strategies, and actionable advice to get a PM job. Looking for practical insights that accelerate careers and boost growth? Stay tuned to his channels.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aagupta/
Leah Tharin
Leah Tharin is quickly becoming one of the most refreshing voices in PLG and AI product strategy. She and Elena Verna often talk openly on their podcast about failed experiments, bets she wishes she had made earlier, and the psychological traps PMs can fall victim to when making decisions under pressure. She blends experimentation with a rare empathy for users and teams. Leah’s content gives you courage, not just frameworks. Follow her if you want to become the kind of PM who’s willing to run toward the problems others likely avoid.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leahtharin/
Casey Winters
Casey is the person companies call when growth stops being tidy and starts being real. He’s held some of the highest-pressure growth roles in tech, and it shows in the precision of his thinking. Casey doesn’t talk about acquisition, retention, and marketplace dynamics as abstract concepts; he talks about them like someone who has been deep inside the machine, pulling the actual levers. He understands how all the moving parts fit together and sees growth as a system, not a set of disconnected tactics. If you want to understand growth beyond the buzzwords – the real mechanics, the tough calls, the compounding decisions – then following Casey is a masterclass.
LinkedIn: hhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/caseywinters/
Rich Mironov
Rich Mironov has seen every version of product dysfunction and knows how to talk about it with refreshing honesty. He has spent decades coaching leaders, fixing broken product organizations, and helping teams prioritize when everything feels urgent. Rich is the voice you need when you want the truth about how product really works inside companies, not how it works in glossy diagrams.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richmironov/
Product operations & scaling organizations
Graham Reed
Graham has built product operations from the ground up in five businesses, after years of witnessing what breaks when product teams scale from 5 to 50. He turns that frontline experience into product ops systems that actually accelerate decisions rather than slow them down. Co-hosting the Product Opscast and writing for Product Ops Confidential, he cuts through the buzzwords to focus on the tools, frameworks, and systems that keep autonomy alive while creating calm amid chaos. Product leaders follow Graham because he proves the power of product ops as a force multiplier, not just an extra layer of process.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/grahamreed/
John Cutler
John sketches the hidden systems behind product org dysfunction: the incentives, thrash patterns, and bet flows that make teams feel perpetually stuck. His visuals hit like therapy for PMs who recognize their chaos instantly. These aren’t silver bullets, just clear maps of what's really happening beneath the surface, from alignment gaps to healthy experimentation. His newsletter, The Beautiful Mess, offers fresh perspectives on why strategies fail execution, helping product leaders navigate scale with eyes wide open.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnpcutler/
Ross Webb
Ross leads AI Product teams and machine learning initiatives, having scaled Amazon and Just Eat products to over £ 50M in revenue. In his Product Team Success podcast, he unpacks how AI demands new rituals, governance, and cross-functional muscle that the traditional product management playbook misses. Ross Webb makes cutting-edge tech leadership feel achievable, equipping you to deliver measurable outcomes at enterprise scale. If AI products feel like uncharted territory, his perspective brings the clarity you need.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rosswebb/
Antonia Landi
Antonia is the go-to person when everything feels a bit too chaotic and a bit too fast. She’s spent years inside high-growth teams watching what breaks, what actually helps, and what sounds good on paper but collapses the moment real humans get involved. Her take on product ops is refreshingly honest and grounded in real experience, not theory. If you want someone who talks about the hard parts – the gaps, the frictions, the “why is this so painful?” moments, she’ll make you feel a lot less alone in the mess.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/landiantonia/
Martin Eriksson
Martin helped put product management on the map long before it was fashionable. As the founder of Mind the Product, he built a global community that gave PMs a place to learn, be challenged, and feel understood. Thousands of product careers trace back to something they heard on an MTP stage or read in one of his essays. Martin has a gift for boiling down the messy, emotional (sometimes chaotic) reality of product work into something clear. Follow him now if you want perspective from someone who has shaped the discipline at a foundational level and still understands what PMs actually struggle with today.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/martineriksson/
Julie Zhuo
Julie is the rare leadership voice who makes you feel understood, not lectured. After years leading design teams at Meta, she’s seen the complicated, emotional, wonderfully human side of building and scaling teams; the part most people don’t talk about because it’s messy and hard to package into frameworks. Julie talks about it anyway, and that’s what makes her indispensable. If you want to become a leader people genuinely want to follow – more grounded, more empathetic, more confident – then Julie’s work is a breath of fresh air in a space that craves honesty.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/julie-zhuo/
Emerging product management voices
David Pereira
As a battle-tested CPO across B2B SaaS companies, David delivers the blunt reality-check every feature factory needs. He dismantles delivery theatre and other bloated rituals with hard truths drawn from his own experience. He offers fresh alternatives to outdated practices, guiding senior PMs toward truly outcome-driven work that moves the needle. A great example of that? The product roadmap template he designed for airfocus users.
