Modern Product Management with Marty Cagan

This Q&A with Marty is not one of the best, the questions are not particularly good, but still a few good insights on key themes like strategy, the PM role, agile methods, etc.

Strategy

• The main thing I get frustrated with at companies, is that they have no strategy – not even a bad strategy, just none.
• They have some objectives, like grow the business or reduce churn rates. And then a roadmap of features. But that’s it.
• This is a difference with good product companies, where the strategy is right at the heart of what teams do.
• Strategy requires doing things that are hard, like making decisions about what not to work on. They have too many priorities. They don’t really understand what it means to focus.
• Thinking and looking at insights is required for good strategy. It takes a lot of work.
• Managers need to sit down one-on-one with product teams to discuss how they are contributing to the strategy.
• Product strategy should tell you what problems need to be solved. This is what you then give to the product teams to tackle. Not just passing down a roadmap.

What is an empowered team?

• Do they get to figure out the best way to solve the problems they are tasked with, or does somebody else figure that out?
• But to do that, they need a true cross-functional team. PM, UX and design, and engineering.
• The biggest thing missing from most teams is a real product manager. They have product owners, but not a product manager.
• A product owner is just a backlog administrator. This is not that helpful to a product team.
• These people can be coached most of the time to be a product manager though.
• The PM is a problem, because there is only one on a team, unlike engineering. And if that PM is not capable, then you have a big problem.

Trust in product teams

• The executives need to trust the team, and in particular the product manager.
• Otherwise they won’t let them figure out the solutions.
• In the team it requires trust between the different roles, because to solve the problems it means everyone working together.
• Character is also important. Don’t hire jerks, otherwise it is hard to collaborate as a team.

Agile methods

• Lots of teams say they use Agile or Kanban, but this doesn’t mean they really are agile in nature, they are still following a roadmap and building features.
• There are a bunch of processes out there that call themselves Agile, but they are not. The most famous one is SAFe – this is just marketing, there is no agile there in shape or form. It’s command and control and waterfall.
• Companies sometimes have these Agile religious people. Anytime you have a religious view on these things it is dangerous.

Product Discovery

• Discovery is much faster than delivery. We should do doing 15-30 prototypes or tests a week.
• We like discovery because we can very quickly find out whether something is worth building or not.
• Don’t like using the term MVP much anymore because it confuses people. It’s just another prototype mechanism. Most prototypes, and most MVPs, are going to be thrown away at the end.
• I’m allergic to process. A competent product manager is choosing the right techniques for the job.
• The four risks: value, usability, feasibility, viability, all require different methods.
• Sometimes it’s very easy and it just goes on the backlog. Sometimes it’s very risky and we have to do a lot of prototyping.

The difference between B2C and B2B

• It depends if it’s a good or bad B2B. Most B2B companies are terrible. That’s long established. They do terrible products.
• If it’s a good B2B company, the difference is not big at all. Basically you should build products for business users the you build for consumers.
• Most B2B companies are not well run from a product perspective. They are really sales driven.
• That leads to a whole bunch of bad behaviours.

How to measure progress in the discovery phase?

• Try not to think of discovery as a phase. It’s what design and PM do every day.
• You can look at silly metrics like how many prototypes we did. But none of that matters.
• What matters are the results. Look at the result KPIs.
• Everything else is a vanity KPI.
• You can do 100 prototypes in a week and still have a terrible product.

What does a sales team or CEO say when asked when a feature will be ready?

• It’s normal for customers to ask about features.
• You need to have a conversation with them about what they are really trying to do.
• The real answer is easy: we will solve the problem by a certain date. Not a certain feature.
• This is easier in B2C than it is in B2B.

Recommended book: Lean Analytics – this is one of the best in the series, and good for learning the data analytics part of the job. Also take a course on statistics.

What skills do product managers lack the most?

• Four big things:
  • Deep understanding of your users and customers
  • Deep understanding of the data and analytics
  • Deep understanding of your own business
  • Deep understanding of your industry
• A key thing for product people is constant learning. If you don’t like learning then you won’t like this job.