Transforming with Marty Cagan! Plus... Stepping on a Succession of Rakes
“You know what? I think the leadership team are starting to realise it’s not the product leadership that’s the problem”.
I was speaking to a friend recently about how things are going at their company. They have been there for a few years and seen a few things. Digging into it, it’s one of those companies that seems to have started out as a vague idea. The company grew by doing whatever early adopters asked for and ended up with a product that wasn’t quite good enough. However, the product had enough revenue that the founder thought it must be good enough.
The company has gone through product leaders at a fast pace, each one coming in with high hopes and, ultimately, failing to make a substantial difference to the company’s fortunes. The product remains uninspiring and no one’s really that happy. Each product leader eventually got jettisoned and replaced by a slightly different type of product leader (the marketing-focused one, the tech-focused one). The circle of life continues. Rinse and repeat.
My friend looked at me conspiratorally and said “You know what? I think the leadership team are starting to realise it’s not the product leadership that’s the problem”.
This isn’t the first time I’ve heard this story about one company or another, and I’ve started to refer to this phenomenon as “rake-setting”.
If you’re up-to-date on your Simpsons (and by up-to-date, I mean that you’ve watched a 20-year-old episode), you’ll remember the scene where Sideshow Bob keeps treading on rakes whilst trying to hatch his dastardly plan. He’s set up to fail, and fail repeatedly, with painful consequences.
Product leaders are set up to fail all the time. It doesn’t mean that they can’t succeed, simply that they’ve had a selection of rakes placed around them, each begging to be stood on to hilarious effect. Some of these rakes include:
A no-questions-asked “next deal always wins” sales-led mentality.
An overreliance on subject-matter experts who “just know” what customers want.
Assuming that whatever your biggest customer wants is what all the others want.
Assuming that, somehow, your sales team are coincidentally talking to prospects in the same order that you should prioritise your roadmap.
Refusal to allow the product team anywhere near customers.
Hiring a product leader to “optimise engineering” and keeping them at arm’s length from “the business”.
Imposing way too much process way too soon and wondering why everything’s ground to a halt.
Now, you might assume that a skilled product leader will manage to win backing from the leadership team to start putting some of these rakes back in the shed where they belong. And, in many companies, they can! In many others, there is little to no appetite to do anything at all. Or, there’s an aggressive, intentional effort to keep these rakes on the ground. The product leader keeps getting hit in the face, eventually fails, gets replaced by another product leader with a slightly different skills mix, then that leader fails, and so on.
I’m sure there are many more rakes. I’d be interested to hear yours! In the meantime, please watch where you’re treading, and good luck out there.
Transforming your Organisation to the Product Operating Model (with Marty Cagan)
Marty Cagan has a new book out and I was delighted to get him back on the podcast to talk about it.
I had Marty on the podcast a couple of years ago to speak about Empowered. It was one of my earlier episodes, and it’s a fun story of how we got that together, but give it a listen if you want some retro joy.
The new book is called Transformed and is all about… transforming! Specifically, transforming to the “Product Operating Model' - yes, they’ve finally named “the way the best companies work”. Inspired and Empowered were very much written for product teams in product companies, whereas Transformed is an attempt to bridge the gap between legacy organisations and well-functioning product organisations.
Obviously, Marty has a lot of fans, but also a few detractors. These people complain that he’s unrealistic, setting too-high standards, or demotivating people who don’t work for companies like that. Personally, I think standards are great, but I also accept that not all companies will get there. Sometimes it’s a case of marginal gains and improving what you can. I still believe in the standards though, and those standards are based on principles that we should all aspire to.
The PM isn’t the Boss of the Team
One thing that is always a good predictor of how well-functioning a product team you have is whether the product manager is the de facto boss of the team. It is true that the product manager should generally get to decide what problems to solve, and the order in which to solve them. But, that doesn’t mean they get to throw their weight around. This is a collaboration of peers!
As ever, I consider this a product leadership problem. A product leader who tolerates this is either saying:
This is exactly how I want you to work
I don’t want you to work like that but I can’t fix it
Neither of those is a great look for a product leader. Whilst accepting that there may be many rakes placed in our way, we should always look for ways to involve our cross-functional partners as equal peers rather than throwing specs over the wall at them. If you’re a product leader who believes that’s the way to work, please get someone in to help you out.
That’s all folks
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