Marty Cagan: prediction

Transcript context

…Let me actually read a quote from you where you talk about this exact point. You wrote, "I have been warning for several years that delivery team, product owners and feature team product managers are likely to be facing a reckoning as companies realize that these roles are not what they thought they were. From what I can tell, that reckoning has begun and I'm expecting GenAI will only compound this." That's the pessimistic version of the world. Either I might be overreacting. Might be. I'm not really known for being alarmist, but maybe. It's possible. I hope so, but I doubt it. I think these trends are real. Now, does that mean people are... It's hopeless? They should all start retraining to be, I don't know what, housing construction, something that GenAI won't replace maybe? No. I think what really this does is you need to raise your skills. Enough with the silly facades of delivery teams and feature teams. You should raise your skills. And a lot of product managers, they reach out and they're like, "I know I'm in a feature team and I don't like it." I often use the phrase they're trapped in a feature team and they're like, "This isn't what I signed up for. The New York Times article about product management wasn't this. This was different." And they're like, "What should I do? Should I just leave my company and go to one of these other companies?" And I try to explain that they actually have a lot more agency than they realize. There is a lot an individual contributor... Of course, there's way more than a product leader could do. And that's the biggest shame in all this, is they're not doing this. Most product leaders are not doing this 'cause they of course have a lot of agency, a lot of ability to change a company. But an individual can do it as well. They can raise their game. They can literally do a self-assessment and raise the skills from a product owner or a feature team product manager to a real product manager. At a minimum, I tell people, and I've seen this countless times, at a minimum, your company will appreciate it and probably promote you because you will be one of the few that actually understands these things. Hopefully even more than that, they'll say, hey, why don't we try running a set of teams this way and see how we do? So it can happen from the ground up too. I imagine many people are wondering, how do I do this? I know you've written books, I guess there's courses, there's all kinds of things. If you could give people a couple tips of how to get better at this and what skills to focus on, what's a quick piece of advice you could share there?…

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