The Product Operating Model with Chris Jones

the thing that Tony's a great writer and and he's got got just some great stories great anecdotes that go all the way back into the 90s before he was at Apple uh but it's also just so rare to get a look under the hood at Apple because they are so famously famously private um a book I've recently read a non-fiction book that's not strictly in my you know around this sort of business is something called being You by NL Seth and it's a book on Consciousness and and sort of Neuroscience and and kind of what the state-of-the-art looks like there found the book just utterly fascinating recommend it for anybody who's who's uh you know interested in topics like that something that triggered me while you were talking about is the secrecy that Apple has do you think that's a good thing or a bad thing for the large conglomerates uh to keep their secrecy is that part of the secret sauce of Apple hard to say um I don't think there are too many companies that could pull that off I mean it's a there's just sort of a a culture of discipline that has been you know part of that place you know really since the beginning so I think there are probably a lot of companies out there that would like to be a little bit more secret about how they do things but uh they're just you know not able to to hold it together so they're really kind of a rare phenomenon um you know you don't you don't really see it happening you know too much and whether or not it's part of their success um hard to say I mean you know I think Apple uh in the last um the last couple of years I think there they a little bit of shine is coming off of it you know there's there's a a bit more you know they they could sort of do no wrong you know almost anywhere I mean everybody really loves them but you know certain aspects of especially how they're treating their developer audience and things like that it's beginning to to to look a little bit more like a death star than you know than it was before do you feel in that sense because I think that Apple indeed is a very interesting example do you feel that people buy their products because of the products and what the products actually can do or is that they buy a an image if you will I think with apple there is a certain amount of brand and belonging and you know kind of where the the the brand space that they occupy that people do want to identify with it um and I think the other reason is just the tightness of the experience that comes from how vertically integrated most of it is you know specifically the hardware and the OS you know kind of how all that stuff works together uh their their you know integration and their kind of w Community it does it does lock you out of of you know bringing things in from a lot of other places but things are just tight things just work together um that's also beginning to I don't know about you but you know my experience as an apple consumer that that that's uh not what it used to be uh and you know we're kind of into a little bit different space than than maybe even two or three years ago but I would put it up to those two things experience and and brand yeah Jim go no I was just thinking about because I'm an Apple user not a not a fanboy not a not a power user but you know I got a phone an iPad and a Macbook um I also have some windows stuff and I thought I was kind of thinking about is the luster off um I don't know um I do think my next laptop will not be a Macbook um I got my initial MacBook in probably I don't know 2008 because I was tired of feeling like I only knew one language like I could only write with my right hand I wanted to become ambidextrous because I was working in business and it almost felt like back in the day when my parents said hey you got to learn to drive a stick because you never know when you're going to need to and people to this day like even as recently as last week like well what do you mean you have a Windows computer and a Macbook and it almost feels like I'm not loyal like I'm not being loyal to either brand I'm like right I love them both just for different reasons yeah yeah I get that I've I've had that uh that same I'm pretty much I'm pretty much the same as you right I've got there are a lot of products Apple products in my house but I it's not that I just go Apple first all the time if there is something that I think is better I'll certainly bring that in and kind of tolerate a little bit of the lack of integration in my own ecosystem and there have been periods especially when I was um back you know before I joined Silicon Valley product group I was had a product at a at a mobile company and that there was a period there where I had three phones that I was carrying around you know different operating systems and part of it you know I approached it the way you're saying it's like I feel like I need to have a few more skills you know I feel like to to really speak knowledgeably on this stuff I need to go deep on on multiple things um I have to say though every time I followed that urge I was always a little I got over it really quickly it's like okay I did that you know I'd spent 48 Hours on you know whatever this or that phone and and it's like it just really didn't feel as tight uh for me and I was definitely somebody who appreciated kind of all the little hiccups being being ironed out especially with something as personal as a phone yeah is it indeed that the ecosystem that these days is a lot more important because there are so we we have a lot of stuff that's that's coming at us right and having I can imagine I'm very curious about your perspective having a single ecosystem that where you don't have to accept all those little hiccups just lowers the amount of cognitive well load that we have true uh but you know as you're saying this I'm really realizing that I I do have multiple ecosystems that I'm that I'm participating in you know I I do have a lot of Apple gear around here I've got a lot of Google stuff and I've got a lot of one-off things that are neither of those even in cases when either Apple or Google or both are are offering you know something competitive so um and it's tough it's tough to keep track of it I I recently hit that crossover point you know you know how how you relate to your how your parents relate to technology and you're always a little bit annoyed with them that they aren't trying these things out or they don't quite get that this is how you do it um I really have just noticed in the last six months I have now become that guy to my kids I was hanging in there for a long time you know technical background and working in Tech but uh just kind of keeping track of all the complexities within an ecosystem across these ecosystems I'm now the old man so it's gonna happen it's gonna happen to all of us unfortunately it will yeah yeah I got to say in that regard my dad he's almost 75 now he adopted his first smartphone earlier this year and up until that point I I think I received five different videos from him all lasting multiple minutes today he's he he's restoring this Old Navy vessel right it's his hobby it's one of the few things that he