(2020-05-14) Cagan Meaningful Transformation

Martin Cagan: Meaningful Transformation: adopting techniques such as Agile methods for delivery (agile software development) may be necessary, but they are nowhere near sufficient.

The prerequisite for this transformation is getting your senior leaders – normally starting with the CEO – to understand the necessary role of technology as the key enabler of the business, and not just a necessary cost of doing business. ((2019-08-29) Cagan Product Vs Feature Teams)

there are three major steps. And as a general rule, they need to happen in this order

First, you’ll need to ensure you have strong product leaders in place

Second, you’ll want to give those strong product leaders the ability to recruit and develop the staff required for empowered product teams.

Third, for the product teams that are ready to operate in the empowered product team model, you will need to redefine the relationship with the business.

this change represents a bit of a give and take with the leaders in the organization.

What’s in it for them is that the old way of working has never been very effective, so most are willing to at least give it a try (iff they have trust in the product leaders).

For most feature teams, the most dreaded aspect of the product manager role is dealing with the stakeholders. The product managers of feature teams feel like they can never make all the various stakeholders happy. There simply is not enough time, or enough people, and sometimes the requests from the stakeholders don’t even make sense.

In an empowered product team, the team is there to serve customers, with products that customers love, yet work for the business. The stakeholders are partners we need to collaborate with to come up with solutions that work