Marty Cagan
President, Silicon Valley Product Group
Marty is currently the chairman of Silicon Valley Products Group. Former Senior Vice President of eBay Products, author of Inspired, the Bible of Product Management. He served as senior vice president of eBay product management and product design, responsible for planning products and services for global e-commerce websites. Before eBay, Marty was vice president of Netscape products. Prior to that, he founded Continuus Software as a product partner and CTO, and was acquired by IBM after NASDAQ went public. During his career, Marty has assumed and competed in many product management responsibilities, such as product management, software development, interaction design, software testing, and engineering management.
Topic
Product Leadership is Hard
I normally like to talk about how strong product teams work to solve hard problems in ways their customers love, yet work for their business. This is the general topic of Product Discovery, and it's the main subject of the book INSPIRED. However, I have learned that in a remarkable number of companies, while the teams may want to work this way, the company is not set up for the teams to work this way. In response, my focus has turned to the role of product leadership in providing the environment necessary for product teams to do good work. Much of my writing over the past couple years has focused on the challenges of leadership, and the specific and critical deliverables that product leadership is responsible for. In this talk, I will spell out these responsibilities, and discuss why each is critically important, and share examples of strong product leadership from some of the best companies in our industry.
