Product management theater | Marty Cagan (Silicon Valley Product Group)

27:11And now you've reverted to design by committee. So no, the product manager needs to bring this knowledge. They also need to bring deep understanding of the market. So this is, when I describe these things to a typical product owner, they're like, I'm not even, we're on different planets. What they learned in a CSPO or a PSPO class was how to manage a backlog in GERA, which to me is very analogous to learning how to operate, you know, Google Docs. Of course, that's not the job. That's something we do every day, but it's not the job. Just any more than yeah, developers are in GERA every day. Does that mean that's their job?

27:54Of course not. Their job is to build. So yeah, this is, this is what a product manager contributes. And really the distinction, if you, if you want to draw a think about it on a spectrum, a product owner is in one extreme. And honestly, that is a role in a delivery process that has no business being a dedicated person really doesn't. And most teams, I know the senior engineer could do it better anyway. Second, on the other side of the spectrum is what we're talking about an empowered product manager. And then a feature team product manager is somewhere in between there. They do more than administer the backlog.

28:34They do a lot of project management. And don't get me wrong, project management is important, but it is not product management. And furthermore, in almost every company I see with feature team product managers, they have a boatload of project managers anyway. So you could hear like there's some exasperation in my voice because I feel like this has been quite clear for a long time. But most companies are deaf to this. They don't care. And I have theories about why that's kind of depressing. But you know, for whatever reason, I feel like now I'm raising the volume because people are now seeing this the hard way because a lot of companies are cutting and these are easily among the most vulnerable people in a company.

29:27Yeah, let me actually read a quote from you where you talk about this exact point. You wrote, I have been warning for several years, several years that 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. From what I can tell that reckoning has begun. And I'm expecting Gen AI will only compound this. That's kind of the pessimistic version of the world. Yeah, you know, the real this is all you either I might be overreacting might be. I'm not really known for being alarmist, but maybe it's possible.

30:05I hope so. But I doubt it. I think these trends are real. Now does that mean people are it's hopeless. They should all start you know, retraining to be I don't know what housing construction something the Gen AI won't replace maybe. No, I think what really this does is you need to raise your skills enough with the silly facades of, you know, delivery teams and feature teams. You should raise your skills and a lot of a lot of product managers they reach out and they're like, I know I'm in a feature team and I don't like it. They say I often use the phrase they're trapped in a feature team. And they're like, this isn't what I sign up for.

30:49This is not what I, you know, the New York Times article about product management doesn't this right. This was different. And they're like, what should I do? Should I just leave my company and go to one of these other companies and I try to explain that they actually have a lot more agency than they realize. There is a lot an individual contributor. Of course, there's way more than a product leader could do. And that's kind of the biggest shame in all this is they're not doing this. Most product leaders are not doing this because they of course have a lot of agency, a lot of ability to change a company.

31:25But an individual can do it as well. They can raise their game. They can move. They can literally do a self assessment and raise the skills from a product owner or a feature team product manager to a real product manager at a minimum. I tell people and I've seen this countless times at a minimum. Your company will appreciate it and probably promote you because you'll, you will be one of the few that actually understands these things. Hopefully, even more than that, they'll say, hey, why don't we try running a set of teams this way and see how we do. So it can happen from the ground up too. I imagine many people are wondering, how do I do this?

32:08I know this is you've written books, I guess there's courses, there's all kinds of things. If you could give people a couple of tips of like how to get better at this and what skills to focus on, what's kind of a quick piece of advice you could share there. Well, this is maybe the most frustrating thing to me of all. And in fact, I should have answered when you asked me like 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 was this article that made the rounds online? By probably the biggest certification institution for product managers.

32:43And 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, 100%. They didn't even pretend to put a little of the product, which most people of course are more creative than that. They bend over a little bit to make it look like a product manager, but not even close. 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. So these certifications, which in my opinion are bogus, but most people don't know.

33:30And just imagine you're a brand new product manager, you look online probably what 90 % of the content out there is from the feature team world. More worst. And so unless they get really lucky, where they happen to be really lucky and have a manager that is like guiding them in a good direction, it just propagates. And you see this all over, articles, books, conference speakers, and a lot of times I can't even bear to watch. And it's not like there aren't great people out there who can speak. It's just that proportionally, they're in the minority. So it's not as easy as it should be. Like you're saying, why can't people just go and learn?

34:13They can if they're lucky enough to kind of know where to go. Obviously I'm biased, you're biased too, we're biased on this, but that's some kind of people need to take more control of their career. And really use their judgment, try to figure out what do you want to be if you want to be in the product world? What do you want to be? What kind of a product manager do you want to be? And if you want to stay fine, but if you want to do this, then there are good resources for sure. There are good resources out there. And of course, I'm hoping more and more people do that. I think that's such a powerful insight.

