The disease of process people

"That same model" refers to feature teams where product managers are given predetermined roadmaps rather than discovering customer problems and solutions.

What's so frustrating here is you have all these people that realize things aren't good yet most places they turn are just propagating that same model. So these certifications, which in my opinion are bogus, but most people don't know. And just imagine you're a brand new product manager. You look online probably what, 90% of the content out there is from the feature team world or worst.

Too many people in our industry view themselves as a victim of their company, like they're stuck in a feature team and there's nothing they can do about it other than quit. I think that's not true. There is so much they can do.

On a real empowered product team, product manager is a creator, not a facilitator. I always cringe when somebody tells me, oh, my job is to say why? And I'm like, 'Well, what do you do for the rest of the week besides the 10 minutes it takes you to say why?'

There is no question that a lot of companies overhired during the pandemic. I go into some companies and honestly I can't believe all the ridiculous roles that they have, agile coaches and product owners and product ops and business analysts.

It's about time to money more than time to market. We know how to do time to market. If you insist on time to market, we know how to do that. The techniques are well-known. The harder part is time to money.

A product team, an empowered product team, instead of being given that roadmap of features, they're given problems to solve. Now they're customer problems or they're business problems or both, but they're given a problem to solve. Usually one or two a quarter on top of of course the keep the lights on kind of work that everybody does, but they're given hard problems to solve and the measure is not ship the thing. The measure is it solves the problem.

On a feature team, you're basically given a roadmap of output. That's the key, is output. In other words, their features are projects that usually it could have come from an executive, could have come from a big pocket customer, could have come from wherever. But it's a bunch of features and literally you're being asked to design, build, test, deploy that feature.

Cagan is responding to a question about how product managers can evaluate advice from online communities when most content comes from companies doing product management poorly.

Probably the most important skill for product people, and I know this sounds awful, but is really learning how to think critically. And that involves literally evaluating.

Empowerment does not mean you set up this product team and they go decide what to work on. No, that would just be anarchy, right? You'd have 50 teams doing 50 things. Instead, empowerment means the leaders do their job, come up with the bets, and then the teams are able to figure out the best way to solve those problems.

I was not allowed to take the product manager role until I had visited 30 customers in person, 15 in the US, 15 in Europe. That was just the person who was coaching me. That was their rule. And all I know is those 30 customers changed my life because I thought I knew our customers and I really didn't.

If you are fundamentally a backlog administrator, good luck protecting that because already people are doing that. It's only a matter of time before that becomes pretty well-supported.

Product teams don't do product strategy. Product leaders do product strategy. They need to do the product strategy.

For an empowered product manager, if your responsibility is value and viability, if you boil it down, that's the real challenge left with ChatGPT or GenAI, is viability becomes even more the important question.

Too many people in our industry view themselves as a victim of their company, like they're stuck in a feature team and there's nothing they can do about it other than quit. I think that's not true. There is so much they can do.