How the best leaders empower their product teams and set them up for success.

Marty Cagan

|

Partner

of

Silicon Valley Product Group
EP
131
Marty Cagan
Marty Cagan

Episode Summary

Today on the show we have Marty Cagan, partner at Silicon Valley Product Group, and author of INSPIRED: How To Create Tech Products Customers Love and Co-author of newly published EMPOWERED: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products.

In this episode we talk about the tremendous gap between how the best companies operate and how the rest work, what they do differently and why, and then dove into Marty’s new book EMPOWERED and the motivation behind it. 

We also discussed how the best leaders empower their teams, how real product discovery and product work happens, and then talked about how alignment is a consequence of a good product strategy.


Genius Makers by Cade Metz

Mentioned Resources

Highlights

Time

The tremendous chasm between how the best companies work and how the rest work. 00:02:20
EMPOWERED: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products. 00:06:25
What the best leaders do to empower their teams. 00:09:31
How the best companies today do product discovery and product work. 00:13:10
Alignment is a consequence of a good holistic product strategy. 00:18:55
OKR’s only work with empowered teams. 00:21:23

Transcription

[00:00:49] Andrew Michael: hey, Marty. Welcome. 

[00:01:36] Marty Cagan: Oh, thanks very much. Thanks for inviting me, Andrew. 

[00:01:38] Andrew Michael: It's great to have you for the listeners. Marty is a partner of Silicon valley product group who help companies with product organization, vision strategy, discovery, delivery, and process by providing advisory consulting and training services.

Marty is also the author of inspired and number one bestseller on how to create products. Your customers love as well as most recently, the [00:02:00] author of Empowered. Marty started his career as a software engineer at HP and went on to serve as the VP of product to companies like Netscape and eBay. So my first question for you, my is after a long career in software and product development, what has been the single biggest shift you have noticed since starting your career in product?

[00:02:20] Marty Cagan: Oh boy, that's a big question. Actually. What's the biggest shift. It's complicated because we really have two worlds out there in the product world. We have how the best companies work and how the rest work. And unfortunately, I would argue the best companies are maybe five or 10% of the companies there.

So maybe the biggest shift I've seen is the gap that's been growing. Between those two, when I first started my career, there, wasn't that big a gap between the best and the rest today. There's a massive gap between the best in the rest. And that of course is very counterintuitive. You think [00:03:00] that you think that the profit motive alone would motivate more companies to work like the best, but there's a lot of reasons why they don't.

And so today you see a tremendous chasm. Between how the best work and how the rest work. And I think that's probably the biggest, I don't know if it's the biggest, but it's certainly the most frustrating change. 

[00:03:23] Andrew Michael: And it's interesting. It's what do you think is causing this? Do you think it's just use the sheer number of companies now competing in the market versus maybe back like 5, 10, 15 years ago when you just had a limited set of companies working on product, or do you think there's other factors that are causing this.

[00:03:39] Marty Cagan: I know there's many factors for sure, but it is true that, 20, 30 years ago there was a pretty small bubble for technology. There was C it was Silicon valley, of course, with San Francisco, with Seattle and some, a little bit in New York and now it's it and probably, 90% of the real innovative companies were coming out of [00:04:00] their.

Now that's not true at all. Of course, it's it's truly global. And that's actually one of my favorite. Changes because I love the fact cause it was already, they were running out of room and sit in San Francisco anyway. So I love that it's more diverse, but on the other hand, what we see and I think this is probably the largest contributor to that gap I was just talking about is so many people, starting companies have never.

Seen it done. They've never worked at a good company before. They never seen it. All they know is, what do they know? Maybe something they learned in business school, or maybe something they read about in an article or on a book. And so they've never experienced it. And so they more of the old mistakes being made now than ever before.

[00:04:51] Andrew Michael: Yeah, I can totally relate to that as well. I self I grew up in South Africa. I'd been living in Cyprus for the last 18, 19 years now. And [00:05:00] when you don't have access to the network to the environment to learn. You've forced to actually leave and to put yourself in places into environments.

