Marty Cagan: observation

Transcript context

…I've changed my mind on product ops. One reason is because I also was like, "I don't need another person in the loop on everything I'm doing. I just want to have..." I don't know why I would do that even though I have endless work and I have working crazy hours. But I think one of the great things about product ops people that I talk to is there's not many of them. You need one often to do a ton and to help a lot of different teams, so it's not like a team that just grows like crazy. That's what I like. Same with user research, by the way, and you had a very good guest on that I think tried to make that point as well, a small high leverage group. So it works for data analysts and it works for user research where they are helping the teams do the work they need to do, but that's where it really depends what they're doing. I will tell you I've seen too many companies where the product leaders are not doing their job, so what they do is they hire product ops to try to do their job. They're the ones now responsible for educating the product managers. That's just not good. I have just a few more questions before we get to our very exciting lightning round. Actually, maybe just one more question. We'll see where this goes. So I've mentioned this earlier that a lot of startup founders are just like, "I do not need product managers. I'm not going to hire them ever. Or maybe I'll wait until I have hundreds of engineers." But then I find many of them change their mind, bring in a PM and they're like, "Oh wow, this is amazing. Why didn't I do this earlier? This person, it's exactly what I needed." And these are guests I've had on the podcast that were like, "We don't need PMs." And then they get one and they're like, "Okay, I see. This is great." Do you have any advice for founders that are in this boat of just like, I don't want product managers, they're going to screw us up, they're going to slow us down? Any advice for this?…

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