and over the last 20 years one of the things that changed in the agile community and not all of them thank goodness but unfortunately many of them and I have to say many of them in Europe especially they decided to take agile in a different direction they took it in a direction of process and a direction of predictability and the result is they are not getting the benefits of agile the easiest way to see that is most of them are releasing once a month or worse once a quarter if you're doing that you're not getting even the most basic benefits of agile and it's just agile theater this is just waterfall with a marketing name of agile and that's unfortunately what's happened who do you blame for that I really blame the agile coaches in the in the community and the industrial complex all of these certification programs and everything thing that are just BS we all know they're BS they know they're BS but they they are and it's a shame because agile really can deliver real benefits but those are the agile principles not the way the processes have been formalized hey there welcome back to the show I'm aonso and I'm your host and you know what before we begin I just want to take a moment to say thank you thank you so much for tuning in I am so excited to have you here here and to share with you this exciting and spicy episode with the one and only Marty Kagan Marty has probably observed and advised more product teams and leaders than anyone in the world for many he is the Godfather of product management he's a bestselling author of some of the most iconic books in our industry he wrote inspired empowered and recently launched transformed and he's probably one of the world's most requested speakers in product conference es in this episode Martin and I discussed all things transformation you know moving from projects to products why adal can only really help with a third of Transformations and why it's also the easiest part why product leadership is the key to enable Transformations we talked about product Ops we talked about how AI will impact how we build products and so much more this was so fun and I really hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did all all right without further Ado Marty Kagan all right Marty we are live how are you today I'm good all funo thanks so I am so happy to to see you you've just released your latest book transformed yet another Masterpiece and I just wanted to say that it wouldn't be an understatement um to say that your work and svpg in general has been a remarkable contribution to the to the product community and first things first I have have a lot to dig into uh in this conversation you wrote inspired probably the best product management book for so many people out there and you wrote it specifically for product teams and then you wrote empowered specifically targeted for product leaders and now you wrote transformed so who's this book for and why is it needed Martin sure well like you said the first two books were really for product teams and product leaders and it's all about techniques that we see used in the best companies however it's also true that right from the very first edition of inspired uh the probably the single most common piece of feedback we would get is that people would the good news is they'd say they like this they want to work this way they believe this is the right way to work but then they immediately would say something like but our company could never do this it's so different than what we do I don't know if it's even possible for us to change and you know we've been that's what we've been doing for 20 years is helping companies to change so we knew it was possible but in truth you know we're just a handful of people working with a handful of companies so uh what we wanted to do with this book was to kind of definitively answer that question to show people yes it's possible it's hard but it is possible and here are a dozen companies that have just like you that that have changed none of them are Silicon Valley companies they're all from around the world and uh if you want to change you absolutely can so that was the the goal of this book it's it's really instead of a product techniques book it's a change management book it's more about how do you make these changes and and I love I love that uh you targeted that book particularly to that audience specifically because I see a lot lot of companies that need to transform that need that change especially you know everywhere I go in Scandinavia and and in Europe in general I see so many product managers intitled but what they're really doing is just a product owner in a delivery team or a feature team I see so many teams with both product managers and product owners focused on outputs given road map with features I see um well I don't see product leadership through product leadership and I see an insane focus on delivery Frameworks like scrum and and even even worse perhaps like safe and other things so Mario I wanted to ask you is this a global challenge you think or do you think Europe is particularly behind in the way most of their organizations structure themselves and and and operate from a prodct product operating model perspective yeah I mean there's a temptation to say oh well you know San Francisco Silicon Valley they're way ahead and the rest of the world is below behind but I really don't think that's true um first of all you can be right in San Francisco and find companies with these problems unfortunately I think it's terrible to say that but it's true you can find these problems in all over the US especially on the east side of the US uh and it's also true that in places like Europe including Scandinavia how about Stockholm right with Spotify uh you can find amazing companies that are fantastic really the good examples of what we talk about so it's I don't think it's like that it's more um it's not the location it really has to do with the leaders and what they believe and if any of those leaders have worked in a company like you may know in with Spotify the founders had done tech product companies before that so this was not their first first rodeo as we say and so they were able to take what they learned and did a you know a beautiful job with that and then in other cases because you could argue Spotify had it easier