35:00You just shared that 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 way the right way. And feature teams is the way to describe it. Can you talk a bit more about that? Like why is that the case? Why don't we hear more from great companies? In fact, one of the most frustrating things for me is community. One of the things that's great about community, you have one of the biggest communities today. I mean, but there's a lot of these communities out there in the product world, products sub communities.

35:30And the one I love about them is you pretty much everybody who meet genuinely wants to help. You know, 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. And I'm looking at that and the person is oh, thank you very much. No, I know what to do and I'm no, there goes another one. You know, that is just it becomes self -propegating. And like what are you going to do? It's somebody going to try to, you know, police these board thousands and thousands of them, you know, like a Lenny endorse person or a Marty endorse person.

36:18I don't want to do that. You probably don't want to do that. It's a recipe for disaster. You know, so this it there are so many reasons it propagates. Most of the books I see, 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' book, continuous discovery habits. Good book. Try to get everybody to read that. But but that's the exception. And most of the time people are earnestly describing what they learn. Not really what good companies do. So it's very difficult because these are not bad people. They're they're well -meaning.

37:02They have any advice for somebody asking questions, getting answers and having a sense of should I listen to these people? You know, it's very much this exists in the whole world, right? Byerby where you have to use your judgment, you have to think probably the most important skill for product people. And I know this sounds awful, but is really learning how to think critically. And that that involves literally evaluating. I know I talk to people all the time when I help them for their interview. And I say, look, the most important thing you need to do some research on the manager that will be your direct manager.

37:38Do some background research. Go look at where they worked. It's all on LinkedIn. Check out those companies. Check out that product. Make sure you are prepared there because that's what really matters. Not so much the company, but who's going to coach you? So there are there's a lot that people can do that to sort of prepare themselves, arm themselves, take more ownership of their career. What's interesting. I think you run I'm sure you run into this. And I'll just share something that I thought of. So before it, well, was it Airbnb? I was reading your stuff. I was like, who works like this? Like you tell you about all these companies that are working in the strange way of just being given a roadmap.

38:20And like, no way. Like, this is not a thing. What is he writing about? And it's because I was working at a company that does things well. And I know you disagree with where things have gotten. But anyway, so imagine many people listening to this are like, there's no, like, I don't believe this is how a lot of companies work. What are you talking about? And then I also imagine there's a large percentage of people that work at a feature factory. And there's like, no, it's fine. It's not, it's not actually the way you're describing. So I bet this is quite frustrating for you. Yeah, I've experienced that because I I spent most of my career in that same bubble.

38:53And I was so surprised to find that people didn't work the way we did. I remember when it was too, because I was a developer at the time for developer tools. And I was building tools assuming that people were building like we built. And then I was sent out. I remember because one of the most high -opening visits was my very first visit to Walmart headquarters. And they were doing things so differently. They had, you know, just very different way of working, very different equipment, just everything. And it was a wake -up call. It was like, you know, what? I'm living in a bubble. Silicon Valley is not like the most of the world here.

39:36And of course, I realized that why not? Why don't companies in Arkansas and India and everywhere else have the access to the same methods and tools and techniques. And so that sort of became the inspiration for, you know, Silicon Valley product group was to spread those things. But I've had that exact conversation. I told him the same thing. He was asking me because he had known me. And I'm like, I know you're right about this stuff. But I really can't believe people are doing this. And I'm like, Shriosh, I wish it wasn't true. But, you know, he doesn't doubt it today. Yeah, because he's doing a lot of that work now too.

40:21I'm curious what you, if it's okay for people to be on a feature team and just stick with it and be happy. There's actually this LinkedIn post today by this PM the way we're like Ben Arez, who talks about how if there's like a B2B sales driven company, maybe it's okay for it to be feature factory where people know exactly what you need to build, build these things. It's fine. We don't need you to inform our outcomes. Thoughts on that. Is it ever okay to just be like, it's fine? Well, my first answer is this is not an accident why most B2B software is such crap. It is horrible. And of course, the ones that really stand out, they usually are not this way.

41:02So sales driven product, I don't know if I, I mean, don't get me wrong. There's companies like Oracle that are massively valuable driven with sales driven product. But, you know, Oracle, do you really want to be Oracle? If you want to be SAP, that's, I mean, does anybody like those products out there? I don't know. I don't, not sure I've ever met anybody that didn't hate those products. So, I know I'd say, that's just bad product. Now, I would argue that some of my favorite examples, in fact, 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.

41:47So, I mean, there's a bigger reason I think so many sales companies, 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. And until and and less, the CEO decides this is not very good, usually because some good product company comes along and takes away their customers, that's probably not going to change. Got it. So, your feedback there essentially is, sure, you can operate this way. You're not actually going to build great product in long term. You're going to run into criminal companies. The other thing I'd argue, Lenny, is an empowered product team can do everything a feature can team can do and more.

