Marty Cagan argues that as companies grow, decisions drift toward committee consensus, where the goal shifts from building something great to avoiding blame, and innovation stalls. He proposes keeping product discovery…
Marty Cagan answers a set of recurring questions he fielded at a conference, distilled into a quick Q&A on how product organizations should be structured. He argues that product management defines what engineering…
Marty Cagan argues that product management should not sit inside marketing or engineering, the two most common homes for it. Marketing tends to confuse listening to customers with product discovery and merges product…
Marty Cagan introduces the core competencies that a product operating model requires, framing product teams as responsible for solving hard customer and business problems rather than delivering features on request. He…
Marty Cagan argues that the root cause of many large companies losing their product innovation is an over-reliance on process over people. He builds on his earlier overview of Product Ops models by focusing on why…
Marty Cagan argues that product organizations contain three kinds of contributors rather than two: makers (designers, engineers, researchers), managers, and a growing group he calls process people. Process roles like…
Marty Cagan argues that a common reason transformation efforts fail is structural: large management consultancies and IT outsourcing firms are poorly positioned to drive a shift to the product model. Their people are…
“Many companies are either starting on or in the midst of an organizational transformation. Their goal is to adopt the product operating model (as described in Marty Cagan’s book Transformed) or something akin to it. Much of this is being fueled by the success of the FAANG companies (Facebook,”
Many established companies that began as retailers, airlines, or financial firms now sell directly to customers online, yet they often manage that customer-facing software the way they manage internal IT systems. The…
Marty Cagan argues against the view that a technology company is essentially made of engineers who build software and salespeople who sell it, with everyone else treated as overhead. He contends that combining even…
Cagan argues that much of the confusion about product management comes from lumping together two very different team types that both get called 'product teams.' He distinguishes delivery teams (essentially re-packaged…
Marty Cagan argues that many product companies pride themselves on a 'consensus culture', but in practice this breeds frustration, slowness, risk-aversion and unimpressive products. The root problem, he says, is…
Marty Cagan argues that as startups grow and split into functional groups, walls form between product, technology, marketing and design, with product-technology being the most damaging. Teams loyal to their function…
Marty Cagan argues that the most damaging way companies try to scale product management is splitting the PM job across two people, the so-called 'two in a box' anti-pattern. The core problem is that the PM on an…
Marty Cagan argues that moving to the product model rarely requires a reorganization, because org design is largely orthogonal to whether a company adopts product principles. He describes the two dominant org models…
Cagan argues that team autonomy and leadership control are reconciled when leaders supply two inputs: a clear product vision and specific, prioritized business objectives for each team. Teams should then have freedom…
Teresa Torres and Hope Gurion argue that when shifting to a product operating model, companies should start with a small set of pilot teams rather than training everyone at once, which tends to produce chaos and…
Marty Cagan describes an anti-pattern in which fast-growing, product-successful companies gradually lose their good habits after hiring senior leaders from large, brand-name firms that have stopped innovating. The…
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…
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…
Marty Cagan explains why he has largely stopped recommending OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) to most companies: the technique is simple, but organizations rarely have the structure it needs to work. He argues three…
Marty Cagan extends his earlier point that product teams must learn fast in discovery while still delivering with confidence, arguing that the balance depends heavily on company culture. He lists the traits of a strong…