Product Operating Model Archives

The Product Operating Model at Google – A Critical View

Anti-Patterns, Product Discovery, Product Operating Model, Product Stategy

Marty Kagan and Elias Lieberich, just published an article titled “The Product Model at Google”. It’s a good article that gets many things right, but I think there’s also a more nuanced picture that’s worth talking about. I see Google as an example of a company that used to have one of the best product […]

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Beyond Productivity: Gen-AI’s Deeper Use Cases

Frameworks and Tools, Product Management, Product Operating Model

By now you must have heard an awful lot about how gen-AI will “10X” tech workers’ productivity and massively cut development costs. This promise is music to the ears of executives and tech-eutopians, but currently is not backed by any rigorous research (most of the evidence comes from coding competitions and reported usage — mostly

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The Product Operating Model Explained

Product Operating Model

In his latest book, Transformed, Marty Cagan introduces the term The Product Operating Model (POM) which he defines as “How the best tech-powered companies work …— principles, practices, and competencies ”. I feel that, like Product Discovery, which Cagan also coined, the Product Operating Model is going to be an important and useful concept, but

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Developing a Transformational Vision for AI and Beyond

Product Operating Model, Product Stategy

Everyone’s figuring out their AI strategy now. But a strategy has to be guided by a vision — how the world will be different, for better or for worse, due to AI, and how these changes will affect your target market. Armed with this vision you can choose your part in the future (mission) and

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Why Is Product So Hard?

Product Management, Product Operating Model, Product Stategy

Building great products — ones that deliver high value to the customers and to the company — is extremely hard. This is evident from discussions I hold with product people, who regularly report not being able to create impact. It’s also clear from data: A/B experiment statistics, feature usage data, and startup failure rates, all

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Embracing Uncertainty: A Modern Take On Strategy, Goals, and Roadmaps

Product Operating Model, Product Stategy, Roadmaps and Planning

We all strive for certainty — if we do X, Y will happen. Certainty is comforting; it allows us to operate without fear, doubt, or having to think too much. Many of the processes your company employs, especially strategy, roadmap, and project planning, are meant to create certainty — Here’s what we need to do

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A Culture of Good Decision-Making (Part 2)

Prioritization, Product Operating Model

In part 1 of this article series I discussed the principles high-performing companies use to accelerate and improve the quality of their decisions. In this article I want to give you specific techniques to do the same, including the ACID model, not judging decisions by their results, and publicly killing HiPPOs. This is a long

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A Culture of Good Decision-Making (Part 1)

Product Operating Model

Many organizations struggle with decisions-making: both speed and quality are well below where they need to be. Key contributing factors include: While these challenges are common, slow, bad decisions are not a universal problem. Some organizations are able to make good decisions fast and at scale. In this two-part article series I’ll cover the most

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Who Should Rule the Product?

PM Role and Skills, Product Operating Model

Recently the product sphere had boiled-over over Airbnb removing product managers from product teams and converting them into product marketing managers. The Airbnb transformation may be a one-of (essentially an attempt to adopt the centralist Steve Jobs / Apple model), but the story and the discussion that followed surfaced an age-old debate: who should rule

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Adopting Evidence-Guided Development in Your Org

Product Discovery, Product Operating Model

This is an excerpt from my book, Evidence-Guided: Creating High Impact Products in the Face of Uncertainty. While the chapter references the GIST Model (Goals, Ideas, Steps, Tasks), the methods described can be used broadly. Switching to an evidence-guided mode of work is rarely easy. The people developing the product and influencing it have to

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