42:29So, I feel I find it very sad whenever, and once in a while I do hear somebody say, well, why isn't it good enough to be a feature team? I mean, how do you answer that really? To me, why are you in this business? Do you really not care what your customers think about your products? Seriously? I know I would never hire you if I had any say, but because that's one of the first things we want, right? We want people to genuinely care about our customers and about our business and making lives better for them. So, I don't have a lot of sympathy for those people. I mean, if they want, I do know that there's plenty of resources for them.

43:11So, they're fine. It's the people that really want to do better than that. Reminds me of something your colleague Christian said on our podcast episode of, how lucky are we to get to solve people's problems and help them? Christian is a living example of what we're talking about. Absolutely. He lives for these opportunities. This episode is brought to you by Vanta. When it comes to ensuring your company has top -notch security practices, things get complicated fast. Now, you can assess risk, secure the trust of your customers, and automate compliance for SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, and more with a single platform Vanta.

43:52Vanta's market -leading trust management platform helps you continuously monitor compliance alongside reporting and tracking risks. Plus, you can save hours by completing security questionnaires with Vanta AI. Join thousands of global companies that use Vanta to automate evidence collection, unify risk management, and streamline security reviews. Get $1 ,000 off Vanta when you go to Vanta .com slash Lenny. That's V -A -M -T -A .com slash Lenny. I want to touch on something, so I interviewed the CTO of Meta. It made me this really interesting point. When I think of Meta slash Facebook, I always imagine them as a very bottom -up culture.

44:33People on teams build experiments, run things. There's not a lot of, you know, do this, do this, that. But the way that he framed it is it's actually very top -down at Meta. Zuck and execs come up with, here's what we're working on, here's their strategy, here's our big bets. He sees it actually as a much more top -down than a bottom -up team, but it seems it comes across as bottom -up. I guess I know there's a difference between bottom -up first top -down versus featured factory and power product team, but I guess thoughts on that. Yeah, so first of all, I would argue what he described is exactly what I see in good product companies.

45:10Exactly, but we don't frame it as top -down. Top -down is really mean something very different. In fact, handing a team a roadmap of features, that's very top -down. Another very common misunderstanding, which comes again, a lot of the agile coaches, they have misguided so many organizations, but product teams don't do product strategy. Product leaders do product strategy. They need to do the product strategy. So you need, and look, I'm not the biggest fan of it, but Zuck is very good at product. Very good. That's sort of the problem in the world. He's so good at it, but that is the job is to make these strategic decisions, the focused decisions, the bets you're going to place.

46:00But then in a good organization, you give those bets to the teams, and you really do give them latitude to figure it out. And honestly, I spent a while since I worked Facebook at the time, but they had very good teams, very good product teams, serious cross -functional, serious engineers, serious product managers and designers, and they could solve very hard problems. And that is what made them good. So that's, I don't frame that as top -down. I frame that as product leaders doing their job and product teams doing their job. It's a very common misunderstanding that many people have about what empowerment even means.

46:44Empowerment 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 15 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. Awesome. That's a great clarification. I think a lot of people don't totally get that. So this is actually really helpful. I think for a lot of people, speaking of meta, there's another product leader at meta. He was actually one of the former guests and actually also one of the most popular episodes, Nikelle Singal.

47:21And he works with a lot of CPO's and heads of product companies. The way described it is, notice there's a reboot in what the PM role has been over the past couple years because of the end of the Zerparra. So the way he sees it is for the past decade. PMs are mostly responsible as like growth people. 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 kind of gone away, there's a return to building, finding product market fit, validation, and discovery. I'm curious if you see that. Do you see kind of a shift in the way in what PMs should be doing the last couple of years post Zerparra?

47:57So yes and no. I think he's right in general, but there's a really important nuance. Many teams that aren't very good yet, they do exactly what he described. He describes as a gross hacking. I describe it as optimization. All they're doing is these low risk, simple experiments. They live behind the A, B test of just doing like we're going to change the call to action here and where maybe more people will register. That kind of test. Should they do that absolutely? Is that product really not really that's not discovery? That's optimization. Now in many companies, they do that because they're giving a roadmap of all the features.

48:40So 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. So I would argue what he's probably seeing mostly is a team that's learning how to go from a feature team to a product team. Now has that happened more in the last two years? I would like to believe so, but I don't know. Some days I feel like yes, he's right. Some days I feel like I don't know who he's talking to because these people are still stuck doing optimization work.

49:25And so that's a hard to say. There's probably a lot of nuance there. In general, I think yes, but I don't think it's tied to interest rates. I don't think it's tied to that. I think it's more tied to the quality of the leadership and the need of the business to do more than optimization. I know people ask you this all the time, but I'm curious, is there anything bigger seeing change in the PM role broadly? We've talked about quite a few big dynamics that are changing. Interestingly, what we're really been talking about is the different definitions of the PM role. And so if we hold one of those definitions constant, let's say we are focused now on the empowered product manager, the one you and I grew up with and those are the ones that are responsible for value and viability.