because they were they started that way with their Founders they really did with the important things on the other hand a company like train line in London they they had none of this this was classic everything you just described old school you know it and delivery Frameworks and outsourced engineers and they completely turned themselves around how did they do that well they had they brought in some leaders that knew how to do that and that's what they did MH so when you speak about the best organizations versus the rest which has been a theme from from your work um since since many years ago um what's then the the criteria to bucket some of these best organizations that you see all over the world is it what they do differently than the rest or is it what they generically speaking don't do um well definitely some of both I would say um by the way the way we sort of Define the best is a company that has proven that they can consistantly innovate at scale on behalf of their customers come up with solutions that their customers love but work for their business so that's kind of how we Define and there are some uh you know well-known companies companies that do that are really not a secret they're usually the most successful financially uh companies in the world so the stock market recognizes these companies um so that's how we Define it uh what do it really mean when you look at those companies that's what I think we uh we try to share when you look at those companies there are well by our count 20 principles that you find in those companies that are in all of them really even if they have very different cultures you know like an apple culture is very different than a Spotify culture it's very different than a Netflix culture but all of those companies have these principles that they live and so we refer to them as product first principles and I actually think that's what's important and in companies that are not doing these things that are not able to innovate you usually don't find most of those principles it's a very different model so for example the most I think probably the most fundamental principle of a strong Product Company is that they understand the need to experiment they understand that with without experimentation you get no innovation they just understand that and and so you know you go to a good company and of course they experiment they run them constantly but you go to most companies no they don't what they do at best is they do what we call optimization experiments which are these trivial AB tests where they just change something like the the size of a font or the color of something and they you know they're seeing if that does better if it makes them more money of course they should do that optimization but that's not experimentation that's not what we mean by experimentation and so that's as basic as you get an experimentation culture now there's a lot of different ways to do experiments because there's lots of different kinds of products with different kinds of risks but if you don't have a way to do experimentation you're just not going to innovate as as one example um but there are many examples let's let's dig into that one a bit and then let's move into some some of the other principles of course we won't have the time to cover all the 20 but um this one experimentation you mentioned that optimization is one thing in real experimentation really testing ideas continuously over time is another thing what ingredients must be in place for an organization to be able to continuously experiment just like some of the best organizations in the world that you've seen well that's actually a big question so what do you need in order to really live these principles and we argue the most important thing is you need a set of competencies uh you need a set of skills on the teams that most companies that have not decided to work this way they don't have those comp competencies you you alluded to some of them before but for example you need Engineers to play a front and center role so if your engineers are outsourced you're not going to be able to do these things they're just not going to happen I can't point to a single consistently Innovative company that outsources their Engineers they in fact I joke to CEOs sometimes that you know a good company would no sooner Outsource their CEO than they would Outsource their Engineers you just it makes no sense uh uh and so that's a whole different way for them to view this things right now why is it that's because the the main source of innovation are our Engineers they're the ones that are know working with the enabling technology so they're the ones that know what's just now possible so you would you know that's one critical core competency another one that you often don't find in most companies because they really don't understand the importance of this is professional product designer they you know they might have some graphic designers around but they do not play this role that we need a pro a real product designer to do somebody who really takes responsibility for the customer experience every touch point with that uh and then of course the one one of the ones you mentioned a real product manager not a product owner not a feature team project manager type but a real product manager somebody who is shaping the product right alongside with the designer and the engineers and these product managers are very skilled in their customers they're skilled in the data they're skilled in how your business Works in detail like how is your product sold how are they're marketed what's the go to market in general uh how are they funded how are they monetized what are the compliance constraints what are the legal constraints privacy constraints who else on the team knows these things so they need a product manager as well and then these cross functional teams once you have those skills the other big thing that's needed is they now need to be empowered the word we use is empowered which means they need to be given the problems to solve not just the features to build and then they can use these skills to go run these experiments and then figure out what works and then deliver it to our customers so that's um you know there's a lot there that needs to be in place and none of those skills really happen unless you