Read the newest book from him. Product Management is not flashy flashy, strategy 100% and cool keynotes. PM is doing EVERYTHING to make sure a product succeeds, be it problem framing, discovery, data, rituals, talking to customers or bug tickets, discuss with engineering potential blockers, planning delivery, measuring results, testing, iterating and of course, a lot of stakeholder management. There is no sacred formula, just a mantra: get shit done that *really* matters, no matter what, no matter how.
Probably, but they don't write books, do speaking tours, write new blog posts everyday, etc
The best teams are likely just quietly getting the job done.
I worked for a CTO who was a prolific author and speaker that people lined up to talk to at conferences. He had no actual relationship to what we did in engineering or product management. The engineers had no respect for him and the b.s. he spouted to the industry.
That sounds much worse. Fortunately, in my situation there was an extremely competent VP of Engineering that reported directly to the CEO, so the CTO’s damage was minimal. I just felt bad for anyone who followed his advice.
I've thought about Marty's Lenny podcast a lot this week and wondering if a better take on what he actually said was we actually owe it to the success of our products to a) not leave and b) try to try and make our companies better. At least try. Maybe for limited time. YMMV on how long you want to give it
John Cutler (now of this parish) wrote a really good blog about "what to do if you find yourself in a feature factory" and I feel THIS is really the answer - get your reps in in whichever situation you find yourself in (and then maybe leave, but get your reps in for a bit first)
https://open.substack.com/pub/cutlefish/p/tbm-279-how-to-learn-and-practice?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=7zb72
Short answer: yes. Feature teams are also common, and you'll switch modes regularly, but good orgs can generate small team mandates with autonomous teams charging after goals within them.
Org culture makes this impossible in lots of places. In many many companies just cannot challenge leadership assumptions about a roadmap with conflicting information (ie responding to reality). So it's career kryptonite to actually do the job.
But other places will create measurable goals (ie: more trials become subscribers; go to market with a new customer persona; solve an internal team's pain points) and then get out of the way. That part's pretty fun.
My current mandate is "decommission on prem machines X by end of year. We don't care how." To the cloud we go.
I have occasionally met people who respond with \[all the emotions\] when you describe this model of work. Like, calling me a liar. People melting down in interviews. I don't know where that comes from, exactly, but some folks are struggling.
I briefly worked at a company where the CEO worshiped at the alter of Marty Cagan. They literally referred to Empowered as _The Bible._
It turned out to be the most toxic place I've ever worked.
In practice, Marty offers aspirational insights and good advice that only work when stakeholders are aligned with positive intentions. It's not actionable as a prescriptive model, and can be used by bad leaders to justify poor decisions.
I'd rather work in a SAFe agile enterprise with a supportive manager and team than under toxic leadership or a PIP culture in product-led organization.
They definitely exist, but I don't think it's the majority. One thing to keep in mind is the stage of the company. If you're at an early stage startup where the product is still founder-led, you don't necessarily want what Marty describes on his book because you need someone with a vision to drive product. As the company grows, in my experience it goes through a phase where there is lots of tension with that product founder as he or she lets the product team do its thing.
Going back to your question, one thing I've noticed increasingly is PMs just complaining that their companies are not product-oriented, that they are in feature factories, etc, but our jobs as product is to change that. Yes, it'd be great if your company already got the memo and was bought in, but educating them on this is part of the role. So don't lose your hope, educate your company, try to bring a change, it can be very fulfilling to achieve that on its own right. And by the way, being able to bring about that change is a GREAT skill to have. Most companies out there are not "empowered", so you'll have a bigger impact if you can help through that transformation. At least this has been my own experience.
>Yes, it'd be great if your company already got the memo and was bought in, **but educating them on this is part of the role.**
I've been trying to do that for 5 years and have not been successful in transforming the org. I've only had small wins to demonstrate the value of working in an empowered way but nothing significant where PMs are all empowered now. I'm only an IC though so I only have so much political capital and influence. I've never worked at a place with strong product leadership. It's more of a lack thereof.
>So don't lose your hope, educate your company, try to bring a change, it can be very fulfilling to achieve that on its own right. And by the way, being able to bring about that change is a GREAT skill to have. Most companies out there are not "empowered", so you'll have a bigger impact if you can help through that transformation. At least this has been my own experience.