David’s constructive candour shakes up stale thinking and “turns product managers into value maximizers”. If you're ready to escape output obsession, his voice belongs in your feed.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidavpereira/
Itamar Gilad
Itamar has become the voice of calm in a world full of noisy frameworks. As a former Google product manager, he saw how complex decisions are made inside high-pressure environments, and he created the GIST model to help teams cut through chaos. Itamar writes for PMs who are tired of guessing, tired of politics, and tired of pretending their roadmap is set in stone. His work brings clarity where most teams feel confusion. Follow him if you want a more rational, structured, confidence-boosting way to decide what to build next.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/itamargilad/
Claire Vo
Claire has spent years leading product at growth-stage companies like LaunchDarkly and Optimizely, where alignment and decision quality matter more than perfect roadmaps. She writes about leadership the way it actually shows up: uncertain, high-pressure, and full of trade-offs. She’s especially good at unpacking what changes when your role shifts from shipping features to shaping teams and direction. Her posts are a good gut-check when you’re no longer just managing a backlog, but the people and decisions around it.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clairevo/
Jarom Chung
Jarom directs user-facing products and major feature sets at Lucid, where he’s spent over eight years leading teams behind some of the platform’s most used capabilities. He brings a rigorous, analytical mindset shaped by a Ph.D. in biological and biomedical sciences from Harvard, which shows in how clearly he breaks down complex product problems. His content focuses on prioritization, stakeholder management, and keeping teams aligned: Practical lessons from someone still in the trenches. He humbly shares what he’s learning as he goes, making his advice practical and actionable. Follow Jarom if you want steady ideas you can use without turning your workflow upside down.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaromchung/
Maggie Crowley
If there were a podcast hall of fame for product nerds, Maggie Crowley's "Build Podcast" would be on the wall. She blends sharp product intuition with a rare ability to extract candid, practical lessons from operators who have actually done the work. As Drift’s Director of Product, she’s spent years making tough decisions under pressure and brings that same grounded perspective to her content. Maggie feels like a long-lost PM friend, who you trust to tell you what actually happens behind the scenes, not the shiny, polished version you hear at conferences.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maggiecrowley/
Tim Herbig
Tim Herbig is the quiet force shaping how a new generation of PMs works. His thinking on discovery, OKRs, and alignment is trusted by teams who want fewer buzzwords and more repeatable ways to actually solve problems. Tim has a talent for turning overwhelming product challenges into straightforward steps that real teams can follow. He doesn’t write to impress you; he writes to help you get unstuck. Follow him if you want practical guidance that will genuinely make you better at your job tomorrow, not someday.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/herbigt/
Wrapping up…
The people in this list are the ones pushing product forward in meaningful ways.
Whether you’re just shipping your first feature or heading up strategy for thousands of users, these voices will sharpen how you think, how you lead, and how you build.
Because these days, great PMs are shaped by what they see happening around them and who they learn from.
Emma-Lily Pendleton
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Experience the new way of doing product management
Experience the new way of doing product management