can actually still properly do and he's very proud of that that he keeps sending these videos it's it's sweet but also like very old at the same time and up until that point he had a very old school Nokia where all the paint was already rubbing off the whole thing was falling apart but he continued because he could not keep up with how these smartphones work it's interesting yeah but good for your dad you know that's uh not not a lot of 75 year olds have that kind of Courage definitely true Chris is the Sonos issue that's currently in the news almost daily for me is that on your radar um it is okay yeah yeah no I so here's the thing though so I'm also a big Sonos customer you know I I may own six or eight products you know from Sonos and uh know the company reasonably well you know the the debacle was really about the app you know a big refresh they did to the app and and lost ground in some places and and tweaked some people as far as what the experience is um so it's on my radar from a news perspective but it's not on my radar from a actual experience perspective because I really wasn't using the app I I was always just casting directly from um was either using a voice uh you know a voice interface for it or I was casting directly from uh Spotify Spotify has linkages into it's and it's not even really a cast I mean it's it's actually participating directly in effectively you can use the Sonos app sorry the Spotify app as your front end to Sonos so I don't I haven't really gone in and figured out what it is people are so upset about but you do as a product person you have to be very very careful when you've got an audience that loves you and an audience that has created a whole you know infrastructure within their house that is most likely took them a little while to set up and their ways of interacting with it they've gotten disal habits if you're going to go and dramatically change something like that um you a you have to have a very good reason and B you have to you have to manage that experience of getting somebody migrated from the old you know the old way of doing things to the new way of doing things so um I know your question was is it on my radar so I guess that's a yes but uh I wouldn't I wouldn't say that I have personally directly felt it because it didn't mess with the way that I used Sonos in any you know real significant way yeah and the reason I ask is when we we we see headlines like that given what the three of us do and I'm not saying we do the same thing but we're in generally similar sphere um and then crowd strike you know a lot has been said on LinkedIn about oh this is a an early indicator of a problem and this is the problem of letting certain vendors get too close to this or being you know too uh loyal to an ecosystem and having diversity and resiliency and all those things so when things like crowd strike or the Sono stuff starts to hit your average consumer not just the Tech Community when you and Marty sit around do you talk about like what is this an indicator of how do is this is this a um an indication of something is this an inflection point or is it are you just readers and consumers like the rest of us oh I see interesting I kind of put these into different categories so I I don't know maybe I'm not quite seeing the connection yet um Sonos I think is absolutely an example of what I think we are all about here um that that was a failure in uh you know product Discovery you know the fact that there's always going to be a risk right whenever you bring something out whether it's a small feature or complete redesign of an app or a new or a new product there is a whole constellation of risks and ways that this can fail some of them have to do with you know is it bringing value some of them have to do with you know do we really know what it takes to to you know around the tech technical feasibility some of it relates to the business and if we were to put this out there is it going to interfere with how we go to market and then this one I think in the case of Sonos was was really one of experience did it actually uh work for people and their own cognitive models you know to to sort of consume the value of the product and the bar was particularly high on Sonos because there were there was always there was already a a rabid fan base that was used to a particular experience so to go in and disturb that so profoundly um they also you know you could argue that there were some value risk problems too because it went out actually with fewer capabilities and these were certain capabilities that I don't know if it's a large part of Their audience cared about or just a vocal part of Their audience but they got burned on both of those and uh that is that is that's classic product fail right those are those are things that that uh you know really should be worked through in terms of talking with customers in terms of showing them prototypes and you know kind of figuring out looking at data uh you know and and you know understanding all of the implications of the choices that you're making and where all those risks are so that one definitely fits there you know the crowd strike one is a little bit trickier um you know that one there was clearly really just a sort of a normal breakdown here uh you know whether it was a breakdown in regression testing or or just what uh this is something that you know Microsoft at all and even even you know crowd strike as well they've done this tens of thousands of times now you know with a very very large ecosystem so clearly something broke down just in the process I think one of the things though that you're asking about is when you've got so so much brittleness and so much interdependency uh you know within a particular ecosystem does it make it inevitable that something like this is going to happen and I would say those are interesting questions but they may be a little far a field from the types of things I would be talking with with Kagan about on a regular basis who knows that we haven't actually had a conversation on it so there there may be something interesting I'm curious though did did that get at anything I just said there get at at kind of the the essence of your question or is there kind of a point that you're you're looking for an observation you've made hell Chris I don't know if I ever have a point but I'll tell you how in my brain these things are connected so as crowd strike was going on I was reading the book thing around corners and something that hit home as I'm literally out doing yard work and listening to this book and seeing messages from friends and others um dealing with the real effects of crowd strike it kind of led me to realize you have to first put yourself in a position to see uh an inflection point or a change in the bigger picture and then you have to know what you're seeing and you have to know what to do with that signal you're getting so I think both of those are ways of saying do we see a risk here so if you were fully invested in the Sonos ecosystem when they make a mistake or stumble a big mistake it has a really like if I wanted bundle up all my Sonos gear and stick it on Facebook