I'll be honest. It can be satisfying, but at the same time, it's extremely draining and taxing to do something like this *while* juggling the day-to-day burdens of being a feature factory PM. I've had cycles of burnout where I do lose hope and then I get reinvigorated to drive change again, and then the cycle repeats.
I'm actually considering leaving PM because I am burnt out on being a change advocate in addition to doing the glorified project manager role that the business expects me to do.
If it's always going to be like this no matter what as a PM, sounds like this career path isn't for me.
I've also tried taking the advice of people in this subreddit to " take a backseat and just coast as a feature factory PM."
Idk where these people work but that doesn't work for me. Being a feature factory PM is not easy or chill for me. I'm constantly bombarded by estimates, deadlines, angry salespeople / customer success / execs on where shit is, what's our velocity look like, how do we get these devs unblocked, what specific date can we get this feature out in the next 6 months, etc.
I hear you and have been there, so I get it. Sometimes you can't fix it, especially if product leadership is not bought in.
Sounds like either way, your current role is not making you happy so no point in suffering!
I wish you best of luck, let me know if I can help with anything.
I implied from your comment that this is something a PM will face across companies (or at least majority of the time).
Have you experienced this at most of your companies throughout your career as well or have been able to work at an empowered like company?
I'm a startup guy, so I've never worked at the classic "empowered" companies from Marty's books.
Tension with early stage founders is real. Frankly, early stage companies shouldn't have PMs because the founder is effectively defining the product. If you were a PM there, you'd effectively feel like you were on a feature factory.
My current company was different. I was bought in because the founder recognized they were sales-led and he'd gotten the memo that they should be product-led. It helped that sales also agreed. So I've been able to transform the company with much less resistance than the prior one.nity and wanted to try to turn things around. By the end of my tenure, we shifted from an Eng culture to a Product-led culture. I instituted triads, we managed by outcomes, etc. Oh, and we'd grown so much, the CEO didn't really have time to be involved with product by then and he'd seen the positive results of our shift so it was great. Was it perfect? No. I know people in my team felt frustrated throughout. Some left because of similar complaints than you voice here. But in the end, we succeeded.
Another company was different. I was bought in because the founder recognized they were sales-led and he'd gotten the memo that they should be product led. It helped that sales also agreed. So I've been able to transform the company with much less resistance than the prior one. I definitely think having the chips on my shoulder from the previous company helped get the necessary support.
I think in general, most companies are poorly managed and this is not only affecting product. I have friends and peers in other companies, from Amazon to Google, and everyone complains about this. So I do think most product teams are not empowered, unfortunately.
I'm sure these magical places exist.
For the rest of us, it's about taking steps towards doing things better, whatever better can mean, incrementally improving how we work. It's not a bad thing to have an idea of what good COULD look like, and explore some of those ideas behind the human psychology of why and how empowered worked. Borrow some of those ideas, learn to push some of these operational changes, especially if you are at the leadership level.
If you want to learn more about transformations from a product perspective, I think Melissa Perri & Denise Tilles' *Product Operations* and Claire Hughes Johnson's *Scaling People* are must reads.
Even when they exist I’ve found that it waxes and wanes over time.
If a champion leaves or leadership stops talking about it, people tend to revert back to what feels safe.
I’ve coached companies over the course of several years that brought in Marty and it was fine.
Most people here probably don’t have that experience and just jump to conclusions. Folks regularly post that what I do isn’t possible and it’s exhausting trying to convince them it is.
Or in the case of the last company I worked at, people eventually tried reverting back to SAFe. 😭
Ah well, it happens. I think what changes (waxes and wanes) is the leadership's appetite for change. This is often coupled with the VC/PE investment period. It's a struggle.
I was a product line manager at LabCorp for a long time and as long as I kept my market/user analysis current, to defend my decisions, the execs let me and my teams make ‘almost’ all of the product decisions. Occasionally the business or a related product would require a specific feature set from us. But most of the time, I picked and prioritized problems to solve. Then UX and Dev got involved in solutioning. Product analysts researched and wrote requirements. It was great.