50:14In general, I think the principles are stable and I think they will remain stable. However, the techniques are undergoing some radical changes, especially with generative AI. Don't get me wrong. I've been living this every day as most of us have. I don't have it figured out. In fact, I recently changed my advice because I used to say start with chat GPT, go from there and let's all help you make that great. We'll go from there. And what I kept seeing was people taking what they get to literally, too seriously, too much value. And they were heading off in a wrong direction and then they were optimizing that.

51:03So there's a lot going on right now. It's a moving target. Depends which system you're using and the day of the week now, what you're at. But whatever, now I've been recommending to people that they think through the answer first. Use, really get them to think. Put something down. Then use chat GPT 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. So I've kind of reversed and I did that because people are trusting the result too much. And when you talk about what they start with, is it like here's a strategy? I'm thinking for this product, there's like a PRD.

51:47Yeah, I mean, certainly you can use it for a spec, right? A PRD. You can certainly use it for strategy. You can certainly use it for even things like triaging bunks. You can use it for, I mean, it's hard to think of something you can't use it for. The harder question is what is the good for? Yeah. Something all in those lines I wanted to chat about. Something I've been thinking about. I want to write a post about this is which skills of a product manager will be most disrupted by AI. So I think short -term, there's like communication is getting improved. You can improve your writing strategy, maybe.

52:21Like here's my strategy. Give me some feedback. So I think there's like a things are kind of being optimized a bit through chat GPT and tools like that. But like in the five or 10 years, are there any skills that will potentially go away or 95 % of it will be done by AI? And if so, which, where do you see most of that change happening? Absolutely. And I think that is happening. I mean, more on the engineering side right now and also on the design side, but I fully expect it will happen. Like I said at the beginning, I don't know when really, because that timing is hard question. But this is another one of my arguments to people of why you need to up level your skills.

52:59If you are fundamentally a backlog administrator, good luck protecting that because already people are doing that. You know, it's only a matter of time of course that becomes pretty well supported. So that is not a good job prospect. Now, then we can talk about a feature team project manager. There's very little that's going on in there that is truly, you know, value at. Most of these are administrative kinds of things that can be done at least significantly with help. So I don't feel, I wouldn't feel confident if I was a feature team product manager that I could keep doing this for any amount of years at least.

53:45Now, for an empowered product manager, if your responsibility is value and viability, if you boil it down, that's kind of the real challenge left with chat GPT or Gen AI is viability becomes even more important question. There's some very hard things left. So designers, I think the real product designers at the top of the chain, they're going to be incredibly important. And of course, tech leads are going to be incredibly important more than ever. But for product manager, especially with viability, there are so I've been on so many of these calls where we've been talking about the implications of probabilistic software versus deterministic software.

54:32And what is okay, like from the lawyers are weighing in already with the legal perspective, but also ethical perspective, and just like if this is mission critical, is this something that we could be okay with having a probabilistic answer? We don't know. Trying to figure that out. So what is that really? That's question. So a lot more is landing squarely on the product manager than I think in general in the past. You talk about viability, just so people know what you mean when you say that what's like the one sentence definition of viability means. So value means for the customer, viability means for your business.

55:13So that means it works for your business. You can sell it, market it, it's legal, you can service it, it's compliance, all of these constraints, you know, you know, the hard part, remember Airbnb, it wasn't so hard to get people to sign up, it was hard to make listings legal in San Francisco. You know, that's the hard part is the compliance side. Yeah. I want to talk about your book. Is there anything else along these lines before we get into your book that you thought would be interesting to touch on or share? I think that's good. We covered a lot. We did. I imagine we covered some of the elements of your book.

55:52But let's talk about the book. So this is your third book. Is that right? Yes. Okay. What made you decide to write another book and make an add -in addition to the Mardi Cagan canon? And what is it about? This is a different one though. It's different kind because inspired, hopefully you know, is for product teams and product managers. It's really a book about product discovery and then empowered. It's really about product leadership, vision strategy, team topology, coaching, it's all about that. And that was the original idea. We would share those techniques because that's what we share. But the single most common question we got, honestly, from the first edition of Inspire, was that people would read the book and they would say, I love this.

56:42I want to do this. But have you ever seen our company? We are so far away from that. We're like night and day. And in fact, 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 like, how in the world do you transform to work like this? And I mean, we've been getting that question for years. Now, that's really what my partners, Christian, Jonathan, Christopher, Leah, that's what they do is they help companies to transform. That's what we've been doing. But we do that on a one off basis, you know, there's only five of us.