have a good product leaders that know how to recruit these people and Coach these people and so if you had to point to one thing that really is missing from companies that haven't done this it's probably the product leaders Because unless you have serious product leaders they won't assemble the teams we've been talking about I totally agree and I really want to dig into product leadership uh just in a bit but let's just uh dissect what what you said so um you've mentioned that what companies are missing is a set of competencies to test ideas continuously to be able to do so and you've mentioned of course the broll of the product manager product a real product designer not a graphic designer we're talking about a full stack you know service design uh industrial design if it's Hardware uxui a proper a proper product designer and I have to I have to dig into this one a little bit because Marty in Norway we have a pretty decent design Community a lot of product organizations surprisingly have actually great designers you know great service designers and and and so on and sometimes I bet it's because probably the whole um way they organize themselves is more towards feature teams rather than power empowered product teams but sometimes there's this clash between who owns what because the service designer or a a real product designer is incredibly competent to do Discovery and then they see the role of the product manager to basically drisk viability but when it comes to Value they feel that sometimes well we are more than usability we do more than usability we uh we also uh responsible for Value but then there's the sometimes a clash what's your what's your take on that collaboration because I know you probably have a lot of great thoughts on how great teams actually collaborate yeah and we're talking here about a real imp powered product team not cuz these you can have a similar symptom with a feature team but that's not about value that's just about the designer doesn't understand what the product manager is trying to do because they're not they're just really a project manager but in your scenario I think is more interesting which is it's a real empowered product team and now you have a product designer and a product manager both focusing on and able to contribute a lot to value and and by the way this is what we call our favorite situation who this is exactly what we want right this is what we want we actually want a little better is we also want the engineering Tech lead to contrib you know feel real passion about value as well so um the the way it is is we want to make sure whatever we build is valuable usable feasible viable that's all I mean uh lots of an engineer contributes to Value many ways that's why often Innovations happen from them and of course designers do uh a lot of that value is is delivered to the user through the user experience right it's literally coming through the experience so we don't we love it when everybody takes responsibility so when we say you know a designer is accountable for usability if what that really means is if the system is unusable the we're going to hold the designer accountable for that we're going to like where where were you on this like how could this happen if a product is not valuable in other words people do not choose to buy it the person we're going to hold accountable for that is a product manager that doesn't mean that the rest of the team doesn't help and we want them to help with that but we have people who are accountable just like for viability uh in fact that's often where it's more of a problem the product is something our customers absolutely value and love the problem is it's got a legal issue or it's got a compliance issue whose fault is that well that's the product manager's fault they are supposed to know the viability constraints it's not the designer's fault it's not the engineer's fault so we're we're looking at uh accountability there so we love it when all of them care about all of these things and the scenario you're bringing up I'll be honest it it's more common in a b Toc product than a B2B product in a b Toc product one of the challenges with consumer products is that every user is a buyer and that means that uh a lot of times the designer is in a great position to help with value uh of the customer in a B2B product it's usually not because the user and the buyer are very different people and so the designer is in a good position to help the user get value but they often don't even talk much to the buyer the product manager is doing that I see so um let's go back to the principles Marty just to explore a little bit more some of of uh the 20 principles you you wrote in your latest book I particularly wanted to dig into Innovation over predictability uh which I love because again a lot of the organizations uh in Europe that I see organize themselves around projects so how is this principle Innovation and over predictability how is this valuable for an organization running projects why is it important for them yeah well in fact the whole move to the product Model A lot of people just describe it as moving from projects to products or from projects and output to products and outcomes that's really what's going on uh that not unique to Europe just to be very clear it's not uh yeah this is a global problem um the truth is it's yeah it it's a global problem because it's a lot easier to tackle PR predictability it's a lot easier if and unfortunately where it falls apart is when you look at the success of typical projects and the you know the depending on which industry experts you want to listen to but it's somewhere between 70 and 80% of those things built in projects don't deliver the value that they were promised so we know it doesn't really work why doesn't it work because predictability is not the hard part now we do want predictability that is a desirable thing right if we if we're building something for our customers they kind of need to know often when that's going to be there especially if they have to plan for it but predictability is time to Market outcomes is time to money so and what we really care more than even predictability is time to money and the IR irony is the project model is so inefficient that we can usually get both time to Market and time to money faster if