Marty Cagan: preference

Transcript context

…I always love just the message of empowerment and giving people motivation to you can actually make change. You're not stuck in this way of working, and I know you do that a lot. The official title of the book, so it's TRANSFORMED: Moving to the Product Operating Model. What do you mean when you... There it is. I don't have my copy yet 'cause that hasn't come out in the US yet, otherwise, I'd have it here on my side as well. There it is. It's a beautiful green color by the way. It goes nicely with the other colors. Amazing. Beautiful design, whoever did that. Okay, so the part of the title is Moving to the Product Operating Model. What does that mean? That was the biggest pain for the book was... 'Cause honestly, I had dodged that question for 20 years. If you look at any of my writing before starting on this book, I just said, "Look, do you want to work like the best or do you want to work like the rest?" That's how we referred to it, the best versus the rest because there is no word, there is no name that talks about the common principles with all the best companies. So we would just say, do you want to work like the best or not? But when I started to write the book, I'm like, okay, I can't just say work like the best. We have to have some name for this, but I don't know if you've come across this Lenny, but you don't want to coin a new term if you can avoid it. It is really painful to try to develop a new term. Some of the companies we worked with use the term product operating model and don't get me wrong, that's not the only term. Some people use the term product led company or product driven company, but those two we just don't like because it gives all the wrong message and the rest of the company thinks it's a power grab. So we wanted to avoid those words. We like product operating model for a couple reasons. One is it's a model, it's a conceptual model. It's not a process. It's not really a thing, it's more of a set of principles and also it's non-threatening to a lot of people. It's just saying, "Look, this is how these companies operate. You can look at it and decide if you think it's good for you too." So we adopted that term, we call it product model for short. And all it really is it boils down to a set of 20 principles and those 20 principles are what we find. Remember we started with this. I was explaining, when I listen to your guests, I'm listening for what's special about each of their companies, but what I'm looking for is the commonality. 'Cause most of the time when I see a successful company, they are living these principles. Principles like you have to experiment. You have to embrace experimentation. If you don't do that, most of this is not possible. Or you have to make sure that everything you release is instrumented so that we can prove the outcome. Stuff like that, that there's a million different methodologies and frameworks and tools and processes, but matters is those principles. And so that's what we mean by that product operating model. There's at a high level we talk about it, is how you decide what you're going to work on? How you decide which problems to solve? That's what most companies do in annual planning, but it's basically the product strategy. That's what your Meta friend was describing that the leaders do. That's their job. The second is how do they solve problems? Do they have the skills to do product discovery like we're talking about? How to actually come up with good solutions that work for the customer and work for the business. That's the second big dimension of the product model. o do product discovery like we're talking about? How to actually come up with good solutions that work for the customer and work for the business. That's the second big dimension of the product model. And the third big dimension is how do they actually build, test and deploy product to their customers? Do they do it in a way that is reliable, that is demonstrable where you can show that this generates the outcomes that you need? Those are the three big areas. And then there's a number of competencies. There's four new competencies that most companies don't have, but what makes it tricky is they have people with those titles, but they don't have people with those jobs. The one we've been talking about is product manager.…

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