YouSaid · the spoken record
Marty Cagan
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- 2024-03-10
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- 2024-03-10
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“To be honest, a lot of the inspiration for what we write comes from questions from people. And so we love it when people read something. And if it works great and they tell us we love that too. But if they have follow-up questions, one of the nice things about the online archive is we'll just go update the article to address the question. We love that. Feel free.”
2024-03-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Product management theater | Marty Cagan (Silicon Valley Product Group) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, yeah, the book should be available worldwide in electronic Kindle audio and hardback on March 12th. We'll see. But that's what the publishers promise. And you can find about all of the things I talk about and all our stuff is for free on the website, svpg.com, Silicon Valley Product Group. And yeah, if you don't know at least one of the partners, you should try to meet one. We all love meeting the community and I think you'll enjoy it. So yeah, hopefully that's useful.”
2024-03-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Product management theater | Marty Cagan (Silicon Valley Product Group) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, well, honestly, I would have been really happy just staying in engineering. I've always loved design. I think no matter what, though, I would have been building something, whether if it was houses or cars or whatever, I like building things.”
2024-03-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Product management theater | Marty Cagan (Silicon Valley Product Group) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't really have a life motto, but I do have one I share a lot with people because as you might imagine, I think writing really helps me think and I encourage other people to develop their thinking skills. And there's a great quote from Leslie Lamport, the guy who, well, you're not old enough to know this, but he invented one of the first word processors called Latap, which I used to use back in the day. But it's, if you think, sorry, if you're thinking without writing, you just think you're thinking.”
2024-03-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Product management theater | Marty Cagan (Silicon Valley Product Group) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, my favorite thing to do is ride motorcycles. And there is a new generation of product that who knows might save my life one day, but these are literally wireless airbag vests that you wear. And it uses AI technology and sensors to decide if it should deploy. Luckily, mine has never had to go off, but I know a lot of, I mean, for a lot of people, it saved their lives. That's an example of technology where without the technology, it's a very vulnerable, even with it, it's vulnerable.”
2024-03-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Product management theater | Marty Cagan (Silicon Valley Product Group) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I recently got a Rivian, which is amazing. They did an absolutely beautiful job. You know, they're kind of the Airbnb of car companies because the founder is a designer and it is just, imagine if a designer designed a next generation car. It's a phenomenally good job.”
2024-03-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Product management theater | Marty Cagan (Silicon Valley Product Group) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I just want to, if they give me the same old, you know, I can tell where they learned from their answer. Don't have to give my answer, they just shouldn't give the old feature team answer. That's all.”
2024-03-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Product management theater | Marty Cagan (Silicon Valley Product Group) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Online, but I do have a go to question that I pretty much start with everybody, and that I want to know if they can even define the job of a product manager.”
2024-03-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Product management theater | Marty Cagan (Silicon Valley Product Group) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, Lenny, you couldn't ask that to a worse person because I know I watch almost nothing so. Not a good one for that”
2024-03-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Product management theater | Marty Cagan (Silicon Valley Product Group) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just love the way this guy thinks. And he wrote a book called What's Our Problem that I found really provocative, challenged me in a hundred different ways. So love that.”
2024-03-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Product management theater | Marty Cagan (Silicon Valley Product Group) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love the new book from Tony Fidel called Build. It's a wonderful book, and he's describing the product model, but for hardware devices and his perspective was fabulous. He had a front row seat to some of the most iconic products in the world, the iPod, the iPhone, the NES devices love it. So I loved his book and I'd been recommending it to all kinds of people. Another one I really liked is, do you know Tim Urban, the guy behind Wait But Why?”
2024-03-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Product management theater | Marty Cagan (Silicon Valley Product Group) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Honestly, Lenny, we talked about so many big topics. I'm worried that may have overwhelmed people. I hope not because you brought up, you asked all the hardest topics.”
2024-03-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Product management theater | Marty Cagan (Silicon Valley Product Group) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, remember usually as soon as you get product market fit, you're working on it for other products and other markets. And so it's an ongoing thing. But while it's small, you know, usually is most useful just to look at the number of engineers. At a certain number of engineers usually like 20 to 25, it's a lot better if co-founder is the product person for that.”
2024-03-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Product management theater | Marty Cagan (Silicon Valley Product Group) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the founder should be doing that and needs to be doing that, and it usually causes conflict if they bring in a real product manager too soon. It's too many cooks in the kitchen. You need to reach a certain scale before it helps you to have other people responsible for value and viability. That all assumes that they understand real product management, right? Otherwise, it's going to lead to very different symptoms.”
