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

0:00 There is no question that a lot of companies overhired during the pandemic. I go into some companies and honestly I can't believe all the ridiculous roles that they have. Agile coaches and product owners and product ops and business analysts. And this is essentially the theater you're describing. People that aren't real product managers. They're dramatically overpaid for the Value they provide. Because it's a project management role. It is a lot easier to deliver output than it is to deliver outcomes. What made you decide to write another book and what is it about? Too 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. than quit. I think that's not true. There is so much they can do. Today my guest is Marty Kagan.

0:48 Marty has been helping product teams and product managers. Improve their craft. processes and careers for over twenty years. He's worked with more product teams and more product managers than any human alive. He's also written two of the most popular books in the field of product management.

1:06 Inspired and empowered. And this week he's releasing his newest book, Transformed. In our conversation, we cover some spicy and important topics. Where the product management field is going. The overhiring of product managers and adjacent functions

1:21 A trend he's noticed called product management theater. Also, why most product management advice you find online is giving you the wrong advice, and why that's the case. Why many product managers are simply project managers and how to avoid becoming that person? Also, how to avoid hiring that person, what skills you need to work on and build to be an incredible product manager, especially with AI. How to shift your team and company to be more empowered

1:47 Sig that you're working on a feature team and why you probably don't want to be there, and so much more. If you care about the feel of product management and where it's going. You will absolutely love this episode. With that, I bring you Marty Kagan, after a short word from our sponsors. And if you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes, and it helps the podcast tremendously. Let me tell you about a product called Sprig.

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4:46 Marty Kagan, welcome back to the podcast. Thanks very much, Lenny. Thanks for inviting me back. Thank you for coming back. So our first episode together is still one of the top five most popular episodes of my entire podcast, which is wild because the podcast was much smaller.

5:02 Back then You're you've also got a book coming out. We're gonna talk about that. You've also been getting a lot more spicy in your writing as of late. You've been writing about product management theater and product leadership theater and All these sorts of things. So I'm excited to dig into a lot of these things.

5:17 I thought I'd start with just asking what is driving this recent spiciness in your writing? I n it's conscious. I I s find myself, I'm aware of myself sort of dialing up the rhetoric around this stuff. Uh you know, I've actually been saying these things for a long time. I honestly and I've I mean it's on the record. You can read the blog articles from ten years ago, twenty years ago, but Things are changing and

5:44 First of all I should acknowledge I don't know if you're this way, Lenny, but most product people I know like me are Paranoid. So we're kind of always worried. that things are gonna come and just take our customers away and change our disrupt our products and stuff.

6:00 I know that there's a degree of that. I'm always looking at what are the things that could really shake things up. In a good way, but also in a bad way. And there's been a number of things I've been very worried about for a long time. And I think that there is sort of a convergence of factors that are going on.

6:19 One of the challenges is it's simultaneous. So so there are a number of things happening in parallel. Which is kind of a recipe for some chaos and a lot of fear. And you know, in the product community, in the design community, and the engineering community, it's there. You can see it. And I talk to people I mean Like you, I talk to people pretty much every day.

6:42 So I do have a lot of theories about why this is going on and what people can do to best protect themselves, their career, their companies. And so I'm happy to share that, but it is It's not small. It's not a small set.

6:58 Maybe before I get into it though, I realise that People should understand where I'm coming from. And how it's different than where you're coming from. Uh because this is this perspective. And I I just to be clear, I think both uh we're both trying to help the product community.

7:15 But we're trying to do it in very different ways. And I want to be clear, uh I love the way you do it. In fact If people don't know I'm a paid subscriber. The earth because I find it incredibly useful for what I want to do.

7:30 So let's talk about that. I mean My take you you obviously could describe what you do better than anyone. But my take is that you are and this is what I find valuable. You're sharing a Broad range, increasingly broad range of perspectives.

7:46 Uh people Ways of working, ways of doing products, experiments with the product model. you know, uh experiments in leadership. I love that. It actually helps me a lot. That's why I subscribe.

8:01 And I'll I'll be honest, the main reason I took some prodding for me to I know there's something about actually paying for a subscription when there's like a hundred different product related newsletters and stuff. But what happened was You had some I mean, you have a lot of subscribers and People that I know would see something and they'd email me and they say, Did you see what Lenny was talking about with Linear or with whoever? And like uh how do you how do you underst how do you explain that? What do you think is going on?

8:30 And it made me want to watch a lot of these some of these companies I know. And about other ones you've introduced me to that I don't know anybody at. So to me that's incredibly valuable. It's a whole lot easier than the way it used to be, which is a whole lot of traveling to a lot of companies. So I love that. You are helping

8:50 So many people to get a broader understanding of product. My goal is different. This sort of S V PG. We're also trying to help the product community, but we're Yeah, it's interesting what When I watch your interviews, you're trying to pry out of people what's special about what they do.

9:08 Which is what I want to hear. But interestingly, what I'm looking for is not what's different. It's what's the same. I'm looking for what we're all about is sharing the principles and the practices that are used consistently by the best product companies. In fact, we have a heuristic. We've never made a secret of this.

9:27 We are always asked about new techniques and new new methods, new processes, and we're like, look. We need to see it being used by at least several of the companies that have cons proven they can consistently innovate. If those companies can use it. Productively. We we're we're all about evangelizing that.

9:49 It's worth pointing out that we don't You know, we make this clear in every one of the books. We don't invent any of these things. We just If if they work, we like to talk about them. So we're looking for the commonality. And mostly we're looking for, you know, to help a company, whether it's a startup or a large company, to have the best possible chance of success.

10:12 That's the goal for us. Yeah, it's a different goal. You can see that. So All these data points become interesting as data point, but we're looking for those things that kind of last. And you never know. I mean you have to see for one, like I love Working with startups.

