Marty Cagan - Best Selling Author - Inspired - How To Create Products Customers Love

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:01) Today, we are talking to Marty Cagan, the most influential tech product leader of our time. I'm talking HP, Netscape, eBay, Adobe. He is the bestselling author of the book Inspired: How to Create Products Customers Love. Marty started as a developer, became CTO, and then full-on product god. He gives advice for CTOs based on their current stage of growth.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:30) It's pure gold, Jerry. All right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast. Here we go. This is the Modern CTO podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:49) So Musk, Bezos, these guys are both guys you'd like to meet. I read at the bottom of your most recent post. Have you read their life stories?

(Marty Cagan at 00:01:00) Yes, I have. And I do know lots of people that know the guys, and so I hear a lot of secondhand, thirdhand stuff. But yeah, they're pretty impressive guys.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:14) Right. And then you mentioned that you did some work with Audible?

(Marty Cagan at 00:01:19) I did. Yeah, that's right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:21) What did you do with them?

(Marty Cagan at 00:01:21) Well, I've worked with several hundred tech companies. They were one of them. I worked with them both before they were acquired by Amazon and then after they were acquired. And mostly, I do the same things with companies. I just help them try to get better at product.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:39) Yeah. You just tell them, look, people want to listen to the books and they're like, Marty, you're a genius. This is what we're doing.

(Marty Cagan at 00:01:44) They knew that. They knew that. They were very early too. There's an untold story behind Audible that not enough people get to hear. And I'm with you. I love listening to books. It's a blast. I wish I had more time for it because it's kind of a slow way to read a book, but it's such a cool way to read a book.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:05) I love it. It's passive. You can do it in the car, right? Going to work and be consuming content, or in the shower rather than having to hold the physical book.

(Marty Cagan at 00:02:14) Yeah, but it's also very immersive. That's what I love about it. I can imagine, you know, my grandparents talked about how they'd listen to shows on the radio, and that's kind of what I imagine.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:27) War of the Worlds. Yeah. So I'm a big fan of the voice too, like with the Alexas and the Google Homes. Do you have any of those?

(Marty Cagan at 00:02:36) Sure. And I am too. I wrote about the early Alexa effort recently. Actually, that's an article. I did just send you one link, but I probably should have sent you. There's one that's got a lot of attention from engineers and CTOs called, what is it? Customer-Inspired, Technology-Enabled. And it talks about a lot of the best innovations out there and how basically all of them came from the engineers. And including the early Alexa story. Alexa didn't start as Alexa. You know, it started as a much more modest and pretty unexciting thing, and one of the engineers just saw the potential. So, and actually, in this article, I tell the story of six very impressive products like that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:32) Oh, yeah. I want to read that. Did you send me that link?

(Marty Cagan at 00:03:35) I will.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:36) Yeah. Yeah. And I'll post it in the show notes too so people can go check that out. You're a fantastic author, Marty.

(Marty Cagan at 00:03:42) Oh, thanks.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:43) I very much enjoy the way. I found your book. I was at my friend Derek's house, and he's a CTO, and it looked beautiful. And it was on the, you know, on his bookshelf and said, you know, How to Create Products Customers Love. And I was like, oh man. How can you ignore that title, right? Even if you feel like you know what you're doing, that title just says, come read me. Right? So I picked it up, and I started flipping through it, and I was like, oh, this is real smart. I ended up borrowing the book. That was one I actually read with the pages and whatnot. Now I sound old, right?

(Marty Cagan at 00:04:22) Was it a black book or a white book?

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:25) Black with the orange bottom.

(Marty Cagan at 00:04:27) Yeah. So that was the first edition of Inspired. I just recently published the second edition, which is actually a 100% rewrite. And that's the one I sent you a review from a CTO on the new edition. So—

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:45) Oh, excellent. So what, so it's a 100% rewrite, but you kept the name and title. And then can you get better than perfect?

(Marty Cagan at 00:04:55) Oh, yeah. I mean, that's, you know, it was a ten-year-old book now. It just hit in January, this month. It's ten years old.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:02) No way.

(Marty Cagan at 00:05:03) Yeah. So it's shocking how much is still relevant. That surprises even me, but there, it's not really that I focus on principles anyway, which are meant to last a long time. But still, all of the things I talked about, I think there's way better ways to talk about now. And a lot more recent examples. And so I ended up just completely rewriting it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:30) Oh, okay. I will definitely check it out. Yeah. Here's, so I'm not always super nice and super happy to everybody if you, you know, listen to the show. I'm not just being nice to you. I genuinely believe in your work. Here's what happened. So I got your book from Derek.

(Marty Cagan at 00:05:45) Oh.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:45) And I went home. This is a couple years ago. Maybe, I don't know. Time is actually kind of difficult for me now that I'm getting older. But, and I'm only 30, so I'm not that old. I started taking notes. I'm like, oh yeah. You know, I came across this. You know? This is right. This is, I felt like I was a craftsman or a toolmaker, and I've made this library of tools over the course of, you know, my experience. But then I walked into a hardware store where there's these refined tools that are really, really good. And so I just started eating them up, and then I had to stop taking notes because I realized I was essentially just transcribing your book. I was like, okay. I'm not taking any more notes. I'm, you know, 10 pages in and I'm just done. I'm just going to now recommend the book to people, right?

(Marty Cagan at 00:06:32) Well, that's good. It's cool that people like it. It's fun to write.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:40) Yeah. So I'm reading in your background, right? Doing the show notes, prepping for the show, talking to Marty, and I see that I saw 1990s and Netscape and instantly, boom, right in my mind. I was like, browser wars. Were you a part of this?