2024-03-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Product management theater | Marty Cagan (Silicon Valley Product Group) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, first of all, I'm one of the people that tries to discourage them from hiring product managers too soon. A lot of them make the mistake of hiring them too soon. Now realize what we're talking about here, again, the whole discussion we've had, this is another layer to, I'm talking about a real product manager. If they're using them as project manager, which a lot of times they are, well, I would tell them they're overpaying, but okay, you can get some help for project management. That's not a good use of the CEO's time. But if there are a real product manager and they're worried about value and viability, that is the founder's job.”
2024-03-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Product management theater | Marty Cagan (Silicon Valley Product Group) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A small high leverage group. So it works for data analysts, it works for user research where they are helping the teams do the work they need to do. But that's where it really depends what they're doing. I will tell you, I've seen too many companies where the product leaders are not doing their job. So what they do is they hire product ops to try to do their job. They're like, they're the ones now responsible for educating the product managers. That's just not good.”
2024-03-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Product management theater | Marty Cagan (Silicon Valley Product Group) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's what I like. Same with user research, by the way, and you had a very good guest on that I think tried to make that point as well.”
2024-03-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Product management theater | Marty Cagan (Silicon Valley Product Group) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so for a while, they would all have these little associate product managers. And then a lot of companies, they have, oh, we also have product owners. Product manager and product owner makes no sense. Huge anti-pattern. Today, a lot of companies use the same excuse, but its product manager has product ops people to do the dirty work. No. And honestly, I don't think I would not want to be one of those people because I think they're very vulnerable right now.”
2024-03-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Product management theater | Marty Cagan (Silicon Valley Product Group) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of them, unfortunately, think of it. They focus on the whole phrase of process and governance. That's like a huge red flag. And I try to tell people, if that's what you see run, don't walk away from that. The other thing that's going on in a lot of companies, it is amazing to me how creative companies can be to try to find a way to justify giving product managers assistance. Because, you know, the product manager says too much work, which is really ironic to me because they're usually feature teams that are saying this. And I'm like, it's not even enough for your job. But anyway, they're like, too much work. And so they're like, well, we need help.”
2024-03-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Product management theater | Marty Cagan (Silicon Valley Product Group) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the only difference is they're now brought together under one product ops leader. That's all. That is the same. How long has that been with us, Lenny? More than 20 years. Team companies have had user research teams and have had data analyst teams to help you make decisions qualitatively and help you make teams quantitatively. So that's not new at all, but it is good. And I think there is some amount of value about bringing that in. Some companies, of course, they interpret and define product ops very differently.”
2024-03-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Product management theater | Marty Cagan (Silicon Valley Product Group) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's tricky. I mean, First of all, product ops. Some people have asked me is product ops the same as product operating model? No, that was just a very unfortunate name conflict. But product ops is more analogous to DevOps and design ops. That's all. Now, can you use product ops in the product operating model? Absolutely. If you're using one of the definitions that are part of the model. So for example, the heart of product ops in the good companies I know is user research and data analysts.”
2024-03-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Product management theater | Marty Cagan (Silicon Valley Product Group) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's very normal, and I think wise to batch, because look, most teams, most product teams are releasing on the order of 20 times per day. You're going to do a marketing release 20 times a day. That would be useless. So it makes sense to have messaging on a periodic basis. But good companies, by the time they message it, it's live. It's been coming out. We may have released some things dark, as you know, but we've got it in production solid. We've proven each thing probably with an A-B test.”
2024-03-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Product management theater | Marty Cagan (Silicon Valley Product Group) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have to realize in most of the rest of the world, they release monthly or mostly quarterly. Think about that quarterly releases. Think about it, you cannot take care of your customers, you cannot learn at the pace you need to. And by the way, quality is going to be terrible in that model.”
2024-03-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Product management theater | Marty Cagan (Silicon Valley Product Group) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“None of these should Surprise you because they are what's consistent in the good companies that we know, but these are the things that we think matter.”
2024-03-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Product management theater | Marty Cagan (Silicon Valley Product Group) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, just stop me. But there's a whole set of principles around the more cultural things like innovation is more important than predictability. That's a principle that learning is more important than failure. The principles are more important than process. Some examples of that in terms of teams empowered with problems to solve. That's one of your foundational principles we talked about that this idea of real ownership, real sense of ownership so that it's theirs. Well, of course in discovery you'd recognize all the principles, but it's about addressing product risks. It's about embracing quick experimentation. It's about testing ideas responsibly. These are principles. And then I did mention a couple of the delivery principles, things like small, frequent uncoupled releases. For most companies, that's CICD, instrumentation of everything, monitoring of everything. These are deployment principles or delivery principles.”