10:28 But As you know, a lot of startups are dominated by the founder and the early people and it almost doesn't matter what techniques they use, if they're good, it's amazing what they do. That's just amazing. And so That's uh probably important to get out of the way. I'm yeah, I love this. Bring in that perspective. I agree with everything you said. I think we are very different in what we're providing to the product community and

10:51 It's interesting being on this side of the Microphone is I built a lot of empathy for journalists. Where like I know uh the Brian Chesky episode is a good example where There's a lot of things there that might sound problematic and you disagree with.

11:04 And as me interviewing him. The challenge I have is I have an hour with him. And I have to always decide, do I go and push back and try to Hey, is this actually working the way you're describing? Is this actually the right way to approach stuff? Here's why maybe you would not versus There's so many things I wanna get to and ask him about as I'm like, Oh, which way do I go?

11:22 And then if I'm pushing back too hard, people are like, I'm not gonna go on this podcast where he's just questioning everything I think. So it's a really it's a really interesting thing. Totally fair. And also I I don't think you want to scare off your guests. This is a This is really the platform they have to share what they think is important. I I do always find it entertaining'cause a a number of the companies you profile I all already know.

11:46 And it's always fun to hear them describe it versus what I see at their company. Because of course they're not always the same. But that's just human nature, right? We all do that. And so anyway, I I hope you continue doing what you're doing, Lenny, and um I wanna uh

12:03 Yeah I'll keep I'll keep following. Amazing. I appreciate it. And same same to you. All right. So with the writing, I think an implication with the way you're describing is basically You're telling people things they don't want to hear, but they Need to hear. Yeah. That's the way you think about it, right? I do. Uh it's

12:19 Yeah. In fact, I've got some very uncomfortable things to talk about, which I know You know this The more intelligent part of me is like, Don't bring that up. But also the other side of me is like

12:31 But people need to hear it. So that's talk about it. If people need to hear it, which I agree. So you've been talking about this concept of product management theater and product leadership theater. Let's get into it. What is that what does that look like? What is that what's the sign that you're in this theater versus doing it? The way you should be doing it.

12:48 There is no question that a lot of companies hi overhired during the pandemic. Just That was easy to see even while it was going on. And you know, it's not just that they overhired, a lot of them Lowered the bar.

12:59 But at the same time, of course. We have uh A change in the financial world that has really increased the cost of funds. And that's another thing going on simultaneously. And probably the the

13:13 One of the biggest things of all, and this is the hardest because It's uh it's not happened yet. is the predicted impact of generative AI. Right. I mean this is I don't know if you saw literally uh the CEO of of NVIDIA the other day was saying

13:29 to don't don't Learn programming. Mm-hmm. First of all, I'm not even sure that's good advice, but the fact that the CEO of one of the most amazing companies in the world is saying Don't

13:42 learn programming that's Disruptive. And so this at a minimum it creates uncertainty among the leaders in the companies. At a minimum. But honestly, I think it there's very real impact.

13:56 I'm convinced of that. I just don't know the real time horizon. I've I've I've got a long history of being overly optimistic. Like I think things are gonna happen sooner than they really do. So I don't know when they'll really happen, but that's a big one. Here's another one that I think is not talked nearly enough about.

14:15 And that is In a lot of companies. Especially outside of Silicon Valley. Team size has just gotten out of hand. It's just gotten

14:27 I go into some companies and honestly I Can't believe all the ridiculous roles that they have. Yeah, I'll go into that more if you want later, but Yeah, the No question that

14:38 People realize that smaller teams can often produce more and better results. How many of your guests have said as much, you know? I've heard it from many of them. It's No, reducing the size of the organization, ironically, can get you a lot more. In terms of results.

14:56 So there's this general appreciation that maybe we overdid it here with all of these roles. Uh. When of course I'm talking about Agile coaches and product owners and product ops and Business analysts and

15:12 All these assistant product manager type. So we'll go into that if you want, but It's gotten out of hand in a lot of companies. And then the one that I really probably shouldn't bring up just because it's it's become a A religious topic almost. And I know it's a super sensitive topic for people.

15:31 But uh the reality is with remote employees. Both velocity and innovation have taken a real hit. Now we can talk about don't get me wrong We are I don't think we're ever gonna go back to the days of Big companies having almost all co located teams.

15:49 But There is no question. I mean I work with a lot of them. They are all struggling with innovation and the velocity things go slower and they don't really do that level of innovation that they used to do. Uh, and so we These are big factors. These are sort of macro factors that are going on.

16:09 And then On top of that, if you get outside of sort of the Silicon Valley bubble It's kind of even worse because uh They have been investing at these companies, especially the big companies in all these extra roles.

16:24 You know, I mentioned agile coaches, but like scrum masters and Every flavor of project manager you could dream up. They're everywhere. And every kind of assistant to product people. It's just

16:38 I think it's gotten crazy. I've been fact I wrote an article a long time ago, something like a decade ago, that was very popular at the time called Epic Waste. And I was pointing this out and saying, This is crazy. The ironic thing is that the better companies do way more with a lot less. So anyway, the roles. And then what about all the years that have been going on where they uh think these big companies think the answer lies in processes?

17:03 Especially Things like Safe, which outside of the sort of Silicon Valley world is Depressingly popular. Yeah. You know, and even though Scrum a lot of people don't even understand simple processes like Scrum and they miss the point.

17:19 So 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. And you know, we talked about the sheer number of people becomes a problem and The amount of that cost can be shocking and the amount of waste is basically embarrassing. So it is not a surprise to me.

17:40 The companies are reacting to that. The bigger surprise, honestly, is it's taken so many compan so long for so many companies to realize uh what is going on. Yeah no. Bottom line is today I think they

17:55 They all Everybody спешні адса In the sort of those Big process and

18:02 roll heavy companies, they need to take a hard look. And how they build products and how they serve their customers. And they need to look harder at how the best companies do this with so much less proportional spend And so much more pot uh real return.

