(2024-03-10) Lenny Interviews Cagan On Product Management Theater

Lenny Rachitsky interviews Martin Cagan on Product management theater. What is driving this recent spiciness in your writing?

I've actually been saying these things for a long time, honestly, and it's on the record... there are a number of things happening in parallel, which is a recipe for some chaos and a lot of fear. And in the product community... (BigTech layoffs, (2023-09-09) Itamar Gilad On Linkedin Why Did Airbnb Kill Product Management)

we're like, "Look, we need to see it being used by at least several of the companies that have proven they can consistently innovate." If those companies can use it productively, we're all about evangelizing that. We make this clear in every one of the books. We don't invent any of these things. We just, if they work, we like to talk about them.

I've got some very uncomfortable things to talk about, which I know the more intelligent part of me is like, "Don't bring that up." But also the other side of me is like, "But people need to hear it."

There is no question that a lot of companies overhired during the pandemic. That was easy to see even while it was going on. And it's not just that they overhired, a lot of them lowered the bar.

in a lot of companies, especially outside of Silicon Valley, team size has just gotten out of hand. I go into some companies and honestly I can't believe all the ridiculous roles that they have. And I'll go into that more if you want later, but no question that people realize that smaller teams can often produce more and better results... of course I'm talking about agile coaches and product owners and product ops and business analysts and all these assistant product manager types... ((2021-10-29) Cagan Process People)

the reality is with remote employees, both velocity and innovation have taken a real hit.

on top of that, if you get outside of the Silicon Valley bubble, it's even worse because they have been investing at these companies, especially the big companies in all these extra roles

I wrote an article a long time ago, something like a decade ago that was very popular at the time called Epic Waste.

they think these big companies think the answer lies in processes, especially things like SAFe, which outside of the Silicon Valley world is depressingly popular?

what's going on in so much of the world is they have so little in the way of outcomes to show for all this cost.

I think there's just this broader trend of people just really dislike PMs in a lot of places.

I think it's a different really answer

what you're describing, they're feature teams. And the truth is, and I've been saying this for a long time, the truth is they don't need PMs in a feature team....And I don't blame those people for not finding value in the product manager.

Now on the other hand, in a real product team, that's a very different job and I don't see that. In fact, I consider that complaint you're raising as the biggest clue that they're probably a feature team.

And then of course the first thing I ask the product manager is how do you define your job? And I bet you've heard a hundred variations of the mealy mouth, squishy, I facilitate this and I do some communication and I herd the cats and I'm listening to that going, man, I would not want to try to defend that job to the CEO.

let's spend a little time on just what does it look like when you're on a feature team, feature factory versus an empowered product team?

Some of the easiest is on a feature team, you're basically given a roadmap of output

It is a lot easier to deliver output than it is to deliver outcomes.

And a product team, an empowered product team, instead of being given that roadmap of features, they're given problems to solve. (OKR, oppportunity solution tree)

the measure is not ship the thing. The measure is it solves the problem

you have to come up with a solution that's not only usable and feasible, which is what a feature team does, but is also valuable and viable. And that means you need a different set of skills that your engineers and your designers almost never have. That's not a knock on them. Those are very different skillsets.

Lenny (00:24:00): And this is essentially the theater you're describing, that people that aren't real product managers doing product management activities

They're not doing any of the role and they don't have any of the skills. Now of course, what really bothers me is it's not that hard if they are motivated. It's not that hard for them to develop the skills. (high agency?) (Counter: it's hard to build skills in an ill-structured domain if you aren't allowed to apply them in a learning loop.)

a product manager is responsible for value and viability

on a real empowered product team, product manager is a creator, not a facilitator.

A product manager is a creator and so there's this side-by-side creation with design and engineering to come up with these solutions. (product discovery)

you have to really become an expert on your users and customers

Another is you're supposed to be the expert on the data. How is our product being used?

Another big one is you are the person on the team that represents the compliance issues, the sales issues, the marketing issues, the financial cost issues, the monetization issues, go to market in general.

project management is important, but it is not product management.

most companies are deaf to this. They don't care.

delivery team, product owners and feature team product managers are likely to be facing a reckoning as companies realize that these roles are not what they thought they were

I think what really this does is you need to raise your skills

I often use the phrase they're trapped in a feature team and they're like

they actually have a lot more agency than they realize. (high agency bullshit)

They can raise their game.

I've seen this countless times, at a minimum, your company will appreciate it and probably promote you because you will be one of the few that actually understands these things. Counters: (2019-12-31) Can You Know Too Much About Your Organization, yeah execs who provide weak strategic context love hearing about it...

What motivated me to get spicy, what pushed me over the edge. Maybe I was in a bad mood that day, I don't know. But it was this article that made the rounds online by probably the biggest certification institution for product managers. And they had this big article saying, "This is what a product manager does." And it was a big graphic, and I'm looking at it and I was thinking, I cannot believe they said this out loud. This is 100% project manager.

And what I realized is what's so frustrating here is you have all these people that realize things aren't good yet most places they turn are just propagating that same model.

most of the content you find online about product management is, I think you called it 90%, or it's just from companies that are not doing it the right way,

In fact, one of the most frustrating things for me is community

everybody you meet genuinely wants to help. Really everybody. The problem is somebody posts a question, happens many times every day, and the majority of the well-meaning people jump in with what they learn at their crappy company.

I'm asked to review a lot of the books. I love it when it's an exception and it's like, wow, that's a good book. Teresa Torres's book, Continuous Discovery Habits, good book. Try to get everybody to read that. But that's the exception.

