Product Operating Model

How to create a winning product strategy

Role of Leadership in Transformations - All Things Product Podcast with Teresa Torres & Petra Wille

Teresa Torres and Petra Wille argue that product transformations stall when teams are trained in continuous discovery but leaders keep managing through feature requests and roadmaps. Training leaders first is presented…

Stakeholders and the Product Model

Cagan and Jones argue that moving to a product operating model changes not just product teams but the business stakeholders who rely on them. The shift is from shipping feature roadmaps (output) to solving customer and…

The Product Operating Model Explained: From Pilot Teams to Full Transformation

Teresa Torres explains the product operating model, a set of first principles popularized by Marty Cagan, which focuses on achieving customer and business outcomes rather than shipping outputs. She contrasts it with the…

The Politics of Pilot Teams

Marty Cagan argues that as more companies move toward the product operating model, political dynamics become central to change, and a well-designed pilot team is the key early step. A pilot acts as a low-cost, fast MVP…

Expecting Resistance: Handling Stakeholder & Leader Concerns During Product Operating Model Pilot

Teresa Torres and Hope Gurion continue their series on adopting the product operating model, focusing on resistance from leaders and stakeholders rather than pilot teams. They argue that transformation is…

Preparing Leaders and Stakeholders to Support Product Operating Model Pilot Teams

Teresa Torres and Hope Gurion argue that a champion such as a CEO can start a product operating model shift, but it stalls without support from leaders and stakeholders across the company. Pilot teams need managers and…

Product vs. Project Operating Models - All Things Product Podcast with Teresa Torres & Petra Wille

This podcast episode asks whether an organization can run a product operating model and a project operating model at the same time. Teresa Torres and Petra Wille contrast the two: project models organize around fixed…

INSPIRED in the Generative AI Era

Marty Cagan introduces a re-recorded audio edition of INSPIRED and reflects on how the book has held up since its 2007 and 2017 editions. He argues its focus on underlying principles rather than current process is why…

Avoid This Common Organizational Transformation Mistake (And What to Do Instead)

Teresa Torres and Hope Gurion argue that a common mistake in organizational transformation, such as shifting to outcome-driven teams or a product operating model, is training everyone at once. Such broad mandates rarely…

Is Your Organization Ready to Adopt the Product Operating Model?

Teresa Torres and Hope Gurion argue that many organizational transformations toward the product operating model stall because companies start before they are ready. Driven partly by consultants and the success of big…

The Product Model and Agile

Marty Cagan addresses a recurring question: how Agile relates to the Product Operating Model. He argues Agile is only one of three dimensions of the product model, covering how software is built, tested, and deployed…

The Product Model in Traditional IT

Marty Cagan and Chris Jones examine whether the product operating model, originally designed for product organizations building technology products, applies to traditional IT departments. They argue it can help when IT…

Book Discussion Guide

Marty Cagan, author of INSPIRED, EMPOWERED, TRANSFORMED and LOVED, shares discussion guides for book clubs and product teams. The guide recommends an order for reading the books, starting with TRANSFORMED for an…

Good Product Coach / Bad Product Coach

Marty Cagan argues that most product coaches and trainers are steeped in the feature-team model, which is the opposite of what companies need when moving to a true product operating model. He frames a good coach through…

The Product Model at Amazon

Marty Cagan and Richard Russell use the origin story of Amazon Prime to show how Amazon's approach to building technology products mirrors the product operating model used by the strongest product companies. The article…

Product Predictions 2024

Marty Cagan shares his 2024 product predictions in narrative form, framing each as a hope and a worry rather than a forecast, given his track record of overestimating how quickly change arrives. He covers ten recurring…

The Product Model at Spotify

Marty Cagan and Joakim Sundén argue that Spotify's enduring success comes from the product operating model rather than the popular idea of 'The Spotify Model' (squads, tribes, and similar org labels). They walk through…

Transformation Fail

Marty Cagan argues that most digital transformations fail, and draws on two decades of hands-on work helping companies adopt the product operating model to name the root causes. He lists ten recurring mistakes, ranging…

Who Is Product Operating Model For?

Marty Cagan addresses a common objection from non-tech companies: that the product operating model doesn't apply to them. He argues that being a 'tech company' is about how a business chooses to power its offering with…

The Product Operating Model

Marty Cagan explains that his upcoming book TRANSFORMED needs a name for the way the best tech companies work, and he tentatively settles on the 'product operating model' or 'product model.' He notes that the industry…

The Product Operating Model: An Introduction

Marty Cagan introduces the product operating model as a set of first principles that leading product companies use to consistently create technology-powered solutions that deliver customer value and business results…

Product Management: An Introduction

Marty Cagan lays out the product operating model, in which a product manager sits on a small cross-functional team alongside a designer, a tech lead and engineers, and is accountable for solving customer problems that…

The Transformation Series

This is an index page from Marty Cagan's SVPG site introducing a series of articles on how a company can transform from merely adequate to truly excellent at product work. It groups the articles into themes…

Transformation Defined

Cagan and Moore argue that 'transformation' is often described with labels like Agile or product-led, which fail to capture what actually changes. They propose defining transformation by three concrete shifts: how a…