Moving To The Product Operating Model by Marty Cagan

Are you constantly juggling competing priorities, leaving little time for the big-picture thinking that drives product success? If so, mark your calendar and sign up for our Product Drive Summit where Marty Cagan will share his insights on the product operating model.

In the meantime, this article will give you a sneak peek into his talk regarding the transformative power of the product operating model. Let’s explore:

• Who Marty Cagan is.
• Key insights from Marty Cagan’s book, TRANSFORMED.
• The core dimensions and concepts of the product operating model.

TL;DR

• Marty Cagan has over 20 years of experience helping most companies adopt the product model, founding the Silicon Valley Product Group, and speaking at major conferences.
• Marty Cagan’s book, TRANSFORMED, provides strategies and real-world examples for shifting to an agile, innovative product operating model.
• According to him, there are three critical dimensions to ensuring agile, customer-centric product operations:

1. Product development: Frequent releases and updates allow for responsiveness to customer feedback, proactive problem detection, and maintaining high user satisfaction.
2. Problem-solving: Systematic problem-solving ensures solutions that are valuable, usable, feasible, and viable.
3. Prioritization: Prioritizing problems based on a customer-centric vision and insight-driven strategy.

• Now, let’s explore 5 product concepts of the Product Operating Model:

1. Product culture: The collective mindset focused on customer feedback, innovation, collaboration, and continuous improvement for product excellence.
2. A product strategy: A high-level plan with a clear vision, data-driven decisions, adaptability, and goal alignment to guide product development.
3. A product team: This involves cross-functional teams with autonomy, participative leadership, future focus, shared responsibility, task focus, and aligned purpose.
4. Product discovery: Identifying and implementing top-priority solutions via customer feedback, iterative development, hypothesis validation, and stakeholder collaboration.
5. Product delivery: Leveraging agile practices, quality assurance, continuous delivery, and monitoring to ensure high-quality product releases.

• There are three essential product operating model competencies. They include the Product Managers, Lead Engineers, and Product Designers.
• Discover more about the product operating model and accelerate your product’s growth by attending the Product Drive Summit with Marty Cagan and other experts.

Who is Marty Cagan?

Marty Cagan has been helping companies move to the product operating model (POM) for over 20 years. He served as an executive responsible for defining and building products for some of the most successful companies in the world, including HP Labs, Netscape Communications, and eBay.

Then, he founded the Silicon Valley Product Group to pursue his interests in helping others create successful products through his writing, speaking, advising, and coaching.

As part of his work with SVPG and after his truly impressive case studies, Marty is an invited speaker at major conferences and top companies across the globe—one of them is our Product Drive Summit next October!

Marty Cagan: Moving the product operating model

Marty Cagan is a renowned product management expert and an acclaimed author. His book series include:

• INSPIRED: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love
• EMPOWERED: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products
• TRANSFORMED: Moving to the Product Operating Model

The latter book addresses the challenges and strategies that come from shifting to a product-operating model. It addresses challenges such as overcoming objections from stakeholders or the friction from changing the way you build your product—making it easier to transform your company.

TRANSFORMED is written for those driving change, including senior company leaders, executives, product leaders, and team members who support or depend on product teams. Plus, it’s filled with real-world examples and practical advice from their decades of experience.

3 Dimensions of the product operating model

There are three critical dimensions in the product operating model, and they involve:

How you build the product

Building a product under the product operating model requires frequent releases and updates.

This is because it allows you to stay agile and responsive to customer feedback and market demands—fostering customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Plus, it helps you detect problems before your customers do and address them with proactive support. For instance, if you conduct funnel analysis and detect friction in the onboarding process, you can focus on personalizing your onboarding flow to engage users from the start and increase activation rates.

How you solve problems

Problem-solving is in the daily routine of any product team.

For the sake of operating under the product model, it’s essential to systemize the way you detect problems, communicate them, and solve them. Otherwise, you won’t be able to meet customer expectations—or worse, implement solutions that are technically not feasible or unsustainable.

That said, you must ensure that your solutions are:

• Valuable: It provides tangible benefits to the customer, such as increased sales, higher retention rates, saved time, bigger revenue growth, etc.
• Usable: Removes technical barriers so any customer can find value in your solution. For example, by implementing onboarding guidance to help less technical users leverage your product to its full potential.

• Feasible: The solution must be technically achievable with the available resources and technology.
• Viable: Ensure the solution aligns with the business goals and can be sustained over time.

How you decide which problem to solve

Now, you can’t expect to solve every single problem. You must learn how to prioritize the problems you solve in your company.

To do this, there are two actions you can follow:

• Creating a customer-centric product vision: This means having a clear image of a product that delivers important value to your customers and then prioritizing solving customer problems that can get you closer to that vision.
• Following a data-driven product strategy: It’s essential to leverage user data for continuously improving your product. With analytics tools that enable you to collect both qualitative and quantitative data like Userpilot, you will have actionable insights on what action to take. For example, you can use our NPS response tag to identify common issues among detractors.