we do product model than if we do project model just because there's a lot of inherent INE efficiencies of the project model the people who build the thing are building it for one shot they rarely are able to do the many iterations that we need in order to get it successful and of course in the product model that's the the basis you own this and you continue to improve the outcomes so and there's technical debt issues that happen more with the project model and there's no accountability in the project model there's all these issues and those are pretty well documented the issues with the project model so it's it's just that I think most of the world it's they do understand the problems in the project model but they don't know that there's an alternative and so you know we're trying to share that there's a much better way to do this and and the good companies have been doing it differently for many years love that so I think some companies they're not aware of an alternative and other companies they you know they read your stuff and it's very ins spiring and they they they hear you well and and they they want to transform but they just they don't know where to begin right that's why the book companies exactly precisely but so just very shortly um for an organization then that is running has been running projects for many years and they want to transform they need to subscribe to a lot of different principles and change the way they see the world but what would would you say are sort of the most important things apart from getting the competencies that we talked about in the beginning uh what else should um they focus on to really transform to a product operating model well probably one of the biggest challenges for the senior leaders is that when you look at something like agile they don't really have to worry about agile because that's something that the it organization does and they either do it well or not but the senior leader is like it's like something that it does in the if you move to the product model it's not like that it impacts the entire company it impacts sales marketing the CEO often the board it impacts compliance legal HR and so there's no sort of delegating it to say a chief digital officer or a chief transformation officer this is something the CEO and the senior leadership team have to decide they want to change the way they work and because it impacts the senior leadership team that is a much bigger and more disruptive undertaking so but then you okay so you you talked about agile and and a lot of these senior leaders they think agile will be the answer to to some of their problems and they uh you know invest a lot of money on on the so-called agile Transformations and and agile process implementation because they believe that it's going to bring them better outcomes uh and you know they bring all all these agile coaches and you know very well-intentioned people but then after a year or two the outcomes are not necessarily what they expected what do you think where do you think the problem is where do you think do you think these investments in these agile Transformations are valuable um do you think this is a problem with senior leadership that they need to just think completely different about what they actually need yeah well there's sort of two levels to this situation let's talk about agile the first level is it is important that the senior leaders understand that the changes that agile can bring I mean it doesn't we'll talk about why even these benefits often don't come but if you do it well there are real benefits but what they don't understand is those benefits don't even attack the biggest part of parts of the problem they attack basically onethird of the problem we talk about when you transform there're sort of at a high level there's three big things you're tackling agile helps you with this first one changing how you build how you build test deploy the second one though is how do you solve problems agile doesn't help you with that at all and the third one is how do you decide which problems you want to solve agile doesn't help you with that at all either so and these three the truth is the first one is the easiest of the three so um the it doesn't even address the bigger two now that said the first one is still really important and 20 years ago when agile was first becoming popular More companies were getting real benefits from agile because fundamentally agile helped us change how we build test and deploy in order to be much more responsive to our customers and actually have much better quality and velocity but it was all based on principles and over the last 20 years one of the things that changed in the agile community and not all of them thank goodness but unfortunately many of them and I have to say many of them in Europe especially they decided to take agile in a different direction they took it in a direction of process and a direction of predictability and the result is they are not getting the benefits of agile and the easiest way to see that is most of them are releasing once a month or worse once a quarter if you're doing that you're not getting even the most basic benefits of agile and it's just agile theater this is just waterfall with a marketing name of agile and that's unfortunately what's happened who do you blame for that I really blame the agile coaches in the in the community and the industrial complex all of these certification programs and everything that are just BS we all know they're BS they know they're BS but they they are and it's a shame because agile really can deliver real benefits but those are the agile principles not the way the processes have been formalized and uh unfortunately this has happened to way more than agile this happened if you remember Six Sigma before agile there are great principles there but a lot of process people took over Six Sigma and applied it in ways that made no sense and it just destroyed companies so yes uh I think the whole today the way me most companies do Agile with agile coaches and product owners that have been trained by people who have never done product before and all the rituals and none of the results it's ridiculous and you know I've been calling that out for a while that's not the way it needed to be so if you're a CEO though and you feel