(Marty Cagan at 00:06:54) On the periphery, I got to watch the whole browser wars. I was working on, I was responsible for platform and tools. So there was a separate team that was doing browser and a separate team that was doing server. But yeah, it was unfortunate because that is what actually led to the demise of Netscape. So, and I totally loved, adored Netscape. I would still be working there if I could. But, you know, we did lose the browser wars after about six years. And then the company was acquired by AOL and, you know, it's not the same after that, and I joined eBay after that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:36) So why did you like it? Was it the relationships, the people there? Or—

(Marty Cagan at 00:07:39) Well, a number of things. First of all, there were the most amazing, I mean, people. Ben Horowitz was there. Marc Andreessen was there. I mean, I could list literally 40 names that have gone on to just sort of greatness around the industry. And so working with these people was amazing. But even more, I thought, you know, Netscape was kind of the birth of the internet. And so it was really the epicenter for this whole new industry. And so for a product person, this is awesome. You know, we didn't even have to leave the building. Customers were coming to us literally every day, and startups were coming to us literally every day. And so, it doesn't really get much better than that. And the technology was moving so fast, and people were doing things that they could never do before. That's always a lot of fun. And, you know, I got to watch so many companies get born, you know, like Amazon and eBay and Yahoo, and then about a year later, Google, and a couple years later, Facebook. You know, it's just an amazing thing to watch.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:50) Cool. Yeah. So I like your, the Amazon reference too. I saw one of the old pictures has been circulating the internet of Bezos with his, you know, wood table and his handwritten sign, right? And we moved into a new office, expanding, and we've been so busy the past month that I hadn't had a chance to change the outside sign, right? We don't have a lot of people come to the physical office anyways, so it's not something that occurs often. But then I was just like, ah, it's kind of Bezos-like. So I removed my motivation for changing the signs all outside. But I see you have some, you have some formal education with, you know, I call it old education, with some Stanford stuff. And I'm just kind of curious, did you find a lot of value in your education, like collegiate education or—

(Marty Cagan at 00:09:45) No? Well, my education was computer science, and I definitely feel like that's what, that was the key for me because it gave me, I was kind of in that first wave of engineers, and it meant that I had amazing job offers. I didn't even have to leave the campus. Apple and HP and several other companies. I narrowed it down to HP and Apple and then chose HP. But, so if I hadn't have learned how to code, basically, that way—I actually learned to code as a kid. So it's not really that I learned to code, but I did learn a lot. And it is true every developer I know, you know, what they teach you in school and what it's really like to develop software for real products is different for sure. But I felt like I had a good foundation. And most importantly, it got me some really good job offers, and I joined the great team at HP Labs. And so that's where I really learned to write software, is at HP Labs. And so that was useful. And I also did that at Stanford. It was their executive MBA. It's just a short, it's a summer program. And for me, that was perfect because there's no way I wanted to stop, you know, building products for two years and go get an MBA. And so a summer was just right. And HP was really good about sending you there. And anyway, I liked that. That was enough.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:24) Yeah. Do any college professors, have they ever reached out to you and let you know that they actually use your book in their college courses?

(Marty Cagan at 00:11:31) Well, not my college professors. I don't know. Because that was a long time ago. But there are lots of, my book is actually used in a lot of classes in business schools, in software engineering programs, in computer science, probably because there aren't, you know, in that space, there's not that many choices.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:52) And was this your first book?

(Marty Cagan at 00:11:54) Yeah. It was my first book.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:56) That might be kind of tough though, right? You come out and you have an amazing book, then you set the bar super high.

(Marty Cagan at 00:12:02) That's true. I was nervous, you know, turning out a whole new edition because what if people didn't like it as much? But, you know, I felt like you gotta, this is true with any product too. You gotta take risks. And if you're gonna make it better, I believe it's significantly better. And so far, all the reviews have sort of agreed with me. So that's good.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:25) And that, I'll Audible it. It's Audible, right?

(Marty Cagan at 00:12:28) It is gonna come out on Audible. The publisher is doing the Audible thing now, but it's on, of course, Kindle and print right now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:36) Are you doing the voiceover?

(Marty Cagan at 00:12:38) I offered to, but they don't seem very excited about having an author do it. They said that. What?

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:44) That's the best ones. I'm an Audible listener. I'm a, if you look at my Audible, you'd be like, wow, he actually really does listen to Audible. I mean, I'm consuming the Great Courses. That's how I fall asleep. The Foundations of Western Civilization is how I fell asleep the past 56 course hours. So I like that stuff. I like passively consuming educational content. I love it when the author is the one speaking.

(Marty Cagan at 00:13:12) Yeah. I do too. And I said that, but they just said that Audible and the publishers, they said they found that in general, books do better when it's read by a professional voice.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:27) All right. Interesting. I've been, I'm assuming that in some way you use Facebook, even if it's locked down for just your family, right?

(Marty Cagan at 00:13:37) I do. I do. Although I've been, to be honest, I have been contemplating if I want to continue with that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:46) So here's a, so I do it because my wife tags me. We have a four-month-old baby girl. Okay? First child.

(Marty Cagan at 00:13:53) Congratulations.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:54) Yeah. Thank you. So I'm getting tagged about 75 times a day. This is the baby wearing this outfit. This is the baby eating food. This is me refinishing furniture while the baby watches. So they're quite a bit. So I go in there, you know, I check it. And also, the show has a Facebook page where I engage with CTOs, which is kind of cool. But I noticed they added this non-blocking animations is a trend I'm starting to see. And it maybe have been a trend, and I'm just not picking up on it. But what I mean by that is, you hit the like and a bunch of likes icons that made up and out. But, traditionally, animations were blocking. And, I mean, I would say, yes, I want it, and then a success message would come up and a little checkmark would animate. Like, that animation would block me from interacting with the app. So I'm noticing these sort of passive non-blocking animations coming up. And then I flip open, I start talking about this with some friends, and then I flip open this app called Musical.ly, which apparently is just taking the world by storm with the next generation. And it looks like it's so busy. There's icons and stars, and it looks like a crazy game. There's so much happening. It's so intense about what's going on. And my question for you is, are these busier interfaces? Do you think that they're short-lived, or do you think they're gonna be long-term?

