Marty Cagan: evaluation

Transcript context

…Seems reasonable. So a lens that I want to use for part of the rest of our chat is this documentary that you've been recommending in some of your writing that I recently watched and I'm really excited to chat about it. It's a documentary called The Lost Interview where they interview Steve jobs, after he was fired from Apple but before he came back to run Apple. And there's a ton of insights that you've been able to extract that I also loved listening to and thinking about, and I'm excited to chat through this. So first question is just, what about this interview has struck you most initially broadly? Yeah. Well, one of the reasons I loved it is he very rarely talked about product. He loved to talk about his products. He loved to talk about why the iPhone was awesome, why the iPod was awesome, why the Mac was awesome, but the nature of building products was not. I mean, that was his secret sauce if you will, is he had very good insights to this. And so to find this hour plus interview where he's very thoughtful. He had a chance to think through what went well, what went wrong. And to answer your question, in my own writing, and in fact in the recent book Empowered, I share my theory for why there's such a big difference between the best and the rest. In other words, why isn't every company trying to work like the best companies? I mean, why not? Look at the valuation they get. For money alone, you'd think it would do that. And my best theory was that, well, the biggest reason I see is that they have never worked at a company like that, so they don't know what it looks like. They don't know what good looks like. And then I watched this video, which, as you know, resurfaced recently. And Steve Jobs shared his theory from 1995, for God's sakes. And I'm listening to it and I'm going, "Oh my God, his theory is better than my theory for sure." And it's still more relevant. And he talks about product discovery, he talks about process people, he talks about all these really relevant topics. But the one that struck me the most was his theory for why there are so many bad product companies. And his theory was, and by the way, I hope everybody that's listening to your podcast, it costs $4 to rent this on Amazon Prime. Definitely you should watch it. The whole thing. So don't let my summary discourage you. It's worth watching. But anyway, he shares that he thinks what happens in general, as companies get bigger, obviously they wouldn't have got big if they didn't have a decent product at one point or another. But what he was talking about is the same thing I am. Why is it that so many companies lose that mojo? And his argument was because as a company gets bigger, product historically became less important. The people in a company that would be celebrated were marketing people, sales people, finance people. If a company stops innovating, these are the engines for growth. Sales, marketing, or not growth with finance, but cutting cost. And his argument was this happens over time. Pretty soon, these are your leaders. They're the ones that have been promoted. So then what happens? Good product people don't want to work there anymore and they leave and they go to a company that values product. I think that's a better explanation than any other that I've heard. And it was so prescient because when he said this, this had yet to even happen to so many other companies, but it still happens all the time. I wrote an article a while ago called Devolving from Good to Bad that was observing some of this, but he really tapped into it. And honestly I think he's spot on. I like that he describes these as diseases of a company. They own enough market share. This is what happens. Growth is happening. They're winning. They don't need to keep innovating and it becomes this disease. And it's a really powerful way of thinking about it that you want to try to keep this disease from taking over your culture and product and company. And I think there's market share. And then just generally, it happens to companies just doing well. Things are going well, let's not break anything. Why launch something risky and new, and why not just keep selling this thing that everyone seems to want?…

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