Marketplace I could wash my hands of Sonos but then what if I go to work the next day and say hey it administrator hey leader hey CIO what are we doing to prevent something that like just happened from happening again in another part of our business or a similar part of business because I didn't have such a visceral reaction to the technical side of crowd strike um myself but I understood and heard from many people that says see this is the problem this is the problem of of being too dependent on a single platform or like look at when teams goes down half the world stops or when you know whatever and it both all of these things are ecosystems Apple we talked about Sonos you know you could see crowd strike as being an ecosystem or a putting all your eggs in one basket issue even though like you said the the root cause there is very different so I guess I'm just wondering if any of these things add up when you're sitting around thinking about stuff to a change in consumer behaviors to um wanting the products we use to be more open from an ecosystem standpoint like if you had told me when I started my Tech Career in the late 90s that I'd be able to do on a Mac with Microsoft Office I would have said no no way in hell is that going to happen there's no way because back then I mean it felt like Gates versus jobs right and now the lines are blurring iMessage is the last big thing for me if I can somehow consume and use and respond to iMessages on my Windows PC I will feel as a consumer I can make the best choice for me uh in any reason now that's my issue other people may have other things that keep them in or out of a certain group but so I guess the root of my question is are any of these things connected to Consumer Behavior product development or am I interesting yeah as you're talking here the the framing that seems to make sense here is sort of one of kind of we'll call it redundancy versus sort of you know centralization or or you know redundancy versus standardization right that's what it comes down to and standardization gives you the obvious benefits of things working you're having to be less trained up on lots of stuff there's a much simpler ecosystem that you as a consumer or as a CIO whatever have to have to maintain but uh it comes at the cost of this brittleness um and you know when and where does it make sense to inject redundancy you know where or you just differences um uh you know lack of consistency so that you actually can tolerate these things and also in the case of crowd strike you can limit the blast radius of uh you know of any sort of failure and I'm not sure there's there's you know a single you know one of those is always best you know I think there's probably thinking of it as a spectrum and deciding where you want to Anchor yourself on that Spectrum given the nature of the risk um you know again like I don't I still don't really see these as that similar I mean I think this this framing works really well for it infrastructure and stuff like that when there is if you can identify a single point of failure like what happened with with crowd strike that that's perhaps a place that you do want to look at your ecosystem and see if there are ways to to keep the blast radius smaller in the case of of Sonos the the reason why I feel like it's a little bit different is I don't know if they if the the right answer to preventing that problem would have been more diverse ecosystems on the part of the customers you know I think people who were fans of the Sonos products even if you just had one tool right you had at one you know whatever one Standalone bookshelf speaker you'd probably be just as upset uh with that company right now if it was one of your favorite products so I'm not sure that I see Sonos troubles right now as one of a of a monolithic ecosystem or you know a standardized ecosystem I see that one is just straight up uh you know lack of of really understanding the implications of what you're going to put out into the market yeah it really depends as well I guess jy's favorite word it depends on how you use the product because you can use the the true consulted answer exactly exactly you can use the Sonos app and to to control it but personally I use Spotify most nine times out of 10 and I can just select the speaker there from that point on Contin you and blast my music or whatever podcast I'm listening to on that speaker so I don't need the Sonos interface to actually control the thing so it really depends on how you you use it but there are pleora of these kind of examples right now right exactly I'm exactly like you right that's why the the Sonos thing uh hit me mostly from reading the news and not as uh you know as a Sonos customer no exactly but there are plethora of these kind of examples at the moment like mvidia yeah I think it was yesterday where they they completely uh I think it was $270 billion dollars net worth that they that they lost so it's going up and down the moment with very popular popular organizations popular Frameworks as well Angel's going down at the moment new buzzword start to arise and that's my kind of my segue into the into the product operating model it's product is the new thing product management product operating model tell us what it is and how we can actually leverage it yeah so um product operating model I actually don't think it's very new I think maybe that term is new you know it's it's really just been in the last year and a half two years that more and more of the industry is coalescing around that actual label but um the the concepts in there are are things that you know svpg you know my firm uh has has been really talking about for 20 years so um the way we break it up at the highest level it really comes so first of all just look at an operating model we can start from there as as you know what do we mean by an operating model it's really internally to a company how are you organized um how are you organized functionally how are you organized cross functionally and how do you generally get things done you know in the in terms of products how do you decide what to build and then ultimately get that stuff built so you know there are many many different ways if you were to just go and look at your own company and you were to answer those questions how does all that stuff happen you know you're really describing an operating model and you know one of the things that that Silicon Valley product group recognized really early is that there were there were kind of two classes of company um especially on the real Tech forward companies at least early on the companies that we saw that were just routinely doing amazing stuff in terms of creating value on behalf of their customers were just organized differently they were doing things in internally that were different they weren't all exactly the same mind you but there were some core principles that were really quite different from how sort of the rest of the companies operated and at the at the highest level it really came down to what was the sort of motivating incentive engine inside of the company what was it that people saw their job as uh in the Legacy models it