Special episode with Marty Cagan on product operating model and leadership

Welcome to the podcast Dodane do backlogu. In today's special episode we host a special guest Marty Cagan. My name is Marcin and today with me are Kuba Tutaj from Mixmax Wojtek from Zendesk and Tomek from Product Academy. It's a beautiful holiday and Christmas season and we are extremely pleased to host Marty Cagan in our monthly podcast for Polish product management community. Marty, jesteś fundatorem grupy produkcji Silicon Valley. Jesteś autorem książek, o których mówiła cała inwestycja. Inspirowano, wsparli i transformowano, ukształtowano, jak świat zaspiera na budowę produktów, których ludzie kochają. Jesteś prezydentem, najlepszymi liderami produktów, ale także autorem czasami kontrowersyjnych publikacji.

You know, you can transform just by talking to your engineers and product managers, but it really impacts the whole company. And so the goal was to do that. And also the other goal with the book was, you know, online, it's the internet, right? So there's a lot of people out there that don't think it's possible. If you're a born Silicon Valley company, sure, you have a big advantage. But if you're a company in some other part of the world that's older, been around since before the internet, a lot of people thought it wasn't possible. We knew that wasn't true because we've been working with those companies all over the world. But we said, alright, we're going to share their stories.

Would you do a survey of the people you were going to sell to and ask them what they want? That's called a focus. I mean that's, hopefully you know, we don't do that. Now why don't we do that? Because those customers, they don't know what's possible. That's our job. Similarly, if you go to a community that is not using the product model and you ask them what they think the problems are, it's not all that useful. And it's not their fault. It's your fault. It's not their fault. You have to realize, this is why Steve Jobs would hold up his iPhone and say, you can conduct a hundred focus groups, you will never get an iPhone.

In particular, like, Scrum doesn't teach this stuff worse. I don't even know if you've heard this in Poland. It's a horrible, horrible thing, but it's called SAFE, Scaled Agile Framework. It has nothing to do with Agile, but it's marketing. But a lot of people around the world have fallen for the marketing tricks and they did. So anyway, it's nothing to do with anything like that. You learn by a manager normally, or a product coach, if your manager can't do it. You learn by somebody who has worked this way, helping you for at least a few months to learn your new role. And that's especially important. It's not that hard for the engineers and the designers because it's not that big a change for them, but it is a very big change for the product managers.

And in order for them to do that, they have to make hundreds of decisions. Many, many decisions. How do they make those decisions though without understanding the big picture? That is called the strategic context. So you need to provide each of those teams with the product vision, the common product vision, the product strategy, the team topology, This is what helps them make good choices. Without that context, they have no ability to make good choices. They'll make the best they can, but, you know, good chance if you've got 25 product teams in, say, a medium-sized growth stage company in Poland.

...are often dependencies with other teams. I wonder what's your take on this topic of growing dependencies, especially in those bigger platform products, where indeed those dependencies appear. So there's a name for this topic, it's called team topologies. Team topologies, you may know there is a book by that name now too and that's where I got the name from. For years we referred to this as what are the different factors in structuring your product teams. But then the book team topologies came out and I knew one of the authors and I asked where did you get this term? I love the term, we've never had a term as our industry for this.

Let's use your term. And so today that's called team topologies. And team topology is one of the most important decisions made by your product leaders. It should be obvious why it needs to be your leaders because this is by definition looking holistically At your full code base, at everything you're responsible for and what should be the number of teams, the size of teams, the composition of teams and most importantly, the responsibility of each team. That is team topology. A bad team topology is very easy to spot because everybody complains that there's way too many dependencies on everything. Now, of course, what a lot of people don't talk about is that's usually because of tech debt.

Absolutely. And we talk about that in the data site example in the book. So it's orthogonal to the way you want to sell your products, the way you want to spread your products. And when we say product operating model, It's orthogonal to how it's marketed or sold. Okay, that's the first. The second is, and this is just bad luck in English, just unfortunate. Product operating model is different than product operations. There is something called product operations, which is known as product ops.