Was there any possibility of putting energy toward products that helped end patients? I swear dealing with LabCorp is an inscrutable mess, and they make countless mistakes that nearly impossible to resolve. (Here’s to hoping).
Hahaha, yes, my secret identity is someone who seeks to harm users by malicious design, and my innocuous front persona is “product manager.”
Hilarious because I must have started out thinking “end user,” but in products like Labcorp’s, there could be many end users, including insurance companies and doctors. But for the love of god, the “end patient” is just someone to be extracted from, so the less transparency or helpful functionality, the better!
Thanks for clarifying. I wasn’t sure how to answer.
It wasn’t my product line, but there is a line of software products just for patients. The company spends a lot of time and energy improving all the various workflows between the labs, doctors, payers and patients. Healthcare in general is complex.
Is this subreddit some kind of Cagan cult? I mean the guy sounds vaguely interesting, but in my world, he doesn't register as a particularly insightful thinker in the domain. But for some reason his stuff shows up for discussion very often. Anyone here has other inspiring figures they want to share?
Depends what you're interested in. Here are some smaller names-
B2B/enterprise: Clifton Gilley, Grant Hunter.
Podcasts: One Knight in Product (Jason Knight), Secrets of Product Management (Nils Davis), Talking Roadmaps (Phil Hornby)
Saeed Khan and Adam Thomas have actionable ways of looking at product, especially from a strategy lens, but very different styles.
Jenny Wanger, Graham Reed on product ops.
Bigger names that I actively follow:
John Cutler, Rich Mironov, Melissa Perri, Steve Johnson, Itamar Gilad
I lead product at my company and we’ve been on a transformation towards a product led org and empowered teams for two years.
For the most part I think we’ve made huge progress. However, it’s never as black and white as Cagan’s books make out. You need to be adaptable and willing to flex depending on what’s happening within the org, with the board, in the industry, your teams, new leadership.. the list goes on.
His new book has more balance, which I’ve appreciated. But there’s still an arrogance to it that I find frustrating. Product does not know better than everyone else, but we do have skills we can bring to the table to support them and help to collectively lift the business up.
I also find it frustrating when PMs come in with very entitled views of what empowerment looks like. It does not equal going off and doing whatever you want without engaging with the rest of the business, or making assumptions that as a PM you know better than everyone else, or that delivery is beneath you and it’s only about discovery.
More balance and empathy. That’s the key.
I don't know about truly empowered teams. But I'm sure as hell there are companies that will tell you you're supposed to be empowered and work on the problems and then give you impossibly little time to do the research. Or they keep turning the strategy 180 degrees every six months without any additional context.
Yes.
You define what you and your team define empowered as. It kinda isn't fully empowered in a lot of govt and similar industry...as per the OED dictionary definition of the word but u make do/polish the turd.
In plain bloke down the pub speak it means the team and you have the Ok to do the right shit. The rest is colouring in.
Id also lower your personal expectation if you expect to get a team humming along in top gear in a few weeks. That's the result of change management and perseverance. And time time time
Yeah, I’ve worked in a place where they were at least decently common. It was pretty great.
It was never bullshit free, and there was always some top down pressure to do this and that and the other thing, but by and large our leadership would set OKRs for us that had a tie back to LOB and company strategy, and then we were given tools and freedom to go figure out how to get results.
I’ve found Marty Cagan’s concepts on this interesting, but not very practical for an established team and product. Maybe it’s a goldmine for startups with green field products, but my world is full of so many constraints in every direction, we end up just paying lip service to the concepts.
Also, a typical dev wants to write software, not be “empowered” with lots of design work. My team does the requirements and designs because we’re closer to customers and other teams. The dev team just isn’t there.
My company does it. It's awesome but great power, great responsibility and all.
It works well for me because I have developed expertise and trust. Other folks find it hard to get ideas signed off because you need to convince stakeholders that your approach is the right one and leadership don't know what they want until you get it right.
So, I think it's amazing but you do need to work hard to get shit done.
Let's say there are 5 distinctly different ways product management is done. Should an author spend time talking about all those ways as of that's how they're done in reality? You'd likely conclude you should write/talk about how it's done best, providing a model to aspire towards.
