Marty Cagan’s Transformed: A Guide to Product Operating Model Success

Marty Cagan, Founder of the Silicon Valley Product Group, has done it again. His new book, Transformed: Moving to the Product Operating Model, is a fantastic overview of the work that I’d been doing at Singlewire Software over the past few years to move them to a product operating model. In Transformed, Cagan candidly talks about the process of transforming an organization from a legacy, feature or sales-driven org to the product operating model. If you liked his first two books, Inspired and Empowered, you’ll love this one. It wraps everything up into a nice present with a bow on top. Here are a few of the gems you’ll find in Marty Cagan’s Transformed.

Candid Discussion About What Won’t Work

I can tell that Cagan’s experiences over time have made him more confident in his advice. In Transformed, he comes out with some specific things that he knows won’t work. For example, if Cagan had published this book a couple of years ago, I might have left Singlewire sooner. I’d been working for years to build a competent product and UX team, only to hit a wall again and again along the way when it comes to setting a vision and product strategy and truly empowering the teams. What was I missing? Cagan knows and he said it so eloquently.

To be explicit: The CEO needs to be viewed as the chief evangelist for the product model. If this is something your CEO is unwilling or unable to do, then you can likely save yourself a lot of time, money, and effort by reassessing your readiness.

Marty Cagan, Transformed, Chapter 5, The Role of the CEO

Our CEO didn’t have the right mindset, skills, or a desire to take us through the product transformation. Singlewire’s new CEO doesn’t either. That’s why the company has stopped innovating and is seeing little growth each year instead of reaching its goals and delighting its customers. You can’t innovate by constantly reorganizing the sales team. Throughout Transformed, Cagan did a good job of being very clear about what won’t work and how to fix it. His candidness will save teams going through a transformation a lot of time and wasted effort.

Overview of the Product Operating Model

If you’ve read either of Cagan’s previous books, then you already know how to structure an organization under the product operating model. Bringing in strong Product, Design, and Engineering leadership, forming cross-functional teams that work directly with customers to understand their needs, and forming a strong product vision and strategy are all essential activities. In Transformed, Cagan goes through the product operating model again, giving new readers the essentials so they can move forward with their transformations.

Product Model Competencies & Concepts

I enjoyed Cagan’s sections on product model competencies & concepts. There’s nothing new here and he admits that he’s only acting as a curator, but he’s a very good curator. In Transformed, he discusses product concepts such as cross-functional, empowered product teams, product strategy, product discovery, product delivery, and product culture. Side Note: I love how he calls out product discovery & delivery specifically, it’s very close to how I’ve structured my book for agile engineering teams called Agile Discovery & Delivery. 🙂

The principles he lays out are too numerous to include here, but if you’re in the tech or product space you’ll recognize them all as essential best practices too. For example:

• Outcome over output
• Focus
• Powered by Insights
• Minimize waste
• Instrumentation & Monitoring
• …and many, many more

Details on Planning & Executing a Successful Transformation

This is where we get into the newer concepts. Transformed takes you through important information about how to assess, plan, and execute a successful transformation. It also discusses how to partner with various other parts of your organization like sales, the CFO, and marketing. The book speaks directly to these roles and talks about what they can do to help and how they might get in the way.

I craved having a bit of a checklist for this process, which was not included in the book, but all of the information is there and a product leader could go through the book section by section to help them decide whether they have the right people, relationships, and technology in place to be successful.

Case Studies & Coaching Profiles

In addition, the book includes a plethora of stories and profiles from successful product transformations and leaders. This was my favorite part! There are stories from Adobe, Kaiser Permanente, Trainline, and others. Many of the case studies were written by someone that went through the transformation, typically the head of product and divulge details around what was working, what wasn’t, and how they went about making the changes that led to much better outcomes.

Given that this book is coming out a few years after the COVID pandemic, many of the case studies centered around how businesses weathered the storm. They are very effective in highlighting how innovative the product operating model can make companies. But I’m very much hoping we’ll never go through something quite as devastating again, so some of the exact lessons might get dated over time. The key points about innovation and how to navigate change is one of the most important reasons to move to the product operating model and those aren’t likely to change any time soon.

Overcoming Objections

Towards the end of the book Cagan addresses the common objections that various parts of the organization have about the product operating model. They are organized by where the objection is coming from: CEO, customer success, the product team itself, and so on. Honestly this is one of the most valuable parts of the book. When making the kind of far-reaching changes that are necessary when moving to the product operating model, there will be plenty of objections. I read through them and got a little bit of PTSD as I’ve heard many of these objections personally over my career. I sometimes had a good answer and sometimes I didn’t. Transformed arms the people running the transformation with great answers so they can keep things moving smoothly.

Key Takeaways

If you only have five minutes to read this book, then flip all the way to the second-to-last section and read Cagan’s chapter called “Keys to a Successful Transformation”. It’s a top-ten list of the things that are most important to consider when moving to the operating model. If you have fewer than five minutes, here is the top 10 without the valuable commentary in the book.

1. The role of the CEO as key evangelist for the shift
2. The changing role of the technology team from “cost center” to “core enabler”
3. Strong product leaders
4. True product management (interesting point: how do you know you’re on the right track? Each product manager should be considered a viable option to lead the company in the future)
5. Professional product designers who understand not just design, but user experience (UX)
6. Empowered engineers who aren’t outsourced
7. Insight-based product strategy
8. Stakeholder collaboration as the tech team moves from a subordinate position in the company to a collaborative one
9. Continuous evangelization of outcomes
10. Corporate courage

Conclusion

Has your interest been piqued? Transformed happens to be on sale right now as part of Amazon’s Prime Day sale and I highly encourage you to pick one up or get it from your library. It’s no secret that I love all of Marty Cagan’s books. Somewhere in the middle of this one, I stopped thinking about how it applied to my last job and started thinking about how I would build my next company from the ground up using these principles. I also started thinking about rewriting some the Capstone course curriculum to be less agile-focused and more product model-focused. Same basic principles, but Cagan tells a more comprehensive product story. Regardless, Transformed should be required reading for anyone working on or with a technology product team. I’m even going to send it to Singlewire’s current CEO. Maybe someday, he’ll actually read it.