57:18How many companies could we possibly work with? So we realized that this question was a global question. And if we've written books that explain like, maybe you want to work this way, but we don't address how to change to work this way. That's like kind of leaving people without that hard part. So the goal of transform, unlike the other books, was to share how to actually change. There are techniques and transformed as well, but there are transformation techniques, there are change techniques like the use of pilot teams or spreading things out, you know, divide and conquer on some of the transformation work.

58:01So the other thing we wanted to do, in fact, we made a rule for ourselves. We knew we needed lots of examples, case studies, but we said it's too easy to include Silicon Valley companies. Because they look, look, Airbnb was born in this model. I mean, they were, they were designers, but still they were a Silicon Valley company. It was a big advantage for Airbnb, over say your favorite bank or whatever, that was not born in this way of working. So we said, all our examples are going to be from outside Silicon Valley world. They're all companies, most of them pre -internet that had to change dramatically to work this way.

58:40And not only were going to show how they changed, but we were going to show with they were able to do what they changed, which to me is the coolest part, seeing the innovation. Some of these innovations, honestly, let it are as impressive as anything I've seen Amazon do. And that's saying a lot. I mean, Amazon, in my opinion, is, you know, the top of the pack. And so that's impressive. What train line in the UK was able to do. A company I had never known before, a few years ago, in Saudi Arabia called almost safer, a travel agency. They own, I forget what it is, 80 plus percent of the market, overexpedia over the big guys in the US because they actually learned this stuff and were able to do it.

59:27And, you know, we have a dozen examples from all over the world, Brazil, Virginia, everywhere, not Silicon Valley, in healthcare, in car sales, and fitness all over the place. So that's, we wanted to be able to get, you know, honestly, there was a few reasons. One is, we wanted them to understand what it really means to move to this way of working. No fluff, just like, what is it really mean? Otherwise, how they're going to get there if they don't even know where there is, right? Then we wanted them to believe it's possible to transform. We're the first ones to say it's not easy, but we wanted them to believe it's possible.

1:00:10And the third thing is we wanted to get them excited about what they'd be able to do after they transformed. And those were the three things we were trying to do in the book. And so that's different than our other books, but hopefully it makes the other books more accessible, like they'll be able to apply more of them. Who would you say this is most suited for? Is it leaders, companies, ICPMs, everybody? Who do you think would be get the most out of this? Yeah, we wrote it intentionally. Again, unlike the other books, the other books are written for people like, right, in your audience, in my audience, you know, their product people.

1:00:44These are written for non -product people too. And so this, the idea is a CEO, a CFO ahead of sale. Anybody who cares about their company changing how they build and wants to help is written for them. So it's, that was one of the hardest parts really, including those kinds of reviewers and making sure all this stuff made sense to them. So basically if you're listening to this and you're like, I am working on these teams, Marty's describing, I don't think this is optimal. We can do a lot better. We can get a lot more on a future team. Hand this book to your CEO essentially. And I'd suggest they read it themselves so they know because you know, this is the, I know I'm going to be talking more about this going forward because I know I need to.

1:01:33Too many people in our industry view themselves as a victim of their company. Like they're stuck in a feature team and there's nothing they can do about it other than Quit. But really, both, you know, they have a family, they're not going to quit. So 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 in a minimum, it'll help their career. I always loved just the message of empowerment and giving people motivation to you can actually make change.

1:02:10You're not stuck in this way of working. And I know you do that a lot. The official title of the book is it's transformed moving to the product operating model. What do you mean when you there it is? I don't have my copy yet because that hasn't come out in the US yet. So otherwise, I'd have it here on my site as well. There it is. It's a beautiful green color, by the way. It goes nicely with the other colors. Amazing. Beautiful design over did that. Okay. So the part of the title is moving to the product operating model. What does that mean? You know, that was kind of the biggest pain for the book was because honestly, I had dodged that question for 20 years.

1:02:47If 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? That's how we refer to it. The best versus the rest because like there is no word. There is no name that talks about the common principles with all the best companies. So we would just say, do you want to work like the best or not? 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, but I don't know if you've come across this Lenny, but it is really, you don't want to coin a new term if you can avoid it.

1:03:27It is really painful to try to develop a new term. Some of the companies we worked with use the term product operating model. And you know, others don't get me wrong. That's not the only 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.

1:04:07And it's also it's non -threatening to a lot of people. It's just saying, look, this is how these companies operate. You can look at it and decide if you think it's good for you too. So we adopted that term. We call it product model for short. But all it really is, it boils down to a set of 20 principles. And those 20 principles are what we find. Remember we started with this. I was kind of explaining when I listened to your guess, I'm listening for what's special about each of their companies. But what I'm looking for is the commonality. Because I really, most of the time when I see a successful company, they are living these principles.