18:18 uh and and really take a fresh look at how to best meet the needs of their customers. I mean that's what transformation is about is moving to work like that. And the ones that do that well, I think are the ones with the best chance to survive. I think there's just this broader trend of people just really dislike PMs in a lot of places. There's this just trend of

18:40 I don't want PMs at my company. I don't want PMs at my starter for a long time. We're gonna have no PMs, it's like this general idea. And I think You're saying a lot of this comes from Many people were hired as product managers that are not good at the job.

18:53 And people's experience with PMs is those sorts of people. I think it's b a different real answer. Those Those examples With very few exceptions. And I hear it all the time, almost every day, what you're describing. They're feature teams.

19:13 And the truth is, and this I've been saying this for a long time, the truth is they don't need PMs in a feature team. They don't. Because it's a project management role, and he Yeah, and they already have plenty of people who can cover that. And furthermore, a lot of times the engineers or the designers say You know, we'd rather do it ourselves than deal with this person that's got this, you know

19:35 complex and trying to be the boss of everybody and they really don't contribute anything. So That's what's really going on in my view. They are Either a delivery team or a feature team. Usually a feature team in this model. And I don't blame those people for not finding value in the product manager.

19:53 They are just not bringing that value. They do bring a little value in fairness. But This is very brutal, but they're dramatically overpaid for the value they provide.

20:05 Now on the other hand, they had a real product team. That's a very different job. Yeah. I don't see that. In fact, I consider that. complaint you're raising as the biggest clue that they are probably a feature team.

20:19 And then I'll go ask them how they're working and what that person 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 sort of mealy mouth squishy, I kind of facilitate this and I do some communication and I heard the cats.

20:40 And I'm listening to that going, Man, I would not want to try to defend that job to the CEO. I know you talk about featured teams and product teams uh a a lot. I imagine people still aren't one hundred percent sure of exactly what you mean when you say that. So let's spend a little time on just what does it look like when you're on a feature team. feature factory versus a in power product team.

21:00 Yeah. Well On a f the there's a lot of Clues for sure. Some of the easiest is on a feature team you're basically given a roadmap of output. I mean that's the key is output. In other words, their features are projects.

21:14 That usually it could have come from an executive, could have come from a Big. Pocket. Customer could have come from wherever. But it's a bunch of features.

21:22 And you're being asked to design literally, you're being asked to design, build, test, deploy. That feature. You're usually given dates and time frames as well. But that's A feature team. You deliver and don't get me wrong, that's still work.

21:37 But that's output. It is a lot easier to div deliver output. Than it is to deliver. Outcomes. And a product team, an empowered product team.

21:47 Instead of being given that roadmap of features, they're given problems to solve. Now their customer problems or their business problems or both, but they're given a problem to solve. Usually one or two a quarter on top of of course the keep the lights on kind of work that everybody does. But they're given hard problems to solve, and the measure is not ship the damn thing, the measure is it solves the problem.

22:11 And that's why really the biggest difference between a strong product company and the rest is strong product companies understand it's all about outcomes. You just don't get Points. For shipping, you get points for delivering the value. A lot of the CEOs and CFOs I talked to. They resonate best when I frame it as

22:33 It's about time to money. More than time to market. We know how to do time to market. If you insist on time to market We know how to do that. The techniques are well known. The harder part is time to money, and I know that's what they care about.

22:47 And that's harder. And that's what a product team really does. It's only when you sign up for an outcome That you have the needs. For a product manager. In the sense uh I would say in the Silicon Valley sense.

23:00 That's when you need a product manager. Because If you've been asked to solve these problems. That means 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.

23:16 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 skill sets. So now you need this person who understands the customers and understands the business deeply. That's where the product manager role came from. That's what they still at a good product company are responsible for.

23:41 So that's a very different job. It's also if if you have a person playing that kind of product manager It is very unlikely they've got time on their hands to Get in the face of the designer and start wireframing for them or start

23:56 Irritating the developers. They got their own work to do. And this is essentially the theater you're describing. that people that aren't real product managers doing product management activities. Can you just talk about what that looks like? Yeah, I mean the biggest example of that is that they are Uh you know, they carry this title product manager because The whole world.

24:17 Largely thanks to you know this cool. But uh But they um But 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.

24:29 If they are motivated, it's not that hard for them to develop the skills. And that's you know, that's what I talk to people about. You can raise your game. So that you actually can contribute at this level. That's what you should do for your own career, but by the way And not accidentally. That's what your company needs you to do.

24:48 And for people that are listening to this wondering, what are these skills that I need to build to be a real product manager? I think you often say it's mostly Focus on value and viability and that's where a lot of this Value and viability is what you're responsible for as a product manager. Just like an engineer is responsible for feasibility. Th it has to be a solution that can be built and delivered. But a product manager is responsible for value and viability. I

25:12 Another way I like to frame this is on a a real empowered product team. Product manager is a creator, not a facilitator. I always cringe when somebody tells me, Oh, my job is to say why. And I'm like, Well what do you do for the rest of the week besides the ten minutes it takes you to say why, you know? It's like ridiculous.

25:32 People think that. But you know what, on a feature team, when you're scrounging around for some justification of your job, it's not that big a surprise. But no. The why actually comes from the product strategy anyway. You don't even do the why. A product manager is a creator, and so there's this side by side creation with design and engineering.

25:52 to come up with these solutions now in order to do your job And represent value and viability. There are some real skills. that are involved. First of all, you have to really become an expert on your users and customers. Yeah I know that I was not allowed to take the product manager role.

26:08 Until I had visited thirty customers in person. Uh fifteen in the US, fifteen in Europe. That was just the person who was coaching me. That was their rule. And all I know is those thirty customers changed my life. Because I thought I knew our customers and I really didn't.

26:25 Another issue. You know, you're the supposed to be the expert on the data. How is our product being used? How is that usage changing over time? How is it being purchased? So That's big.

