Marty Cagan: Product Lessons from Steve Jobs and Elon Musk; Why do we idolize engineers? | 20VC #957

Marty, this is such a joy to do. I, I, I'm sure you know, but I, I've loved your writing for quite a while now, so a bit of a fanboy moment for me having you on. But thank you so much for joining me today.

Well, thanks for inviting me. I'm flattered to be on your show. (laughs)

That is very, very kind of you. I wanna start though with a little bit of context. So, you are the OG of product management, as many have, uh, cited. How, how did you come to be the OG of product management, Marty, in a swift two to three minutes?

Well, the truth is, I, um, I, I do hear things like that, and I can't help but laugh a little. My interest has actually never been really product management. My interest has always been product teams, um, to m- 'cause I've never seen a product come from a product manager. I've only seen great products come from product teams. And so, um, anyway, sort of a long way of explaining that is, uh, or a shorter way (laughs) of explaining that, I, um, I started as an engineer for 10 years and, uh, I was lucky. I was at a great place, HP Labs. It was, uh, uh, and I was working on tools and products for other developers, other engineers. So, s- very fun 10 years. I had a great time. And that was during the time where they were kind of in their prime.

Yep.

They were known as the consis- most consistently innovative company in the world at the time, and that's why I went there, and I had a great time. Uh, I did get interested there in more than just engineering. I started asking the questions about, "Who decides we should build this particular product? How do they know that's gonna be a good thing to do?" I started asking those questions, sort of beyond the little swim lane of a typical engineer, and I learned about product, I learned about design, and I learned about go-to-market, and I learned about all these things, uh, which was great. Um, my lucky break happened actually because, uh, I had done all these products for developers, and as you know, Netscape was really the original internet company, and, uh, I got to work for Marc Andreessen. I was, you know, there was already a browser team, there was already a server team, but I was for, uh, platform and tools, in other words, again, doing products for developers. Uh, in this case though, it was the internet, new platform instead of just, you know, W- Windows. And so, um, that was a dream job, honestly. I'd still be there if, uh, if, if it was still going as a company, uh, but as you know, after about five or six years, we, uh, lost the browser wars, to Microsoft and your internet history, and, um, I, and I got to meet, during my time at Netscape, I got to meet the bou- the founder of eBay, Pierre, Pierre Omidyar, and I really liked him. Uh, I loved his vision for the company. You know, eBay was probably the first real app in the internet era, the child of the internet, um, and so it was a great, I was brought on to be their head of, their original head of product and design. Really, he was the original head of product, that's the truth, but, you know, he was the founder, um, and they had got some real traction, really, because of his innovations. And then, um-