Notes from Marty Cagan talk on Great Product Teams at Google Campus São Paulo

Talk link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tilfeZtUaB8

Product Teams
- PM
- Designer
- Engineers

PO: is the administrative part of the job in the SCRUM/Agile methodology (a backlog administrator)
PO job title should be killed
a PM should have the PO role as one of their responsibilities
it’s harmful if the product owner is not the product manager

Great Product teams

1. Tackle Risks Up Front

— “the rikiest thing you can do not take any risks”
— Kinds of risk (tackle those before writing a single line of code)
-Value Risk
-Usability Risk
-Feasibility Risk
-Business Viability Risk

— tackling those risks is called Product Discovery. In this phase, 13 to 30 iterations(working prototypes) per week.

2. Discover Collaboratively (truly)

-implies a competent PM, implies a strong product designer, implies you’re using engineers not only to code, but also to invent.

Waterfall way of working (min 33:25, for a good dose of self awareness)

idea -> wireframes -> designer -> dev backlog -> SCRUM

→ this is not agile! this will not drive innovation!

-The little secret in product: the best source of innovation are our engineers (in waterfall way of working you’re getting less than half their value)
-Why we desing collaborativly?
— the technology drives functionality as much as functionality drives technology
— the technology drives design as much as design drives technology

- tech lead + designer + tech lead sitting together!

Idea: (tech lead rotativo, PM + design pick the tech lead they want to work on a given feature)

3. Focus on results (not on output)

- if you have a roadmap, thats output

Other ideas

10% of the ideas you try will work (benchmark with google and microsoft)

google search “Product fails” to listen Marty telling how bad product teams are working in order to learn with their mistakes

“a story is just a placeholder for a discussion”

How do you include engineers in the discovery?
- The best teams, where all engineers want to participate in discovery, it takes only a few minutes a day (really???)

the role of a product designer
- 20% graphic designer
- 80% interactions design (with some user research in there)

Continuous Discovery and Delivery
- Discovery is optimized for learning fast
- Delivery is optimized for running a business, deliver something solid, release with confidence