And previous with companies like I left Cyprus to stay in Copenhagen for a while to stay in Boulder, Colorado for a while, really religious to try and immerse myself in different communities where you could find these good companies doing great things. But if you're not, you just, you don't know what you don't know.

It, it really is an eye-opener when you see a company doing product. 

[00:05:27] Marty Cagan: That's true. And I think the biggest reason we've seen success spread around the world is so many of my friends that had, I'd worked with for years in Silicon valley, they went back to India. They went back to China, they went back to Germany, back to.

England. And they brought what they learned with them and they created amazing companies. So today it's really not limited, but you're right. And I do have a lot of sympathy for those leaders that have never been exposed. To the option to the alternative, [00:06:00] 

[00:06:00] Andrew Michael: for sure. Cause I don't think it's for lack of trying or lack of one for most people, it's more just not knowing what you don't know.

Very cool. Talk to us a little bit about the new book cover. See, like we, we can talk about inspired four hours because I think that's a number one best seller, but I'm interested now a little bit more, obviously I mentioned too that I just haven't got halfway through the book now empowered, what was the motivation to, to write this? We'll co-author the second book now. And maybe just give us a quick, 

[00:06:25] Marty Cagan: Yeah. What motivated empowered was actually inspired the book inspired and sounds like you're familiar with inspired and it of course speaks right to the topic of retention because of course inspired.

If you create a product or customers love, you're going to be in a much better position in terms of retention than a product that people really don't love. And of course we see that all the time and that is so my, the first book inspired was meant to really share the techniques. A good companies had figured out in order to create a product that people really do want to keep buying every [00:07:00] year.

But what I found was the techniques for the teams. Spread especially with the second edition of inspired, it got more of a global readership and they spread all over the world. But what happened was the leaders in those companies didn't know how to set up an organization. So the teams like that can work, do good work.

And so I started hearing from people literally. Engineers designers in random parts of the world that said, we want to work like this, but our management won't let us. And of course that was crazy to me. I didn't understand why not? Like literally you don't want to work like the most valuable companies in the world.

Th that not reason enough, but I started talking to these people in many cases, I'd started visiting them and, understanding what was going on. And I realized, like we talked about before they had never seen it done well. They have no idea. In fact, the [00:08:00] closest they'd seen to anything is what in the U S we call it in, in the rest of the world, it just means whatever technology, but in, in Silicon valley, it is not what we do in the tech product company.

It is what you do in a bank or something where you just hire a bunch of rent to developers to build whatever. Garbage, some stakeholders ask for. And so that's all they know. And so they say then we're going to build like that. And that of course is a recipe for failure. So anyway, I realized.

It's not enough to share the techniques of what good teams do I needed to share the techniques of what good leaders do and that's. So that was the motivation for empowered. I had no desire for another three-year project to write a book, but but I realized it really was needed. And yeah, that's what empowered is for leaders of engineering design product, and the leaders of the [00:09:00] companies Yeah, it's off to a pretty good start.

And I hear all the time from CEOs that tell me now they understand this is what they want to do. They just didn't know what to call it. They didn't know how to work, but they knew they wanted to work like Google. They knew they wanted to work like Amazon. They just didn't know what that meant. 

[00:09:19] Andrew Michael: Yeah.

What does that mean? Maybe give us like a couple of points, like some of the companies that you're seeing and leaders themselves, like really effectively building their companies and empowering the product teams. What are they doing? 

[00:09:31] Marty Cagan: It's almost where to start. The big takeaway is that it's a very different model from top to bottom, it's a very different model.

Some of the things I often share with the CEOs when they just don't yet appreciate how different it is. I say, look, today, you're outsourcing most of your engineers. That's you would never do that at a good product company. I would tell them that, a good product company would no sooner outsource their CEO.