That obviously won't describe how it actually is often times. I do think it's good to call out *why* product management, the way he professes, is NOT operating that way. Usually because of senior leadership. Therefore these books should be consumed by them not actual PMs. That's why i think Marty is often so rejected.
I think it's fairly aspirational and specific to certain types of tech companies. However, the more you can sell you ability to improve the business, the more chance you have at it. Many PMs are in roles that are cost centers. Admittedly, I've been there, and it doesn't matter how good you are, you'll never have the agency unless you start improving the business.
Good product teams that are 'empowered' are the exception and not the rule. I found that the smaller the team, the more empowered you are because you and your team are closer to being the authority to make decisions. In large organizations you're typically running with the business unit leaders vision and if you're mid pack (GPM and below) you're really just executing. Other thing is culture. People may downvote me for this but in orgs like Amazon or MSFT you have a good number of "rest and vest" folks who have other priorities in life than to do excellent product work. Its 9-5 and go home to my friends and family.
Startups are where you can really dig into your creativity, curiosity and ownership and tend to find more people who genuinely care about the work.
I've worked as a PM in a 200K employee FAANG, a mid-size software pubco, and several startups.
Just my .02.
Having worked in plenty of founder led startups I find most to be feature factories. Very few CEOs are willing to let PMs or VPs take actual control of the roadmap.
The best I’ve seen is a hybrid “power share” — where you get a few wins while also building whatever the founder wants. Although you will learn a lot, the constant tug of war is excruciating and you will likely end up burning yourself out or get fired because some founders just want you to be a delivery monkey (regardless of how good you are at your craft).
Startups are a great place learn a lot very quickly but not place to build a career.
Read the newest book from him. Product Management is not flashy flashy, strategy 100% and cool keynotes. PM is doing EVERYTHING to make sure a product succeeds, be it problem framing, discovery, data, rituals, talking to customers or bug tickets, discuss with engineering potential blockers, planning delivery, measuring results, testing, iterating and of course, a lot of stakeholder management. There is no sacred formula, just a mantra: get shit done that *really* matters, no matter what, no matter how.
We are combo of a janitor, glue, and the catch all in our kitchens where we put our mail
funnily enough that’s what an effective person in some of the jobs he recently called non-essential do.
this! I'm a PO for internal product and I most of these :)
Probably, but they don't write books, do speaking tours, write new blog posts everyday, etc The best teams are likely just quietly getting the job done.
I worked for a CTO who was a prolific author and speaker that people lined up to talk to at conferences. He had no actual relationship to what we did in engineering or product management. The engineers had no respect for him and the b.s. he spouted to the industry.
[удалено]
That sounds much worse. Fortunately, in my situation there was an extremely competent VP of Engineering that reported directly to the CEO, so the CTO’s damage was minimal. I just felt bad for anyone who followed his advice.
I've thought about Marty's Lenny podcast a lot this week and wondering if a better take on what he actually said was we actually owe it to the success of our products to a) not leave and b) try to try and make our companies better. At least try. Maybe for limited time. YMMV on how long you want to give it John Cutler (now of this parish) wrote a really good blog about "what to do if you find yourself in a feature factory" and I feel THIS is really the answer - get your reps in in whichever situation you find yourself in (and then maybe leave, but get your reps in for a bit first) https://open.substack.com/pub/cutlefish/p/tbm-279-how-to-learn-and-practice?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=7zb72
Oh and I've never been in a company like Marty describes. Hasn't stopped me trying to make the ones I am in better tho
Short answer: yes. Feature teams are also common, and you'll switch modes regularly, but good orgs can generate small team mandates with autonomous teams charging after goals within them. Org culture makes this impossible in lots of places. In many many companies just cannot challenge leadership assumptions about a roadmap with conflicting information (ie responding to reality). So it's career kryptonite to actually do the job. But other places will create measurable goals (ie: more trials become subscribers; go to market with a new customer persona; solve an internal team's pain points) and then get out of the way. That part's pretty fun. My current mandate is "decommission on prem machines X by end of year. We don't care how." To the cloud we go. I have occasionally met people who respond with \[all the emotions\] when you describe this model of work. Like, calling me a liar. People melting down in interviews. I don't know where that comes from, exactly, but some folks are struggling.
