Special episode with Marty Cagan on product operating model and leadership

Wszystko, co to naprawdę zrobiło, to było wyjaśniać go nowej audiencji. Inspired wyjaśniało model produktu do kierowników produktu i zespołów produktu, a Empower próbowało wyjaśnić go kierownikom produktu. What about the CEOs, the head of sales, the head of marketing, the finance people? All of those people need to help as well and they were asking a lot of questions for a long time. And so the goal of Transform was really to explain it to a non-product audience because they are so essential in transforming. A lot of people think

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 so the other thing I think the book Transform did was expose people to other companies all over the world. I mean in Europe, in Saudi Arabia, in Brazil, in places that are not known as technology hubs. And, you know, like in all our stuff we use real names, people could look them up on LinkedIn, they could reach out to them and they started to believe maybe we can change. And so I would say the best news to us since the book came out is so many more Leadership teams have been reading the book and reaching out and saying, yeah, I think we could actually do this and we'd like to try.

Even if leaders are all in. Yeah, it's a cultural change and it's easy for the leaders to say we're all in. And then the head of sales comes with a big check from a prospective customer and they're like, well, maybe not so much. One of the case studies in fact in the new book is about a company exactly like you're describing. 100% sales led enterprise software. And yes, the CEO knew that wasn't working. Even the head of sales knew that wasn't working. But that's one thing to know it's not working. It's another thing to believe something else could work better. And so... Yeah, it really took... You know what it took was the head of product that knew that he had to win the heart and mind of the head of sales and the head of finance and the CEO.

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.

Makes it much harder on them. And the other is People think somehow, deep in their head, especially, I have to say, this is especially common problem in Europe, that the main way you empower teams, I mean we all, most of us, like, yeah, we know we need empowered teams, but they think the way you do that is that you convince the managers to back away. Give them room. Stop bossing people around. The irony is empowered teams don't require less management, they require better management. A lot of companies fail in their transformation because of the leaders don't understand the essential role they have to play.

Those are probably the two biggest areas that people really struggle with. The techniques like to move to continuous delivery. They are very well understood. They're really, there's some work involved for sure, but that is not rocket science. The techniques of product discovery. If you have the skills on the team, that's what they've been trained to do. It's not that hard. But if you try to do either of those things without people with the necessary skills or without product leaders that know how to coach their people, you're probably setting the teams up to fail. Mhm. I also see this kind of problem, especially about product leadership. I think that in Poland we have misunderstanding about this role, this area of responsibility.

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.

It really is a completely different job. Think about it this way. A product owner is trained as a role in a delivery process. A product manager is the prime job in product discovery processes, right? So it couldn't be more different, the job. Couldn't be more different. Yes, the product manager should also be the product owner and that's just the backlog administration responsibilities. That is nothing. So, the first issue is they have to coach and develop their people. The second issue is the whole idea behind empowered teams is that you've hired and you've coached this cross-functional set of people with the skills they need to come up with solutions that are valuable, usable, feasible, viable.

And the truth is, those product managers, they might be officially responsible for product strategy, almost certainly they don't even know what that means, and there's no way for them to really do that. At a product team basis. The whole idea of product strategy is to look holistically across the 25 teams. So it's sort of a nonsensical thing. It's also nonsensical, and I know I sound like I'm beating up on the poor agile coaches of the world. Most of them are really good people that just have never been trained. By anybody that knows what they're doing. So the result is they'll often come in and say, oh, we have 25 product managers. We need you each to create your own product vision.

If it does go well, then they can talk about spreading it. And I've encouraged so many people to do that, and I have heard from many of them where they did it, At a minimum, their company starts to realize they have a lot more skills than their peers and they're often a candidate for promotion. This is a good thing. We love that. So they can absolutely raise their game that way. The book Inspired is really encouraging people to do that. That said, that's just at a team level. If you've got 25 product teams in your company, the real wins are gonna take the next level up. And that's, not to sound like a broken record, but that's back to the critical role of the product leader.

Now, product leaders, this is their job. We are talking about right in the middle of their job to lead this change. This is why most companies hire a product leader. The CEOs know that something needs to change. They just don't know how to do it themselves, so they hire a product leader. Now the problem is when those product leaders don't know what to do. And that's where a product leadership coach, I often recommend them for a few months even, just to get a product leadership coach to help them once a week so they can learn what they need to do in order to show how this works. I think we nicely segue to the strategy discussions in general. So we also can pull some numbers from the survey we did, where we asked about

I also wanted to follow up on the topic of leadership because historically when I look back on my career, I think that real leaders also made a big impact on the way how the product model changed. And we also see it in the data on the survey that we made that even when we look at how often individual contributors have their one-to-one Widzimy, że praktycznie ponad 50% odpowiedzialnych stwierdzi, że albo nigdy nie mieli tego, albo rzadko mają tego. I to, co zainteresowało mnie w książce Transformed, w której wyjaśniłeś, że prawdziwi liderzy myślą o zmienianiu myśli i serca ludzi, I próbuję wziąć się w szczyty jakiegoś kogoś, kto starał się być liderem produktu w firmie, która nadal działa jako stary model.

Same with product managers. This is what is essential. So the best way to get into that leadership position is to build those skills. And then, Admitably, this is something that not everybody in the world agrees with, but I find it consistently, not only do they believe this at a product model company, but they think everybody else is insane not to believe it. And that is that you would never You would never put anybody in place as responsible for something if they didn't have that expertise.