Then they would outsource their [00:10:00] engineers and they're like, okay, I don't understand why. And I said look at every innovative product that you love. Let's look at your iPhone. Let's look at your ex Alexa device. Let's look at your Peloton. Let's look at Stripe. Let's look at slack. Any of these.

Who do you think invented these things? It was the engineers. Do you think that happens if you've outsourced your engineer? First of all, like you've got to have a very different understanding of engineering. Plus your, when you talk about technology, I tell them, you talk about it like a cost center.

You're trying to reduce costs. That's not technology, a good product company. They view technology as a profit center. It's a completely different perspective, a completely different model. And I explained to them, it goes way beyond design and product and engineering. It goes, it hits, it impacts finance, HR, sales, marketing, all of this.

Usually I miss the course I would normally do this in a, over [00:11:00] dinner with the founders, can't do that for awhile. I'm looking forward to get back, but it doesn't take too long before they realize, oh my gosh, all right, this is a very different model. It's a very different way of working and that's what we need to get them to understand once they understand how different it is, then they can talk about how do I change?

[00:11:20] Andrew Michael: And I love the point of job that you make in terms of the outsourcing model, because this is something like you hear extremely often. And ultimately if you're building a technology company and you're outsourcing your technology are you really building a company? It has never made sense to me.

This is one, I think you can move foster maybe without sourcing, but I think every single time I've tried it, I could never ends up working out well, because I think one it's like a, you don't have the core competency in house to be able to work with you. But secondly, if you're outsourcing. They're not really motivated to solve the problems, like the way you are.

They're not really invested or interested or intrigued. So I think there's just a number of issues when it comes to it. 

[00:11:56] Marty Cagan: And even if you got very lucky and they were [00:12:00] motivated, they're not in a position to do that. They're not even invited to. Party right where those things are figured out. They're not in the room when the roadmaps are conceived, they are just literally there as mercenaries.

So it's really set up to fail when it comes to innovation and it doesn't go faster at all, and it doesn't save money at all. This is a very common misunderstandings, but. Like I said, the diff at the beginning, the difference between the best and the rest, this is not a small difference. 

[00:12:33] Andrew Michael: Yeah, absolutely.

One of the things like I was listening to some, because I've got the book notable is that, and it's also been thinking like myself into new with the company. Now that we're building, is it often than not? When it comes to product, we get sucked into this motion of just managing the backlog doing our daily scrums and then shipping and not really doing much product work really like focusing on the discovery, understanding the customer's pain points and how build.

So [00:13:00] how some of the good companies out there doing this effectively, how are they managing the time and how are they empowering their teams to actually do product discovery? 

[00:13:10] Marty Cagan: Yeah. And what you're describing is not even product management, even though they call it that it's project management. That's what that is.

It's the product owner role on an agile team. It's not a product manager. This is not really an issue so much in it's not, when I point out to friends in good product companies, that this is what's going on, they can't believe it. They've never heard of this, but in a lot of the world, especially Europe That's what they think.

They think that's what a product job is. And really the root of that is because they're being taught. . by coaches, agile instructors that have never done the job. All they know is the process. And they're confusing the process with the job. And this has caused serious problem across the, across Europe, in terms of [00:14:00] innovation, they are.

Really been struggling because of this. And I've been calling this out increasingly I wrote an article recently called the CSPO pathology. This is the certified scrum product owner pathology. In other words, why so many products fail? Because of those people it's they don't know what they're doing.

They don't know what they're teaching. They've never done it before. So it's, we call that the blind leading the blind and that is that's right off the bat. So this is another one of those big differences between how the best in the rest work. The job fundamentally is different. You said, how do they empower the team?

The truth is in most companies like that, they don't empower. They are, they're not meant to be empowered. They're meant to just code. So the product owner there is prioritize the backlog, the design. Makes it pretty makes it follow the company style guide from the engineers. The first time they see the ideas it's sprint planning and they're just [00:15:00] there to code that's it.

So that is the opposite of what a good company does. Literally the polar opposite of what a good company does. So that's back to, okay, we need the company to take a much different perspective on this. We need to, instead of giving these team roadmaps of features to build, we need to give them problems to solve.