1:04:55You know, principles like you have to experiment. If you have to embrace experimentation, if you don't do that, most of this is not possible. Or you have to make sure that everything you release is instrumented so that we can prove the outcome, stuff like that, that there's a million different methodologies and frameworks and tools and processes. But what matters is those principles. And so that's what we mean by that product operating model. There's at a high level, we talk about it is how you decide what you're going to work on. That's what how you decide which problems to solve. That's what most companies do in annual planning.

1:05:36But it's basically the product strategy. Right. That's what your metafriend was describing that the leaders do. That's their job. The second is how do they solve problems? Do they have the skills to do product discovery like we're talking about? How do you actually come up with good solutions that work for the customer and work for the business? That's the second big dimension of the product model. And the third big dimension is how do they actually build tests and deploy product to their customers? Do they do it in a way that is reliable? That is that is demonstrable where you can show that this generates the outcomes that you need.

1:06:18Those are the three big areas and then there's there's a number of competencies. There's four new competencies that most companies don't have. And so what makes it tricky is they have people with those titles but they don't have people with those jobs. The one we've been talking about is product manager. What would be more interesting to share? He said there's 20 attributes of a product team, 20 principles. I'm so curious what these are. We don't have time to go through them all. Can either share a few of those, you share it experimentation as one or these four, the way you just mentioned, I'm just curious what you said.

1:06:58Well, I could share as much as you want. But the four competencies are product manager. Again, we're talking a serious product manager here. Not a product owner, not a feature team product manager. Product manager, real product designer, service design interaction, design visual design, user research, real product designer, a real tech lead, and then a real product leader, a manager of product design engineering that is that knows how to coach their people and knows how to do a real product strategy, which is what we were talking about. So those are the four competencies, new competencies. For most companies, those are new, meaning they might have people with those names, but they don't have those roles institutionalized.

1:07:43It's interesting. You're building on the classic triad with this leader above. It's like the stool with something on the stool or something or something. That is the triad. That's where it came from. The word triad came from those three. We didn't invent that. But I think the product leader is a really interesting addition. You can't just have this team off to the side without a product leader. Every seeing that work. That's so true. Because one of the things I really learned with Inspire was that it wasn't enough to have the teams do their job. They needed leadership to do their job. So it is both.

1:08:17And that's why I was saying we don't frame it as top down bottom up for that. We frame it as each group doing their jobs. And when that happens, it's actually a beautiful thing. Yeah, we're going to link to a post of Euro product leadership theater, which talks about how people do this actually badly and what it looks like when it's just pretend versus actually doing the right. Good. Okay. And then yeah, what are some of these principles? Just a couple. I mean, just stop me. But there's a whole set of there's a set of principles around the more cultural things like innovation is more important than predictability.

1:08:52That's a principle that learning is more important than failure. The principles are more important than process. Some examples of that. In terms of teams empowered with problems to solve. That's one of your foundational principles. We talked about that. This idea of real ownership, real sense of ownership. So that they it's theirs. Well, of course, in discovery, you'd recognize all the principles, but it's about addressing product risks. It's about embracing quick experimentation. It's about testing ideas responsibly. These are principles. And then I did mention a couple of the delivery principles, things like small, frequent, uncoupled releases for most companies that can see ICD, instrumentation of everything, monitoring of everything.

1:09:44These are deployment principle or delivery principles. So none of these should surprise you because they are what's consistent in the good companies that we know. But these are the things that we think matter. That's awesome. And I imagine people listening to this if they're in that 10 % or 20 % of companies that you describe as doing this well or just like, of course, and then the rest are just like, no, there's no way we're going to be able to do that. You have to realize in most of the rest of the world, they release monthly or mostly quarterly. Think about that quarterly releases. Think about you cannot take care of your customers.

1:10:22You cannot learn at the pace you need to. And by the way, quality is going to be terrible in that model. I don't want to go on this tangent necessarily, but I know in some cases like a quarterly release like Shopify, as an example, they have like seasonal releases like the winter launch and the summer launch. And salesforce .com has a big. But they don't confuse the actual releasing by the teams with the marketing releases. So it's very normal. And I think wise to batch because look, most teams, most product teams are releasing on the order of 20 times per day. You know, do a marketing release 20 times a day.

1:11:01That would be like useless. So it makes sense to have messaging on a periodic basis. But good companies by the time they message it, it's live. It's been coming out. We may have released some things dark as you know, but we've got it in production solid. We've proven each thing probably with an A B test. Yeah. Every means actually in that same model, most of the stuff they announce over a couple of times a year is already out or in an experiment to most people. One thing I wanted to clarify. So you call this the product operating model. There's also the throw product ops, which you touched on a little bit.