2024-03-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Product management theater | Marty Cagan (Silicon Valley Product Group) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's so true because one of the things I really learned with Inspire was that it wasn't enough to have the teams do their job. They needed leadership to do their job. So it is both, and that's why I was saying we don't frame it as top down, bottom up for that. We frame it as each group doing their job When that happens, it's actually a beautiful thing”
2024-03-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Product management theater | Marty Cagan (Silicon Valley Product Group) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I could share as much as you want, but the four competencies are product manager. Again, we're talking a serious product manager here, not a product owner, not a feature team product manager. Product manager, real product designer, service design interaction, design, visual design, user research, real product designer, a real tech lead, and then a real product leader, a manager of product design engineering that knows how to coach their people and knows how to do a real product strategy, which is what we were talking about. So those are the four competencies, new competencies. For most companies, those are new, meaning they might have people with those names, but they don't have those roles institutionalized.”
2024-03-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Product management theater | Marty Cagan (Silicon Valley Product Group) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 do you 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. And so 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.”
2024-03-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Product management theater | Marty Cagan (Silicon Valley Product Group) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Most of the time, when I see a successful company, they are living these principles. You know, 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. There's a million different methodologies and frameworks and tools and processes, but what 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. That's how you decide which problems to solve. That's what most companies do in annual planning. But it's basically the product strategy.”
2024-03-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Product management theater | Marty Cagan (Silicon Valley Product Group) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, 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 kind of 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 because I really...”
2024-03-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Product management theater | Marty Cagan (Silicon Valley Product Group) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And others, 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 it's also, it's non-threatening to a lot of people. It's just saying, look, this is how these companies operate.”
2024-03-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Product management theater | Marty Cagan (Silicon Valley Product Group) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know that was kind of the biggest pain for the book because 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 in all the best companies. So we would just say, if 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 it is real. 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 used the term product operating model.”
2024-03-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Product management theater | Marty Cagan (Silicon Valley Product Group) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'd suggest they read it themselves so they know because you know this is the I know I'm going to be talking more about this going forward because I know I need to. Too many people in our industry view themselves as a victim of their company. Like they're stuck in a feature team and there's nothing they can do about it other than quit. But really, they have a family. They're not going to quit. I think that's not true. I think there is so much they can do. And hopefully they can see that in the book. It's like they can see what they individually can do to push their company in this direction. And at a minimum, it'll help their career.”
2024-03-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Product management theater | Marty Cagan (Silicon Valley Product Group) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we wrote it intentionally again, unlike the other books. The other books are written for people like us, right, and your audience and my audience, you know. They're product people. These are written for non-product people too. And so the idea was a CEO, a CFO, a head of sale. Anybody who cares about their company changing how they build and wants to help is written for them. So it's... Was one of the hardest parts, really, and including those kinds of reviewers and making sure all this stuff made sense to them.”
2024-03-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Product management theater | Marty Cagan (Silicon Valley Product Group) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fitness all over the place. So we wanted to be able to get, you know, 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 like what does it really mean? Otherwise, how they're going to get there if they don't even know where their is 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. Like they'll be able to apply more of them.”
2024-03-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Product management theater | Marty Cagan (Silicon Valley Product Group) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“James, 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 are as impressive as anything I've seen Amazon do. And that's saying a lot. I mean, Amazon, in my opinion, is The top of the pack. And so that's impressive, what train line in the UK was able to do, a company I had never known before a few years ago in Saudi Arabia called Almos Safer, 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 learn this stuff and were able to do it. You know, we have a dozen examples from all over the world. Brazil, Virginia, everywhere, not Silicon Valley in healthcare. Car sales”
2024-03-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Product management theater | Marty Cagan (Silicon Valley Product Group) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are techniques transformed as well, but there are transformation techniques, they're change techniques, like the use of pylotines 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 then, look, look, Airbnb was born in this model. I mean, 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...”
2024-03-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Product management theater | Marty Cagan (Silicon Valley Product Group) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, what they were asking was, How in the world do you transform to work like this? And I mean, 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 like maybe you want to work this way, but we don't address how to change to work this way, that's like kind of leaving people without that hard part. So the goal of Transform, unlike the other books, was to share how to actually change.”
2024-03-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Product management theater | Marty Cagan (Silicon Valley Product Group) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is a different one, though. It's a 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 because 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.”
2024-03-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Product management theater | Marty Cagan (Silicon Valley Product Group) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So value means for the customer. Viability means for your business. So that means it works for your business. You can sell it, market it. It's legal. You can service it. It's compliance. All of these constraints, you know, you know the hard part. Remember Airbnb? It wasn't so hard to get people to sign up. It was hard to make listings legal in San Francisco. You know, that's the hard part is the compliance side.”
2024-03-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Product management theater | Marty Cagan (Silicon Valley Product Group) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We don't know. Trying to figure that out. So, what is that really? That's a viability and a value question. So a lot more is landing squarely on the product manager than I think in general in the past.”