was primarily around output are we releasing on time how many features did we get through the P0 and P1 requirements in the road map all of those sorts of things is really like if you're an engineer that's what you're occupied with that's how your manager is measuring you that's what the business is looking to you to provide it's all about output if you really think it through though and you you can imagine a company you know a product and Tech organization that's just awesome as far as output they can still be building all the wrong things and not really moving the company forward at all right so that that's really one of the big insights on the product model the product model creates incentives and forces and and you know measurement and all of this around outcome so what is the thing that you're trying to achieve by shipping this particular product or this particular feature and it might be a revenue based outcome or it might be a you know other Financial things cost whatnot but it might be something else you know it might be about customer acquisition or it might be improving how long it takes to uh on board a new customer on board a new partner into the system uh you know all of those sorts of things can be outcomes and there's really sky the limit on outcomes but the whole point of the product operating model is that it frames things and it expects things of people around outcomes now so this is all just words right when you really try and put that into practice you realize that a lot of behavior necessarily has to change and in some cases the types of people who are working at the company may not be you know people who are really good at output may not be the ones who are going to be the you know all the same people who you want to actually aim at these outcome oriented you know approaches so that's the that's the highest level we're moving from output to outcome in doing that though there's still a lot of altitudes that you can be operating at and I'll just I'll do these really quickly um the first one is kind of the one that most people think of it's how do you build you know how are your engineering teams organized how often are you shipping you know how well is your uh is your product instrumented when you actually put it into the you know into the field into the market into whatever it's you know your a bunch of users or a bunch of customers or whatever right that's the it's the how you build part the other the second dimension is how do you solve problems and what this means is what is the unit of work that's allocated onto teams is it a feature to be built or a road map to be executed on as we as most of us are are used to or is it a problem that needs to be solved and furthermore if we're going to give a team a problem to solve we're actually going to empower that team to decide what the best solution to that problem is right and that's a that's a big big step and naturally once you do that what that team does in order to be successful is very very different than what it does to be successful in the output regime so that's the second first was you know how you build second one is how you solve problems the third level is really getting to overall you know kind of leadership and the relationship between you know quote unquote the business parts of the company and the technology parts of the company it's who decides what problems to solve how do you decide what problems to solve and really this speaks much more to having a cohesive product strategy most companies really don't have one they've got a lot of different initiatives that they're working on at any given point they've gone through a big prioritization you know sort of exercise in order to get us down to these 50 initiatives and we're going to dull that out all into the teams when you truly have a product strategy it looks a lot different it's not really coming directly from the individual businesses it's more the actual product organization itself product and Tech that are deciding these are the places we're focusing on and they're going to do it in a way that works with the business so um a lot behind all three of these things that I said but that really that's the fundamental cut at the product operating model how you build how you solve problems how you decide what problems to solve there's a lot to unack here but I want to go back to the first thing that you mentioned that you've been talking about this together with svpg uh for 20 years now what is it that makes it become more popular in the last year and a half two years yeah boy that's an interesting question um I would say um well first of all I've seen it become popular as sort of waves of Industries right there are certain industries that are you know that that kind of cop to this and and you know we'll see you know a lot of inbound interest you know to svpg for you know working with us that'll cluster around certain industries and you know early on obviously it was the tech companies the ones who were actually selling technology you know now it's really kind of all manner of company you know many of them you know from Big Legacy Industries so um we've seen it uh but I think it's beginning to really start to reach a ground swell across a lot of Industries and I think it's sort of a collective fed upness with the fact that companies are spending a huge amount of money on technology and they're not really seeing a lot of returns for you know for what it is that they're spending and I think this is becoming much more a part of the conversation and more and more now there's you know it's a Tipping Point more and more are realizing you know CFOs are talking to one another and saying okay look we've been funding all these projects we get nothing out of these projects what are you doing you know and then they saying well we've actually changed our financing Model A little bit in order to to really be a lot more product forward we've got durable teams for example that are responsible for different aspects of our portfolio uh we're putting a lot more of this whole idea of product Discovery in here so that the teams can actually go out and try these ideas much much earlier in many cases before they build anything so um so yeah I think it's uh I think uh you know as I'm kind of working this this answer out it's I think it's there's been a bit of a Tipping Point that's happened you think the has uh to do as well with the fact that let's let's go with scrum because it's in my Title Here below these kind of models Frameworks methodologies wherever you want to go with whether it's scrum or something else in many cases are very locally implemented so in other words maybe just a team does it or at best a department or a collection of teams and if I hear you talk uh about the uh the product operating model it's more throughout the entire organization rather than like a very small part of it it's possible and we've certainly had somewhat of that progression as well I mean we've been telling the story up and down the organization but even just looking at the the svpg books you know inspired really focuses at the altitude of individual teams you know it's sort of