Marty Cagan: evaluation

Transcript context

…We covered a lot. We did. I imagine we covered some of the elements of your book, but let's talk about the book. So this is your third book, is that right? Yes. Okay. What made you decide to write another book and add an addition to the Marty Cagan cannon and what is it about? This is a different one though. It's different kind because INSPIRED, hopefully you know, is for product teams and product managers. It's really a book about product discovery. And then EMPOWER is really about product leadership, vision strategy, team topology, coaching. It's all about that. And that was the original idea. We would share those techniques 'cause that's what we share. But the single most common question we got honestly from the first edition of INSPIRED was that people would read the book and they would say, I love this, I want to do this. But have you ever seen our company? We are so far away from that. We are like night and day. And in fact, a lot of people would tell me point blank, there's no way their company's going to go along with this. And so what they were asking was, how in the world do you transform to work like this? And we've been getting that question for years now. That's really what my partners, Christian, Jonathan, Christopher, Leah, that's what they do is they help companies to transform. That's what we've been doing. But we do that on a one-off basis. There's only five of us. How many companies could we possibly work with? So we realized that this question was a global question. And if we've written books that explain, maybe you want to work this way, but we don't address how to change to work this way, that's leaving people without that hard part. So the goal of TRANSFORMED, unlike the other books, was to share how to actually change. There are techniques in TRANSFORMED as well, but there are transformation techniques. There are change techniques like the use of pilot teams or spreading things out to divide and conquer on some of the transformation work. So the other thing we wanted to do, in fact, we made a rule for ourselves. We knew we needed lots of examples, case studies, but we said it's too easy to include Silicon Valley companies because Airbnb was born in this model. They were designers, but still they were a Silicon Valley company. It was a big advantage for Airbnb over say your favorite bank or whatever that was not born in this way of working. So we said all our examples are going to be from outside Silicon Valley world. They're all companies, most of them pre-internet, that had to change dramatically to work this way. And not only were we going to show how they changed, but we were going to show what they were able to do when they changed, which to me is the coolest part, seeing the innovation. Some of these innovations, honestly, Lenny, are as impressive as anything I've seen Amazon do and that's saying a lot. Amazon in my opinion is the top of the pack and so that's impressive, what Trainline in the UK was able to do. A company I had never known before a few years ago in Saudi Arabia called Almosafer, a travel agency. They own, I forget what it is, 80 plus percent of the market over Expedia, over the big guys in the US because they actually learned this stuff and were able to do it. lled Almosafer, a travel agency. They own, I forget what it is, 80 plus percent of the market over Expedia, over the big guys in the US because they actually learned this stuff and were able to do it. And we have a dozen examples from all over the world, Brazil, Virginia, everywhere, not Silicon Valley. In healthcare and car sales and fitness, all over the place. Honestly there was a few reasons. One is we wanted them to understand what it really means to move to this way of working. No fluff, just what does it really mean? Otherwise, how are they going to get there if they don't even know where there is? Then we wanted them to believe it's possible to transform. We're the first ones to say it's not easy, but we wanted them to believe it's possible. And the third thing is we wanted to get them excited about what they'd be able to do after they transformed. And those were the three things we were trying to do in the book. And so that's different than our other books, but hopefully it makes the other books more accessible. They'll be able to apply more of them.…

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