The nature of product | Marty Cagan, Silicon Valley Product Group

**Marty Cagan** (0:00)
People don't buy the problem, they buy your solution.
Obviously, they don't buy it if it's not solving something they care about, but there are many products that are solving what they care about. The real question is, do you solve it better than everybody else so that they buy you? And that's where you need to take time. So this is more like the coaching I give the teams. I tell them, look, be careful. If you need to spend a little time on the problem, fine, but don't spend a lot of time because you need to save as much time as possible to come up with the winning solution.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:41)
What can I say about Marty Cagan that hasn't already been said? He's the author of Empowered and Inspired, two of the most widely read and influential books on product management. He's also the founder of Silicon Valley Product Group, which he started over 20 years ago. More than anyone else out there, he's been producing the most consistently great and actionable advice for product managers and leaders looking to level up their product game. Before getting into teaching, he was VP of product at Netscape. He was also Senior VP of eBay. I am humble to have Marty on this podcast. He is an absolute legend in the PM community, and I can't wait for you to hear this episode. And with that, I bring you Marty Cagan.
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Hey Ashley, Head of Marketing at Flatfile. How many B2B SaaS companies would you estimate need to import CSV files from their customers?

**Ashley** (2:17)
At least 40%.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (2:18)
And how many of them screw that up? And what happens when they do?

**Ashley** (2:22)
Well, based on our data, about a third of people will consider switching to another company after just one bad experience during onboarding. So if your CSV importer doesn't work right, which is super common considering customer files are chopped full of unexpected data and formatting, they'll leave.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (2:41)
I am 0% surprised to hear that. I've consistently seen that improving onboarding is one of the highest leverage opportunities for both sign up conversion and increasing long term retention.
Getting people to your aha moment more quickly and reliably is so incredibly important.

**Ashley** (2:56)
Totally. It's incredible to see how our customers like Square, Spotify and Zura are able to grow their businesses on top of Flatfile.
It's because flawless data onboarding acts like a catalyst to get them and their customers where they need to go faster.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:12)
If you'd like to learn more or get started, check out Flatfile at flatfile.com/lenny. Marty Cagan, welcome to the podcast.

**Marty Cagan** (3:26)
Ah, thanks for inviting me, Lenny.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:28)
It's absolutely my pleasure. I'm just gonna jump straight in. I've noticed that you've been getting a lot more philosophical about product, especially in a lot of your recent writing, including a recent post that you call The Nature of Product, where you talk about a lot of these core misconceptions that people have about product management, essentially how people don't really understand how different it is to build product at a company with a strong product culture versus what you'd call not such a strong product culture.
And the way that you described it is that it's trying to explain to someone what the Grand Canyon is by just showing them pictures of the Grand Canyon. And so I'd love to just dive into that and just kind of hear your take on this new philosophical bent that you've taken on product and these misconceptions that you've been seeing across product and product management.

**Marty Cagan** (4:16)
Yeah, sure. I mean, it's frustrating and that's kind of what caused me occasionally I go through these sort of philosophical waves where I look a little harder about. It's frustrating because I really thought by the year 2022, we would not have such a chasm between how good companies work and the rest. There's such strong incentives like just the profit motive alone. Why don't more companies want to work like the best? So I find that just perplexing.