akin to scrum teams and empowered starts to focus at the larger product organization as a whole so kind of all of engineering together with all of product management together with all of design and and that sort of thing and now the the transformed book you know our latest one really is focusing on the whole company and what does it mean for the product organization to relate to the rest of the company so I think there is a certain maturation that's happened all of these things have been out there but there's been a bit of a bottoms up uh understanding of the concepts Jim what's your thought well it's only been about the last five years that I've had the benefit of being able to sit down with with a few CFOs in a non-w work setting and ask about stuff and I guess I was late to the party to realize that most of them are not required or incentivized or looking at how money is spent they're they they've told me themselves I'm more of a chief accounting officer like I'm making sure that the money is being spent in the right place and that people are doing what they should with the money and all that but so when I ask when they ask what I do I talk about what I do and and I tend to think in terms of Investments and experiments and what's a quick hypothesis we can go test Etc and I asked them you know do you think about as you're allocating budget to go solve a problem they're like oh that that's that's not my job so I'm curious when you mentioned CFOs earlier who are you seeing in a lot of your clients as the one who says I'm the one or part of the group who is looking at where are we investing where who are we giving a problem to solve how are we funding them are there any patterns that you're seeing there's a couple it used to be driven I I might I might take a slightly different run at the question but hopefully an answer that you know will drop out of this um it's sort of where is the where is the center of gravity for transforming to this operating model you know and the things that it entails and for a long time it used to be the most senior people within the the product and Tech organization so if there was a CPO it might be the CPO or might be a CTO or it might be the combination of those people and they would kind of start the work and at the same time that they were really kind of educating their respective departments within the company on how to work this way they're also evangelizing it outside of that broader you know or organization and ultimately it does H that has to include the CFO you know the CFO may not be an eager initial um you know participant in all of this and these ideas are going to be quite foreign to a to it sorry did I say CTO I meant CFO uh was I saying that okay so yeah the CFO right so the ideas are oftentimes very foreign to a uh you know to the typical CFO who's used to seeing an Roi you know a business case you know we're gonna spend this much money we're gonna get this much money we're gonna hold you accountable we'll build the team and you know we'll get these returns from all of this that's what they're used to and it kind of makes a lot logical sense especially for somebody who thinks of themselves as a as a as a chief accounting officer um more and more we are seeing these projects being driven from above like in some cases even the CEO right the the CEO is the one who's saying look this is not working whatever it is we're doing with technology is not working and clearly just looking around at our competitors looking around at our valuation you know this is the thing that is going need to change so you know they may deputize their head of product to go out and figure this out but the energy is coming from there uh and in some cases CFOs I have seen a couple of them where they're getting wind of these ideas first and realizing that so much of the prop so so many of the seeds of an output based culture are planted right with the funding model right the funding model necessarily puts you into this top- down output based oper model and to really undo that you're going to have to get all the way to the funding model so um so I I kind of rambled a bit to get there but I I uh hopefully that uh that got it your question no it's helpful thank you so let's take a pragmatic approach or practical approach how if organizations and practitioners are now listening how can they start by implementing this model yeah so uh you know obviously there are a lot of you know it depends of course on this but but let's just start with the size you know of the organization um if you are uh you know of of any sufficient size this is not going to be an easy undertaking you know it's not going to be the sort of thing where it's like okay I can go read a couple of books and uh you know bring in a couple of coaches and and instantly we're going to be transformed um usually what you want to do is find some area that is you know reasonably well set up for this you know one that you can get organized around durable teams one where uh the the teams can be realistically set into motion to figure out solutions to outcomes the teams are staffed with the right sorts of people the teams have the right sorts of experience or the very least training on what product Discovery actually looks like and then the leaders really you know provide the air cover on those teams to to help ensure that they can work this particular way and you do that for a quarter or two and along the way hopefully you were stumbling upon some innovations that wouldn't have otherwise been generated by the rest of the operating model you're evangelizing what's working you're evangelizing the fact that we are you know we've we've now devolved accountability for outcomes down into these teams so it's not just your business stakeholders who are responsible for the outcomes these other people are on the hook with them and therefore they're doing a lot better work they're approaching the work really really differently so you begin to harvest these winds and get the attention of your Executives get the attention of other people who want to be working this way and then you spread it you know to to other places so the the the short answer I'm having a hard time finding short answers for you guys today sorry about that appreciate it the short answer for for this executive is is you go U go deep with a smaller number of teams rather than going shallow with a larger number of people I like it thank you very much there's a question coming from the audience as well so keep keep the long answers going because I really appreciate them are there any examples of companies that have adopted the product operating model and have reasonable success with it yeah and and sorry this Probably sounds like Shameless promotion but but we we profile a number of the in the latest book and in the transformed book so uh and the thing about this is you know obviously these things are are quite uh you know private confidential so we had to get uh get the right sorts of permission to to talk about these but just to give you a couple of examples that are written about in the book uh there's a a the company um train line you know so uh Xander I know