26:36 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. This is all legal constraints. This is all the product manager. Just think if you don't have this person on the team. And you wanna empower this team to make decisions.

27:01 What are you gonna do? You just gonna make it up? Or what they usually do is they call meetings with twenty stakeholders all in a room to try to decide these things. And 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.

27:21 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. Yeah. What they learned in a C SPO or a P S P O class was how to manage a backlog in Jira.

27:36 Which to me is very analogous to learning how to operate, you know. Google Docs. Of course. That's not The job.

27:46 That's something we do every day, but it's not the job. Just any more than Yeah, developers are in Jair every day. Does that mean that's their job? Course not. Their job is to build. So

27:58 Yeah, this is this is what a product manager contributes. And really the distinction If you if you wanna draw think about it on a spectrum, a product owner is a one extreme. And honestly That is a role in a delivery process. That has no business being a Dedicated person. Really doesn't.

28:17 And most teams I know, the a senior engineer could do it better anyway. Second, uh 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. They do a lot of project management.

28:37 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.

28:56 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 I have theories about why, but that's kind of depressing, but You know?

29:11 For whatever reason. I feel like now we I'm 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. Yeah. Let me actually read a quote from you where you talk about this exact

29:30 Point. You wrote I have been warning for several years several years the 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.

29:46 We'll only compound this. That's kind of the pessimistic version of the world. Yeah. You know the The real

29:54 This is all You either I might be overreacting. Might be. Uh I'm not really known for being

30:02 Alarmist, but maybe. Possible. I hope so. But I doubt it. I think these trends are real.

30:09 Now Does that mean people are It's hopeless. They should all start You know, retraining to be I don't know what.

30:18 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

30:36 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 s I often use the phrase they're trapped in a feature team. Yeah. They're like, this isn't what I sign up for. This is not what I, you know. The New York Times article about product management does wasn't this.

30:55 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 that a product leader could do. And that's kind of the biggest shame in all this is they're not doing this.

31:18 Most product leaders are not doing this. Have a lot of agency, a lot of ability to change a company. But 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 an a a real product manager. At a minimum, I tell people, and I've seen this countless times.

31:43 At a minimum. Your company will appreciate it and probably promote you. Because you'll will you will be one of the few that actually understands these things. Hopefully even more than that. They'll say, Late, hey, why don't we try running a set of teams this way and see how we do.

32:00 So it can happen from the ground up too. I imagine many people are wondering, how do I do this? I 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.

32:30 Maybe I maybe I was in a bad mood that day. I don't know, but Uh was this article that made the rounds online. I Probably the biggest certification institution for product managers.

32:43 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's thinking, I cannot believe they said this out loud. This is hundred percent Project manager.

32:58 Hundred percent. They didn't even pretend. to put a little of the product which most people of course are more creative than that. They they They bend over a little bit to make it look like A product manager, but not even close.

33:11 And what I realized is what's so frustrating here is you have all these people that realize things aren't good. Yeah. Most places they turn are just propagating that same model. So these certifications which in my opinion are bogus, but

33:28 Most people don't know. And and just imagine you're a brand new product manager, you look online, probably what, ninety percent of the content out there is from the feature team world. Or worse. And so Unless they get really lucky, or they happen to be really lucky and have a manager that is like

33:48 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 d I can't even bear to watch. Um, and it's not like there aren't great people out there who can speak. It's just that

34:05 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? They can if they're lucky enough to kind of know where to go. Obviously I'm biased. You're biased too. But that's um, you know, kind of

34:25 People need to take more control of their career. Yeah and really use their judgment, try to figure out what do you wanna be? If you wanna be in the product world, what do you wanna be? What kind of a product manager do you want to be? And if you if you wanna s you know, if you wanna stay, fine, but if you wanna Do this.

34:47 Then there are good resources for sure. There are good resources out there. Um then And of course, uh I'm hoping more and more people do that. I think that's such a powerful insight you just shared that

35:01 most of the content you find online about product management is I think you called it ninety percent or It's just from companies that are not doing it the way the right way. Featur teams is the way you 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.

35:22 Yeah, but 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, product subcommunities, and But what I love about them is you pretty much everybody you meet genuinely wants to help. You know, really everybody. The problem is Somebody posts a question happens many times every day.

35:44 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 Now I know what to do and I'm going Oh no, there goes another one

36:01 You know, that is just It it becomes self propagating. And like what are you gonna do? Is somebody gonna try to mo you know Police these boards? Thousands and thousands of them?

36:14 You know, like a a Lenny endorsed person or a Marty endorsed person. I don't wanna do that. You probably don't wanna do that. It's a recipe for uh disaster. You know So This it there's 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.

36:35 And it's like wow, that's a good book. Teresa Torres's book, Continuous Discovery Hobbits. Good book. Try to get everybody to read that. But But that's the exception. Most of the time people are

36:47 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.

37:03 You 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? Buyer beware. You have to use your judgment. You have to think. Probably the most important skill for product people, and I know this sounds Off.

37:23 But is really learning how to think critically. Yeah. And that that involves literally evaluating. Yeah, I know I talk to people all the time when I help them for their interviewing, I say, look, the most important thing you need to do some research on the manager that will be your Direct manager, do some background research. Go look at where they worked. It's all on LinkedIn. Uh, check out those companies, check out that product. Beha make sure you're prepared there because that's what really matters, not so much the company.

37:52 But who's gonna 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'll run into this and Uh, I'll just share something that I thought of. So before while I was at Airbnb

38:11 I I was reading your stuff and I was like Who Who works like this? Like he's talking about all these companies that are working in this strange way of just being given a roadmap. I'm like, no way. Like this is not a thing. What is he 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 gone, but anyway. Um So I imagine many people listening to this are like there's no

38:34 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 just like no it's fine. It's not it's not actually the way you're describing. So I bet this is

38:47 Quite frustrating. Yeah, I I've experienced that'cause I I spent Most of my career in that same bubble. and I was so surprised to find That

38:57 People didn't um 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

39:14 eye opening visits was my very first visit to Walmart's headquarters. And they were doing things so differently. Uh they had s 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. Uh Silicon Valley is not like the m most of the world here and

39:37 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 remember as you're saying it.