1:11:40And he thoughts on product ops. We've had a few guests here talking about it. It's tricky. I mean, first of all, product ops, some people have asked me is product ops the same as product operating model. No, that was just a very unfortunate name conflict. But product ops is more analogous to DevOps and design ops. That's all now. Can you use product ops in the product operating model? Absolutely. If you're using one of the definitions that are part of the model. So for example, the heart of product ops in the good companies, I know is user research and data analysts. And the only difference is they're now brought together under one product ops leader.

1:12:26That's all. That is the same. How long has that been with us, Lenny? More than 20 years. Tink companies have had user research teams and have had data analysts teams to help you make decisions qualitatively and help you make teams quantitatively. So that's not new at all, but it is good. And I think there's a there is some amount of value about bringing that in. Some companies, of course, they interpret and define product ops very differently. A lot of them, unfortunately, think of it. They focus on the whole phrase of process and governance. That's like a huge red flag. And I try to tell people, if that's what you see run, don't walk away from that.

1:13:15The other thing that's going on in a lot of companies, it is amazing to me how creative companies can be to try to find a way to justify giving product managers assistance. Because you know, the product manager says too much work, which is really ironic to me because they're usually feature teams that are saying this. And I'm like, it's not even enough for your job. But anyway, they're like too much work. And so they're like, well, we need help. And so for a while, they would all have these little associate product managers. And then a lot of companies they have, oh, we also have product donors.

1:13:51Product manager and product donor makes no sense. Huge anti pattern. Today, a lot of companies use the same excuse, but its product manager has product ops people to do the dirty work. No. And honestly, I don't think I would not want to be one of those people because I think they're very vulnerable right now. I've changed my mind. I'm product ops. One reason is because because I also was like, why do I, I just want to, I don't need another person in the loop on everything I'm doing. I just want to have, I don't, yeah, I don't know why I would do that. Even I have endless work and I have working crazy hours.

1:14:26But I think one of the great things about product ops people that I talk to is there's not many of them. They're like, you need one often to do a ton and to help a lot of different teams. So it's not like a team that just grows like crazy. That's what I like. Same with user research, by the way. And you had a very good guest on that I think tried to make that point as well. A good, a small, high leverage group. So it works for data analysts and works for user research, where they are helping the teams do the work they need to do. But that's where it really depends what they're doing. I will tell you, I've seen too many companies where the product leaders are not doing their job.

1:15:00So what they do is they hire product ops to try to do their job. They're like, they're the ones now responsible for educating the product managers. That's, that's just not good. I have just a few more questions before we get to our very exciting lighting round. Actually, maybe just one more question we'll see where this goes. So I've mentioned this earlier that a lot of startup founders are just like, I do not meet product managers. I'm not going to hire them ever or maybe I'll wait till I have hundreds of engineers. But then I find many of them change their mind, bring in a PM and they're like, oh, wow, this is amazing.

1:15:34Why didn't I do this earlier? This person exactly, this is exactly what I need. And these are guests I've had on the podcast that were like, we don't need PMs and then they get one and they're like, okay, I see. This is great. Do you have any advice for founders that are in this boat of just like, I don't want product managers, they're going to scroll up, they're going to slow us down. Yeah, you need advice for this. 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.

1:16:03Now, realize what we're talking about here. Again, the whole discussion we've had, this is let other other layer too. I'm talking about a real product manager. If they're using them as project manager, which a lot of times they are, well, I would tell them they're overpaying, but okay, you can get some help for project management. That's not a good use of the CEO's talk. But if they're a real product manager and they're working about value and viability, that is the founders job. So the founder should be doing that and needs to be doing that. And it usually causes conflict if they bring in a real product manager too soon.

1:16:43It's too many cooks in the kitchen. You need to reach a certain scale before it helps you to have other people responsible for value and viability. That all assumes that they understand real product management. Otherwise, it's going to lead to very different symptoms. So I think one piece of advice here is after product market fit. It's a better time to hire product manager. Otherwise, they're just kind of between you and the product and it slows everything down. Right. Yeah, I mean, remember usually as soon as you get product market fit, you're working on it for other products and other markets.

1:17:16And so it's an ongoing thing. But while it's small, usually it's most useful just to look at the number of engineers. At a certain number of engineers, usually like 20 to 25, it's a lot better if the co -founder is the product person for that. Also, I was going to ask you if you have a heuristic engineers. And so thank you for preempting that. That's essentially all I had to chat about, Marty. Do you have anything else that you think would be interesting to share or touch on or leave listeners with before we get to a very exciting lightning round? Honestly, Lenny, we talked about so many big topics.

1:17:54I'm worried that may have overwhelmed people. I hope not. But because you brought up, you asked all the hardest topics. Well, good job, me. Good job, you. With that, we've reached our very exciting lightning round. Are you ready? Sure. What are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people? I love the new book from Tony Fidel called Build. It's a wonderful book. And he's describing the product model, but for hardware devices. And his perspective was fabulous. He had a front row seat to some of the most iconic products in the world, the iPod, iPhone, the Nest devices, love it.