you're in the uh in Continental Europe if you've ever used that to purchase uh train tickets that's a UK based company uh they went through a pretty significant transformation that's that's documented in the book and uh you know not only does it talk about a lot of the outcomes and the real you know value that was created as a result of doing this it talks about certain innovations that were enabled that nobody at the company could have possibly even imagined you know coming to based on their old operating model uh we do a a pretty big um download case study on a doe specifically when they did their transformation from uh the Creative Suite to the Creative Cloud that actually is uh pretty well known in the industry uh it was before people were using terminology like product operating model and even transformation but that's exactly what Adobe did uh and um you know had a huge unlock in in value and market cap uh there's another company that we um uh that we go through called Data site uh which is a B2B company based in Minneapolis in the United States uh and uh you know some of the things that they did we've of course worked with with many other companies you know some of which you'd know some of which you wouldn't know but those are the ones that we uh we got permission to write about in depth so I hope the uh the answer has been uh question the question has been answered sufficiently um looking at the audience as well and a follow-up question coming from the same person what would the SE of an ideal product organization look like I think that's a very interesting question the CC Suite of a company that's transformed of the product model is that the question or is it the SE Suite of the because that's really that you know seite is going to be at the company level and we've got a company that's running against the product operating model and if that is indeed the question um I would say they're really isn't an ideal uh other than you do need to have somebody nominally at the kind of most senior level of product management and of engineering and a lot of times there is somebody who is quite senior maybe peered to those people uh around product design um now a really large company may actually have this replicated across multiple business units uh but we'll just talk about you know a single business unit company you typically are going to need leaders um and in most cases I do see them in the SE suite at the very least the the head of technology is in the SE Suite um and I do you know ideally like to see the head of product management and the head of Technology being peered to one another uh just you know that's really the nature of product but this isn't a this is more ideal than than required there are certainly ways to to work around or charts that aren't necessarily uh you know exactly compliant with what I just described what you Rec recommend when we're starting with the implementation or the the adoption or whatever you want to call it with the product operating model they would actually pair the two of them up to create immediately create the most ideal scenario yeah we we so you know one of the real things about the product model is is uh just the the amount of collaboration that it's looking to create cross functional collaboration specifically not just employee collaboration but specifically product managers engineers and designers and you know kind of at multiple levels we want to have that type of collaboration happening if it's um you know if they're really mismatched in terms of level that can make collaboration a little bit trickier and if there is you know if U for example a lot of organizations out there might have the role of product management but they're they they uh report very low in the organization to lower level Business Leaders right so they're not peer they're they're peered but you have to go kind of up and around uh rather than they're being sort of a central leader of product management and that's the other kind of attribute we're looking for becomes particularly important on that dimension of of how you solve problems because if you don't have people living at that level it's nearly impossible to stitch all of that together and create a cohesive strategy across across the product line that's interesting Jim well before we hit record we were kind of talking about do organizations have to rest ructure move people around and I I when you mentioned durable teams earlier and now these you know bringing these people together of engineering and and product I'm curious if I'm making the right mental Connections in that we may not change who somebody's reporting to like a reporting structure but are there changes that you're regularly recommending about functional um uh organization of people and teams or are you largely able to do this with zero changes to this definition of my team and this is my team my department my product Etc yeah yeah I realized we had a conversation I probably probably didn't tell the whole story there because I was assuming sort of a different starting point it really so it depends right it does depend on what a company has going on if you don't have a role you know one of the key competencies you know something like product management or maybe you got product owners uh who are you know reporting up to various parts of the engineering organization but not real product managers you know if if a competency is just lacking that is going to require a change to the or chart furthermore if a competency is completely you know atomized and fragmented that may require a change to the or chart very few of the companies I deal with are at that you know starting from you know that level most of them have at least the competency is nominally identified within the organization and there is some you know leadership hierarchy around that particular competency and when that is the case usually there's a lot that can be done without having to disturb the or chart uh at least initially you know that it's uh there you know they may come to that conclusion themselves uh that they do have to to to move things around but you know I certainly wouldn't come out swinging that this is a prerequisite it but that is different from those other cases that I was talking about if a competency is completely lacking or if there's real no no clear leadership hierarchy for that particular competency now I'd get taken out behind the old Woodshed if I didn't ask this follow-up question since you just mentioned it how do you define the difference between product ownership and product management because it sounds like you just talked about them as very different things and this is a daily question I think for for Sund and I yeah yeah it's a big it's a big uh difference and and you know I may be uh stepping on some L landmines here either with you guys or your audience um but yeah how how we've always looked at it is um we see product ownership as a role in a process you know typically it's a role in a in a process like scrum or or something like that right they have certain certain duties that they're supposed to do in order to keep that process moving forward uh product