40:00 The first time Shriash Doshi told me the same thing. He was asking me 'Cause 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. Right. Yeah, and I'm like Sriash.

40:12 I wish It wasn't true. But you know, he he doesn't doubt it today. Yeah,'cause he's doing a lot of that work now too. I'm curious what you th if it's okay for people to be on a feature team and

40:25 Just stick with it and be happy. There's actually this LinkedIn post today by uh this PM the way I really like Ben Ares. If there's like a B to B sales driven company Maybe it's okay for it to be

40:38 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

40:49 My first answer is this is not an accident why most B to B software is such crap. It is horrible. And of course, the ones that really stand out. They usually are not this way.

41:02 So 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

41:13 You know, Oracle? Do you really want to be Oracle? If you wanna be S A P 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

41:28 Uh no, 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. So 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

41:56 The CEOs are not product people. And that's why they run that way. And it until and unless 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 gonna change.

42:13 Got it. So your feedback there essentially is Sure, you can operate this way, you're not actually gonna build great product and long term, you're gonna run into problems. An empowered product team can do everything a feature can team can do. And lore. So

42:30 I feel I find it very sad whenever and I once in a while I do hear somebody say well you Why isn't it good enough to be a feature team? I mean, how do you answer that really? Uh. To me is like why are you in this business?

42:46 Do you really not care what your customers think about your product? Seriously? I know I would never hire you if I had any say. But'cause 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 I don't have a lot of sympathy for those people. I mean if they want

43:08 I I do know that there's plenty of resources for them. So They're five. 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

43:20 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.

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43:57 Alongside reporting and tracking risk. Plus, you can save hours by completing security questionnaires with Banta 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 N T A dot com slash Lenny. I wanna touch on something. So I interviewed the CTO of Meta

44:26 And he made this really interesting point. So when I think of meta slash Facebook. I always imagine them as a very bottom up Culture. People on teams build experiments, run things. There's not a lot of You know, do this, do this, that

44:39 But The way that he framed it is it's actually very Top down, it matters Zuck and the execs come up with here's what we're work working on, here's our strategy. Here's our big bets.

44:49 And so 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 uh empower product team, but I guess thoughts on that. Yeah. So

45:04 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. Top down is really means something very different. In fact, handing a team a roadmap of features, that's very top down.

45:21 You know, one another very common misunderstanding which comes again A lot of the agile coaches they have missed you know misguided so many organizations. But uh Product teams don't do product strategy.

45:35 Product leaders do product strategy. They need to do the product strategy. So you need and look, I'm I'm Not the biggest fan of Meta, 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 um

45:53 That is the job is to make these strategic decisions, the focus decisions, the the bets. You're gonna place. But 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

46:09 It's been a while since I worked with it was Facebook at the time. But They had very good teams. Very good product teams. Serious

46:19 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.

46:33 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. Empowerment does not mean you set up this product team and they go decide what to work on.

46:50 No, that would just be anarchy, right? You'd have fifty teams doing fifty Thanks. No 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 I think a lot of people

47:09 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 a former guests, and actually also one of the most popular episodes, Nikel Singal. And he works with a lot of CPOs and heads of product at companies. The way you described it is notice there's this reboot in what the PM role

47:28 has been over the past couple years because of the end of the ZERP era. 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.

47:43 And now that The money has kind of gone away. There's a return to building I'm curious if You see that, and do you see kind of a shift in the way

47:54 And what PMs should be doing in the last couple years post Zerp. So 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

48:09 They do exactly what he described. G you know. He describes it a gross hacking. I uh uh 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 gonna change the call to action here and more maybe more people will register. That kind of test.

48:28 Should they do that? Absolutely. Is that product really Not really. That's not discovery. That's optimization. No. 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.

48:47 They literally don't want to break it. And so I am 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.

49:06 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

49:23 You know, optimization work. And so um That's a hard So 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

49:37 So 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 big you're seeing change in the PM role? Broadly. We've talked about quite a few big dynamics that are changing.

49:54 Interestingly, what 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 empower product manager, the one you and I grew up with and those are the the ones that are responsible for value and viability. In 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.

50:27 I've been living this every day as w 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 I'll help you make that great.

50:45 We'll we'll We'll go from there. And what I kept seeing Was People taking what they get.

50:53 Two literally, too seriously, too much value. And They were heading off in a wrong direction and then they were optimizing that. So, you know, there's a lot of lot going on right now. It's a moving target. Depends which system you're using and And the day of the week now of what you're at. But whatever.

51:14 Now I've been recommending to people that they think through the answer first. You know, use Really get them to think. Put something down. Then use chat GPT to see if you can't improve on that.

51:28 to see if you can't challenge that, to see if you can't make your argument tighter. So I've kinda reversed. And I did that because People are trusting The result too much.

51:43 And when you talk about what they start with, is it like here's a strategy I'm thinking for this product or is it like a PRD? Yeah. Certainly you can use it for a spec, right? A PRD. Yeah. You can certainly use it for strategy. Uh, you can certainly use it for even things like triaging bugs. 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 it good for?

52:05 Yeah. Something along those lines I wanted to chat about. Something I've been thinking about. I wanna write a post about this is Which skills of a product manager will be most disrupted. By AI. So I think short term

52:17 There's like communication is getting improved, you can improve your writing. strategy maybe, like here's my strategy, give me some feedback. So I think there's like a Things are kind of being uh Optimized a bit through chat GPT. And tools like that, but like in the five or ten years, are there any skills that will

52:33 potentially go away or ninety five percent of it will be done by AI and if so, which Where do you see most of that change happening in the city? And I think that is happening. I mean more on the engineering side right now and also on the design side, but I I fulfill. Like I said at the beginning I don't know when

52:51 Really,'cause there that timing is hard question. But this is another one of my arguments to people of why you need to up level your skills. If you are Fundamentally a backlog administrator, good luck. Protecting that.