(Marty Cagan at 00:15:23) Well, it's actually more complicated than that. So I, and this is fresh in my head, this topic, because I just came back. Every year or two, I go to China. And I don't know if you've had a chance to visit there, but in the tech world, it's just amazing. And I've been going there for now 20 years. And it is, you know, there, if you look, if a typical American looks at one of their services or apps, they're like, oh my god. How could people stay on this? It's nonstop. My head is spinning. It's so busy. It makes our stuff look like Craigslist or something.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:04) Right.

(Marty Cagan at 00:16:06) And the truth is, they are dramatically successful. I mean, they have 750 million internet users there, and it is massive. And so, it's not as simple as saying, you know, is this just a design trend or not? Depending on the application, depending on the user, sometimes it is more appropriate.

(Marty Kagan at 00:16:37) Actually, isn't Musical.ly also a Chinese — I think it's a Chinese service too. But anyway, so, you know, you kind of have to judge each one independently based on the goals and its users. And sometimes, you know, one of the easiest ways to do that is different cultures around the world. Like, South Korea famously likes these just more rich or crowded, cluttered interfaces. Japan likes these, and China definitely likes these.

(Marty Kagan at 00:17:13) And a lot of the more Western cultures prefer otherwise. But I think that doesn't mean that one is necessarily good or bad. It's whatever is necessary for that product and that audience.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:26) You know, as you're talking, I'm thinking about this conversation. So one of my friends is Jack, and he's president of the opera. And we have a fairly popular opera in our city, like opera house. And we were eating lunch, and he was telling me about how, you know, historic — like, back back in the day, right — they would, people would come listen to these operas because they were sensory overload.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:50) Like, people might think that they're boring now. Oh, you got a person singing and some music playing. But for then, what they were experiencing in their regular everyday life, when they would come to this opera and watch, there would be so much happening, so much to take in. It was like sensory overload. And so when you were talking, I was thinking about that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:07) Like, I do see it more in games than I do in business apps, maybe because, you know, that's part of your everyday life, the sort of business app. And the games, maybe for the next generation, they're making them a lot more stimulating.

(Marty Kagan at 00:18:22) Yeah. I mean, it's — there's certainly game mechanics, and this idea of really keeping people's attention is one dimension. You're right, it shows up a lot in games. But you just have to look. This is where design is one of the three key roles in product, and I have so much respect for great designers — great interaction designers, experience designers, visual designers, industrial designers. They are — you know, it's a super hard problem that they're asked to tackle and come up with really the right experience for that customer trying to solve whatever problems they're trying to work on. So yeah, I try to keep an open mind. And I also know just because I don't like an interface really is meaningless if I'm not in the target market, for sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:15) Absolutely. In China, have you ever seen a business system or some sort of business utility, like a CRM or something like that, that has a Dance Dance Revolution-style busy interface?

(Marty Kagan at 00:19:28) Well, I haven't. But the truth is, you know, because of the language difference, I have a hard time, really. You know, I can't do like I can in the US where I can just go sit down and play with an app or something. I don't really, really don't know what the financial app is saying. I couldn't tell you if it's a payroll app or a CRM app. So —

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:48) You go to open your bank account, and it's like two kittens and a duck. You're like, am I broke? My sister actually lives in Shenzhen, and she's been there for quite a while. So I talk to her all the time and —

(Marty Kagan at 00:20:01) She could probably answer that. I wouldn't be surprised, though, if they have — there is this trend around the world called consumerization of the enterprise, which is bringing a lot of consumer practices to business software. And so I would not be surprised if some of that has been done. Just like you can see LinkedIn adapt a lot of Facebook techniques over the years, for sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:26) If somebody has a relationship at LinkedIn, they need to go work on their ad platform. If you — you go spend ten minutes creating an ad on Facebook, and then you go spend ten minutes creating an ad on LinkedIn. Like, LinkedIn feels like their ad system feels like they outsourced, like —

(Marty Kagan at 00:20:42) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:43) $2,000 that they spent to have someone make an ad system. Like, it frustrated me. And then it was really expensive, so I was just like — and I just, I don't mess with ads on LinkedIn right now. That's a user experience thing, though. Like, if it was pleasant to make ads on their system and they were more expensive, I still might do it. But it's frustrating and it's more expensive, and that marks me out.

(Marty Kagan at 00:21:06) Yeah. If, though, you really do — if your business needs to be on LinkedIn, then that's sort of the only game in town. And so that's why LinkedIn makes so much money from advertisements.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:20) Right. So your book, the title, right? "Inspired: How to Create Products Customers Love." Do you have a sort of like one-sentence answer to that title? Like, when I say, "Hey, Marty, you know, how do you create products customers love?" Do you have some sort of quick answer for that?

(Marty Kagan at 00:21:38) No. That's the truth. In fact, I usually start by telling people, you know, doing a great technology-powered product is super hard. Many things have to be done well. If any of them doesn't get done well, you have a failure. So that's kind of my elevator pitch: Doing product is hard. Don't fool yourself. And in fact, I think, you know, there's always people that try to tell you it doesn't have to be hard, and I think they're just — they're not helping anybody by saying that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:07) When I saw that question, what came through my mind was I was actually trying to, you know, be a little introspective and think back to the products that I love and think about why I love them, right? And what I came up with, for me personally, right, is when the result is greater or equal to the expected value. So what I mean by that is when a product does what I expect it to do, I'm happy and I like it. When it exceeds my expectation, I love it. And when something happens that I don't expect at all and it's not what I wanted, then I dislike it. And so I kind of look at it as when expectation and reality are in sync or the reality is greater than the expectation, that's when I love a product.