And then what empowerment means is they. Figure out the best way to solve those problems, not just the best way to code, but the best way to solve the problem. And that's what a true that's what a real product team does. They combined product skills, design skills, engineering skills to solve hard problems in ways that the customers love that work for our business.

We can sustain a business. 

[00:15:46] Andrew Michael: Yeah, I think this is like one of those areas. I think maybe early on in my career as well, I made a similar mistake was with just trying to prepare a backlog, bring the ideas and this is what we need to execute. Some definitely been guilty of in the past, but I can't remember.

[00:16:00] It was like, Maybe eight, nine years ago, I was somewhere and someone said to me what do you mean you don't bring engineers into the brainstorming sessions? Like it's literally their job all day, every day to solve like hard problems, like coming up with unique solutions to these problems. And you're not bringing them into the sessions.

You're literally living your best assets on the table by not involving them in the process earlier, not bringing them in. And there was like an aha moment for me like early on in my career as well. It definitely see how this comes into empowerment and it's not about telling people what to do.

Like it's give them a problem and let them figure it out that that's what they enjoy doing. That's what they love doing. And that's, what's gonna give you the best results. 

[00:16:39] Marty Cagan: Yeah, another really good company I haven't mentioned yet. Of course, is Netflix. And they like to, they have a mantra in the company, which is lead with context, not control.

And the idea is, instead of control is telling teams, this is what you need to build. Context is this is the problem we have. This is our strategy. This is our partner. [00:17:00] But you have to figure out the best solution to this in the course, the premise here of all good companies, there was a great quote from Steve jobs before he died at apple, we don't hire all these smart engineers in order to tell them what to do.

We hire them to show us what's possible. And the premises, the engineers, like your friend told you if your engineers are working with the enabling technology every single day. So it puts them in the best position to see what's just now possible. If you give an engineer like that, the context they need, that's when the magic happens.

And the irony to me is how few companies do that. 

[00:17:39] Andrew Michael: Yeah, definitely. So it sounds like this is like a really great time for the book as well. And I definitely see like you singled out Europe as well as the mistakes happening here is what. Living in Europe. I definitely do see this like trend happening and having lived on both sides in the U S and it definitely is a different environment.

And like early on, I [00:18:00] went to an accelerator program out in Copenhagen. I went to accelerator program out in Boulder, Colorado. Just like the speakers that came to speak to the mindset that they came to the product, like the way you're talking about startups thing was like, it was mind-blowingly different.

It wasn't like, I remember just when we arrived in Boulder, Colorado with three co-founders back then, and we were just like where have we come? Sort of thing, being in that environment for us was like critical to getting like the knowledge and understanding. I wanted to touch a little bit on.

When it comes to churn and retention, so often we talk about alignment, being critical to being able to solve for charity intention and not just through the product org, but through the entire company. And what are some of the areas we're using like really good product company, a product teams aligning with the company as goals and how are they going about tackling these challenges together as.

[00:18:55] Marty Cagan: Yeah, big topic for sure. Alignment is absolutely critical, but it's [00:19:00] more of a consequence of a good holistic product strategy. And of course, so many people you can see there's no alignment in their company at all, because what they're really doing is chasing a hundred different things.

And the chances of those hundred different things, taking you all in the same direction. Almost nil. So what in a good company, of course, it's a very different model. They have a product strategy that is all insert in service of achieving a product vision. So it we start with a business goal.

We get into product vision. The product strategy though, is how we're going, which was it's number one. What problems do we need to solve in order to deliver on that? And at the same time, meet the needs of the business as we go. That's where the problems to solve actually come from that, we're going to give to the product teams, if you do this holistic product strategy on talking about alignment is easy.

Alignment is [00:20:00] natural. Every team is doing something for a purpose to get us to this whole accomplish these goals. And in fact, in most companies that are still working on product market fit Retention is that's like everybody needs to be focused on that. We're not, that's one of our favorite ways to know if we really have product market fit is retention.

