By Marty Cagan · svpg.com · LinkedIn
Marty Cagan, writing with Chuck Geiger, argues that a product manager's success depends heavily on the working relationship with the head of product development, often called the CTO. The essay defines the scope of that organization, which covers architecture, engineering, QA, operations, security, and release management, and then lays out five CTO responsibilities in priority order. Each responsibility is paired with a way to measure it. The piece matters because it clarifies what a strong technology leader should own and how a PM can partner with them to build and deliver winning products.
01Key takeaways
- A PM's job is only half done without a strong working relationship with the product development leader.
- Measure the CTO's organizational health through development plans, retention, and peer evaluations.
- Track delivery by output quantity and quality, release frequency, and launched software reliability.
- Involve engineers and architects in discovery to capture far more value than code-writing alone provides.
- Reduce post-discovery schedule churn, since changing plans after discovery signals weak upfront work.
- Have regular lunches with your engineering counterpart to uncover their challenges and offer help.
02Key sections
- Defining the product development organization
- The essay explains that this group builds and runs the company's products and goes by titles such as VP Product Development, CTO, or VP Engineering depending on company size and stage.
- Organization and delivery
- The CTO should build a strong management team that develops people, and should enable rapid, reliable, high-quality releases, with productivity as the key measure.
- Architecture
- The CTO ensures the system can deliver the scalability, performance, and functionality needed to compete, tracked through infrastructure headroom and outages caused by architectural issues.
- Discovery and evangelism
- Engineers and architects should contribute throughout product discovery rather than only writing code, while the CTO acts as the public spokesperson for the technology organization.
- Building the partnership
- The authors recommend that PMs and engineering leaders regularly meet, share challenges, and help each other to create an effective overall product organization.
03From the post
“A partnership dedicated to teaching best practices to product teams and product leaders”
Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.