53:06 Because Already people are doing that. You know, it's it's only a matter of time before that becomes pretty well Support it. So uh that is

53:15 Not a good job prospect. Uh 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 add. Most of these are administrative kinds of things. That

53:30 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.

53:45 Now for a for a Unempowed. Product manager. If your responsibility is value and viability, if you boil it down, that's kinda the real challenge left with Chat GPT or Gen AI.

53:59 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 gonna be incredibly important. And of course. Tech leads are gonna be incredibly important.

54:16 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.

54:32 And how what is okay like from a There 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 a viability and a value question.

54:56 So A lot more is landing squarely on the product manager than I think in general in the past. Mm-hmm. You talk about viability, just so people know what you mean when you say that, what's like the one sentence definition of what viability means? So value means for the customer. Viability means for your business.

55:13 So that means It works. for your business. You can sell it, market it. Uh it's legal, you can service it, it's compliance. All of these constraints Yeah, you let

55:25 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 wanna talk about your book.

55:40 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 covered a lot. We did. We did. I imagine we covered some of the elements of your book. But let's talk about the book. So this is your third book, is that right? Yes. Okay.

55:57 What? made you decide to write another book and make an uh add an addition to the Marty Kagan canon. And what is it about? This is a different one though. It's different kind. Because um

56:09 Inspired Hopefully you know, is for product teams and product managers, it's really a book about product discovery. And then uh empowered. It's really about product leadership. Vision strategy, team topology, coaching.

56:24 It's all about that. Yeah. That w that was the original idea we would share those techniques'cause that's what we share. But the single most common question we got, honestly, for from the first edition of Inspire.

56:38 was that people would read the book and they would say I love this. I wanna do this, but have you ever seen our company? We are so far away from that. We are like night and day. And in fact, a lot of people would tell me point blank, there's no way their their company's gonna go along with us. And so what they were asking was like how in the world do you transform to work like this?

57:01 Yeah, and I mean we've been getting that question for years. Now My partner's Christian Jonathan, Christopher, Leah, that's what they do is they help companies to transform. That's what we've been doing.

57:14 But we do that on a one off basis, you know? We don't there's only five of us. How many companies could we possibly work with? So We realize that this question was a was a Global question.

57:27 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 kinda leaving people without that. Hard part.

57:39 So the goal of Transform was unlike the other books was to share how to actually change. There are techniques in transformed as well, but they're transformation techniques. They're change techniques, like the use of pilot teams or spreading things out, uh You know, divide and conquer on On some of the transformation work. So

58:02 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 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.

58:21 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 gonna be from outside Silicon Valley world. They're all companies, most of them pre internet. That had to change dramatically to work this way.

58:41 And not only were we gonna show how they Change. But we were gonna show what they were able to do when they changed. Which to me is the the coolest part. Seeing the innovation

58:51 Some of these innovations, honestly, Lenny, 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

59:06 train line in the UK was able to do. a a c 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, eighty plus percent of the market over Expedia over the big guys in the US. Because they actually learned this stuff and were able to do it and

59:27 You know, uh we have a dozen examples from all over the world. Brazil Virginia. Everywhere. Not Silicon Valley. In healthcare, and

59:39 car sales and uh Fitness. All over the place. So that's We wanted to be able to get yeah, 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 does it really mean?

59:57 Otherwise, how are they gonna 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.

1:00:10 And the third thing is we wanted to get'em 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. Would you say this is most suited for, is it?

1:00:31 Leaders at companies as I CPMs, 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 us, right? And your audience and my audience, you know. They're product people. These are written for nonproduct people too. And so this the idea is a CEO, a CFO, a head of sale.

1:00:52 Anybody who cares about their company Changing how they build it once to help. It's written for them. So it's uh That was one of the hardest parts, really. Yeah.

1:01:03 Including those kinds of reviewers and making sure all the 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

1:01:18 I don't feature team. Hand this book to your Yeah, essentially. And I'd suggest they read it themselves so they know Because you know this is the

1:01:27 Uh I don't I'm gonna be talking more about this going forward because I know I need to. Too many people in our industry view themselves as a victim.

1:01:38 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 gonna quit. So I think that's not true. I think there is so much they can do.

1:01:54 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 the minimum it'll help their career. I always loved just the the message of empowerment and giving people motivation to you can actually make change. You're not stuck in this way of working.

1:02:12 And I know you do that a lot. The official title of the book is It's Transformed, Moving to the Product Operating Model. Mm-hmm. What do you mean when you there it is. I don't have my copy yet,'cause 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. Night goes nicely with the other colours. Amazing.

1:02:32 Beautiful design, whoever did that. Yeah. Okay, uh 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 Cause honestly, I had dodged that question for twenty years.

1:02:47 Um 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? That's how we referred 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?

1:03:09 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

1:03:21 I don't know if you've come across this, Lenny, but it is real you don't want to coin a new term if you can avoid it. It is really painful to try to develop a new term. Some of the companies we worked with use the term product operating model. Yeah. You know, others don't get me wrong, that's not the only term. Some people use the term product led

1:03:41 company or product driven company. But those two we just don't like because It gives all the wrong message. And and the rest of the company thinks it's a power grab. So we wanted to avoid those words.

1:03:56 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 it's also it's non threatening to a lot of people.

1:04:11 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 we adopted that term. We we call it product model for short. But um And all it really is is a s it boils down to a set of

1:04:31 twenty principles. And those twenty principles are what we find. Remember we started with this, I was kind of explaining When I listen to your guests, I'm listening for what's special about each of their companies. But what I'm looking for is The commonality.