1:18:35So I loved his book and I'd been recommending it to all kinds of people. Another one I really liked is Tim Urban, the guy behind Weightbutt Y. I just loved the way this guy thinks. And he wrote a book called What's Our Problem that I found really provocative, challenged me in a hundred different ways. I love that. I've been reading about his book writing process as he was writing it over the many years. And it was just quite a journey. He went on to make that book happen. Yeah. Do you have a favorite recent movie or TV show that you really enjoyed? You know, Lenny, you couldn't ask that to a worse person because I know I watch almost nothing.

1:19:13So not a good one for that. Great. That's I think that's often for the best. Do you have a favorite interview question that you either use yourself or find useful when interviewing books, product managers, especially? Well, given how much interviewing I do, I stop giving out my real favorite questions because they became online. But I do have a go -to question that I pretty much start with everybody and that I want to know if they can even define the job of a product manager. What do you find in the answer and what do you look for? Is it just how close they are to your version of a product? I just want to if they give me the same old, you know, I can tell where they learned from their answer.

1:19:52That's all. They don't have to give my answer. They just shouldn't give the old feature team answer. That's all. Give a favorite product. They recently discovered they really love whether it's software or something physical, something around the house. I recently got a Rivian, which is amazing. That they did an absolutely beautiful job. You know, they're kind of Airbnb of car companies because the founder is a designer and it is just imagine if a designer designed the next generation car. It's a phenomenally good job. Wow. I was imagining you could rent people's cars and that sounds pretty cool.

1:20:32But you're in a different way. Interestingly, both you and Boz from Metta both had cars as your favorite recent product discovery. He had a Mercedes Benz. Oh, and I made the joke that I hope to give away these gifts, these products someday and the budget is blowing up with all these cars. Well, my favorite thing to do is ride motorcycles and there is a new generation of product that who knows might save my life one day, but there's these are literally wireless airbag vests that you wear and it uses AI technology and sensors to decide if it should deploy. Luckily, mine has never had to go off, but I know a lot of, I mean, for a lot of people that saved their lives, that's an example of technology where without the technology, it's a very vulnerable, even with it, it's vulnerable, but wait, you ride motorcycles?

1:21:29I do. I had no idea what sort of what bike do you ride? I have two fun tracks. Both BMWs. We need to see a picture of this somewhere. That's amazing. I had no idea. Two final questions. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to share with friends or family and find useful, either in worker and life? I don't really have a life motto, but I do have one I share a lot with people because as you might imagine, I think writing really helps me think and I encourage other people to develop their thinking skills and there's a great quote from Leslie Lamport, the guy who, well, you're not old enough to know this, but he invented one of the first word processors called Latta, which I used to use back in the day.

1:22:14But if you think, sorry, if you're thinking without writing, you just think you're thinking. There's a version of this that I love and it's the same idea that I don't know what I, I don't know what I think until I've written it down. I think John Didian said that. I might do it. I so agree. That's like that's where I started writing. I just want to figure this out that I have in my head and crystallize and something that makes sense. Last question. You've been doing this work for many, many years. Now, how many years have you been at this?

1:22:4543. 43 years. What do you think you, what else would you have been doing right now if not having gone down this track? Oh, well, honestly, I would have been really happy just staying in engineering. I've always loved design too. I think I would have been really happy as a designer. I think no matter what, though, I would have been building something, whether if it was houses or cars or whatever, I like building things. I love that. You're essentially a one man triad team in this dream. Marty, this was incredible. Everything I was hoping and B we covered so much stuff. I think we're going to help a lot of people transform through final questions.

1:23:26Working folks find your book. When is it available? Working they reach out if they want to follow up on stuff. And how can listeners be useful to you? Well, yeah, the book should be available worldwide in electronic, Kindle, audio and hardback on March 12th. We'll see. But that's what the publishers promise. And you can find about all of the things I talk about. And you know, all our stuff is for free on the website, esppg .com Silicon Valley product group. And yeah, if you don't know at least one of the partners, you should try to meet one. We all love meeting the community. And I think you'll enjoy it.

1:24:09So yeah, hopefully that's useful. Yeah, we've had two partners so far. We'll work our way through the rest over time. And I want to make sure you answer the last question. How can listeners be useful to you? To be honest, a lot of the inspiration for what we write comes from questions from people. And so we love it when people read something. And if they if it works great and they tell us we love that too. But if they have follow up questions, one of the nice things about the online archive is we'll just go update the article to address the question. Yeah, we love that. You do the same thing. Feel free.

1:24:42All right, amazing. Marty, thank you so much for making time to do this and for being here. Thank you, Lenny. Bye, everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple podcasts, Spotify or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny's podcast .com. See you in the next episode.