Marty Cagan on Product Management Theater in the Age of AI

**Joel Beasley** (0:00)
Today, we're talking to product management expert and author Marty Cagan about product management feeder and what it means to build products in the age of AI. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Modern CTO.

**Joel Beasley** (0:18)
Hey Marty, how are you doing?

**Marty Cagan** (0:19)
Well, you're rocking quite the beard since the last time we talked.

**Joel Beasley** (0:23)
I've been growing it since our last conversation.

**Marty Cagan** (0:26)
Looks good.

**Joel Beasley** (0:28)
Thank you. It's been a while. You were episode 9, this is episode like 950 That's crazy. And I haven't learned much.
I'm kidding. We'll just go ahead and jump right in.

**Marty Cagan** (0:40)
Sounds good. I have said that there is a problem called product management theater, where people have the title, but they're really doing a very different job.
I think AI is shining a light on why it's so important not to do that model, but it's also at the same time making it easier to do that model than ever before.

**Joel Beasley** (1:11)
Yeah, AI has been something that's definitely come up since the last time we've chatted. How is that like directly affecting product? Like what are product managers doing with AI right now?

**Marty Cagan** (1:21)
Well, so that sort of leads back to the first question. So there are multiple ways of building products. This is not news to anybody. Multiple ways to build products.
In general, we would put them into sort of three buckets.
Not so much in the US., but in a lot of the world, especially Europe, they have this idea of an Agile product owner and a bunch of developers. That's never been good at creating products. It's a software factory model. And AI, especially with the new tools for like cloud code, are just making that model irrelevant.
So good riddance is what I say to that, because that was never a good model. That was people misunderstanding what Agile was really about. And so the other two models, and the second one is very prevalent in the world, especially in the US. I hate saying that, but it's true.
And that is called the feature team model. This is actually what most tech organizations do. And what that is, it's known as the project model. The idea is a bunch of executives come up with a roadmap, which is a prioritized list of features and projects. Those items on a roadmap get assigned to product teams of some sort. We call them feature teams that work this way. And their job is to knock out as many of those items on the roadmap as they can. And so they have somebody call the product manager, used to be called a business analyst, better, more accurate definition of it, where their job would be to gather the requirements of what that feature is. And then they usually pass it off to a designer to do a design, a user experience, and then pass it off to a bunch of engineers to build, then sprint planning would happen basically, and they would build it, some number of sprints, and they would ship it. That's called the feature team model or the project model, because at the end, you have a shipment, which is great, but it doesn't actually necessarily achieve any kind of business outcome. In fact, the vast majority of features that are shipped don't move the needle at all. So the project model is very predictable. It's pretty straightforward and easy to do, but it's not very effective when it comes to business results. That has been well known for a long time, but the truth is, up until gen AI, if you talk to a typical CTO or even CEO, they would tell you, look, our bottleneck is, it just takes a long time to build anything. And so the focus was really on the developer's building. Now, of course, in a lot of companies, that is dramatically changing. And the bottleneck is no longer the engineers taken to build something and get it out. The bottleneck is now much more appropriately recognized as, what do you want these people to build?
And that's the product management role, in a nutshell, figuring out something worth building. And GENAI is shining a light on how important that is. But at the same time, and I'll talk about the product model in a minute here, but at the same time, I need to point out, because I thought as soon as GENAI came out and saw it, we saw how amazing it was for this, people would finally abandon the project model. But they didn't. So many people look at the project model and say, with GENAI, I don't even have to talk to my customers. I can just send it to my customer service stuff and read all the requests and build a roadmap, and I can press a button and have a prompt create a PRD for me and then I can actually create everything I need. GENAI can speed up. So all that's done, and you see that more than ever, you have more garbage being shipped than I ever remember.