Marty Cagan: evaluation

Transcript context

…You touched on this idea that people mention this way working sounds like a dreamland to folks that haven't experienced it. And I asked folks on Twitter what questions to ask you, and that came up a couple times, is people are like, "I read your stuff." And I'm like, "Does this actually exist anywhere? I've never experienced this way of working," just to make people feel like this is possible. One, is there companies that are good examples of this way of working that you like to describe? And then two, just to reaffirm, this is possible, this happens at companies out there, correct? Oh, I mean, it's funny. So first of all, and I should always say this at the very beginning. Whenever I work with teams, I always try to remember to say this somewhere. Nothing I talk about, and honestly being very clear, nothing I've written about in Inspired, nothing I've written about in Empowered was invented by us. All we do is share the practices we see being used in the best teams. So the heuristic is pretty easy. If it's used by several of the best teams, we're like, "Okay, let's start recommending it. Let's see how it works there. And if it works well, we'll start advocating it." And on the other hand, somebody says, "Oh, have you heard about this process? Or have you heard about this tool?" And if none of those companies are using it, I'm like, "Don't bother me. It's either snake oil or it's not proven yet." We don't invent any of this stuff, we just try to share it. There's a little bit, I mean, I'd say the thing that we do is we try to untangle the company's culture from the technique, because Amazon's got their favorite cultural stuff, google does, Netflix does Stripe does. And don't get me wrong, I love those cultures, but they're all different cultures. They're very different cultures. So what we're trying to do is untangle that and share the techniques themselves. But you can read books. Working Backwards from Amazon describes what I talk about all the time, but it's using Amazon terms. You can read No Rules Rules from Netflix. You can see how that's done. You can read Build that talks about how Apple did it. It's all great, but you've got to work a little harder to see the common threads. That's really what we're trying to do. But all these companies Stripe, fabulous Shopify, look at what Slack has done. Even props to Spotify, they've been able to hold their own against Apple and Amazon for so many years. And of course, I'm talking about well known brands. There's countless small companies that nobody's heard of, but hopefully if they keep doing well, people will hear of them one day. But no, it's not a few companies. And there's great companies all over the world today, but it is true that it's a small fraction of total companies. And that's the part that really bothers me. Do you have a sense of what that fraction is? What percentage?…

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