Recap of Marty’s Recent Discussion on Product Operating Models

I wanted to share my takes on Marty’s recent talk at the just product 2023 event organised by Product Masterclass. His presentation was truly enlightening, and I’m eagerly anticipating his upcoming book, ‘Transformed.’

Introducing the Product Operating Model

Marty underscored that top-tier product companies adhere to common principles in product development, despite the diversity of their organisational cultures.

He introduced the concept of the ‘product operating model’ as a conceptual model for how companies strategise, problem-solve, and make decisions regarding their products. For instance, he referenced the Spotify model, demonstrating that the name itself doesn’t hold the secret but rather the principles underlying it. Marty highlighted the importance of understanding these principles. Many companies want to adopt the product model but struggle with transformation due to various challenges.

The Three Dimensions of the Product Model

Marty divided the product operating model into three dimensions:

1. How You Build: Emphasising continuous delivery and instrumentation.
2. How You Solve Problems: Focusing on product discovery and addressing the four risks (value, usability, feasibility, and viability) to drive innovation.
3. How You Decide Which Problems to Solve: Ensuring the selection of most impactful opportunities and addressing critical business threats, highlighting the importance of product strategy.

Product Model Competencies

Marty stressed the significance of specific competencies within product teams, including product managers, product designers, engineers, and product leaders.

Product Model Competencies

• Product Manager Role: Detailed discussion about the responsibilities of product managers, with a focus on delivering value and ensuring viability.
• Product Designer Role: Highlighting the role of product designers in enhancing usability and user experience.
• Engineering Role: Emphasising the importance of engineers, particularly tech leads, in delivering and ensuring the feasibility of products. They play a key role in product model!
• Product Leaders: Discussing the role of leaders in product management, design, and engineering. Two primary responsibilities of product leaders are coaching (a better way of teaching) team members to develop skills and providing strategic context to enable good decision-making.

Key Product Model Concepts and Principles

Product Strategy:

Essential for innovation, it involves focusing on a few impactful initiatives. There are four principles of product strategy:

• Focus: Maintaining a singular focus can be challenging, but it’s essential to ensure that your 20 product teams align with a unified product strategy.
• Powered by Insights: Insights can originate from various sources such as customers, data, technology, and markets. These insights provide us with valuable guidance on the levers we can pull to drive progress.
• Transparency: A key takeaway here is the importance of transparency. It’s crucial to avoid a mere shift of power from one centre (stakeholders) to another (product teams). Transparency ensures that stakeholders comprehend that decisions aren’t driven by political agendas but by well-founded reasons.
• Manage the Risks: Identifying a critical problem is just the beginning; it doesn’t guarantee an immediate solution. Recognize that tackling challenges often involves navigating a multitude of risks. In the realm of product strategy, it’s akin to strategically placing a series of bets.

Product Strategy from Marty’s Keynotes

Product Team

Empowered Product Teams: These teams are cross-functional, small, durable, and accountable for their work. They take ownership of problems to solve, deliver results, and collaborate effectively.

the Product model is about pushing decisions down to the most appropriate product team — those closest to the relevant customers and the relevant technology.

Empowered Product Teams from Marty’s Keynotes

There are four principles of an empowered product teams:

• Empowered with Problems to Solve: The team is given the authority to identify problems and determine the most effective solutions.
• Accountable for Results: The team bears the responsibility for achieving results.
• Sense of ownership: It’s essential for the team to cultivate a strong sense of ownership, although cultural differences exist between Silicon Valley companies and other regions. In some Silicon Valley companies, product managers or teams are often granted equity options as a means to make them genuine stakeholders in the product’s success. One of the things to be feared most is that the teams where the employees don’t care.
• Collaboration: Working together with engineers and designers to come up with solutions that are worthy building. Sometimes you might even need to convince your engineers the products worthy building.

Product Discovery:

the essence of product discovery is to be able to very quickly and inexpensively determine whether a given product idea is worth building.

Product Discovery from Marty’s Keynotes

A rapid and cost-effective process to evaluate product ideas. Principles include minimising waste, addressing product risks continuously, embracing rapid experimentation, and testing ideas responsibly.

Product Delivery

Product delivery refers to how products are built, tested, and deployed. Marty emphasises the importance of the principles behind: small, frequent, uncoupled releases, instrumentation, and monitoring.

Product Delivery from Marty’s Keynotes

• Monitoring: This entails monitoring at multiple levels, from the AWS infrastructure to the application itself. To ensure the effectiveness of new solutions, it’s essential to have the necessary infrastructure in place for definitive assessment.
• Small, Frequent, Uncoupled releases
• Instrumentation: we got to know what is happening all the time
• Monitoring: This entails monitoring at multiple levels, from the AWS infrastructure to the application itself. To ensure the effectiveness of new solutions, it’s essential to have the necessary infrastructure in place. So, we can definitively know our new solutions solves the problem for real.

Product Culture

A strong product culture values principles over processes, emphasises trust over control, prioritises innovation over predictability, and values learning over failure.

What Does Transformation Really Mean?

It is about moving to those competencies, moving to those dimensions.

Overall, Marty’s talk emphasised the importance of these concepts and nurturing a product-focused culture for successful product management and innovation.”

Q&A session

Marty also highlights the significance of product sense or “gut feel” in product management and how it can be developed over time through deep immersion with customers, data, and industry trends.

Marty acknowledges that B2B (business-to-business) enterprises may encounter obstacles due to extended sales cycles and recommends incorporating consumer-oriented approaches to enhance product expertise. Nevertheless, he highlights that when a B2B company commits to such a transformation, it typically encounters fewer hurdles than a B2C company, especially when the CEO is fully onboard with the transition.

Marty also recommended the book ‘Accelerate’ by Jez Humble and ‘Steve jobs: the lost interview’. I watched the interview again, In the interview, Steve Jobs notably criticised the excessive obsession of people with processes while emphasising that the content itself holds far greater significance.

References

1. Here is the keynote link. You can find other speakers’ keynotes as well.
2. Steve Jobs The Lost interview