management is it's that and a lot more right so uh you know it it typically involves really you're you're discovering products on behalf of your customers that work for the business that is a product manager's job so as such you are you know intimately concerned with the value of what the team is creating not just doing what a stakeholder is asking you to do not just what you know cooking up some requirements but actually finding the right solution one that's going to be valuable for the customer and one that's going to be viable for the business so there's just a huge amount in that um we typically see the extent to which there is a product owner it is the product manager but it might be 15% of their job you know the rest of it is a lot of other stuff right working cross functionally working with stakeholders uh getting in front of customers interviews you know user tests looking at data you know all of these sorts of things one of the things that is particularly problematic so some companies like they'll call it product owner when it really is a product manager sometimes they'll have product managers when they really are kind of a product owner you know we're we're really trying to uplevel the definition of what a product manager is one of the real big problems that we really try and avoid is when companies have both you know it's like okay we've got product managers and we have product owners we got all the Best of Both Worlds right and that's actually that introduces a number of problems itself um you know not the least Le of which is okay who's in charge you know what what are we actually building um it also can create a little bit of Us and Them between product management and Engineering I've seen product owners be out there as like our job is to protect the engineers right and I hate that you know whenever I hear that I also by the way I also hate uh uh okay we're product we're the we're the what and we're the why and you're engineering and you're the how I hate that right that is not collaboration we are all together trying to figure out how to solve this problem that we've been given and we're all being measured on that so yes engineering you may actually have some of the best ideas as to what we're going to be building and when you start to decompose into product owners and product managers you just you kind of obliterate that whole dynamic and you really you know set up this we're communicating in artifacts to one another and this is you know I need better requirements from you and you know all of that sort of thing so so yeah that's my answer we'll see where the bombs land on that one actually interestingly and I think I speak for for both of us Jim everything that you're mentioning now here what a product manager does is how we advocate for product orders to be as well because being a proxy is pretty much what you're describing as a product owner to be like someone who takes the orders from thank you dear stold is he turns his back to the to the team again turns around and then gives away the orders like there more command and control as if there is no decision-making Authority no ownership actual ownership whatsoever while as the things that you describing what a product manager should be is in my vision as well as what a product owner should be doing he's not in in service of the stakeholders he's in service of the value that the product is delivering to whomever the stakeholders are the users the stakeholders and bottom line is just get done focus on the outcomes and yeah the only difference to me between a product manager and a product owner is the use of the Cadence and the events of scrum but that's pretty much it the activities that he supposed to do looking at data and and being very closely related and in relationship with the users and so on that's all in my opinion my humble opinion who and who am I to disagree with you but what a product owner should be doing as well so uh I've got two small things to inject here and they may be points of agreement or they may be points of of disagreement because most of what you said uh is um I think we're we're we're quite aligned on that um the first thing is um when we talk about the product model and we talk about value and users and customers stakeholders are not customers stakeholders are part of the business stakeholders are the business so we are not serving the stakeholders we're serving whoever this product is serving right which and that's obviously a lot easier to see when you've got products and customers that are outside of the company uh it gets a little bit more complex when you're doing internal systems but but that's the that's the first thing is that we're not serving the business we are serving the customers in a way that works for the business so and that that little difference of phrase can be pretty profound in terms of the culture of the company so I would I would ask you know with your definition um you know does it clear that bar um and if the answer is yes the second thing I was going to say is why not call them product manager because that's really what the the industry is looking for if you're going to call somebody a product owner and you're going to recruit for that job you're going to find people who are all wrapped up in their cspo right and that okay well I'm qualified for that job because I'm certified right when in fact you are anything but qualified for that job uh that gives you you know you understand how the process works but in terms of doing product Discovery in terms of being given just a problem with no Solutions and figuring out the best solution and prototyping dozens of things in a week you know most of most of which are going to get thrown away getting them in front of customers getting them in front of the stakeholders that's a really different skill set than what typically somebody who has a a PO title or a cspo certification only uh is gonna have I fully agree with you I'm I'm looking at you as well Jim I I see a naughty um I would re or agree with everything that you're saying now I'm going to jump into the future with 20 years do you think it's going to happen the same thing to a product manager as it's now happening with product owners or with any term like if we're now going to do whatever you're saying is a product manager supposed to do do you think at some point we're going to get product manager fatigue and we're going to do the exact same thing just with a different name it's possible but I think it's unlikely and it's the the big difference here well first of all I'll give you an empirical answer and to say that this definition of a product manager has been around for a lot longer than 20 years you know it's what we've been talking about you know kind of the essence of what what the you know what a product manager does we've tightened up a little bit of the terminology and the conceptual modeling you know for what the product model is but you know kind of what the product manager is and what they do has been pretty consistent for us we've yeah we've not we've definitely not changed it more than 5% you know over the last uh 20 plus years um the other thing