2024-03-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Product management theater | Marty Cagan (Silicon Valley Product Group) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's some very hard things left. So, designers, I think the real product designers at the top of the chain, they're going to be incredibly important. And of course, tech leads are going to be incredibly important more than ever. But for product manager especially with viability, there are so, I've been on so many of these calls where we've been talking about the implications of probabilistic software versus deterministic software and what is okay. The lawyers are weighing in already with the legal perspective, but also ethical perspective and just like if this is mission critical, is this something that we could be okay with having a probabilistic answer?”
2024-03-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Product management theater | Marty Cagan (Silicon Valley Product Group) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Already people are doing that. It's only a matter of time before that becomes pretty wealth supported. So that is not a good job prospect. Now then we can talk about a feature team project manager. There's very little that's going on in there that is truly value add. Most of these are administrative kinds of things that can be done at least significantly with help. So I don't feel I wouldn't feel confident if I was a feature team product manager that I could keep doing this for any amount of years at least. Now, for an empowered product manager, if your responsibility is value and viability, if you boil it down, that's kind of the real challenge left with chat GPT or Gen AI is viability becomes even more important question”
2024-03-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Product management theater | Marty Cagan (Silicon Valley Product Group) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. And I think that is happening. I mean, more on the engineering side right now and also on the design side, but I fully expect it will happen. Like I said at the beginning, I don't know when, really, because that timing is hard question. But this is another one of my arguments to people of why you need to up-level your skills. Protecting that because”
2024-03-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Product management theater | Marty Cagan (Silicon Valley Product Group) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, certainly you can use it for a spec, right? A PRD. You can certainly use it for strategy. You can certainly use it for even things like triaging bunks. You can use it for... I mean, it's hard to think of something you can't use it for. The harder question is what is it good for?”
2024-03-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Product management theater | Marty Cagan (Silicon Valley Product Group) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And what I kept seeing was people taking what they get too literally, too seriously, too much value. And they were heading off in a wrong direction and then they were optimizing that. So, you know, there's a lot going on right now. It's a moving target. Depends which system you're using and the day of the week now on what you're at. But whatever. Now I've been recommending to people that they think through the answer first. really get them to think put something down then use chat gpt to see if you can't improve on that to see if you can't challenge that to see if you can't make your argument tighter So I've kind of reversed and I did that because people are trusting the result too much.”
2024-03-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Product management theater | Marty Cagan (Silicon Valley Product Group) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We've talked about quite a few big dynamics that are changing. Interestingly, what we've really been talking about is the different definitions of the PM role. And so, if we hold one of those definitions constant, let's say we are focused now on the empowered product manager, the one you and I grew up with, and those are the ones that are responsible for value and viability. In general, I think the principles are stable, and I think they will remain stable. However, the techniques are undergoing some radical changes, especially with generative AI. Don't get me wrong, I've been living this every day, as most of us have. I don't have it figured out. In fact, I recently changed my advice because I used to say, start with ChatGPT, go from there, and let's I'll help you make that great. We'll go from there.”
2024-03-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Product management theater | Marty Cagan (Silicon Valley Product Group) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What he's probably seeing mostly is a team that's learning how to go from a feature team to a product team. Now, has that happened more in the last two years? I would like to believe so, but I don't know. Some days I feel like, yes, he's right. Some days I feel like I don't know who he's talking to because these people are still stuck doing optimization work. And so that's a hard, there's probably a lot of nuance there. In general, I think, yes, but I don't think it's tied to interest rates. I don't think it's tied to that. I think it's more tied to the quality of the leadership and the need of the business to do more than optimization”
2024-03-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Product management theater | Marty Cagan (Silicon Valley Product Group) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So yes and no. I think he's right in general, but there's a really important nuance. Many teams that aren't very good yet, they do exactly what he described. He describes it gross hacking. I describe it as optimization. All they're doing is these low-risk simple experiments. They live behind the A-B test of just doing like, we're going to change the call to action here and maybe more people will register that kind of test. Should they do that? Absolutely. Is that product really? Not really. That's not discovery. That's optimization. Now, in many companies, they do that because they're given a roadmap of all the features. So all they can really fit in are these little optimization tests. But in others, they're scared to do anything else. They literally don't want to break it. And so I find that situation that he described in many companies that need to transform. So I would argue.”
2024-03-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Product management theater | Marty Cagan (Silicon Valley Product Group) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hard problems. And that is what made them good. So that's, I don't frame that as top down. I frame that as product leaders doing their job and product teams doing their job. It's a very common misunderstanding that many people have about what empowerment even means. Empowerment does not mean you set up this product team and they go decide what to work on. No, that would just be anarchy, right? You'd have 50 teams doing 50 things. Instead, empowerment means the leaders do their job, come up with the bets, and then the teams are able to figure out the best way to solve those problems.”
2024-03-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Product management theater | Marty Cagan (Silicon Valley Product Group) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source