5 Product concepts of the product operating model

To fully embrace the product operating model, it’s essential to understand and implement five key product concepts.

These concepts form the foundation of effective product management and drive successful product outcomes. They include:

Product culture

Product culture refers to the collective mindset and behaviors within an organization that prioritizes product excellence.

Creating a product culture involves fostering an environment where everyone is committed to building and improving products that meet customer needs and drive business growth. This involves:

• Customer-focused mindset: Ensuring that all team members prioritize customers in their work.
• Innovation and experimentation: Encouraging teams to explore new ideas, test hypotheses, and learn from failures.
• Collaboration: Promoting strong cross-functional teamwork and open communication between different departments.
• Continuous improvement: Regularly assessing and refining the product design process to enhance value and efficiency.

Product strategy

Product strategy is the high-level plan that outlines the vision, goals, and roadmap for a product. It ensures that every effort put into the development of a product is aligned with the broader business objectives and market demands.

A well-defined product strategy should include:

• Clear product vision: A compelling and easily understood vision that aligns with the company’s overall goals. i.e. “to allow enterprises curate their immense volumes of data, visualize it, and democratize data-driven decisions inside their organizations.”
• Data-driven decisions: Utilizing market research, customer feedback, and performance metrics to inform strategy.
• Adaptability: Regularly updating the strategy to reflect changes in the market, rapidly changing enabling technology, and customer needs. i.e. Integrating the use of AI in your outbound marketing strategy to generate multiple ads you can test.
• Goal alignment: Ensuring that all team members understand and work towards the strategic goals. This, by making clear the responsibilities and tasks of each part of the team and their role toward achieving the goal.

Product teams

Product teams are cross-functional groups that work collaboratively to develop and deliver products.

An empowered product team, as defined by Marty Cagan, is given the autonomy to make decisions and take ownership of their work. This leads to more innovative, agile, and effective solutions as empowered teams are motivated and directly involved in the product’s success.

As a result, these are the different characteristics of successful product teams operating in the product model:

• Participative leadership: Creates an interdependence with empowered product teams who are free to lead and serve others.
• Future focused: Sees change as an opportunity for product growth.
• Shared responsibility: Establishes an environment in which all team members feel responsibility as the manager for team performance.
• Focused on task: Keeps meetings and interactions focused on results.
• Alignment of purpose: Has a sense of common purpose about why the team exists and the function it serves.
• Skill utilization: Applies individual talents and creativity.
• High communication: Creates a climate of trust and open, honest communication.
• Rapid response: Identifies and quickly acts on opportunities.

Product discovery

Product discovery is the process of identifying and validating the right problems to solve and the best solutions to implement.

That said, effective product discovery involves:

• Customer feedback: Regularly engaging with customers to understand their needs, pain points, and preferences.
• Iterative development: Continuously testing and refining ideas through prototypes and MVPs (Minimum Viable Products).
• Hypothesis validation: Testing assumptions and learning quickly whether they hold true or not. For instance, you can use a tool that supports controlled A/B testing for in-app experiences (like Userpilot), and validate if your onboarding process requires an onboarding checklist.

• Collaboration: Involving various stakeholders, including customers, engineers, senior executives, and designers, in the discovery process.

This way, your company can implement solutions that (as we mentioned) are valuable, usable, feasible, and viable.

Product delivery

Product delivery is the process of bringing a product from concept to market. It ensures that the product is deployed on time, works as advertised, and meets quality standards.

Effective product delivery is not only about launching the product successfully but also about continuing to evolve based on user feedback and market changes.

This process involves:

• Agile practices: Utilizing agile methodologies to manage workflows, ensure flexibility, and deliver iterative improvements.
• Quality assurance: Implementing rigorous testing and review processes to maintain high product standards.
• Continuous delivery: Regularly releasing updates and communicating them, for example through in-app announcements.
• Monitoring and feedback: Through using product analytics tools that enable product performance tracking and user feedback in order to guide future improvements.

Essential product operating model competencies

To effectively implement the product operating model, certain competencies are essential.

Each competency holds the responsibility to address different types of risk such as feasibility risks (engineers), usability risks (designers), and value and viability risks (product managers).

These competencies include:

• Product manager: Oversees the product development process, ensuring alignment with the product vision and strategy. Key skills include strategic thinking, customer empathy, and strong communication.
• Lead engineer: Responsible for the technical aspects of product development, ensuring feasibility and quality. Key skills include technical expertise, problem-solving, and leadership.
• Product designer: Focuses on the user experience and interface design, ensuring usability and visual appeal. Key skills include creativity, user research, and design proficiency.

Join Product Summit to learn more about the product operating model

Successful transformations to the product operating model can accelerate your product’s growth by fostering innovation, improving efficiency, and increasing customer satisfaction.

To delve deeper into how to successfully transform your company, join us at the Product Drive Summit, where Marty Cagan and other industry experts will share their insights and experiences. Learn firsthand how to implement these practices and drive your product’s success!