Cagan extends his series on product team autonomy by examining how code ownership interacts with it. When companies split a codebase among product teams, one team's changes often touch code another team owns, creating…
Marty Cagan argues that product teams often conflate empowerment and autonomy, and that the two should be considered separately. Empowerment means a team can choose how to solve a problem, while autonomy means it can…
Cagan describes a role that appears in large matrixed companies: the business owner, who represents a business unit (by geography, device, or function) that a central product organization serves. He argues this role can…
Chris Jones argues that organizational transformation, like product development, should be rolled out incrementally rather than all at once. Because people adopt change at different speeds, a sweeping rollout can…
Marty Cagan argues that a company growing rapidly from startup to large organization faces stress, and that practices and people who drove early success can later hold it back. He suggests leaders who excel at startups…
Marty Cagan argues that if he could change only one thing about how a product organization works, it would be empowering engineers. Engineers work with enabling technology daily, so they are best placed to spot what is…
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…
Jon Moore, an SVPG partner, argues that the principles behind empowered, outcome-focused product teams are not new and not tech-specific. He points to Ingvar Kamprad's 1976 essay 'Testament of a Furniture Dealer' as…
Marty Cagan follows up on his critique of SAFe, the scaled-agile framework, by answering reader questions. He argues that process choices are really culture choices, and that adopting a heavy framework signals top-down…
“Listen to this episode on: Spotify | Apple Podcasts Organizational change is exhausting — so stop trying to force it. Petra and Teresa unpack why trying to fix the people and processes around you is almost always wasted energy, and what actually works instead. If you've ever wanted to champion a”
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…
Teresa Torres argues that a company's staffing choices reveal its real values. Most companies say they prioritize customer love and data-driven decisions, yet employ far fewer product managers, designers, researchers…
The post compares general management (GM), functional, and hybrid org models, explaining how company stage, how close a North Star metric sits to revenue, and how critical the end-to-end customer journey is shape the…
Marty Cagan argues that company culture, defined by how a company treats its employees, customers, and partners, directly shapes how product teams work and what they build. He suggests a company's treatment of employees…
Marty Cagan argues that as companies grow, product organizations often drift into serving internal stakeholders, documenting requirements, mediating conflicts, and allocating developer time, which crowds out customer…
Cagan argues that companies often ask how they can copy the product management model of Google or Apple, but this usually backfires. Those models fit their specific founders, cultures, and products, and Apple's in…
As a product grows from one team to many, keeping a holistic view of how the whole product fits together becomes very hard. Cagan argues that three senior roles are needed to hold that view: a principal designer for…
Marty Cagan answers the most common objections people raise against the idea of empowered engineers, the engineers who take part in product discovery rather than only building what they are handed. He argues that the…
Marty Cagan argues that the Agile movement had two parts: frequent small releases, and empowering teams to solve problems rather than execute roadmaps. The first change spread easily, but the second threatened…
Marty Cagan answers reader questions prompted by his earlier article distinguishing product teams from feature and delivery teams. He clarifies that designers and engineers contribute far beyond usability and…
Marty Cagan responds to a critique of the Spotify model of scaled Agile by arguing that the critic overlooks Spotify's business outcomes and Fitbit's decline after adopting the process the critic favored. He contends…
Marty Cagan argues that successful product-model transformations deliberately confront political realities rather than avoiding them, since changing how an organization decides and builds is fundamentally a people…
This essay describes how Ramsey Solutions, a financial education company, approached its digital transformation by first examining its own identity and capabilities rather than only envisioning its future. Its CEO's…
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…