Marty Cagan: preference

Transcript context

…And for people that are listening to this wondering, what are these skills that I need to build to be a real product manager? I think you often say it's mostly focused on value and viability, and that's where a lot of this- Value and viability is what you are responsible for as a product manager, just like an engineer is responsible for feasibility, it has to be a solution that can be built and delivered. But a product manager is responsible for value and viability. Another way I like to frame this is on a real empowered product team, product manager is a creator, not a facilitator. I always cringe when somebody tells me, oh, my job is to say why? And I'm like, "Well, what do you do for the rest of the week besides the 10 minutes it takes you to say why?" It's ridiculous. People think that. But you know what? On a feature team, when you're scrounging around for some justification of your job, it's not that big a surprise. But no, the why actually comes from the product strategy anyway. You don't even do the why. A product manager is a creator and so there's this side-by-side creation with design and engineering to come up with these solutions. Now, in order to do your job and represent value and viability, there are some real skills that are involved. First of all, you have to really become an expert on your users and customers. I know that I was not allowed to take the product manager role until I had visited 30 customers in person, 15 in the US, 15 in Europe. That was just the person who was coaching me. That was their rule. And all I know is those 30 customers changed my life because I thought I knew our customers and I really didn't. Another is you're supposed to be the expert on the data. How is our product being used? How is that usage changing over time? How is it being purchased? So that's big. Another big one is you are the person on the team that represents the compliance issues, the sales issues, the marketing issues, the financial cost issues, the monetization issues, go to market in general. This is all legal constraints. This is all the product manager. Just think if you don't have this person on the team and you want to empower this team to make decisions, what are you going to do? You're just going to make it up? Or what they usually do is they call meetings with 20 stakeholders all in a room to try to decide these things, and now you've reverted to design by committee. So no, the product manager needs to bring this knowledge. They also need to bring deep understanding of the market. So when I describe these things to a typical product owner, they're like, "We're on different planets." What they learned in a CSPO or a PSPO class was how to manage a backlog in Jira, which to me is very analogous to learning how to operate Google Docs. Of course, that's not the job. That's something we do every day, but it's not the job just any more than... Developers are in Jira every day. Does that mean that's their job? Of course not. Their job is to build. So this is what a product manager contributes. And really the distinction, if you want to think about it on a spectrum, a product owner is one extreme. And honestly, that is a role in a delivery process. this is what a product manager contributes. And really the distinction, if you want to think about it on a spectrum, a product owner is one extreme. And honestly, that is a role in a delivery process. That has no business being a dedicated person, really doesn't. And most teams I know, the senior engineer could do it better anyway. Second on the other side of the spectrum is what we're talking about, an empowered product manager. And then a feature team product manager is somewhere in between there. They do more than administer the backlog. They do a lot of project management. And don't get me wrong, project management is important, but it is not product management. And furthermore, in almost every company I see with feature team product managers, they have a boatload of project managers anyway. So you could hear there's some exasperation in my voice because I feel like this has been quite clear for a long time, but most companies are deaf to this. They don't care. And I have theories about why, but that's kind of depressing. But for whatever reason, I feel like now I'm raising the volume because people are now seeing this the hard way because a lot of companies are cutting and these are easily among the most vulnerable people in a company.…

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