In this ProductTank Brisbane talk, Silicon Valley Product Group partner Marty Cagan runs through some of the highlights and thinking in his most recent book Transformed.
Please read on for key highlights or watch the video in full.
Marty starts his talk by saying he didn’t want to write his most recent book, Transformed. But so many people believed that the ideas he espoused in his other two books, Empowered and Inspired, weren’t possible, that he and his partners at SVPG decided they needed to answer this doubt.
Transformed tries to help you understand how to change your organisation and move to the product model, he says. It’s written for CEOs and anyone who wants to be a change agent at a company looking to change.
He emphasises that the product operating model
It’s very easy to say moving from output to outcomes, but what does it really mean? There are three dimensions, says Marty.
Changing how you decide which problems to solve. Most companies have some form of planning process, where different parts of business make their case. It means looking at the most important opportunities and most serious threats and making bets.
Changing how you solve those problems. This is product discovery, Marty says, and it’s where new competencies come in. He says the single biggest reason why companies fail to transform successfully is because they don’t take product management seriously. If you set up an empowered product team without an empowered product manager the team will fail, he adds, saying: “The thing that drives me nuts is that it only takes a few months to raise somebody to the level they need to be.”
Changing how you build, test and deploy. We need small frequent reliable releases, Marty says, not monthly or quarterly releases. It means continuous deployment. You need to get to a minimum of releasing every two weeks, he says, and 20 years of data shows that you get better speed and better quality by releasing constantly.
Marty then runs through product model competencies, and the different roles in the model - including product manager, product designer, tech lead and product leader. He thinks engineering should not be outsourced, saying: “It’s a non-starter… it’s no coincidence that the vast majority of innovations out there first came from engineers. But in most companies the executives make the roadmap and the engineers aren’t even in the room, sometimes they’re not even in the country. They’re basically order takers and we need the opposite.”
Marty then touches on product model concepts and product model principles, all of which align under product teams, product strategy, product discovery, product delivery or product culture. Product culture, for example, informs how you make decisions, he says. At Spotify, for example, he says there are signs on the walls that say “100% predictability = 0% innovation”. He criticises the addiction to process in big companies. Process can take over, but it’s not the point, he says, product model principles are the point. “I’d encourage you to think hard about all those principles… we believe they are and you will find them in good companies.”
Empowered teams enable companies to push decisions down to the people closest to the technology and the users, Marty says. But the team needs context and to understand the big picture to make good choices.
Marty then gives some examples of successful companies that have become product first including Trainline, The Guardian, Datasite and Carmax. “None of these transformations are easy,” he says, “you need to have answers to the objections from stakeholders.” SVPG has been collecting these objections for years and Transformed has a section that deals with them and will give you answers
Marty says: “Transformation is not about learning the techniques, it’s about winning hearts and minds. It starts with your team but that’s usually pretty easy. The problem is stakeholders and executives who are used to working a certain way and don’t trust you enough, especially if you have a history of making promises you can’t deliver on - which is standard practice with agile. So much of this is about re-establishing trust.”
He closes by saying that product discovery is problem discovery and solution discovery. An empowered product team can do user research and find really good problems to solve. Don’t do that, says Marty, because your stakeholders have been doing this for years and are used to driving the problems to be solved. Your focus should be on solution discovery. He says: “People are not buying the problem, they’re buying your solution. If your solution is not dramatically better than the alternatives, you’ll lose.”
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