1:04:47 Uh'cause I really Most of the time when I see a successful company, they are living these principles. You know, principles like You have to experiment. If you you have to embrace experimentation. If you don't do that

1:05:02 Most of this is not possible. Or you have to make sure that everything you release is instrumentated 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

1:05:25 At a high level we talk about it as How you decide what you're gonna work on. That's what How you decide which problems to solve. That's what most companies do in annual planning.

1:05:36 Well but it's basically the product strategy. Right. That's what your meta friend was describing that the leaders do. That's their job. The second is how do they solve problems? Do they have the skill to do product discovery like we're talking about? Uh how to do uh to actually come up with good solutions.

1:05:56 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 test and deploy product to their customers? Do they do it in a way that

1:06:08 That is reliable, that is um That is demonstrable where you can show that this generates the outcomes. That you need. That's uh

1:06:19 Those are the three big areas and then there's There's a number of competencies. Yeah, there's four new competencies that most companies don't have. And so uh But what makes it tricky is they have people with those titles, but they don't have people with those jobs.

1:06:36 The the one we've been talking about is product manager. What would be most interesting to share, uh he said there's twenty attributes of a Twenty principals. Uh I'm so curious what these are, but I know we don't have time to go through them all. Uh Can you either share a few of those. You shared experimentation as one. Yeah. Or these four uh This the what you just mentioned. I'm just curious what the I can share as much as you want, but the the four

1:07:01 Competencies are product manager. Again, we're talking a serious 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

1:07:18 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. Yeah. Which is which is what we were talking about. So those are the four competencies, new competencies. For most companies, those are new.

1:07:37 Meaning they ha they might have people with those names, but they don't have those roles. Institutionalized. It's interesting you're building on kind of the classic triad. With a sleeter above. It's like the stool with like something on the stool or something. Or uh thing up the side. And that is the triad. That's where it came from. Tri the word triad came from those three. You know, we didn't invent that. Right. But I think the product leader is a really interesting addition there. You can't just have this team off to the side without a product leader overseeing that work. That's so true, because one of the things I really learned with

1:08:07 in 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. And 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 job. And uh when that happens, it's actually a beautiful thing.

1:08:27 Yeah, we're gonna link to a post of U Road uh 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 it right. Good. Okay. And then yeah, what are some of these uh principles? Just to shift on a couple and a few. I mean just stop me, I can but there's a whole set of there's a set of principles around The real more cultural things like

1:08:49 Innovation is more important than predictability. That's a principle. That uh Learning is more important than failure. The principles are more important than process.

1:09:00 Some examples of that. Um In terms of teams. Empowered with problems to solve. That's one of your foundational principles. We talked about that.

1:09:10 This idea of Uh wheel ownership. Real sense of ownership. So that they they it's theirs. Um

1:09:18 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

1:09:35 Small, frequent uncoupled releases. For most companies that's could C I C D Instrumentation of everything, monitoring of everything. These are Deployment principle or delivery principle. So

1:09:47 None of these should Surprise you? 'Cause 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 ten percent or twenty percent of companies that

1:10:03 Uh you describe as doing this well, or just like of course. The And then the rest are just like no there's no way we're gonna 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. Yeah. Think about it. You cannot take care of your customers. You cannot learn at the pace you need to.

1:10:25 Uh and by the way quality is gonna 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 is an example. They have like seasonal releases like the winter launch and the summer launch. Well, and Salesforce.com has a big but th don't confuse the actual releasing by the teams with the marketing releases. So it's very normal and I think wise.

1:10:52 ' Most teams, most product teams are releasing on the order of twenty times per day. You gonna do a marketing release twenty times a day? That would be like Useless. So it makes sense.

1:11:05 To have messaging. On a periodic basis. But good companies By the time they message it. It's live.

1:11:14 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. Airbnb is actually in that same model. Most of the stuff they allowance every couple times a year is already out or or in in in experiment to most people. One thing I wanted to clarify. So you call this the product operating model.

1:11:37 There's also the therole product ops, which you touched on a little bit. Any thoughts on product ops? We've had a few guests here talk about it. It's tricky. I mean um 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.

1:11:55 Um But uh Product options. More analogous to DevOps and design ops, that's all. Now

1:12:03 Can you use product ops in the product operating model? Absolutely. Yeah. 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.

1:12:18 is user research and data analysts. And the only difference is they're now brought together in under one product ops leader. That's all. But that is the same. You know, how long has that been with us, Lenny? More than twenty years.

1:12:33 Teen companies have had user research teams and have had Data analyst teams. To help you make decisions qualitatively and help you make teams quantitatively. So that's not new at all, but it is good. Yeah.

1:12:47 I think there's a there is some amount of value about bringing that in. Some companies of course They use they interpret and define product ops very differently. A lot of them unfortunately think of it, they focus on the whole phrase Of

1:13:04 Uh Process and governance. That's like a huge red flag. Yeah, night. Try to tell people if that's what you see, run. Don't walk away from that.

1:13:15 The 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 uh which is really ironic to me'cause 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.

1:13:42 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 owners. Product manager and product owner makes no sense. Huge anti pattern.

1:13:55 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 on product ops. One reason is because

1:14:15 'Cause I I also was like why do I I just wanna I don't need another person in the loop on everything I'm doing. I just wanna have I don't yeah, I I don't know why why I would do that, even though I have endless work and I am working crazy hours. But I think one of the

1:14:27 Great things about product ops people that I talk to is that there's not many of Then they 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. Good. A small high leverage group. So it works for data analysts, it works for user research, where they are helping the teams do the work they need to do.

1:14:52 But that's where it really depends what they're doing. I will tell you what I've seen too many companies where the product leaders are not doing their job. So what they do is they hire product ops to try to do their job. No They're like they're the ones now responsible for educating the product managers.

