In-situ diagnosis appears to be one of the essential methods for gaining insights as how an electrode material failure, therefore feeding back for designing and creating new materials with enhanced battery performances. In this presentation, I will focus on recent progress on ex-situ, in-situ and operando S/TEM studies for probing into the structural and chemical evolution of electrode materials for lithium ion battery. I will highlight several recent key observations, which appear to be well documented, while essentially are poorly understood, and therefore act as the bottleneck for the advances of both cathode and anode for better batteries. It would be expected that this presentation can stimulate new ideas as how to attack these bottlenecks to advance the potential cathode and anode materials.