like all right I was sold a bill of goods with agile I thought it was going to solve all these problems but now you're telling me it only solves onethird of the problems and furthermore the people we hired were not even good ones to do that third and so there are a lot of CEOs that are justifiably unhappy about this and I think that's why you're seeing a a backlash yeah yeah yeah absolutely and I mean you so you mentioned something very interesting which is whenever you have these movements you have process people take over you they can if you're not careful see yeah they can right of course um so and and this has happened with agile to some extent and I'm just thinking about product Ops you know it's slight it's a slight Divergent in in our conversation now but what I'm afraid is that there's a very thin line with product tops becoming yet another sort of process mentality and and governance and so on um um just like we've seen with agile you you see product Ops departments that they are now starting to some of of course not all but some just taking over process and stand over standardization and healthy standardization and um and governance and and there's a new book out there as well um that also discusses this and I think for someone reading reading transformed and reading some of the new latest books on product tops and am seeing what some what some companies are implementing there's a bit of mixed signals there as well yeah it's true I mean this product Ops is still very early though it's very early and unfortunately I have seen some companies that Define product Ops just the way you defined it and that's a problem it's the same problem really but it's problem uh and but the good news is I've also seen companies Define product Ops very differently which which is very helpful in my opinion uh but it's not this it's a very different definition um it's a tricky one because you know product Ops is just the same idea conceptually as devops and design Ops uh is me but product doesn't really have that need in the same way so it's kind of this placeholder and different people and different companies have kind of filled that definition themselves uh based on their goals and so if you're looking for process in governance yeah that can happen on the other hand uh one of my partners Chris Jones was telling me about a company he met where they they brought in a product Ops person one person who views it as his job is to spread the product model around the company which is all principles and he he was like that's awesome and I said yeah I love that too that's awesome I wish more companies would do that in other words product Ops doesn't have to be a process enforcer they could be principal enablers uh and exctly that would be great now of course that's what the managers the leaders are supposed to do too but having say a very experienced product person like a principal product manager who's there to help share those principles love that so there can be good definitions of product Ops there can be others that are just one of the ones that I'm worried about is nothing to do with process nothing to do with process at all but I don't like it which is there are some companies that have a definition of product Ops which is instead of having a product manager and a product owner like you talked about and like like safe has that nonsense well they have a product manager and a product Ops person doing the same lowlevel stuff be and their argument is the product manager has too much work to do so we'll give all the little tasks to product Ops which is you know and just it really does bother me we've got so many people in the world who think product managers they don't even see the value in them and then you have some product managers saying oh and not only am I not valuable but I have to have all these other people helping me even though developers don't have uh devops doesn't mean that every developer has somebody assigned to do jir dirty work for them right and designers don't have somebody like that so it's um you know that's a little bit of nonsense as well so complicated but today the definition of product Ops is not uniform there are too many different definitions so uh I'm H I have strong opinions on each definition but the first thing I need to know is which definition is it one of the good ones is it one of the bad ones or is it one of the ones that really don't matter it's just a name absolutely I I mean I think this is a problem in general not just with product Toops but the fact that there's some there's a term that is coined and then there's so many misinterpretations and then there's a load of there's a notion of um people that go out to and spread their message that is not sort of the good the good definition like you talked about and then Junior people you know becoming product managers are wanting to be a real product manager for the first time they they go online and they read all this all this madness um all these definitions that what a product manager actually um actually does and then you see and it's a product owner uh responsibility so that's an issue and I I'm a bit concerned with u that becoming a trend for product tops like more more and more people spreading the the bad definitions of it I don't know how that's sort of the nature of the internet um it's very hard to uh you know it's hard to know what to do there there yeah we'll just have to let things play out probably at least you're being you're being spicy about it Marty and I I I love that um that you're you're spreading the the good definitions um to to a lot of people so that's a that's a great start um so back to the the three main things that organizations need to do you talked about you know agile helping you potentially with a third and then you talked about the two others that are much more important particularly which problems to solve which is related to product leadership and I wanted to to to dig into that a little bit um I want to dig into this because I I don't see a lot of true product leaders out there and and you've mentioned that there's a lot of misinterpretation of the the role of a product manager I think this is even worse for product leaders ERS um I think the the definition of what a great product leader actually does is is um is not there for many people so