Marty Cagan: evaluation

Transcript context

…I know you talk about teams and product teams a lot. I imagine people still aren't 100% sure of exactly what you mean when you say that. So let's spend a little time on just what does it look like when you're on a feature team, feature factory versus an empowered product team? Well, there's a lot of clues for sure. Some of the easiest is on a feature team, you're basically given a roadmap of output. That's the key, is output. In other words, their features are projects that usually it could have come from an executive, could have come from a big pocket customer, could have come from wherever. But it's a bunch of features and literally you're being asked to design, build, test, deploy that feature. You're usually given dates and timeframes as well, but that's a feature team. You deliver. And don't get me wrong, that's still work, but that's output. It is a lot easier to deliver output than it is to deliver outcomes. And a product team, an empowered product team, instead of being given that roadmap of features, they're given problems to solve. Now they're customer problems or they're business problems or both, but they're given a problem to solve. Usually one or two a quarter on top of of course the keep the lights on kind of work that everybody does, but they're given hard problems to solve and the measure is not ship the thing. The measure is it solves the problem. And that's why really the biggest difference between a strong product company and the rest is strong product companies understand it's all about outcomes. You just don't get points for shipping, you get points for delivering the value. A lot of the CEOs and CFOs I talk to, they resonate best when I frame it as it's about time to money more than time to market. We know how to do time to market. If you insist on time to market, we know how to do that. The techniques are well-known. The harder part is time to money and I know that's what they care about and that's harder and that's what a product team really does. It's only when you sign up for an outcome that you have the needs for a product manager. I would say in the Silicon Valley sense, that's when you need a product manager. Because if you've been asked to solve these problems, that means you have to come up with a solution that's not only usable and feasible, which is what a feature team does, but is also valuable and viable. And that means you need a different set of skills that your engineers and your designers almost never have. That's not a knock on them. Those are very different skillsets. So now you need this person who understands the customers and understands the business deeply. That's where the product manager role came from. That's what they still at a good product company are responsible for. So that's a very different job. It's also if you have a person playing that kind of product manager, it is very unlikely they've got time on their hands to get in the face of the designer and start wire framing for them or start irritating the developers. They've got their own work to do. And this is essentially the theater you're describing, that people that aren't real product managers doing product management activities, can you just talk about what that looks like?…

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