(2024-05-22) Cagan Good Product People

Martin Cagan: Good Product People. Recently Shreyas Doshi published a reminder that the vast majority of the best product people are not likely to be spending their time on social media. His point is that the best product people are busy practicing the craft of product, and not trying to attract followers. (product manager)

Many of the best product people are not actually product people.

I define a strong product person as someone that is obsessed with solving tough problems in ways that are loved by their users and customers, yet can sustain a business, and are just now possible.

many of the best product people I know are in fact engineers.

Many people gravitate towards engineering because they see technology as the means to enable them to solve these tough problems. But the best engineers don’t constrain their thinking to just feasibility and the enabling technology. They care deeply about value, viability and usability as well

Recently, two such people that I follow did a podcast together. The first, Mike McCue, I’ve known since Netscape days, and the other, Molly White, I discovered about a year ago, and while I don’t know her personally, I have been reading her content for a while now, and she is a truly exceptional thinker.

I want you to hear how these two people think. I want you to see what real product sense looks and sounds like. I want you to get a taste of what it’s like to work with strong engineers that care just as much about what they build, as how they build.