Marty Cagan: evaluation

Transcript context

…AB testing and feature management platform built by alums of Airbnb and Snowflake for modern growth teams. Companies like Twitch, Miro, ClickUp and DraftKings rely on Eppo to power their experiments. Experimentation is increasingly essential for driving growth and for understanding the performance of new features, and Eppo helps you increase experimentation velocity while unlocking rigorous deep analysis in a way that no other commercial tool does. When I was at Airbnb, one of the things that I loved most was our experimentation platform where I could set up experiments easily, troubleshoot issues, and analyze performance all on my own. Eppo does all that and more with advanced statistical methods that can help you shave weeks off experiment time, an accessible UI for diving deeper into performance and out of the box reporting that helps you avoid annoying prolonged analytic cycles. Eppo also makes it easy for you to share experiment insights with your team, sparking new ideas for the AB testing flywheel. Eppo powers experimentation across every use case, including product growth, machine learning, monetization and email marketing. Check out Eppo at geteppo.com/lenny and 10X your experiment velocity. That's getE-P-P-O.com/lenny. Marty Cagan, welcome back to the podcast. Thanks very much Lenny. Thanks for inviting me back. Thank you for coming back. So our first episode together is still one of the top five most popular episodes of my entire podcast, which is wild because the podcast was much smaller back then. You've also got a book coming out. We're going to talk about that. You've also been getting a lot more spicy in your writing as of late. You've been writing about product management theater and product leadership theater and all these sorts of things. So I'm excited to dig into a lot of these things. I thought I'd start with just asking what is driving this recent spiciness in your writing? 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.…

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