is I you know I think a big part of the demise of product owner to the extent that there is a demise is that um we're trying to wrap such a tight recipe based definition around it you know and put a certification on it it's like you do these 10 things and you learn these 12 things then we can call you and you pass this test we're going to call you a cspo um and that is the role I mean anything like that is better found to have a shelf life you know when you when you kind of keep it much more oriented around what core principles are within the competency those are pretty consistent and you know I'll go back to the empirical side of things even as we've seen massive waves of Technology you know Innovation come through this idea of what a product manager is really hasn't changed you know kind of what they do hasn't changed everybody keeps saying okay well AI is here you know generative AI is here you know this what's what how is it going to affect this job and of course there's some things that are happening but the fundamental principles behind the job orientation and value orientation and viability finding a solution to a problem uh being measured as to the effectiveness of that solution being measured on the outcomes collaborating cross functionally with design and Engineering all that stuff stays true interesting Jim you have a question yeah I I'm aligned with everything you said in fact as you were describing kind of typical product management I I've seen product management and product ownership work well hand inand I've seen them definitely be at odds and uh have conflict and I've seen the pattern you described I think of um you know I focus on the big picture strategy stuff the sea level I go to the conferences I talk to vendors suppliers and all that and then you just deal with those you know Geeks and get get the work done that I need right um I refer to that by the way is the outside game and the inside game right product manager you're the outside game product owner you're the inside game and by the way that starts to work for old it terminology as well like okay you know product manager and business analyst or whatever like when anytime you're trying to divide it up into the outside game and the inside game Sorry I I interrupted your no I like it in fact it was like five hours ago today I used that same idea of regardless of what we call this person we need some level of focus inward to the team to solve their issues to respond to things to help them with the Tactical how and then we also need an outward focus and at various times a single person is likely never going to be able to dedicate enough Focus to both of those directions and you know I I don't know if there's a good model out there I I do believe that good product managers in my experience surround themselves with people who have complimentary skills to them one of the best product managers I've observed and been working near knew what their deficiencies were and they brought data scientists to them they brought a pricing analyst to them and all that and I think that's what Su and I would would support for a product owner too if that's what a company called those people um and yeah I mean no no real reflection or question other than than to say yes ant everything you're seeing and saying I think we support it's just if a company doesn't have maybe mature product ownership and they don't have any or mature product management it sounds like you would suggest that they don't do both at the same time and that they would instead build a product management skill and capability internally is that true well so sort of I mean that I would say in general we would coach companies not to build both disciplines and if they do have both disciplines to try and collapse them so um and and it's mainly because we don't want to ensconce in the product operating model here's a group of people who are the inside people and here's a group of people who are the outside people and you know the job progression as an inside person gets to be a better and more senior inside person and outside person does the same on the outside product management is a holistic job it involves both of them so um that's the first thing you don't want you don't want two of them U now by the way this doesn't preclude you from having more and less senior product managers and maybe an entry-level person may really be really good on the inside game and and is still developing on the outside game and they might be potentially in a support position for a while as needed but we're really saying there is one competency here not two competencies so that's the first thing I'm saying and I I usually make a pretty strong point about that the second point this one I I would make less strongly is okay if you've got one role you've really got it down to one why aren't you calling it product manager um because you know are you calling it product owner because it fundamentally is a product owner and you're you're coming from the command and control or you're just calling it a product owner for legacy reasons and I would if you know if you guys were one of my customers I would be asking you the question what you know why what's holding you back you know from from labeling it this other way because I'm telling you from the outside the Optics that you're setting is you the Optics that you set this expectation that it's is a more tactical inside sort of job that's associated more with this certification than anything else I think that might be a really cool topic to have like a a debate between silic valley product group and one of the the largest scrum organizations see what the the answers would be I would like that I would love that I also like to be mindful of both of you gentlemen's time there's one last question in the audience and I hope I do not butcher your name goam Adia asks can the role of a product owner or product manager be automated in five to 10 years now you touched on it a little bit this is last question I want to ask you and then we'll let you go yeah um I don't think so um I do think that there are a lot of tasks that product managers are doing where they're going to uh get a lot more support you know from the from the the AI tools but just the nature of this job and the level of judgment and you know the the the sort of the cross functional complexity um I actually have more confidence that that you know product manager as a you know as a kind of a a I let me put it this way I would be more comfortable with my kids saying that that's what they wanted to be than them wanting to be an engineer for example I think uh I think it's I think that job is less vulnerable to being automated than many many other jobs out there interesting Chris there are so many other different things where we could talk about I would like to pick your brain on on numerous topics but I thank you so much for this past hour it really flew by to me it was very very valuable and I there yeah there are so much more that I want to know lots of fun meeting both of you I really enjoyed it too and you know let's let's do it again sometime awesome thank you Chris all right cheers e e e for