um let's let's dig into product leadership in general you've you wrote that a product leader managing a product team or leading a product team spends 80 around 80% of her time coaching and Staffing can you please elaborate on that please yeah first some probably term terminology we use the term product leader as short for all the managers of product managers product designers and Engineers so uh we say product leader just because that's a lot less words U but normally the product managers report to a director of product management the designers report to a director of design and the engineers report to a Dev manager and uh engineering director so they are getting this product leadership help from their manager now the other thing to talk about when you talk about product leaders is first level product man uh leaders which is managing an in individual contributor like an engineer designer product manager and then higher level ones which are more managing managers what we what that was referring to the what what you cited was um first level managers people managing individual contributors the primary job for those people is to coach and develop their people that's how almost everybody who's good learned the craft of product certainly how I learned the craft of product most people I know that's how they learned it they worked for a manager that knew how to do the job and and was doing their job to coach you this is referred to as coaching it's the like at Google for example the number one attribute of their managers as rated by their people is the manager is viewed as a good coach um like Bill Campbell used to say you cannot be a good manager today without being a good coach so this is what you're doing you're helping your people learn how to do the job once uh that's why 80% of your time is Staffing and recruiting uh sorry Staffing and coaching of course the better you do at Staffing the easier it is to coach but that's your job the other 20% of the time is on product strategy on product Vision it's and sharing that with the teams but as you go higher to say Chief product officer or chief technology officer it's really reversed only about 20% of your time is in coaching and Staffing and the rest of your time is the product the Strategic context because you're responsible really for the product Vision the product strategy the team topology the objectives you other words the problems to solve so that what I just described is what I would argue is normal in strong product companies that's just how that's what I see on the other hand if you're a feature team company it's a completely different game because in a feature team company the feature teams are set up to serve the business so the job of a product leader is really to staff this uh it's like an agency you're Staffing teams who can serve the business what does that mean there's there's really no product Vision to speak of in those companies there's certainly no product strategy you don't have those things because they're not empowered product teams the coaching is a lot lesser responsibility you're there to build what you've been told to build so it's a completely different job and I would say the person who has the biggest change when you move to the product model are the product leaders that's very interesting back to to to our first uh part of the conversation this is where most organizations at least the ones I've seen that's what they lack the most is true product leaders and they might have those product leaders in titled you know directors of product even a CPO but what they're doing is you know they're not spending any time coaching their teams and and so what they're doing is basically managing the portfolio of the projects and being the ones accountable for the business results not the teams right so it's a it's a complete um different model and different job as you as you as you mentioned and they're not really taking responsibility for the business results because they can't they're they're really just the stakeholders are the ones defining what's getting done but um you know I would say in that scenario which is very common all over the world a company wants to transform but the product leaders have never done this before they never worked this way before this is why we talk a lot about product coaches mhm because you can either replace your product Leaders with people who know how to do this and that is what some companies do or you can bring in a product leadership coach to help those product leaders learn at the same time their people are learning and um so the truth is in preparation for this book over the last two years we've been building a network of people we could recommend uh we have a long list of coaches in Europe in the in most of the world today um and we don't have any Financial ties with any of them we just wanted to know who are the good coaches out there who are the ones that have done product well that we could introduce to a company and um we're still finding more all the time but today we have a good set of people uh in most parts of the world that we can say this person if you spend a couple months with this person they can show you what you don't know and help you through it and in fact a lot of the Transformations you read about in the book that's what made them work is a a product coach that helped them for the first few times absolutely I talked with with Gabby and with hope a few weeks ago oh good well they're perfect they're excellent examples of product coaches absolutely so just to summarize Marty what you said the one of the most important things for companies to transform is to change how they decide which problems to solve and that is a core product leadership um responsibility for most products product organizations there are basically feature product organizations uh with feature teams they lack that they may lack that role uh perhaps not in title but in in actual role they may lack that and one way to solve it is either recruit an actual product leader or get external help from product coaches is that correct that's right great is there any particular skill or competency that cpos must have that is very different than for example a director of product oh well sure but it's the same as a CTO from a director of engineering you know as you get higher