The Ledger, every show

“And that's what I think SAFE was trying to do, but it's not working because it's not solving the problems of the product management, and it's not solving that problem of connecting the value Back to the product teams. Instead, it's seen as a role that almost l…”

“When people get trained to be a product owner, it's usually a two-day class where they teach them, hey, this is how you break down a backlog. This is how you do stand-ups with your teams. This is how you think about prioritizing work. This is how you manage yo…”

“What I've seen that doesn't work here is that you are basically making these product owners order takers. They are extremely tactical.”

“There's actually a great story about a water company in the Netherlands, right? And they decided to adopt safe. And this is, this was on the news like a couple months ago. They decided to adopt safe in their IT teams and start working with it. And they're they…”

“Take Scrum away. You still need product management, right? Like product owner doesn't exist without Scrum. That's not a thing, but you still need product managers. And that's why all product owners should be product managers. They should be fundamentally produ…”

“A lot of the people at McKinsey haven't done this before, right? They've never been inside the organization trying to transform it and stay there for a long time. And that's why I'd be really skeptical of who's selling that.”

“You should never be like outsourcing your decision making to a product ops person. That's not the point. Like they're the product manager for the product managers. That's how I think about it, right? So their decisions should be around how do I operationalize …”

“I've met a lot of organizations that think most of their issues are in the training of their people. And 99% of the time I see that it's actually in the way that they're setting their goals and deploying their strategy. Because once you train those people. The…”

“Executives buy SAFE because it is the only framework out there that basically draws them a map and says, plug and play, do this. And that's why everybody's so excited about it because it's the only thing that specifies things to this level.”

“I have not seen SAFE slowing down by any means out there for people adopting it. I see more and more organizations adopting it.”

“I've seen it run by a lot of middle managers, like a transformation run by tons of middle managers. And those are the jobs that are usually in most jeopardy when you start transforming and you have to reskill and you have to figure out what to do. And they don…”

“Every single person I have talked to Who like safe found success with safe. They ended up ripping it up and making it into something else. So I'm like, it's not actually safe by the book.”

“Get rid of these two different titles because it's confusing everybody. I've seen companies... I've seen companies with 47 different titles for product managers.”

“McKinsey made a huge division to do this. And a lot of safe was actually introduced to organizations from McKinsey and from large organizations. Consulting organizations like that.”

“And, like, JIRA does not work for that, right? You need a portfolio tool to be able to roll that up Into something that makes sense.”

“And agile coaches who have never been a product manager before in a well-run company are going to struggle there because they're going to revert back to agile processes and optimizing for things like scrum, but they're not going to do what that role is designe…”

“What I wouldn't hire for that role as a first person is like a data. It's not a database engineer, right? Like that's not what we're doing. We're not like Sequel-ing, like turning things into the right SQL tables. Like we're instead trying to get the info…”

“And we say to a lot of CPOs, especially like high growth companies, like make your first hire just a product ops person to help you get this data out and start looking at it because that helps them with board meetings. It helps them set strategy.”

“It's not. Centralizing user research as a practice. It's helping to scale user research so that we can enable more people to do user research, especially when you get into some of these companies.”

“Try to tell teams that, you know, started with scrum or started with some of these more dogmatic processes. It doesn't serve you. Move on, change it, right? Everything's meant to be iterated on. Everything's meant to be adapted. If it does not work for you do …”

“Capital One is a great example that took their agile transformation and started adding product management on it. And they really turned that around in the card business.”

“Nobody was a product manager who went to that meeting, right? Nobody who wrote the Agile Manifesto was actually a product manager.”

“Capital One just came out and said they got rid of all their Agile roles, all their Scrum roles. They were an early adopter of safe. They don't do it anymore.”

“Product operations does not take away decision making rights from the product manager. It's there to inform them.”

“So we usually see that high growth companies start with business data and insights and make sure that they have, they can actually monitor what they're doing and get the strategic inputs. We see larger companies and enterprises kind of go more towards the proc…”

“They're not project managers. They're not the people who are going to be on top of your developers, like watching them build things, making sure that everything's out on time. That's not their role either. They're not going to handle hard stakeholder conversat…”

“ARR is interesting to me, but it's not as interesting to me as ARR by customer segment, right? It's not as interesting as ARR by product line. It's not as interesting if I take that and then look at it by retention or adoption by product or feature set or adop…”

“And I think for product managers, you still need to be super comfortable with data. Like if you can't read these charts, if you can't see, understand trends, if, you know, and a lot of times too, if you're putting this stuff in Looker or, you know, a BI tool, …”

“I don't have a hard and fast rule on that one, but I would say like if you're at a one-to-one ratio, like you're doing it wrong.”

“Head of product.”

“One of the biggest issues I kind of see with them and product management is at this pivotal scale up phase where they go from, Hey, I found product market fit to I'm ready to scale. One it's hiring a great chief product officer that can help them figure out wh…”

“If your executives and your board are telling you that the person who's communicating those things to them are usually not chief product officer level, right? Like if you are, if your executives don't know what you're doing, that's a big problem. So that's usu…”

“If you're going above ten million dollars in ARR, it's usually when you hit around 20 to 30, you start to bring on a CPO and a high growth company.”

“Where the gaps come between that and becoming an executive is like interfacing with the board, understanding the financial super deeply so that you can Create revenue projections off of what your roadmaps and your products strategy is going to be.”

“And it's not like a product requirements document that's 20 pages. It's like a two pager just explaining what we're doing and why. And that context we usually throw into Google docs or a wiki or something like that, link them all together so that you can go fr…”

“A vision should be concrete enough where people can picture what it will be in their head. It can't be a fluffy, like be the backbone of healthcare, right? Like, what does that mean? I don't get it. So people need to be able to look at a vision and say, I can …”

“Good visions also say what you don't want to do. I love reading a vision that's like, we're not going to be like that. And that to me is so powerful because you're like, oh, okay, we're not going to copy that. Right. We're not going to go after that. Cause you…”

“What I say is it doesn't standardize stuff that only belongs to a team. Like I don't care how a team does their standups. Like you choose how to do that. I'm not going to standardize that, but I do care what format your roadmap comes in. I do care how we make …”

“When I did the transformation at Athena health, we had 365 product managers and they all had different, different titles to product innovation all over the place. So we turn them into product managers. We trained everybody.”

“The head of product operations at Uber and the person who started it, Blake Samick, is a case study in our book, and he also did it at Stripe, and he does it at OpenAI”

“I, you know, I saw with my MBA students at Harvard too, we do a whole class They play a product manager. I had a lot of people opt out of being a product manager at the end of it. They were like, I did not realize it was like that, right? Like I did not realiz…”

“Signs that there are no strategy. Teams are all working like dogs. Like they're working. 80 hours a week. I see this all the time. People are heads down, crunching, crunching, crunching, releasing, releasing, releasing, or sometimes not releasing, but they're …”

“Like when I first started doing this. It was at Athena Health and we had 350 product managers and we had to make sure they weren't bothering the people at the same hospital over and over and over again, because they were when we came in and we said, wow, okay,…”