So we need everybody aligned around that goal. Again, if you just tell everybody here's a bunch of features to build, they're all randomly going in many different directions, but if. If you've got a strong product teams, all working, we say highly aligned, but loosely coupled you're gonna make a much bigger impact on those goals like retention.

[00:20:45] Andrew Michael: Absolutely. And you talked a little bit about setting these goals and. Taking a step back looking at sort of the overall company strategy. And from that, like looking at what the product strategy needs to look like, what problems need to be solved. What sort of frameworks are you seeing [00:21:00] companies align around?

Is it okay, ours? Are there any other sort of frameworks that you're seeing some of the best companies using really to align their teams? What may be like, make sense for different stages of companies that you've seen. So you mentioned like early stage companies still seeking product market fit, versus maybe some of the larger companies co-ops like eBay and so forth.

Like what good frameworks can teams implement at the different stages for them to get this. 

[00:21:23] Marty Cagan: The first thing I tell people is don't overly focus on frameworks. There's mostly a lot of scams going on. People it's that silver bullet thing, they try to tell you this is going to do it.

And that, and I think you feel the same way I do about that. The there is a technique that works for. Early stage startup to huge companies that is very much about alignment and that is the OKR technique, but the main reason the OKR techniques. Is not helpful for the vast majority of companies is because the OKR technique was created around the empowered [00:22:00] model.

But most companies don't use that model. Like I said, most companies are not the best. They're the rest. And they have a very mercenary model and the whole idea of. Don't work with that. But if you've got the empowered, if you've got empowered product teams, okay. Ours are very much first and foremost, they're an empowerment tool.

They are designed to give teams problems to solve rather than features to build. But beyond that, the next big benefit is it's an alignment tool to make sure we're all. For example, let's say. Let's just say we're working on retention and we've got a marketing organization is out there recruiting pretty much anybody that they can find.

On the other hand, we got a product organization trying to make the people that actually come through. Happy and love the product. If the organization is not aligned, that's going to just be a mess. [00:23:00] Marketing is going to deliver based on one sort of narrow view of costs. And the product is going to like, say, what do we do with all we're getting all the wrong people here.

The people we need are these people, not those people. And we're out of alignment. On the other hand, if our goal. Yeah, we need to reduce retention where we have a product strategy here and we need to make sure we're recruiting where, into the funnel, the right people that we can convert into happy, long, long time customers.

So that's an example where you really need that alignment. 

[00:23:40] Andrew Michael: Yeah, and I definitely see how, okay. I was failing a where you don't have this empowered model and you're not empowering your team. Because definitely I've seen them like work previously in companies are really effective where they had a really strong empowerment culture and it was really up to the team these are the main three challenges for the company for this next year. It's up to [00:24:00] you and your teams, not to figure out like how your team is going to contribute to this and how are we going to work together. And I think for me, this was like the single biggest. Shift. I noticed the previous company at Hotjar where churn and retention really started making big improvements was one too early.

Started like having the strong alignment as a company. And you mentioned a few examples marketing. Throwing leads through the funnel and then product on the other end, looking like who we got. You're like sales, trying to close deals because the incentives are aligned wrong with closing a deal, not retaining a customer.

And, but when you have this really strong alignment from the top down and this empowerment motorcycle, everybody knows like this is the number one goal. These are the two things that we absolutely need to achieve. And being able to rally around that really. It's an amazing feeling. I think when you get this motion working and up and running and absolutely.

I think for me highly recommended. 

[00:24:51] Marty Cagan: Maybe there's one other thing. Let me add if I could to this. Cause this is something that a lot of companies don't understand. [00:25:00] They think they can, they know they need a highly aligned organization. Of course the, that's not that hard to understand that they need it, but what they don't understand.

Is the role of their leaders in accomplishing that they think they can just say some metrics to the teams and they'll be fine. And that's not how it works with all the highly aligned organizations have very actively involved leaders and managers. They are making sure that teams are highly aligned.