(Marty Kagan at 00:22:49) Yeah. I mean, I think that's a reasonable trait of a successful product if, you know, exceed the expectations, for sure. But, you know, it's hard enough to actually do something that your customers love, but it's even harder. You have to do it in a way that your customers love, but also works for your business. And that —

(Marty Kagan at 00:23:12) That's where a lot of companies, a lot of teams, product teams fall over as they think all we have to do is make our users love us. And I'm like, no, unfortunately, it's a lot harder than that. You have to do it in a way that you can afford as a business. You have to do it in a way that doesn't get you in trouble with the SEC or getting you in trouble with the law or in trouble with privacy advocates. I mean, or in trouble with your marketing organization, or it has to be something your salespeople can sell. I mean, there are so many — you know, it's a lot harder than just something your users love.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:50) First of all, I agree with that. I have two products. So — first of all, we don't do any ads. Like, this is a value-based show, right? Revenue on, bring value, and I'm just doing this as sort of like, this is what I enjoy doing. Like, I enjoy talking to smart people, enjoy talking technology. And before, I was trying to do that through building because I have a, you know, an app company and stuff, and I work with some VC firms, things like that. And that happens. That pays the bills, and that's whatever.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:15) But I noticed that that's the long way, because I'm trying to get — you know, in those circumstances, I'm getting people to do business with me or I'm being a part of a business deal. But I noticed that there's a much faster way: I just call people up and talk to them. And that's what I enjoy doing. So this is what I love. And so I'm living, you know, what I love and my dream, and I'm super happy. There's two products that I use and — no association. They don't pay me or anything — but I feel like that they're making me fall in love with them more and more. Not only did I initially fall in love with them, but I'm continually falling in love with them as they do new things.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:55) I asked myself this question this morning. I'm like, is Marty behind any of these? So it's — the two I'm talking about are InVision, right, and Intercom. Have you heard of either of those?

(Marty Kagan at 00:25:07) Sure. Yeah. Yeah. And InVision — you're referring, do you use all their design tools?

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:16) I don't use all of them. No. Some of them. Yeah. I use them to mock up interfaces to show people prototypes.

(Marty Kagan at 00:25:23) Yeah. I'm with you on InVision too, that I just, I think they're terrific. And I — but I'm not an official advisor or investor in their company, but I have trained almost all of their product people and design people, and friends with their CEO and their cofounder — the other cofounder who's the designer — and just love what they've been doing. And one of my partners, Leah Hickman, was their head of product. And I introduced her to them. And anyway, it's a great story for sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:00) I knew you were close.

(Marty Kagan at 00:26:02) Yeah. Do you —

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:03) Do you know a gentleman by the name of Aaron Walter?

(Marty Kagan at 00:26:06) What's his last name?

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:07) Walter. He's the VP of design at InVision.

(Marty Kagan at 00:26:13) Oh. Yeah. He's the head of design education. And they have done, by the way, I think they've done a beautiful job at building community around design, really better than just about anybody else I know. It's — they have the — it's a unique and I think a very powerful approach to marketing. So that is terrific. Yeah. And that's what he does. And I think I have actually met him, but I was only surprised because their head of design is another guy. And I'm trying to remember his name at the moment, but I'll remember it in a second.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:48) What about, do you know April Underwood?

(Marty Kagan at 00:26:51) Oh, yeah. At Slack. Sure. Another great product leader. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:54) She's on maternity leave right now, and we're trying to get her on the show.

(Marty Kagan at 00:26:59) We reached —

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:00) Out, and we're like, oh, man. I was reading about her online. I was like, oh, this — she's smart. Like, this is good. This is good. We need to have April on the show. And so we reached out, and they're like, oh, she's on maternity leave, so it may be difficult, but they didn't say no, right? And I'm always — I'm like, okay, cool. They didn't say no. So I grabbed, like, the best-looking picture of my daughter, like, so cute, right? And I attached it to the email, and I'm like, all right, Jenny — she's the producer, PR person — like, Jenny, send it out and be like, oh, we want to talk about the kids too, because I just went through this. I just, you know, had my first child, and that's — so much experience there, so many things happening, you know?

(Marty Kagan at 00:27:40) Yeah. See —

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:41) If we can get her on the show and let's talk about designing great products with children or something. Let's find an angle, you know? So I — it'd be cool if she were on the show.

(Marty Kagan at 00:27:54) She would be perfect. And Slack is an amazing story. So —

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:57) Oh, I know their story. I love them. I was a part of it since their invite stage. I follow them, and they just, they keep delivering, and I keep using it. It's every project I have that I'm involved in, it's a requirement. And I used to have to establish it as a requirement, you know, a few years ago as it was emerging, but now nobody even — like, everyone already has their Slack. They're like, yeah, we use Slack too.

(Marty Kagan at 00:28:22) Yeah. Almost everybody does, which is amazing in and of itself, how quickly that's come.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:27) I want to know, Marty, I want to know what gets Marty pumped up. Like, what gets you excited in life?

(Marty Kagan at 00:28:34) Well, I do get a ton of energy from startup founders. You know, there's a — not all of them. Some of them are just purely, you know, mercenaries. You meet them and they're just clearly in it for the money, and fine. Not very interested in those ones. But some of them — so most of them, in my experience, are just so passionate about what they're working on and genuinely trying to change the world in a good way. And I don't always get excited about their vision. Don't get me wrong. Some of them, I love. Like, when I heard about what InVision wanted to do, I loved it because I felt like there was room for that.

(Marty Kagan at 00:29:17) Adobe had owned that space for years, but it was time for — you know, there was definitely room for a new key player. But other times, I'm like, yeah, well, there's probably a market there. I'm not excited about it myself. But that doesn't matter what I — it's that passion of the cofounders that really is — it's an amazing kind of energy, and I love that. And, you know, if I can help them in any way, you know, try and maybe increase the odds that they succeed, I love that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:53) Oh, absolutely. And I loved Adobe's — I like their pivot when they went monthly. That was — I thought that was a real smart move for them.

