Review: Marty Cagan's "Transformed: Moving to the Product Operating Model"

After authoring "Inspired" and "Empowered," Marty Cagan said that he heard from many product managers who told him they wanted to change their company's culture to be more product-led, but did not have any authority to do so. Cagan wrote "Transformed" to provide those product managers and their leaders a roadmap on how to do just that.

The book is especially timely for me, as my company is on a mission to more clearly and consistently use the philosophies and methodologies of product management to grow the business. Moving to a culture of product management is an opportunity to be more customer-insight driven (versus opinions and guessing); know what parts of our membership benefit from a product, feature, content, or service (not just everyone); and have and evaluate agreed upon success criteria for every product that can be measured for its contribution to the business goals and customer value.

As a respected authority on product management and founder of the Silicon Valley Product Group (SVPG), Cagan provides clear direction on and a template for how to embed the "Product Operating Model" in a company's culture and mission.

If you don't have time to read the whole book, buy it for Chapter 48, “Keys to Successful Transformation.” It is a high level view of each role in a transformation, starting with the CEO.

Cagan doesn't pull any punches and can come across as dogmatic. But, he's very clear that his dogma is SVPG's roadmap for success and what he looks for when investing time, education, or money in a company.

While Cagan's roadmap isn't for every company or everyone, I suggest that the book is. Like any learning opportunity, you take it all in and keep what works for you.

What works for me and why I like this book is the consistent emphasis on the customer.

"For whatever reason, as soon as you lose your ability to consistently create value--to innovate on behalf of your customers--it is only a matter of time," Cagan writes, "until your competitors are able to offer a more compelling solution to your customers."

Other quotes that caught my attention:

Changing How You Decide Which Problems to Solve

"A strong product company has a compelling product vision and an insight-based product strategy to identify the most critical problems that need to be solved to deliver on the business objectives.

"A couple of important notes:

"First all three of these dimensions-- changing how you build, how you solve problems, and how you decide on which problems to solve--depend on strong product leaders (Leaders of product management, product design, and engineering), and we hope you can start to get a sense of why product leadership is so hard.

"Second, at a high level, you can treat each of these three dimensions as steps in a progression, and indeed this would be one way to approach a company transformation. But, in reality, each of these three dimensions is a spectrum, and you can and should make progress on different dimensions in parallel."

Changing How You Build

"Realize that everything we build has two outputs that could create value: what we make and what we learn. In the project model, we lose most of what we learn."

Empowered Teams with Problems to Solve

"Rather than simply implementing the features desired by the stakeholders, an empowered product team is tasked with coming up with a solution that works for both the customer and the business.

"This means coming up with a solution that is valuable--the customer will decide to buy or use it; usable--the user will be able to figure out how to use it; feasible--your engineers know how to solve with the time, skills, and technology on the team; and viable--the solution will work for your business in terms of constraints in marketing, sales, finance, service, legal, and compliance."

Customer Centric Product Vision

"It’s important to note that the product vision is, first and foremost, about the customer. How will it make the lives of your users and customers better?"

Product Model Competencies

"In prior models, product teams exist to serve the needs of the business or, more accurately, the business leaders.

"But in the product model, product teams exist to solve hard problems for your customers and for your business, in ways your customers love, yet work for the business."

Product Managers, Product Designers, and Engineers

"To discover an effective solution, the team is responsible for addressing four different types of risks:

"1. Value risk. Will the customer buy our solution or choose to use it?

"2. Viability risk. Will this solution work for our business? Is it something we can effectively and legally market, sell, service, fund, and monetize?

"3. Usability risk. Can users easily learn, use, and perceive the value of the solution?

"4. Feasibility risk. Do we know how to build and scale this solution with the staff, time, technology, and data we have?"

Product Model Concepts

"To truly take care of your customers--both in responding to their needs and consistently delivering new value--product teams need to be able to deliver frequent, small, reliable, and decoupled releases that are instrumented and monitored."

Product Teams

"An empowered product team exists to solve problems in ways that your customers love, yet work for your business.

"What makes the team empowered is that they are assigned problems to solve--they might be customer problems or company problems--and it is their job to come up with the best solution to those problems."

Product Delivery

"Waiting weeks or months is simply no longer acceptable for most companies today. Strong product companies need the ability to respond quickly and competently to pressing customer or market needs."

Transformation Techniques

"Depending on the size of the organization working to transform, it can take anywhere from six months to two years to move to the product operating model, and that’s assuming the company is serious about the transformation and it's not just theater."

Driving Up Customer Interaction

"Consider telling each product team with a user-facing experience--customer-facing or employee-facing--that they need to start one-hour product discovery sessions three times per week, every week."

Product Model Dimensions

"…there’s a technique that can be used in any organization to convert a conventional product roadmap into problems to solve with desired outcomes. These are called outcome-based roadmaps (described in chapter 8), and they are often used as a transition tool as companies move to the product model by starting with changing how they solve problems."

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For a quick overview of the book and Cagan's thoughts on product management and many other things, you should check out Lenny's Podcast with Cagan.

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