Special episode with Marty Cagan on product operating model and leadership

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.

And the way he did that was hundreds, literally, in the first year, hundreds of direct customer interactions, sitting down with customers, including salespeople, so that the customers Really saw how this worked and sales saw how this worked and most importantly they could figure out a winning product again. Yeah, maybe I follow up on that. As you know Marty, the target audience of our podcast is also the Polish product community. We conducted a survey actually trying to get more like an assessment of the readiness for transformation or the need for transformation among various product teams in Poland.

Well, it's super easy. Yeah, it's very easy to see feature teams. Basically, stakeholders are driving roadmaps. Number one. Roadmaps are driving the feature teams. In other words, the teams are there to implement the features and projects on the roadmap. The clearest sign is that those roadmaps are full of features and projects which are output as opposed to outcomes. And again, it's driven by the stakeholders. Nothing wrong with stakeholders, but that's not the product model. That is each stakeholder basically looking at their needs and the feature teams are there to serve the business rather than the customers.

And how to coach people at the beginning when you have only intuition. Yeah, but these are trivial differences. The real differences, the real basis of that job. Product management is, yeah, again, if you're coming from feature teams, then it's very much the quote soft skills. But if you're coming from an empowered product team, if you're talking about the model we're talking about, The foundation of product management is number one, deep knowledge of your users and customers. Number two, deep knowledge of your data. And most importantly, deep knowledge of the different dimensions of your business. How does marketing work? How does sales work? How does finance work? How do you fund your stuff? How do you monetize it?

But again, that's the responsibility of the leaders. If your leaders aren't doing their job or if there is no real product leaders, then you're probably going to be struggling Czy masz na myśli jakąś różnicę, kiedy jest to firma multiproduktowa? I w zasadzie, wiesz, różne produkty chcą się zintegrować razem, więc naturalnie jest pewna niezależność, ale robienie jednego z dwóch produktowych zespołów nie wydaje się być dobrym pomysłem. I mean, this is normal. Most medium and large companies have multiple products. This is normal. You also referred the most common technique, which is a team topology technique, is platform teams.

That's where they'll say, alright, we realize that's not working for us. And by the way, it's worth pointing out, why is it that sales led Company doesn't work for the same reason we talked about earlier because your customers don't know what's possible. So if the customers are driving and when you have sales driving, what that really means is customers are driving. Prospective customers are saying we need this feature. We won't give you money unless you give us this feature. So sales goes to and says it's on the roadmap. If you don't like it, I'm going to the CEO right now. And so that's who's driving. And of course, you heard me say the reasons with that.