The Ledger
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Cagan: Almost all innovative tech products come from domain outsiders
“My evidence for that is just look across our industry, across time, that all the innovative products, almost all of them, came from people and teams that had no real domain experience.”
Almost all innovative products are built by teams without domain expertise
“Look across our industry, across time, at all the innovative products, almost all of them came from people and teams that had no real domain experience.”
Founders who outsource engineering to firms like Accenture are not serious
“When I find a founder that thinks that engineers are somebody you can just do a contract with Accenture or somebody. I'm like, you're not serious about this. Come back. If you decide to get serious.”
Cagan never invests in startups lacking a founder product leader
“I personally never invest in a startup unless at least one of the founders is a proven product leader.”
Startup failure stems from inferior solutions, not a lack of demand
“The issue is rarely demand. The issue normally is the solution that you've come up with is not significantly better than the alternatives that are out there. And if it's not significantly better than the alternatives, people won't switch to your product.”
Startups need 50 to 100 attempts to reach product-market fit
“You will probably need to do between 50 and a hundred attempts before you get to product market fit.”
Product teams can validate or invalidate ideas within hours
“Most of the time we can figure out in hours that this is not right. Hours, sometimes minutes. In fact, it's not unusual to do a dozen iterations in a day.”
Qualitative research should find product flaws, not seek affirmation
“With qualitative feedback, your goal is to find all the things that are wrong with the product. So that's the difference. You're not looking for affirmation, which is what these, you know, naive founders are doing. They're not, you're not doing that. You're ac…”
Marty Cagan will not invest without a proven product leader co-founder
“I personally never invest in a startup unless at least one of the founders is a proven product leader.”
Using engineers only to code yields half their potential value
“If you're just using your engineers to code, you're only getting about half their value.”
Process-driven product leadership is a bigger issue in Europe than the US
“The problematic behaviors that you're describing, which by the way, you are spot on. And I hate to say this cause I absolutely love Europe, but it's a bigger problem in Europe than it is in the U S. And the re the reason is because so many of those people are …”
Feature teams operate as mercenaries, whereas empowered teams own outcomes
“In an empowered team, you are literally giving ownership responsibility to the team. And so that they build those skills. They build that confidence. They build those muscles in a feature team. They're literally just mercenaries doing what they're told.”
Cagan: Take-home tests for hiring product managers are ineffective
“I'm not a fan, by the way, of tests in terms of people will have these assignments. In my experience, they're not very indicative of what you're really looking for. And let me put it this way. I still haven't found that test that I think is any good.”
Great products come from product teams, not individual product managers
“I've never seen a product come from a product manager. I've only seen great products come from product teams.”
Startups must hire product managers when engineering reaches 25 to 30 people
“Realistically, once you get past about 25, 30 engineers, a founder is saying like, I, or the teams are saying, I can't get enough time with the founder.”
Empowered engineers are foundational to top tech companies like Tesla and Apple
“There is nothing more than, more important than empowered engineers. And if you look, you know, if you look at companies like Tesla, SpaceX, Google, Amazon, Stripe, Apple, that's the foundation of every one of those companies, empowered engineers.”
Big Tech success does not guarantee success at new startups
“They get somebody from Amazon, they get somebody from Stripe, somebody that's clearly experienced what good looks like. But then they assume that just because they were successful there, that they're going to be successful in our company. And that's not a true…”
Product teams are ultimately responsible for sales performance
“And the bottom line is the responsibility for the sales is on the product team.”
Writing product narratives forces deep thinking and accelerates execution
“Like Stripe, Amazon, they believe think deeply to really. So for example, the written narrative is a way to force you to really think Think things through and then you're gonna move a lot faster.”
Marc Andreessen is the smartest person Marty Cagan has ever met
“Marc Andreessen is literally the, I think the smartest person I've ever met.”
The essence of product discovery is knowing what you cannot know
“The most important thing is to know what you can't know. And isn't that essentially a lesson in humility, right? It's like you need to know what you can't know, because that is really the essence of product discovery.”
Founders gravitate toward risks they feel comfortable with
“Most founders gravitate to the risks they're more comfortable with.”
Value risk is usually the hardest challenge in product discovery
“The first one is. Is it valuable? In other words, will people buy it or if they've already bought it or if it's a free service, will they choose to use it? That's the value question. Usually that's the hardest one, not always, but usually it's the hardest one.”
Product success rates are not increasing despite faster feature output
“The percentage of companies or products that do better is not really going up.”
Product vision is a startup's primary tool for attracting top talent
“The biggest reason somebody great would join your company is because of your product vision.”
Tesla's product strategy is phenomenal and tied to its financing
“I would say what Tesla has pulled off is nothing short of amazing. Amazing on every level. Just phenomenal. And their product strategy has been a very visible product strategy. They kind of had to because it tied in so closely with the financing strategy.”