(Marty Kagan at 00:30:00) Well, it was incredibly smart and necessary. But, you know, most people don't appreciate just how incredibly hard that was and how the vast majority of companies would never have had the courage to do what they did.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:14) You mean rewriting and reworking your entire product line across, like, 20 uniquely written apps that are, like, huge, massive feature bases?

(Marty Kagan at 00:30:22) On top of that, that's literally taking 50% of the revenue of Adobe, $2 billion, and putting it all at risk. That kind of bet is really rare. I wrote about that story if you're interested in the backstory. It's one of the most amazing stories in our industry, and it's largely an untold story because, you know, people know that they're the fastest company to a billion in subscription revenue, but they have no idea what happened to make that happen.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:52) Right. What sort of content do you consume? Like, what's your digital diet look like?

(Marty Kagan at 00:30:58) Well, sounds like you, I do like to read. I would say the most — one of the most important, because I — I'll tell you my challenge is keeping up with all of the sub-industries in technology that I work with. I mean, I work with companies not based on their industry. It's more about their team. And so there are many more industries than I actually know about. And so following those closely would be a full-time job. And I actually — my little — this isn't a secret. I've told other people they should do the same thing. But do you know the blog Stratechery?

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:37) No. Say that again.

(Marty Kagan at 00:31:39) It's a goofy name, and it's spelled Stratechery.com. Stratechery. And it is, by far, I think, the best blog on technology strategy and analysis. And he follows the entire technology industry and is incredibly insightful. This is all he does, is follow the industry and write daily his analysis.

(Marty Kagan at 00:32:12) And so that's my digital diet in terms of work stuff. Usually starts with about half an hour reading and thinking about what he has to say. And then that covers probably 80% of the companies that I even interact with. So that's a huge time-saver for me. And also, I think he's such a good thinker about strategy that it makes me a better thinker about strategy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:39) How'd you find him?

(Marty Kagan at 00:32:42) He's pretty well known in the tech industry, and he's been going for a while. His name is Ben Thompson. Yeah. You'd like it. For CTOs, one of my favorite blogs is called Code as Craft. Do you know that blog?

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:00) No. But I'm in love with the name.

(Marty Kagan at 00:33:02) Yeah. So one of the best companies in the product world is Etsy, E-T-S-Y. You know Etsy, probably. And they produce a blog called Code as Craft. Yeah.

(Marty Cagan at 00:33:13) Yeah. I've known Etsy. I mean, I was an advisor at Etsy when they were just a few cofounders. And now they're huge and public, but they have been publishing this blog that really thinks deeply about how to build product. And so I love their blog and they've written, I mean, it's now more than ten years of great content. So you should check that out. And actually, I strongly encourage, you know, CTOs to read that. It's a great one.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:45) Yeah. We're gonna have these people on the show.

(Marty Cagan at 00:33:48) Well, he'd be great for you to have on the show, probably. And the other, another one, so Etsy just hired a new CTO who, I mean, they've had actually a pretty legendary CTO. And then, you know, but the company's pretty old and public now, and they just hired a new one who's fantastic. His name's Mike Fisher. He was the CTO at PayPal before, and he's a great thinker in terms of technology leadership. So he'd be a good guy for you to interview as well if you haven't.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:22) Say his name again.

(Marty Cagan at 00:34:24) Michael Fisher.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:25) Michael Fisher. And was he there when Musk was there?

(Marty Cagan at 00:34:29) When who was there?

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:31) Musk. Elon was there?

(Marty Cagan at 00:34:32) At, I don't, oh, you mean at PayPal? No. He came after, a little after. That was, but, you know, I love early PayPal, actually. And there was a lot of, I mean, it was incredibly fast growing company. But, you know, dealing with scale, as you know, is super hard. It's the biggest challenge for most CTOs, and he was there through a major stretch of growth for PayPal. And, anyway, he's advised CTOs for the last, like, seven or eight years, and then he decided to join Etsy because it's a pretty prestigious position to be Etsy's CTO, and he couldn't turn it down. So he had been advising them for many years also.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:17) I'm gonna, by the way, we're gonna figure this out, Marty. I'm gonna put some people together and we're gonna get Musk and Bezos. I'm gonna fly out there. They're all in California. And you and I, we're gonna go meet them, have lunch with them, high five them. You can talk the whole conversation. I just wanna be the fly on the wall.

(Marty Cagan at 00:35:32) Yeah. I wish. But they're in a different orbit, but they are, they're pretty impressive for sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:39) CTOs, off the cuff advice. I know when we sent the email, we talked about, you know, CTOs shouldn't be involved in the product UI design. That was your stance. My initial, I'd like this initial knee jerk reaction, like, what? And then I use some of my personal principles, right, with boiling it back down and, taking, you know, using Marty as my spirit animal. Basically, assuming your role and thinking about your experience, and because people don't just say stuff usually. Smart people don't usually just say stuff. They have experience behind it, and that's how they came to their conclusions. Right? So I'm like, alright. Well, I'm gonna try to get inside Marty's mind. Like, where is he coming from when he's saying that they shouldn't be a part of it? Because in my experience, it's different. So I tried to blend the two and figure it out. And here's what I came up with. You ready for it?

