by Marty Cagan | Apr 23, 2020
In my last article I spoke about the concept of an empowered engineer, which I consider the single most important concept for companies that want to move from feature teams to product teams. Overall my sense was that most people understood the points, and many told me...
by Marty Cagan | Apr 22, 2020
It’s no secret that due to the pandemic, many people in many different industries are being furloughed or their companies have shut-down. This has impacted product people as well. Where just a few short months ago, a strong product person had their choice of great...
by Marty Cagan | Apr 20, 2020
During these work-from-home times, I’ve been doing a lot of video-based AMA’s (Ask Me Anything). It gives me a break from my writing, and I enjoy the questions. Every so often I get a question that really makes me think, and that happened recently, and is the...
by Marty Cagan | Apr 13, 2020
Normally the question I focus on in my work and in my writing is “How can we leverage the best practices of the very best companies in order to give ourselves the very best chance for continuous innovation?” While there are many practices that are important and...
by Marty Cagan | Mar 30, 2020
I’ve been spending a good amount of time this past couple of years – and especially the past few weeks – thinking about the root causes of the chasm between the best product companies and the rest. Most of you know that my writing is intended to be very practical and...
by Marty Cagan | Mar 12, 2020
Certainly there are disadvantages to being physically separated from your colleagues, and those are well known, but in this article, I’d like to focus on the potential advantages of working from home (WFH), and encourage you to make the most of this situation. Most...
by Marty Cagan | Mar 4, 2020
We need some way to assign and manage work to product teams, and we want to do this in a way that is empowering and executes on our product strategy. This is the purpose of Team Objectives. Assuming you have embraced the empowered product team model, and you have...
by Marty Cagan | Mar 4, 2020
The companion to empowerment is accountability. Product teams are given the space and time to come up with the solutions to the problems they are assigned, but with that empowerment comes responsibility and accountability. So we need to discuss what happens when a...
by Marty Cagan | Mar 4, 2020
Continuing on our series on team objectives, once product teams have their team objectives for the quarter and are pursuing, active management will still be needed. Much as the product strategy requires ongoing tracking and managing by the product leaders, the team...
by Marty Cagan | Mar 4, 2020
Continuing with our series on Team Objectives, there are several forms of collaboration that are essential, yet often confusing to product organizations as they optimize for team autonomy and empowerment. Shared Objectives The first and most basic form of...