There's actually this LinkedIn post today by this PM, [inaudible 00:40:31] Ben Erez who talks about how if there's a B2B sales driven company, maybe it's okay for it to be feature factory where people know exactly what you need to build.

Well, my first answer is this is not an accident why most B2B (enterprise) software is such crap. It is horrible. Does anybody like those products out there? I don't know. I'm not sure I've ever met anybody that didn't hate those products.

there's a bigger reason I think so many sales driven companies exist, is that most of the time in those companies, the CEOs are not product people and that's why they run that way

why isn't it good enough to be a feature team? How do you answer that really? To me, it is like, why are you in this business? Do you really not care what your customers think about your product?

in the new book we highlighted a classic sales driven financial services company moving to the product model and how it dramatically improved things for the sales organization.

when I think of Meta/Facebook, I always imagine them as a very bottom-up culture. People on teams build experiments, run things. There's not a lot of do this, do that, but the way that he framed it is it's actually very top-down at Meta

Marty Cagan (00:45:03): So first of all, I would argue what he described is exactly what I see in good product companies, exactly. But we don't frame it as top-down.

But then in a good organization, you give those bets to the teams and you really do give them latitude to figure it out.

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.

there's another product leader at Meta. He was actually one of the former guests and actually also one of the most popular episodes, Nikhyl Singhal. And he works with a lot of CPOs and heads of product at companies. The way he described it, he's noticed there's this reboot in what the PM role has been over the past couple of years because of the end of the [inaudible 00:47:31] era. So the way he sees it is for the past decade, PMs are mostly responsible as growth people (growth-led product). They're growing existing products, they have product market fit or they think they do and they're just optimizing, scaling. And now that the money has gone away, there's a return to building, finding product-market fit validation and discovery.

there's a really important nuance. Many teams that aren't very good yet, they do exactly what he described. He describes as a growth hacking, I describe it as optimization. All they're doing is these low risk simple experiments

Should they do that? Absolutely. Is that product really? Not really.

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.

the principles are stable and I think they will remain stable. However, the techniques are undergoing some radical changes, especially with generative AI

I've been recommending to people that they think through the answer first. Really get them to think, put something down, then use ChatGPT 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.

certainly you can use it for a spec, a PRD. You can certainly use it for strategy. You can certainly use it for even things like triaging bugs. It's hard to think of something you can't use it for. The harder question is what is it good for?

People are trusting the results too much.

which skills of a product manager will be most disrupted by AI? So I think short term, there's communication is getting improved. You can improve your writing strategy

this is another one of my arguments to people of why you need to uplevel your skills

If you are fundamentally a backlog administrator, good luck protecting that

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

Now, for an empowered product manager, if your responsibility is value and viability, if you boil it down, that's the real challenge left with ChatGPT or GenAI, is viability becomes even more the important question.

So this is your third book, is that right?

a lot of people would tell me point blank, there's no way their company's going to go along with this. And so what they were asking was, how in the world do you transform to work like this?

So the goal of TRANSFORMED (Cagan Transformed), unlike the other books, was to share how to actually change

we made a rule for ourselves. We knew we needed lots of examples, case studies (case study)... we said all our examples are going to be from outside Silicon Valley world

And the third thing is we wanted to get them excited about what they'd be able to do after they transformed

We wrote it intentionally, again, unlike the other books. The other books are written for people like us and your audience and my audience. They're product people. These are written for non-product people too. And so the idea is 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.

Too many people in our industry view themselves as a victim of their company. They're stuck in a feature team and there's nothing they can do about it other than 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.

Okay, so the part of the title is Moving to the Product Operating Model. What does that mean?

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?"

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

It is really painful to try to develop a new 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 also it's non-threatening to a lot of people.

we call it product model for short

Do you have any advice for founders that are in this boat of just like, I don't want product managers

Marty Cagan (01:15:53): Yeah. Well, first of all, I'm one of the people that tries to discourage them from hiring product managers too soon because a lot of them make the mistake of hiring them too soon.

if they're a real product manager and they're worried about value and viability, that is the founder's job

You need to reach a certain scale before it helps you to have other people responsible for value and viability

At a certain number of engineers, usually 20 to 25, it's a lot better if the co-founder is the product person for that.

What are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people?

Marty Cagan (01:18:15): I love the new book from Tony Fadell called Build. It's a wonderful book and he's describing the product model, but for hardware devices and his perspective was fabulous.

Another one I really liked is, do you know Tim Urban, the guy behind Wait But Why?... he wrote a book called What's Our Problem? that I found really provocative. Challenged me in a hundred different ways, so love that.

John Cutler: Notes on Product management theater.

The latest Marty Cagan episode is going to raise some eyebrows. Over the years, I have sometimes struggled with "getting" exactly where Marty is/was coming from while being a general fan of his work. This episode was highly clarifying for me.

I also find myself looking for objective criteria for “best”. I regularly check in with friends/acquaintances at companies frequently lumped under the “best” category, and their assessment often differs from public perception

Overall, this was a clarifying statement in understanding Marty and SVPG’s approach. You realize that you’re getting common patterns across a sample of companies the team believes to be the best, which is awesome (but comes with a footnote). Marty is a staunch evangelist for what he has seen work and wants to spread it far and wide.

I’m concerned about the “lowered the bar” statement because it is unclear whether the people who over-hired were “above” the bar themselves

There are many reasons we’ve seen a proliferation of roles, and I agree that companies sometimes patch up problems instead of addressing them head-on. For example, patching a leadership hole with product ops is easy. Conversely, there are thoughtful ways to use product ops as a small platform/enabling team to supercharge empowered teams.