(Marty Cagan at 00:36:27) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:28) A lot of the experience that I'm having with CTOs, so I started finding all the CTOs in the world and emailing every single one of them. Personally, I spent just ungodly amounts of time, Marty, just reaching out to them, researching them, asking them questions, talking to them. I wanted to get a feel for the heartbeat of this community. And what I found was very surprising to me. I found that over 60%, almost as high as 80% of the people who wear that label, right? The people who wear the label, they have the experience of going from developer to CTO. So they were writing some code, and then they got a cofounder or someone together, and then they wrote the code of the first version of the application, and then they started to grow the company. That is the majority of what I experience on a day to day basis. Right? Those types of people. So where I was coming from when I'm asking that is my goal in life is I did that. I was a developer that became a CTO, and that was my experience. And I struggled to learn all of these things. You know? I, God. I wish I would have found your book. First of all, I wish you would have written it twenty years ago. Secondly, I wish I would have been there on the day it was released because it probably wouldn't have meant the same to me because when you go through struggle and have pain and learn hard experiences, the information means more to you than just words on a page. Right? So, from that perspective, I wanted to bring some value and bring on an expert like you to give some advice to the CTOs. So I've kind of grouped them into three categories because I talked to all of them, and they all kinda fall into these three categories. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna give you kind of a context, and then I'm gonna ask you for, you know, just, off the top, whatever comes to your mind, it's not a difficult thing, you know, the advice that you would give them. Is that cool?

(Marty Cagan at 00:38:16) Sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:17) Okay. So the first would be the startup CTO. This is what I was describing before. It's the majority of CTOs, and they're usually one to two people developing a product. And the person developing is usually the CTO, and he's writing code or he's wearing that label. And so I found that when I did it, I didn't have a lot of UI, UX experience. I had none. I just started writing and testing. So what advice would you, other than read my book, what advice would you give the start, sort of the startup CTO, the new CTO who's just developing something with a partner?

(Marty Cagan at 00:38:50) Well, so this is more of the cofounder CTO. And it's a very small team. And I don't, I wanna be careful. I don't wanna sound hypocritical because I actually had the same path as you there. I started as an engineer and moved up and was CTO of a startup called Continuous Software. And I also had design and product under me. So I had all three of those roles. But, again, this started as four people and ended up as a hundred people. And then, eventually, they went public and were acquired by IBM. But that was, you know, they went through those stages. So it's not impossible. But what we are talking about, really, is what's best practice and how do you really increase your chances of success. And when I did that startup, that was just before the Internet. That was 1990 to 1995. That was, to be honest, design was nascent compared to what it is now. So I think I got lucky. We kinda got away with it. I don't think you can get lucky like that today. Well, in fact, I usually encourage, well, first of all, I should, there's a principle in software that's worth, that's actually best stated in a famous book that every CTO should read. It's called The Inmates Are Running the Asylum. Have you heard of this?

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:19) Oh, no. But the title again is amazing.

(Marty Cagan at 00:40:23) Yeah. Well, his point, it was written by a very famous, actually, engineering architect, the guy who actually was behind Visual Basic from Microsoft. And he explained the reason so many products are so bad is because they are being designed by engineers. And he was arguing that the reason that is bad, and again, I admitted in the beginning, I was trained, I was trained in computer science, so I had to say I'm guilty of the same thing. When you're trained in computer science, you're trained in how to solve problems in ways that are represented on the computer as opposed to how to get inside users' heads. It's about implementation models rather than user mental models. And his argument was the reason so much software is so bad is because it's being designed by engineers. And this is a very famous book. It was written by Alan Cooper. And, I think once that book probably got out there, and it was 15 years old at this point, but it's still a famous and popular book. Most, most of the time engineers realize that they are not trained to actually design software well. Now, building software is different than designing the experience, of course. We're not, I'm not talking about building the experience, building the front end. I'm talking about designing the front end or designing the experience. And that is a special skill set. Now, I do happen to know a handful of great engineers that are also great at design. But they are, I mean, that's a true unicorn in truth. Those are very rare people. I love it when I meet these people.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:09) I only know one. He's the one that gave me your book.

(Marty Cagan at 00:42:13) Well, so those people are awesome. And if, you know, I always tell people when I, if they've got people like that, don't ever lose them. You know, they are so valuable. But the vast majority of engineers are not like that. So you either get a bad experience or bad code, one or the other, and I don't think either of them are acceptable. So the principle is these are different skill sets. Most CTOs, not only do they not know how to design, they don't have those skills or talents. They don't even know what to look for, in truth. And so this is, this is normally, UX design lives as part of product management and UX design. Those two are together, and that is best practice. Now the other side of this, we're still talking about your scenario here of early stage startup. My view is in an early stage startup, once you've hired three or four engineers, it's time really to hire a designer. Now if you're an early stage startup, don't get me wrong, the designer is gonna work for probably the CTO. It might maybe working for the CEO. Doesn't matter so much. What matters is you get a designer in there. Otherwise, I tell them they're wasting their engineers. As a company grows, it becomes a bigger issue. The other thing I would talk about is if you were, when you interviewed these CTOs, and I don't know how many of them are honest with you on this, but if I ask this question of CEOs, how many of your companies are suffering or at least struggling with technical debt? And, you know, this is probably the single biggest topic for your audience, tech debt. And the vast majority of companies today struggle with tech debt in a minor to a major way. In fact, way too many of them to a major way. And so my point is, look, first, we need those CTOs to make sure they can enable the company to build what it needs to build. And so, you know, occasionally, I'll meet a CTO that is passionate about design or product and the like, great, but make sure first, you know, you do your job that the whole company is counting on you to do. Otherwise, you could either kill the company or very likely, you know, the one who's fired from tech debt is almost always the CTO. So, you know, they need to take that seriously. That's a huge, huge responsibility. Architecture, constantly improving, enabling the business to deliver on its vision. That is incredibly hard. Hiring and retaining great engineers is hard. Evangelizing the technology is hard. These are the core responsibilities of a CTO. Of course, I think it's a good trait when I meet CTOs that care about product and design. To me, that's a great sign. And every once in a while, you get a CTO like that. And in fact, Etsy had a CTO like that. His name was Chad Dickerson, and they actually promoted him to be CEO, which is very rare. You may know there's not many CEOs that came from the CTO role.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:49) Right.