in the organization you have more on your shoulders more responsibilities more uh of the Strategic context is actually coming from you so a CPO is the top of the product line and a CTO is the top of the engineering line in general um and so those are the people that are most critical in fact we tell companies that want to transform the three people that really you want to make sure are working together as they need to is the CEO or the general manager if it's a business unit and the CPO and the CTO those three are the ones that were are either gonna make it work or not so basically if you have a CEO that is not subscribing to the principles that you write in the book uh and that is incredibly feature oriented and you know top down and so on are are all of these uh product people doomed or or can they do a lot uh to to push that information for well what you're describing is a situation which is pretty common which is some one or more of the senior leaders are not convinced right they're just not convinced so they know what they know but they don't know what else there might be so the job of the product leaders are to con you know win over the hearts and minds of these leaders the way they do that is by showing them what's possible and earning their trust trust so you could they could just say oh well my CEO doesn't get it so I'm going to leave and some of them do that but I always encourage them look the CEO doesn't get it probably because the CEO has never seen it and they are are do you expect somebody who's never seen it to just say okay I'm giving you all this control and hopefully it works out well most CEOs are not going to do that what they'll say is okay I'll give you space to do a test an experiment if that works I love that we'll talk about expanding that experiment if it doesn't work though I have still protected the company from what might be a bad Direction they don't know that's how we prove this stuff you start by showing small and then you earn the right to go bigger uh I explained it recently to uh uh one of the cpos that I was coaching and he seemed to um respond well the way I explained it is it's kind of like a multi-level game where you start by playing level one and once You' finally shown you really know level one you get entry to level two and then you get show build your skills and you're good and then you get entry you've earned entry to level three it it work it feels a lot like that you're earning trust every way up and you can start with a product team a single product team MH absolutely and of course having a strong CPO really helps or a product leader in general absolutely regardless of the title you mentioned something that is very important the the Strategic context is owned by the product leader that person is uh crafting a product Vision inspiring everyone convincing people um leading with with that Vision crafting the product strategy to make that Vision a reality team topology all of that jazz team objectives and one of the counterarguments that a lot of people that would say well product strategy should be owned by the team because they are closer to the insights so that's kind of one of the counterarguments that that I hear the most W counter countering the argument of strategic context is owned by the leader so how how have you seen um in in some of the best organizations that you've that you've observed how do they close that Loop of the insights coming from continuous Discovery um towards the leader to based on those insights to continuously craft the Strategic context and communicate it back again yeah how do you close that Loop and this by the way I I do cuz I have heard so many agile coaches basically recommend that so I think that's where this comes from but if you think about it for even 5 minutes it makes no sense think about that first of all we should say product strategies that the product leaders own that is informed by insights that come from product teams so that's no question but think about it this way a typical mediumsized organization not even a big one it's worse for a big one say they have 30 product teams do you really want 30 product VIs and 30 product strategies the whole point of product strategy is to make sure your organization is pursuing the most important problems how can each team decide that how is that even possible for each team to decide that first of all they don't even have visibility to the whole holistic view but even if they did you would get 25 interpretations and you're not going to you know it all they're doing is picking what they want to do as opposed to what are the most important opportunities to pursue so what I think is going on is these are organizations where they have no idea like what really goes on in a product company and what the Strategic context is otherwise these agile coaches would never be recommending this it just is nonsense now the whole idea of an empowered team is they are given a problem solve and the team is able to figure out the best way to solve that and there is a kind of strategy it's Discovery strategy how are you going to do that a delivery strategy how are you going to build and deliver this so there is still other forms of strategy but product strategy comes from the product leaders just like business strategy comes from the senior leaders this the the uh the seite for example are you going to sell internationally that is a business strategy decision that does that doesn't come from the product leaders that comes from the CEO and the head of sales and the head of Finance are we going to sell our products internationally if they decide yes then that probably does impact the product strategy because for example certain kinds of products say products that are very successful in the US can be big failures in China because there are very different uh ecosystems very different culture in China and so you may need a completely different product strategy for that does that make sense makes tottal sense and I you know I've I've written about this as well and I think the the biggest uh point that people Miss is you know they go online and they see they read about the role of product of the product manager and the role of product owner and so on and product strategy is part of that role even in in some of the most sort of well-known uh