Articles by Marty Cagan
Developing Strong Product ManagersMarty provides a skills assessment tool for product managers that involves rating their importance and current capability on various dimensions like product knowledge, process skills, and people skills. It uses a gap analysis to identify areas for coaching. The skills are rated on a 1-10 scale to determine where more development is needed. The manager then focuses a coaching plan on closing the top 3 gaps. Regular weekly check-ins are recommended to track progress. Interestingly, Marty argues that the "associate product manager" level is unnecessary and that people should quickly be brought to full competence or helped to find a more suitable role. Overall, the tool aims to develop product managers through identifying and addressing skills gaps.
Factors in Structuring a Product OrganizationMarty discusses important factors to consider when structuring a product organization. The top priority is ensuring each product team has clear ownership over their area to feel empowered. It is also important to align the product structure with users, development teams, software architecture, and business units, though aligning with users first is advocated. The optimal product team structure changes over time, so revisiting it annually makes sense. Larger organizations commonly have teams providing common services which are among the most difficult due to dependencies. In the end, any product structure involves tradeoffs between optimizing for some things over others.
- The Role of Domain Experience
Marty provides his opinion on whether domain knowledge is a necessary qualification for product managers. The rationale provided in the article also applies to roles in other departments.
- Product Strategy – Focus
Focus is critical for product strategy. Organizations need to pick just a few truly important priorities to work on instead of the many they think are important. Marty gives the example of Pandora, whose lack of product strategy and focus led to many features but little innovation or results. Like work in progress limits help teams, focus helps organizations by limiting the number of major problems they try to solve at once. Good product strategy begins with focus on a few pivotal objectives that will lead to a cascade of favorable outcomes. Without this focus, the product strategy is doomed from the start.
- Discovery – Problem vs. Solution
While many product teams separate product discovery into problem space and solution space, Marty argues that breakthroughs often happen when we break down that wall. With technology products, exploring potential solutions deepens your understanding of the problem in unexpected ways. Marty claims that most product efforts fail due to lacking a good enough solution, not lack of demand. Therefore, teams should spend most of their discovery time on developing the solution through collaboration between product, design and engineering. Great products come from the interplay between value, usability and feasibility, not just defining the problem for engineering to solve.
- Business Strategy vs. Product Strategy
Marty explains the difference between a business strategy and product strategy, why it's important to understand your company's business strategy before developing a product strategy, and how to map them together.
- Stakeholder Management
Marty provides an end-to-end breakdown of stakeholder management, with various tips, such as when to engage stakeholders in discovery and solution previews, and how much time to spend with stakeholders per week.
- Discovery – Learning vs. Insights
Marty discusses the difference between learning and insights in product discovery work. While learning is valuable, the goal is to gain insights that can solve customer problems and benefit the business. Merely learning techniques is not enough; teams must apply their learnings to successfully deliver products. Marty warns against teams getting too focused on learning processes rather than outcomes. Strong product leaders look for profound insights that can pivot strategy or solve problems beyond their current scope.