(2022-01-23) Cagan Scaling With Process Vs People

Martin Cagan: Scaling with Process vs. People. In my last article I provided an overview of the six major models of Product Ops that I have encountered (thus far), and I shared my views on each. But while I highlighted the models that I consider dangerous or harmful, I didn’t elaborate on the root cause of the harmful models

how you can continue innovating as you grow?

I’d like to take a moment to share with you some thoughts on this specific topic from several of the industry’s most successful product leaders:

Steve Blank: “As companies and agencies get larger, they start to value the importance of process over the product. And by product, I mean the creation of new hardware, services, software, tools, operations, tradecraft, etc. People who manage processes are not the same people as those who create product. … Over time as organizations grow, they become risk averse.

Jeff Bezos: “As companies get larger and more complex, there’s a tendency to manage to proxies.

Steve Jobs: “That’s what makes great products. It’s not process; it’s content…The system is that there is no system. That doesn’t mean we don’t have process…But that’s not what it’s about

Elon Musk: “The problem is that at a lot of big companies, process becomes a substitute for thinking

I’ve long argued that the best companies work very differently from the rest. And while the differences are many, it all starts with their approach to this question of how to continue to innovate as they grow

cf (2021-10-29) Cagan Process People