Marty Cagan: preference

Transcript context

…It's conscious. I find myself, I'm aware of myself dialing up the rhetoric around this stuff. I've actually been saying these things for a long time, honestly, and it's on the record. You can read the blog articles from 10 years ago, 20 years ago, but things are changing. And first of all, I should acknowledge, I don't know if you're this way Lenny, but most product people I know like me are paranoid. So we're always worried that things are going to come and just take our customers away and disrupt our products. And so I know that there's a degree of that. I'm always looking at what are the things that could really shake things up in a good way but also in a bad way? And there's been a number of things I've been very worried about for a long time and I think that there's a convergence of factors that are going on and one of the challenges is it's simultaneous. So there are a number of things happening in parallel, which is a recipe for some chaos and a lot of fear. And in the product community, in the design community, in the engineering community, it's there. You can see it. And like you, I talk to people pretty much every day. So I do have a lot of theories about why this is going on and what people can do to best protect themselves, their career, their companies. And so I'm happy to share that, but it's not small. It's not a small set. Maybe before I get into it though, I realize that people should understand where I'm coming from and how it's different than where you're coming from because this perspective... Just to be clear, I think we're both trying to help the product community, but we're trying to do it in very different ways. And I want to be clear, I love the way you do it. In fact, if people don't know, I'm a paid subscriber to yours because I find it incredibly useful for what I want to do. So let's talk about that. You obviously could describe what you do better than anyone, but my take is that you are, and this is what I find valuable, you're sharing a broad range, increasingly broad range of perspectives, people, ways of working, ways of doing products, experiments with the product model, experiments in leadership. I love that. It actually helps me a lot. That's why I subscribe. And I'll be honest, the main reason I took some prodding for me to... I know there's something about actually paying for a subscription when there's a hundred different product related newsletters and stuff, but what happened was you have a lot of subscribers and people that I know would see something and they'd email me and they'd say, "Did you see what Lenny was talking about with Lenny or with whoever? And how do you explain that? What do you think is going on?" And it made me want to watch a lot of these. Some of companies I know, but other ones you've introduced me to that I don't know anybody at. So to me that's incredibly valuable. It's a whole lot easier than the way it used to be, which is a whole lot of traveling to a lot of companies. you've introduced me to that I don't know anybody at. So to me that's incredibly valuable. It's a whole lot easier than the way it used to be, which is a whole lot of traveling to a lot of companies. So I love that. You are helping so many people to get a broader understanding of product. My goal is different, the SVPG. We are also trying to help the product community, but it's interesting when I watch your interviews, you're trying to pry out of people what's special about what they do, which is what I want to hear. But interestingly, what I'm looking for is not what's different, it's what's the same. What we are all about is sharing the principles and the practices that are used consistently by the best product companies. In fact, we have a heuristic, we've never made a secret of this. We are always asked about new techniques and new methods, new processes and we're like, "Look, we need to see it being used by at least several of the companies that have proven they can consistently innovate." If those companies can use it productively, we're all about evangelizing that. We make this clear in every one of the books. We don't invent any of these things. We just, if they work, we like to talk about them. So we are looking for the commonality and mostly we're looking to help a company, whether it's a startup or a large company to have the best possible chance of success. That's the goal for us. It's a different goal. You can see that. So all these data points become interesting as data points, but we're looking for those things that last and you never know. You have to see. For one, I love working with startups, but as you know, a lot of startups are dominated by the founder and the early people and it almost doesn't matter what techniques they use. If they're good, it's amazing what they do. That's just amazing. And so that's probably important to get out of the way. Yeah, I love this. Bringing that perspective. I agree with everything you said. I think we are very different in what we're providing to the product community. And it's interesting being on this side of the microphone is I built a lot of empathy for journalists. I know the Brian Chesky episode is a good example where there's a lot of things there that might sound problematic and you disagreed with. And as me interviewing him, the challenge I have is I have an hour with him and I have to always decide, do I go and push back and try to, hey, is this actually working the way you're describing? Is this actually the right way to approach stuff? Here's why maybe you would not. Versus there's so many things I want to get to and ask him about this stuff. I'm like, oh, which way do I go? And then if I'm pushing back too hard, people are like, "I'm not going to go on this podcast where he is just questioning everything I think." So it's a really interesting role. I think that's totally fair.…

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