1:15:10 That's that's just not good. I have just a few more questions before we get to our very exciting lightning round. Actually maybe just one more question, we'll see where this goes. So I mentioned this earlier that A lot of startup founders are just like, I do not meet product managers. I am not gonna hire them.

1:15:26 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. Why didn't I do this earlier? This person exactly that's exactly what I needed. And these are guests I've had on the podcast.

1:15:39 that we're 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 gonna screw us up, they're gonna slow us down. Yeah. Any advice for this? Yeah, uh well, first of all, I'm one of the people that tries to discourage them from hiring product managers too soon. 'Cause a lot of'em make the mistake of hiring them too soon. Now realize

1:16:04 What we're talking about here Again, oh the whole discussion we've had, this is la other other layer too. I'm talking about in a real product manager. If they're using them as project manager, which a lot of times they are Well, I I would tell them they're overpaying, but okay, you can get some help.

1:16:22 For project management, that's not a good use of the CEO's time. But if they're a real product manager and they're working about value and viability, that is the founder's 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, it's too many cooks in the kitchen. You need to reach a certain scale.

1:16:48 before you it helps you to have other people responsible for value and viability. That all assumes that they understand real product management, right? Otherwise it's gonna lead to very different symptoms. So I think one piece of advice here is after product market fit is a better time to hire a product manager, otherwise They're just kind of between you and the product and that slows everything down. Right.

1:17:10 Yeah, I mean uh Remember, usually as soon as you get product market fit, you're working on it for other products and other markets. And so it's an ongoing thing. But uh Балет сма You know, it usually is most useful just to look at the number of engineers.

1:17:26 At a certain number of engineers, usually like twenty to twenty five, it's a lot better if the found co founder is the product person for that. Awesome. I was gonna ask you if you have a heuristic for 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 our very exciting lightning round?

1:17:51 Honestly, Lenny, we talked about so many big topics, I'm worried that uh Uh may have uh overwhelm people, I hope not, but 'Cause you you brought up you asked all the hardest topics, so Well

1:18:04 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.

1:18:15 I Love the 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.

1:18:31 The iPod. I phone. The Nest devices love it. So I loved his book and I've been recommending it to all kinds of people. Another one I really liked is um

1:18:42 Do you know Tim Urban, the guy behind Way But Why? Absolutely. I just love 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. So love that.

1:18:56 I've been reading about his book writing process as he was writing it over the many years and it was just Um quite 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'cause I know I I watch almost nothing, so

1:19:14 Not a good one for that. Great. That's I think that it's often for the best. Do you have a favorite interview question that you either use yourself or find useful when interviewing folks, product managers especially? Well, given how much interviewing I do, I stop giving out my real favorite questions because they became online, but uh I do have a go to question that I pretty much start with everybody and that's

1:19:38 I wanna 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 project? You know, I can I can tell where they learned. From their answer. That's all.

1:19:55 My answer. They just shouldn't give the old feature team answer, that's all. Do you have a favorite product that you recently discovered they really love, whether it's software or something physical? Something around the house. I I recently got a Rivian, which is amazing.

1:20:09 Uh that they did an absolutely beautiful job. You know, they're kind of the Airbnb of um of car companies because the founder is a designer and it is just Imagine if a designer designed a next generation car. It's A phenomenally good job.

1:20:27 Well, I was imagining you could rent people's cars. And that sounds pretty cool. But you mean in a different way. Interestingly Both you and Baz from Meta both had cars as your favorite recent product discovery. He had a Mercedes Benz.

1:20:43 Oh. And I made the joke that I I hope to give away these gift these products someday. And uh the budget is Blowing up with all these cards.

1:20:52 favorite thing to do is ride motorcycles and um there is a new generation of product Yeah. Who knows might save my life one day, but there's Yeah, these are literally wireless Airbag vests.

1:21:05 that you wear and it uses AI technology and sensors to decide if it should deploy. Uh, luckily mine has never had to go off, but I um I know a lot of I mean, for a lot of people it saved their lives.

1:21:20 That's an example of technology where Without the technology it's a very vulnerable even with it it's vulnerable, but uh Wait, do you ride motorcycles? I do. I had no idea what sort of what's what bike do you ride anyway. I have two. They're both BMWs. Wow. We need to see a picture of this somewhere.

1:21:39 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 work or in life? I don't really have a life model, but I do have one I share a lot with people because Um, as you might imagine, uh I I think writing really helps me think.

1:22:00 And I encourage other people to to to develop their thinking skills. And there's a great quote from Leslie Lamport, the guy who Well you you're not old enough to know this, but he invented one of the first word processors called Lat. Which I used to use back in the day. But it's uh if you think

1:22:16 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 and it's 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 Joan Diddy and

1:22:29 Said that. Same idea. And I s 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 Crystalizing 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 Uh forty three. Forty three years.

1:22:47 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. Uh

1:22:58 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 still building something, whether if it was houses or Cars or Whatever. I I like building things. I love that. You're essentially a w one man triad.

1:23:16 Team in this dream. Marty, this was incredible was everything I was hoping it'd be. We covered so much stuff. I think we're gonna help a lot of people transform. Two final questions. Where can folks find your book? When is it available? Where can they reach out if they want to follow up on stuff? And how can listeners be useful to you? Well yeah, the The book should be available worldwide in uh

1:23:38 And electronic. Kindle. Audio and hardback on march twelfth. Uh we'll see. But uh 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.

1:23:53 SVP.com. Silicon Valley Product Group. And uh Yeah, you if you don't know At least one of the partners you should uh try to meet one.

1:24:04 Uh we all love meeting the community and uh And I think you'll enjoy it. So yeah, hopefully that's useful. Yeah, we've had two partners so far. We're we'll work our way through the rest over time. And I uh I want to make sure you l 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.

1:24:25 And so we love it when people read something and if they uh 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 with To address the question. Yeah, we love that. Feel free.

1:24:42 All 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.

1:25:04 You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny's Podcast.com. See you in the next episode.

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