(Marty Cagan at 00:45:49) Most CEOs come from the product role. And I liked Chad from the very beginning in large part because of that. He cared about not just building, but also creating a culture and creating great solutions for his customers. And so, it's a positive trait. But even Chad, who cared about all that, he had a separate product and design organization.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:15) Right. And, you know, I'm kind of fresh in this. Right? Because it's happened over the past decade for me. That's why I wanted to start talking about it right away rather than, you know, waiting twenty years to start talking about it. Right? So in that transition, what I noticed is going from developer to CTO and then, you know, CTO to almost an investor type individual. Because once you, once you go through making bad products and you learn to make good products, then once you're making good products, then you figure out how to make products that make money and create value and bring value to the market. Then you figure out that it's all about the people because people aren't buying, nobody buys a car to have a large 2,000 pound piece of metal in their garage. They buy a car for the value of transportation, right, or for the value of something else, whether it makes them feel good because it sounds fast or looks, you know, whatever it is. But you never buy something directly. You're always buying the byproduct or the value of something. Right? And they don't buy your code directly. What they're doing is they're buying the value that your CRM code base brings them in their life, their ability to connect better with their relationships. So I started, I started out feature first because I was a developer, so I'm always writing features. So I started feature first, then I figured out, okay, I gotta go value first. And then I figured out, oh, you gotta go talk to people and make sure that the value is actually a need in the market. Right? So that the market demands this value exist. Otherwise, your business doesn't exist. And once I kinda put those together and realized, okay, well, it's all about people and value, then during that process, you have to really, you know, kick up your EQ and become aware of these things and then interact with people. And that sort of pulled me from my generally, you know, introverted state, you know, into more of understanding people because it was fascinating for me. And then once I figured, once I got through those stages, I was like, oh, well, this is, this is just kinda how things work. So I could see what you mean when you're saying, you know, you get a lot of product people that go to CEO because product people tend to learn those things immediately or specialize in those things and then go out in the world and try them. Right? Whereas me, I started specializing in writing clean code and scalable code, and then I had to transition to that role and then learn those skills and practice them and then, you know, move on. So I get what you mean when you say that it's rare for the CTOs. I guess it's just the person and who they are and if they really care about that part of the job. Right? So the second is kind of our mid growth people going from, let's say, 20 to 50. We get a lot of those. I get a lot of people that have 20 something people. They're growing 30. They're expected 50 by the end of the year. They're actually doing this off of revenue and not investor capital, which is, you know, what I look for. I look for people that have revenue. It's not people that raised, I raised a bunch of money. It's like, okay. Great. I wanna see people that have raised a bunch of revenue. And they're kinda struggling with, you know, growing as the CTO. When do they get the product person? What do they look for in a good product manager? How do they validate and identify the expert that they're going to, they're gonna start to relinquish control of the product. Right? Maybe they're working with a designer. They're gonna start to relinquish control, put a product owner in place. What do they look for when hiring that person and scaling that part of their business?

(Marty Kagan at 00:49:39) Well, the first thing—the most common pattern I see is actually a little different than what you're describing. You're describing the scenario, and I think it's just self-selection because you've been talking to CTOs where the CTO had product responsibility and then they let it go over time, give it to somebody else. More common, and I'm pretty confident saying this, is there's almost always two or three co-founders for these startups. And one of them is a technology leader, like you're saying, usually a CTO. And the other one is typically the CEO.

(Marty Kagan at 00:50:17) And that CEO is the one who usually has product responsibility early on. So it's already in the most common startups, I think, split. Now then the question becomes, when does the CEO decide it's time to bring in a product person? The CEO may be a product person, and then it'll go typically a lot longer. But if they're not, they're covering it and eventually bring in a product person.

(Marty Kagan at 00:50:48) Just like they have that question, when do we bring in a designer? Normally, for a startup, they'll bring in a designer quite early because they want to make sure their engineers are not building useless stuff. But they don't bring in a product leader until later, because, like I said, one of the co-founders is playing the role of the product leader, which I like. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. In fact, I like them to play that role as long as they can.

(Marty Kagan at 00:51:15) But at a certain point, they do have—the CEO usually has to decide, are they going to focus on raising money, or are they going to focus on driving the product? And so many, many companies have gone through that kind of decision. Sometimes, the CEO decides, like Zuckerberg's case, to bring in somebody like a Sheryl Sandberg so that he could really focus on product and not have to worry about running the company. And other times, like at Etsy, the original founder, Rob Kalin, decided to bring in a head of product so that he could focus on guiding the company and let go of the product role.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:53) See, and this is exactly why I want Marty Kagan on the show. You've got your whole vast wealth of experience, right? You're experiencing that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:01) I'm experiencing something different. But I think what we agree on is those are—like at some point, the CEO and the CTO need a product person. However the origin was, they come together where when they start to grow, they need to bring in that product person. The last category would be a couple hundred person plus, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:20) I talked to a couple of these guys. They have a couple hundred people at their company and they're CTOs. And I think for them, maybe something more along the lines of, like, revisiting and not getting stale or shaking things up or doing some sort of audit. Like, what advice do you give to them?

(Marty Kagan at 00:52:37) Well, I kind of refer to these—in fact, it's in my new book, I structured it this way. I talk about startups, growth stage companies, and enterprises. And you're now describing the enterprises. Now, at this point, you're probably a public company or you're part of a much bigger company.

(Marty Kagan at 00:52:56) You've got multiple products in your line. I'd be the first to point out that most large enterprise tech companies lose their mojo. Most of them lose their ability to actually innovate. I think I understand the reasons for that. It's not really rocket science.