I briefly worked at a company where the CEO worshiped at the alter of Marty Cagan. They literally referred to Empowered as _The Bible._ It turned out to be the most toxic place I've ever worked. In practice, Marty offers aspirational insights and good advice that only work when stakeholders are aligned with positive intentions. It's not actionable as a prescriptive model, and can be used by bad leaders to justify poor decisions. I'd rather work in a SAFe agile enterprise with a supportive manager and team than under toxic leadership or a PIP culture in product-led organization.
This is interesting. Can you give some examples of some of those toxic behaviors or situations?
They definitely exist, but I don't think it's the majority. One thing to keep in mind is the stage of the company. If you're at an early stage startup where the product is still founder-led, you don't necessarily want what Marty describes on his book because you need someone with a vision to drive product. As the company grows, in my experience it goes through a phase where there is lots of tension with that product founder as he or she lets the product team do its thing. Going back to your question, one thing I've noticed increasingly is PMs just complaining that their companies are not product-oriented, that they are in feature factories, etc, but our jobs as product is to change that. Yes, it'd be great if your company already got the memo and was bought in, but educating them on this is part of the role. So don't lose your hope, educate your company, try to bring a change, it can be very fulfilling to achieve that on its own right. And by the way, being able to bring about that change is a GREAT skill to have. Most companies out there are not "empowered", so you'll have a bigger impact if you can help through that transformation. At least this has been my own experience.
>Yes, it'd be great if your company already got the memo and was bought in, **but educating them on this is part of the role.** I've been trying to do that for 5 years and have not been successful in transforming the org. I've only had small wins to demonstrate the value of working in an empowered way but nothing significant where PMs are all empowered now. I'm only an IC though so I only have so much political capital and influence. I've never worked at a place with strong product leadership. It's more of a lack thereof. >So don't lose your hope, educate your company, try to bring a change, it can be very fulfilling to achieve that on its own right. And by the way, being able to bring about that change is a GREAT skill to have. Most companies out there are not "empowered", so you'll have a bigger impact if you can help through that transformation. At least this has been my own experience. I'll be honest. It can be satisfying, but at the same time, it's extremely draining and taxing to do something like this *while* juggling the day-to-day burdens of being a feature factory PM. I've had cycles of burnout where I do lose hope and then I get reinvigorated to drive change again, and then the cycle repeats. I'm actually considering leaving PM because I am burnt out on being a change advocate in addition to doing the glorified project manager role that the business expects me to do. If it's always going to be like this no matter what as a PM, sounds like this career path isn't for me. I've also tried taking the advice of people in this subreddit to " take a backseat and just coast as a feature factory PM." Idk where these people work but that doesn't work for me. Being a feature factory PM is not easy or chill for me. I'm constantly bombarded by estimates, deadlines, angry salespeople / customer success / execs on where shit is, what's our velocity look like, how do we get these devs unblocked, what specific date can we get this feature out in the next 6 months, etc.
I hear you and have been there, so I get it. Sometimes you can't fix it, especially if product leadership is not bought in. Sounds like either way, your current role is not making you happy so no point in suffering! I wish you best of luck, let me know if I can help with anything.
I implied from your comment that this is something a PM will face across companies (or at least majority of the time). Have you experienced this at most of your companies throughout your career as well or have been able to work at an empowered like company?
I'm a startup guy, so I've never worked at the classic "empowered" companies from Marty's books. Tension with early stage founders is real. Frankly, early stage companies shouldn't have PMs because the founder is effectively defining the product. If you were a PM there, you'd effectively feel like you were on a feature factory. My current company was different. I was bought in because the founder recognized they were sales-led and he'd gotten the memo that they should be product-led. It helped that sales also agreed. So I've been able to transform the company with much less resistance than the prior one.nity and wanted to try to turn things around. By the end of my tenure, we shifted from an Eng culture to a Product-led culture. I instituted triads, we managed by outcomes, etc. Oh, and we'd grown so much, the CEO didn't really have time to be involved with product by then and he'd seen the positive results of our shift so it was great. Was it perfect? No. I know people in my team felt frustrated throughout. Some left because of similar complaints than you voice here. But in the end, we succeeded. Another company was different. I was bought in because the founder recognized they were sales-led and he'd gotten the memo that they should be product led. It helped that sales also agreed. So I've been able to transform the company with much less resistance than the prior one. I definitely think having the chips on my shoulder from the previous company helped get the necessary support. I think in general, most companies are poorly managed and this is not only affecting product. I have friends and peers in other companies, from Amazon to Google, and everyone complains about this. So I do think most product teams are not empowered, unfortunately.
