Marty Cagan: recommendation

Transcript context

…It's absolutely my pleasure. I'm just going to jump straight in. I've noticed that you've been getting a lot more philosophical about product, especially in a lot of your recent writing, including a recent post that you call the Nature of Product, where you talk about a lot of these core misconceptions that people have about product management. Essentially how people don't really understand how different it is to build product at a company with a strong product culture versus what you'd call not such a strong product culture. And the way that you described it is that it's trying to explain to someone what the Grand Canyon is by just showing them pictures of the Grand Canyon. And so I'd love to just dive into that and just hear your take on this new philosophical bent that you've taken on product and these misconceptions that you've been seeing across product and product management. Yeah, sure. I mean, it's frustrating and that's what caused me, occasionally I go through these philosophical waves where I look a little harder about... It's frustrating because I really thought by the year 2022, we would not have such a chasm between how good companies work and the rest. There's such strong incentives, just the profit motive alone. Why don't more companies want to work like the best? So I find that just perplexing. And yes, it's true, and one of the funny things, and I bet you could relate to this, Lenny, I have friends on both sides. I have friends on both sides, the ones that work in not very good companies, a lot of them honestly don't believe me when I describe how good companies work. They're like, "Nobody does that." And then when I tell my friends at the good companies, they often say, "Nobody does that either, why would they do that? Are they crazy? Who would want to work that way?" And so this is mind boggling to me. And anyway, when I try to explain to somebody that's never actually worked on a real product team what it's like, you realize that sometimes it feels like I'm speaking a different language to them. And what I realized is that they are so ingrained in this very, very... And I don't even want to say old school because it's not the fact that it's old, it's just the fact that it's obsolete. They have this idea that a product manager does requirements in some form or another, PRDs, user stories, whatever you want. And then a designer's job is to basically make it pretty and maybe do some wire frames. And then the whole mess is taken its sprint planning to the engineers, and you say, "This is what you need to build next." That is so ingrained. And the quarterly roadmaps come in, it's so ingrained. And they think that the job is, "Yo, our job is to crank out features." And a lot of them don't even think twice because that's all they've ever known. And of course, I try to explain to them, "You know, that's really not how it works in any of your favorite products." Any of your favorite products or companies. It's a very different animal. You've really got true peers. The developers aren't there to just implement your dumb ideas, they are there to help you come up with a great solution. The designer's not just there to make your thing look pretty, they're there to help create a great experience. And by the way, you have a very different job as product manager. You need to bring skills to that team that the team doesn't have in design and engineering, because together you're able to really do what you need to do. So when I describe that, it's pretty different. These are not minor differences we're talking about. These are pretty dramatic differences. I really do believe at this point in time that feature teams and real product teams should not use the same string product manager. The job is so radically different, that it's misleading to call them both product manager. For folks listening to this. And they're like, "Hmm, which one do I work on? I'm not even sure." What are some, maybe three to five, signs that you work at a feature factory or feature team as you describe it?…

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