What about the security issues? What about the legal issues? The compliance issues? This is what the product manager brings to a team. This is the 90% of what they bring to the team. Good people skills, good communication skills, that's the 10%. And of course, if you can only help somebody on the 10%, how helpful is that? It's not really that helpful. They could be the best communicator in the world, but if they don't know what they're doing, they're useless. Yeah, in fact it's hard to disagree with that statement. I think what I found also interesting in the data that we found, but also from my own playground is that Our respondents also counsel like the more this enterprise or like at least scale up organizations where often there was a tendency in the last year also to grow the product areas in various areas of the business and one of the biggest challenge that many of our respondents also express as the blockade in like doing a strong discovery or a fast delivery

But this takes real experience. I mean, if you look at how well Stripe has done growing, look at how well Amazon has done it growing. And they, you know, arguably they're both better than they were when they were smaller. So... What do you do? Well, there's a lot you have to do. That's what we tried to write about in Empowered, which talks about more of those scale issues. That's the product principles. There's a lot of things that you can get away with as a startup that you can't get away with. The advantage of a startup is we can all talk to each other. We're probably all having lunch together. We're small enough. So many of these things are easy that become very hard when all our employees are scattered all over the world.

You may know it's analogous to dev ops and design ops. But product ops, which same thing, you can use, I know some product model companies that use product ops, and I also know many companies that use product ops that do not run the product model. They are independent. So I just want to separate all those things. We're just talking about the product operating model, which fundamentally is a set of principles, 20 principles that we see consistently used in good product companies. Things like if you want to innovate, you've got to experiment. Things like what's more important to you, predictability or outcomes?

That is not how you build product, especially tech-powered product. So companies take a while to learn that sometimes. Sometimes they never learn it. They run out of business before they learn it. So yeah, I think that's what's really going on now. Chciałem po prostu opowiedzieć o tym, co klienci mówią, że chcą, o potrzebie eksportu raportów z systemu. Cała drużyna inżynierii rozpoznała, jak wytworzyć te dane w CSV, ale po kilku innych wywiadach okazało się, że chcieli tylko na to, żeby skrzynić to na slajdy. And it took a couple of emails to these customers. Hey, do you know you can take screenshots even from Mac directly or Windows just to put it on your slides?

Oh, thanks. And that was it. The request is gone. So that's a great example. There are literally thousands of examples like that out there. And it's amazing how many companies don't understand this. Yeah, now especially like we are entering the era of like artificial intelligence also giving us product manager like a different tools to really think about like developing this product sense because I think it was never so easy for us creators Also to like figure out like what are the target visionary solutions for underlying problems that our customers see and we can see the rise of new like even software dimension people especially in the market all about like so far we saw a lot of like software as a service as a type of the software that we are able to commercialize like these days a lot of people try to tend to think about like even

Now, how is tricky. There's a lot of work to the companies, but products are already coming out, as you know, and a lot of them are just marketing, right, because they have to say we're an AI product, but some of them are really good. And that's great. That will continue. I think the next several years we will just see. And to answer the last part of your question, to me, in a couple of years, I don't know how long, it's hard to know, two years, three years, maybe sooner, every product manager will need to be an AI product manager. Just like, remember when mobile came out and we had a few mobile product managers and everybody else was trying to learn mobile.

It is interesting to see. That's exactly what I've been worried about for product managers is there's no question that there are tools to make us more, to come to, to create the things we need to create faster. There is question if it will be better. I think without first principles in place, the same will happen with quality. We will depend on, please write me a spec for something, but you don't know for whom, why. You will just deliver output that has no meaning. Tak, i wiesz, niektórzy ludzie mówią, że to zawsze jest tak. Wielu produktów ludzie nie myślą, więc to jest to, co się dzieje. Ale w każdym razie jest to trudne, na pewno.

Ale myślę, że nie ma kwestii. Dla producentów, reżyserów i zwłaszcza inżynierów, narzędzia coraz lepiej. I'm feeling it daily, like how much faster we can do these brainless things that would typically take us, you know, hours or minutes that are basically, you know, tool time and not thinking time and now it's almost down to zero often. Bardzo miło to zobaczyć. To tylko obserwacja, ale wciąż to, co myślę, musi się wydarzyć. Czad GPT nie odnosi się do nas jeszcze, ale może za chwilę, jeden rok na raz.

We'll see. I think the beauty is that the prototyping becomes as accessible for everyone as never before, basically. Anything that makes it easier for us to test out our ideas is good for the product community. And so that is a good example. That's also directly helping designers. It's directly helping engineers. We've already had good low code solutions. Now we're getting some no code solutions. To jest świetny czas na odkrycie produktu. Wszystkie te rzeczy sprawiają, że wszystko będzie w porządku. Przechodząc do końca, Marty, chciałbym zapytać o ostatnią pytanek. U Ciebie już są trzy książki. Jak prawdopodobnie będzie kolejna książka i jeśli będzie jeszcze jedna, o której myślisz, że może być?

The Vision was always these four books and so those are there. The only thing that I think would be a good thing to do, it's just a difficult one, would be a third edition of Inspired because When Inspired was written, the second edition and the first obviously, it was before the pandemic and it was before the rise of remote work. And now so many people are working in that context. And the problem is the tools are not there yet. The tools are still pretty bad for remote workers to do what we're talking about. I am counting on and waiting for the tools to get a lot better. Once they're better, I'd like to maybe do an update to inspire talk about this topic.