(Marty Kagan at 00:53:15) Most of the time, the visionary product leader is gone. The company has got all these assets and all these people, like lawyers, there to protect those assets. They basically have a lot more to lose, so they're scared to really innovate. This is why I'm so impressed, like we talked about before, about what Adobe did, to really put half their revenue at risk to end up with something much better. Most companies don't have the courage to do that.

(Marty Kagan at 00:53:45) There are some companies, not just Adobe, but if you look at Netflix, if you look at Amazon, which is really poster child for this, if you look at Facebook, they're not afraid to keep making big bets and to keep moving forward. So really, the issue is, if your hypothetical company here has lost its mojo, then the question is, how do you get it back? If they still got their mojo, then it's about how do you keep it. It's much harder, of course, if they've lost it and you're trying to really turn that company around again. And that's one of the hardest problems in our industry.

(Marty Kagan at 00:54:27) I spent a lot of my time—well, most of my time is with the smaller startup and growth stage. But occasionally, if somebody I know for a long time will take a job as head of product, a new head of product at some older company that has really lost their mojo, and I will do what I can to try to help them get it back. I will tell you that typically starts not at the head of product, but at the CEO. Because we're really talking about a cultural change.

(Marty Kagan at 00:54:56) And to get that culture to change, to get the leaders to change how they think about things, how they run their business, how they run their product world, how they run their engineering world, how they staff it, that's a super hard challenge. Fortunately, there are several cases where companies have pulled that off. They really got their mojo back. And those are the ones that give me hope and give other people hope that it's possible. But I always tell people it is one of the hardest things to do, to change culture like this.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:34) You know, I was reading your article, the one where you're mentioning Ray, and you started to go on about the culture. How much do you talk about culture in your newer version of your book?

(Marty Kagan at 00:55:46) A lot. It's one of the four big topics.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:49) Good. Because I loved it. While I was reading it, I have you pegged—you know, everyone does this. I had you isolated as the, you know, user experience type stuff. And then when I started reading, consuming your culture content, I was like, I want more culture from Marty.

(Marty Kagan at 00:56:04) Yeah. Well, to me, that is really the most important topic. If you really want consistent innovation for your customers, it's all about that culture.

(Joel Beasley at 00:56:15) Do you ever experience bad products and, like, want to reach out to them?

(Marty Kagan at 00:56:21) Oh, yeah. All the time. Sometimes I just—well, you know, we all do. We all do. And sometimes if I know somebody there, I will reach out.

(Marty Kagan at 00:56:28) I'll get so frustrated. I'm like, dude, this is so bad. You really have to fix this. Most of the time, companies understand there are issues and are working to fix it. Like, I believe that Facebook understands today.

(Marty Kagan at 00:56:44) I think they've actually understood it for a while, but they weren't really publicly acknowledging it. But they understand that there's some serious, I'm not talking about UX issues here. I'm talking about more product, fundamental issues. But they understand. And most of the people there that I know, and I know a lot of people there, they are great people and they have no interest in doing the wrong thing for the world or hurting the world. They very much want to help.

(Marty Kagan at 00:57:13) But they're trying, they're working on it. It's also a super hard problem that they've created. They created it, but it's a super hard problem to solve.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:26) Right.

(Marty Kagan at 00:57:27) And, you know, I am definitely rooting for them to solve it. But it's not easy. So most of the time when products really have these issues, it's not like they're unaware.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:43) And the last question, right? Super excited about this one. How do you deal with the celebrity of being Marty Kagan? Like, I assume—I have this vision in my mind that you have, like, an endless stream of, like, product groupies standing on your lawn holding up signs that say Marty.

(Marty Kagan at 00:58:01) Well, I hate to disappoint you, but that's not really the reality. So no. It's, you know, the product community is growing, and it's a good-sized community, but it's not that big. And so it's not like that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:20) For the official response to that question, I'm just going to go ahead and mark down, excessive security detail, like, 24/7. You can't even go to the grocery store without security detail.

(Marty Kagan at 00:58:32) No, no. I will say I was in—when I was in China, for whatever reason, like, my book is incredibly popular in the tech community in China. I still can't really explain it, but it is. And so I have much more of a sort of minor celebrity status there than here.

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:54) Are you tall?

(Marty Kagan at 00:58:55) That's kind of fun. Well, tall enough. Yeah. But that's not it. It's, you know, they've been really eating up product stuff for a long time.

(Marty Kagan at 00:59:05) And like I said, there's not that many books in product. And I had a good translator for my book several years ago, and it's just spread all across China's tech community.

(Joel Beasley at 00:59:17) So when are you speaking next? Where can the groupies start to line up?

(Marty Kagan at 00:59:23) Well, I always have talks coming up. I have, let's see. I have a couple coming up that are pretty good. One is there is a launch party being thrown for me by DesignMap, which is one of—you may have heard of DesignMap. They're one of the sort of leading design firms in San Francisco.

(Marty Kagan at 00:59:46) So that is on the twenty-second in San Francisco. I'm going to be giving a talk in Mountain View at Intuit's offices on the twenty-fifth. It's called the Lean Product Meetup. If you've heard of Dan Olsen or Dan Olsen's sessions, they're always popular, and I'll be there on the twenty-fifth. Those are the two talks coming up in the next couple weeks.

(Joel Beasley at 01:00:20) Fantastic. So I'll list those in the show notes and as well as all the other references and links to Stratechery, I think, is what it's supposed to be. Yeah. Yeah. So I'll link all that.

(Joel Beasley at 01:00:31) And, man, this is—I loved this. This is exactly what I wanted. It exceeded my expectations. You created a person that loves Marty.

(Marty Kagan at 01:00:41) Cool. I appreciate it.

(Joel Beasley at 01:00:48) Thank you so much for listening to the Modern CTO podcast. Share this. Get the word out. Thank you guys so much. I couldn't do it without you.

(Joel Beasley at 01:00:54) I appreciate it. You guys are the absolute best.