(2022-04-10) Cagan Jobs The Nature Of Product; Best Vs Rest

Martin Cagan: The Nature of Product. When a product person, or especially a product coach, has not yet had the good fortune to work on a strong product team at a strong product company, then one of the most essential concepts of all, is to try to convey the fundamental nature of technology-powered products.

In this article, I’d like to share how Steve Jobs tried to explain this concept.

In 1995, after he had been fired from his own company, and had some time to contemplate what he’d learned, he was interviewed for a PBS Documentary called Triumph of the Nerds. They only used 10 minutes or so in the eventual documentary, but it turns out that the full 70-minute interview was lost in shipping. It wasn’t until after Steve Jobs passed away years later that the director found a copy of that full lost interview buried in his garage.

He covers a wide range of product topics, including the nature of technology-powered products, but also the dynamics of strong product teams, what he considers “the disease of process people,” ((2021-10-29) Cagan Process People) the perils of product roadmaps, why so many companies lose their product mojo, and the consequences of a CEO that comes from sales or marketing, rather than from product.

for this article, I’d like to highlight one particular segment, where he speaks to the nature of technology-powered products.

“There’s just a tremendous amount of craftsmanship between a great idea and a great product. As you evolve that great idea, it changes and grows. It never comes out like it starts, because you learn a lot more as you get into the subtleties of it. And you also find there are tremendous trade-offs you have to make… Designing a product is keeping 5000 things in your brain and fitting them all together in new and different ways to get what you want. And every day you discover something new that is a new problem or a new opportunity to fit these things together a little differently.”

And it’s worth pointing out that he’s emphasizing solution discovery. Too many product managers and product designers want to spend all their time in problem discovery, and not get their hands dirty in solution discovery – the whole nonsense of “product managers are responsible for the what and not the how.”

Best vs. Rest Explained - Silicon Valley Product Group

In my last article, I shared with you some of the key learnings from The Lost Interview with Steve Jobs. But there is so much gold in that 70 minute interview, that I wanted to highlight a different topic in this article.

I have never had a good answer to the question of why there are still so many bad product companies?

My theory for this has mainly been that leaders at “the rest” have never worked at strong product companies, so they’ve never seen good.

But if you watched the full interview with Steve Jobs, you saw that he shared a different theory. I think his theory is more likely the root cause of most of these problematic companies, and also more helpful and constructive than my own explanation.

Steve argues that for most established companies, innovation is simply not at the core of their DNA. He argues that once they have established their business, the focus of the company quickly moves to sales and marketing

When viewed through this lens, it is remarkable how many companies you can identify that lost their product mojo when they replaced their product-oriented founder (product-led) with a so-called “professional” CEO, either coming from sales or marketing, or business development (when they think acquisitions are the key to growth), or finance (when they think managing costs is their key to growth).

The reason this explanation resonates so well with me is that I have known many of these CEO’s, and in most cases, it’s clear to me they are very smart people, but all too often they show so little interest, beyond lip service, in the machinery of consistent innovation.

Edited: 2022-09-19 12:14:16.651159 | Tweet this! | Search Twitter for discussion

Bill Seitz