Marty Cagan: Alternatives to product management & product leaders
Marty Cagan has recently published two new articles: Alternatives to Product Managers and Alternatives to Product Leaders as a reply to Brian Chesky’s new playbook.
There’s a couple of quotes that I’d like to preserve for myself as I find them extremly valuable to reflect upon my own role.
If you define product management, as I do, as being responsible for the value and viability of what gets built, then there really isn’t an alternative to product management – someone is doing this one way or another. – Alternatives to Product Managers
Alternatives to Product Leaders
On leading with command and control:
In either case, soon enough, the company finds itself dealing with the consequences of feature teams: The teams are not empowered; they are mercenaries, there to serve the business by delivering the projects and features the CEO or stakeholders request. The focus is now on output, and not outcomes. Tech debt issues accelerate as a consequence of the project focus. Product managers become project managers. Design is run like an internal agency. Innovation rarely happens because the engineers are simply there to code. The best people usually start to leave. – Alternatives to Product Leaders
On leading with product leadership:
If you’re a product company, especially a tech-powered product company, I argue [product leadership] is the single most important thing for you to get right. Everything else, including marketing, sales, revenue, profit, and valuation, all directly or indirectly derive from this.