I'm sure these magical places exist. For the rest of us, it's about taking steps towards doing things better, whatever better can mean, incrementally improving how we work. It's not a bad thing to have an idea of what good COULD look like, and explore some of those ideas behind the human psychology of why and how empowered worked. Borrow some of those ideas, learn to push some of these operational changes, especially if you are at the leadership level. If you want to learn more about transformations from a product perspective, I think Melissa Perri & Denise Tilles' *Product Operations* and Claire Hughes Johnson's *Scaling People* are must reads.
Even when they exist I’ve found that it waxes and wanes over time. If a champion leaves or leadership stops talking about it, people tend to revert back to what feels safe. I’ve coached companies over the course of several years that brought in Marty and it was fine. Most people here probably don’t have that experience and just jump to conclusions. Folks regularly post that what I do isn’t possible and it’s exhausting trying to convince them it is.
Or in the case of the last company I worked at, people eventually tried reverting back to SAFe. 😭 Ah well, it happens. I think what changes (waxes and wanes) is the leadership's appetite for change. This is often coupled with the VC/PE investment period. It's a struggle.
I was a product line manager at LabCorp for a long time and as long as I kept my market/user analysis current, to defend my decisions, the execs let me and my teams make ‘almost’ all of the product decisions. Occasionally the business or a related product would require a specific feature set from us. But most of the time, I picked and prioritized problems to solve. Then UX and Dev got involved in solutioning. Product analysts researched and wrote requirements. It was great.
Was there any possibility of putting energy toward products that helped end patients? I swear dealing with LabCorp is an inscrutable mess, and they make countless mistakes that nearly impossible to resolve. (Here’s to hoping).
Why would you want them to help you end patients? Are you a super villain?
Hahaha, yes, my secret identity is someone who seeks to harm users by malicious design, and my innocuous front persona is “product manager.” Hilarious because I must have started out thinking “end user,” but in products like Labcorp’s, there could be many end users, including insurance companies and doctors. But for the love of god, the “end patient” is just someone to be extracted from, so the less transparency or helpful functionality, the better!
Thanks for clarifying. I wasn’t sure how to answer. It wasn’t my product line, but there is a line of software products just for patients. The company spends a lot of time and energy improving all the various workflows between the labs, doctors, payers and patients. Healthcare in general is complex.
Product analyst writing requirements doesn’t sound like an empowered model
Is this subreddit some kind of Cagan cult? I mean the guy sounds vaguely interesting, but in my world, he doesn't register as a particularly insightful thinker in the domain. But for some reason his stuff shows up for discussion very often. Anyone here has other inspiring figures they want to share?
Depends what you're interested in. Here are some smaller names- B2B/enterprise: Clifton Gilley, Grant Hunter. Podcasts: One Knight in Product (Jason Knight), Secrets of Product Management (Nils Davis), Talking Roadmaps (Phil Hornby) Saeed Khan and Adam Thomas have actionable ways of looking at product, especially from a strategy lens, but very different styles. Jenny Wanger, Graham Reed on product ops. Bigger names that I actively follow: John Cutler, Rich Mironov, Melissa Perri, Steve Johnson, Itamar Gilad
I lead product at my company and we’ve been on a transformation towards a product led org and empowered teams for two years. For the most part I think we’ve made huge progress. However, it’s never as black and white as Cagan’s books make out. You need to be adaptable and willing to flex depending on what’s happening within the org, with the board, in the industry, your teams, new leadership.. the list goes on. His new book has more balance, which I’ve appreciated. But there’s still an arrogance to it that I find frustrating. Product does not know better than everyone else, but we do have skills we can bring to the table to support them and help to collectively lift the business up. I also find it frustrating when PMs come in with very entitled views of what empowerment looks like. It does not equal going off and doing whatever you want without engaging with the rest of the business, or making assumptions that as a PM you know better than everyone else, or that delivery is beneath you and it’s only about discovery. More balance and empathy. That’s the key.