Easy to say at a high level, much harder to do in practice because in practice there will be many conflicts. There will be many confusions. We'll find that this KPI gets better, but hurts this other KPI. We need to resolve these things. And unless you have managers that are actively involved in ensuring this alignment doesn't happen.

[00:25:58] Andrew Michael: Okay. [00:26:00] Yep. Definitely see that. And I think when you mentioned terms of metrics and like how definitely across the organization one can impact the other it definitely is a point of conflict when you start impacting other teams metrics and trying to achieve a common goal. The. Next thing I wanted to ask you is let's imagine a hypothetical scenario now that you joined a new company and you arrive and churn and retention is not doing great at this company. And the CEO comes to you and says, same idea. Like we really need to turn things around. We need to do it fast as well. We have 90 days, you're in charge and you need to try and turn things around. The trick is you're not going to go and say, I come to speak to customers, understand what their biggest problem is and their pain points.

And then I'm going to start from there. You're going to go with something that you've seen, been really effective in the past, maybe their previous company or previous consulting environment, and just run with that playbook. What would be the one [00:27:00] thing that you would want to try, introduce the company to try and reduce churn fast.

[00:27:03] Marty Cagan: Ironically, the one thing I'd probably would immediately turn to in this scenario, this hypothetical scenario is talking to the customers. So for example, I meet so many companies like I like you. Most of them are struggling with churn. Churn is just the symptom, right? It's the proof point that you have not got the product, right?

So they know that the product's not right. And at least almost everybody I talk to, they are good at the data they under they're collecting the analytics. So they understand this. But what I try to explain to them is that the analytics will tell you what's happening, but it can't really tell you why. And so I usually, if I'm and I will admit.

I'm not a believer in just everybody do this. It's I like to dig deeper because every company really does have [00:28:00] differences. But if you are looking for a principal, it would be this. I tell them, all right. You've got people leaving every day. When's the last time you actually talk to those people that left to really understand why they've left.

I can't believe how little this actually happens and companies that are struggling and I'm like get going, and they're confused. They think we would need to talk to a thousand of them to have statistically significant results. And I'm like, you're not trying to get statistically.

You're trying to learn what is wrong with your product. Just get. get on a zoom call every day with a half a dozen people who have left the service and talk to them about their experience. It's really not rocket science, but talk to them about their experience. Now, obviously you have to be careful not to guardrail and just jump to the last thing you heard, because you're looking for patterns.

You're looking for the broader picture, [00:29:00] but. It's amazing to me, how many people don't take advantage of this very simple technique of talking to your customers about why they left. And I find it incredibly valuable and always useful, and very often leads to the insight that really fixes this problem.

[00:29:21] Andrew Michael: Yep. For sure. I think definitely in the early stages while you can get carried away and over optimize on metrics, but definitely in the early days, talking about statistical significance, most of the time you don't really have the data points to be able to get that anyway. And I think, again, this is something I was guilty of in the previous startup, where we had like over engineered our metrics and analytics.

We had every metric under the sun, we had an amazing set up data warehouse and so on. We just didn't have the stickiness, then we didn't, like you say, bother to actually get on the phone and speak to people and ask them, like, why were you leaving? This time around? It's like the complete opposite.

It's just like whoever comes in let's get an onboarding call, let's have [00:30:00] a discussion. That's and just having these conversations. A million times more impactful and powerful than just looking at an analytics or dashboard or metrics. And, eh, it has its time and place. But if you don't have the watch with the why you like yourself, I think a you totally missing out on that full picture and you make decisions blind as well at the end of the day.

What's one thing you know today about churn and retention that you wish you knew when you got started with your.

[00:30:28] Marty Cagan: Oh man. There's so many things you have to realize. I started my career a really long time ago. I was, it was before the internet. It was during the PC time and products were very, they were, this was way before agile. These were like 12 to 18 month product efforts and all the problems that come with that, it was so much harder to learn.