certification schools and and and whatnot they talk about this and they they don't even address product leader as a you know as a role because in these organizations they don't they don't have these people yeah I it was actually funny because I I wrote a post that went completely viral like 1 million views um type of post that just mentioning the differences that you just highlighted on product leader versus product team and a lot of the comments were uh stuff like why are you inventing a new agile role you know comments like comments like this it just it makes you it makes you really reflect on okay well so that's where you're coming from you just don't don't um they don't even they don't even know the existence of the role and that's yeah that's true brutal reality a lot of the problems with the agile coaches they don't even know what they don't know because they've never worked in a product company before and I really think this is It's unintentional like I don't think these people are are malicious it's just that they they are out there teaching what they think is a process and all they're doing is spreading bad practices so how can an agile coach learn the craft of product to in as a consequence help the organizations more than what they are doing today Marty what what do you think they well first of all commun I mean uh if an agile coach can't actually help the the engineers learn learn how to do something like continuous delivery then I don't see them with much value at all at the minimum they should be able to help the teams with the kind of test and release automation needed to do continuous deployment at a minimum if they can't do that that team might need a real delivery coach to help them with this but uh there are an there are several agile coaches that are experienced Engineers that can help with delivery MH so you want to make sure that your contribution is real there's something real there not just oh we're looking at the Team Dynamics that is not enough and also that's what the managers are doing that is not enough uh and the managers need to be doing that in order to coach their people um so uh the other thing I've recommended to product to Agile coaches is go work at a product company even for few months even if you have to volunteer there not to bring them anything but to learn how product really works uh it's uh and then you can help a lot of others and I would encourage them uh to think of agile back to the core Manifesto principles and and just realize if you're teaching something like safe this is nothing to do with the agile principles nothing toally agree so Marty very very quickly before we wrap up um let's let's just very quickly discuss the future of product management there's you know geni uh debates and Trends and I I know that you have some opinions on on the impact of of of AI on roles like product owner actually um ref the how how good AIS are becoming when it comes to Automation and and basic tasks that product owners would potentially do so what's quickly your your take on on the impact of AI in the world of product management well that I mean that's an hour topic really of the impact of AI because it can certainly help first of all AI helps us in the products we build but you're really asking how can it help us as we build uh and that is how does it impact the roles it's certainly already impacting the engineering roles and it's starting to impact the designer role and I think it'll also impact the product management role starting with the low-lying fruit and I do tell people because I have a lot of friends that in the US it's pretty rare that somebody has called a product owner like that's a European thing because that was meant to be a role not a job so it's a role that a product manager plays but in Europe a lot of people that's all they are is that role and I tell them look just for you and your family uh you should protect yourself you should raise your skills and so that you're not just so easily replaced um I shared with uh I've been sharing this it's even though it's very depressing but a a CEO of a company in Europe that had 200 product owners I met the CEO and the CEO told me that he was pretty convinced that he could remove all 200 product owners and nobody would be sad that they wouldn't miss it that's you do not want to be in a role where the CEO believes that and the truth is it's hard to argue because do we really need that most of the engineers don't think it's needed most of the designers don't think it's needed I think they're right if that's all you have is agile coach trained product owners you could use the money better probably on engineers and designers so that's not good you want to protect yourself so you want to upskill and and that means moving you know building your skills from a product owner to a product manager and and you can do that I mean there's no reason not to I know countless people that have done that and and uh you can even do a lot of it just on your own books can help there's courses you can take but just do it absolutely yeah then and your books can can certainly help and I was just you know generative AI is going to impact other things it already is impacting product strategy sometimes uh for good and sometimes not for good it just depends on people are learning better ways to use things like chat GPT to help them with their job but you know I'm pretty convinced it's going to impact all of us uh and I'm just hoping it's the good way mhm absolutely Marty unfortunately I would talk for hours but we don't have uh more time um I the usually closing question is where can people find you but I mean Marty Kagan most people know where to find you but you are you in a new space that people should know of or are you more active in a particular space that people should know of these days well I've given up on Twitter so I'm not there anymore so it's just LinkedIn is the last social media site standing um and then uh and svg.com that's where we publish all our stuff and um so uh yeah feel free amazing amazing Marty thank you so much for joining us it was a real pleasure talking with you well thanks for inviting me Al Hano good luck all right that was it for today I hope you enjoyed the episode make sure you subscribe to my newsletter so you don't miss out and see you next time [Music]