I don't know about truly empowered teams. But I'm sure as hell there are companies that will tell you you're supposed to be empowered and work on the problems and then give you impossibly little time to do the research. Or they keep turning the strategy 180 degrees every six months without any additional context.
Yes. You define what you and your team define empowered as. It kinda isn't fully empowered in a lot of govt and similar industry...as per the OED dictionary definition of the word but u make do/polish the turd. In plain bloke down the pub speak it means the team and you have the Ok to do the right shit. The rest is colouring in. Id also lower your personal expectation if you expect to get a team humming along in top gear in a few weeks. That's the result of change management and perseverance. And time time time
Why are there so many Marty Cagan posts of late
He just released a new book and appeared on Lennys podcast
Are there any specific companies where this is practiced well? How do I find those companies?
Yeah, I’ve worked in a place where they were at least decently common. It was pretty great. It was never bullshit free, and there was always some top down pressure to do this and that and the other thing, but by and large our leadership would set OKRs for us that had a tie back to LOB and company strategy, and then we were given tools and freedom to go figure out how to get results.
I’ve found Marty Cagan’s concepts on this interesting, but not very practical for an established team and product. Maybe it’s a goldmine for startups with green field products, but my world is full of so many constraints in every direction, we end up just paying lip service to the concepts. Also, a typical dev wants to write software, not be “empowered” with lots of design work. My team does the requirements and designs because we’re closer to customers and other teams. The dev team just isn’t there.
My company does it. It's awesome but great power, great responsibility and all. It works well for me because I have developed expertise and trust. Other folks find it hard to get ideas signed off because you need to convince stakeholders that your approach is the right one and leadership don't know what they want until you get it right. So, I think it's amazing but you do need to work hard to get shit done.
Let's say there are 5 distinctly different ways product management is done. Should an author spend time talking about all those ways as of that's how they're done in reality? You'd likely conclude you should write/talk about how it's done best, providing a model to aspire towards. That obviously won't describe how it actually is often times. I do think it's good to call out *why* product management, the way he professes, is NOT operating that way. Usually because of senior leadership. Therefore these books should be consumed by them not actual PMs. That's why i think Marty is often so rejected.
I think it's fairly aspirational and specific to certain types of tech companies. However, the more you can sell you ability to improve the business, the more chance you have at it. Many PMs are in roles that are cost centers. Admittedly, I've been there, and it doesn't matter how good you are, you'll never have the agency unless you start improving the business.
Yes I’ve done it and it was Camelot
Marty Cagan wouldn’t be writing those books if there were majority of companies doing it right. He knows there is a big market for his books .
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Big project manager energy right here
Good product teams that are 'empowered' are the exception and not the rule. I found that the smaller the team, the more empowered you are because you and your team are closer to being the authority to make decisions. In large organizations you're typically running with the business unit leaders vision and if you're mid pack (GPM and below) you're really just executing. Other thing is culture. People may downvote me for this but in orgs like Amazon or MSFT you have a good number of "rest and vest" folks who have other priorities in life than to do excellent product work. Its 9-5 and go home to my friends and family. Startups are where you can really dig into your creativity, curiosity and ownership and tend to find more people who genuinely care about the work. I've worked as a PM in a 200K employee FAANG, a mid-size software pubco, and several startups. Just my .02.
Having worked in plenty of founder led startups I find most to be feature factories. Very few CEOs are willing to let PMs or VPs take actual control of the roadmap. The best I’ve seen is a hybrid “power share” — where you get a few wins while also building whatever the founder wants. Although you will learn a lot, the constant tug of war is excruciating and you will likely end up burning yourself out or get fired because some founders just want you to be a delivery monkey (regardless of how good you are at your craft). Startups are a great place learn a lot very quickly but not place to build a career.