First of all, you had to wait so long before you got any feedback on your products. And I'd say the most fundamental thing that's [00:31:00] really changed is today we get feedback before we build the products, not after we build the products and that just changes everything. And and I think the success.

Is absolutely a function of that. You need to make sure that you've got a solution that's valuable, usable, feasible, viable before you write a line of code. And in when I started my career, Oh, people didn't really know how to do that. There were a few places that were starting to, but as a general rule know today much, much better.

And we have so many tools and techniques to do this. Yeah, I, I, a friend of mine actually just his name's Ken Norton, you might've heard with him. He's a long time Googler who now is a. He advises product leaders and product teams. And one of the companies he's worked with this slack and he shared a terrific article just recently about, because many of you, many of us use [00:32:00] slack and you might've seen, they did a pretty important new capability recently called huddles, which is more around trying to get that personal interpersonal dynamic that we lost very much when we.

When the pandemic happened anyway, so it was super worthy problem. Very hard problem. And he talked about how the product team did the product discovery work to do that, how they prototyped, how they tested, how they learned, how they iterated. And I just and I hadn't seen that example and I read it and I'm like, that's abuse.

That's why slack is doing so well. That's what you look for. In a good product team right there. And it's a good summary of it. And he's, he's written lots of good articles. I would encourage your, your listeners to check them out. 

[00:32:47] Andrew Michael: Yeah, absolutely. We'll find that to leave those in the show notes for sure.

I think sounds super interesting and definitely slack is. Top on the list. I'd say for me, like top five product a it's unbelievable the way they execute. And I think it's all around though [00:33:00] with slack. It's not just the product itself. It's like from the marketing to the copywriting, to the microcopy just the whole team is on point.

It's I think around, 

[00:33:07] Marty Cagan: I would argue. You're seeing the benefit of the alignment we were talking about before, right? When a company's got a good strategy when they're highly aligned, when they have good leaders, that's what everything contributes. And the impact is, that whole one plus one is greater than two.

That's what happens when you're highly aligned. 

[00:33:28] Andrew Michael: Absolutely. Marty it's been a pleasure chatting to you today. I see we're running up on time. I want to say, is there any final thoughts you want to leave the listeners with? Like how can they keep up to speed with the work? What should they be paying attention to?

[00:33:41] Marty Cagan: I continue to write articles on product topics that I see all of them one way or another, I would say, contribute to reducing churn contribute to retention because that's all my thing is all about better products. Yeah. And that's all published@svpg.com, but, I think.

[00:34:00] Focusing on creating great products is what it's all about now. And that's a lot harder than it sounds obviously, coming up with something that your customers actually love enough to buy and find value enough to buy, but also can sustain a business. This, but a lot of people don't, it's hard to do.

It's very hard to do. And a lot of people make the mistake of trying to make it sound easy, but I don't think that's fair to anybody. It's not easy. It takes a lot of work, but I think anybody who's working on that quest it's good thing. And hopefully the people that are listening to you are getting better at that.

[00:34:36] Andrew Michael: Absolutely. Thank you so much for the listeners as well. We'll definitely add all the show notes from audio, check out the new book empowered. And if you haven't read inspired yet to grab a copy of that too. Absolutely. Some golden nuggets in that book can I'm sore and you're halfway through mine.

I'm looking forward to finishing it off. So Marty, thanks so much for joining today. I really appreciate the time and it was great getting to, to learn from you. 

[00:34:58] Marty Cagan: Thanks very much for inviting [00:35:00] me, Andrew. Appreciate it. Cheers. 

[u again next week.[00:36:00] 

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Marty Cagan
Marty Cagan
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The show

My name is Andrew Michael and I started CHURN.FM, as I was tired of hearing stories about some magical silver bullet that solved churn for company X.

In this podcast, you will hear from founders and subscription economy pros working in product, marketing, customer success, support, and operations roles across different stages of company growth, who are taking a systematic approach to increase retention and engagement within their organizations.

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