TBM 358: The Genius of SVPG

This post begun with a quick thought shared on LinkedIn (200+ comments):

No one gets fired for recommending "Transformed"
What is a book you could share internally that could get you fired?

If you have a moment, I’d love you to chime in!

Transformed

Transformed by Marty Cagan, Lea Hickman, Chris Jones, Christian Idiodi, and John Moore has been a big part of day-to-day lately. This may have seemed like a critique, but it wasn’t at all. Let me explain.

Between 60-80% of all large enterprises I speak to have brought in Marty Cagan and/or SVPG at one point in the last couple of years. That is an outstanding achievement for the SVPG mission. The positive impact is undeniable, even just based on my (admittedly biased) sample.

He (and the other authors) has found a way to nudge change in an executive-friendly way. I mean this in the best way: no one gets fired for bringing in SVPG. That is an outstanding feat when you consider how directly SVPG challenges leaders to up their product game. Few people out there manage to do this on such a grand scale, and for that, I am very grateful.

If you've ever tried to nudge change in your company, you know the first two questions are, "So who does this well?" and "So how do we get better?" SVPG has the answers. "Here's who does it well, you can get there, and here's how we help." Marty and the team openly say it will be hard—even very hard—and that most companies will fail, but they deliver that message in a tone and framing that execs can absorb without losing face.

Themes like competence, bravery, vision, and strong leadership sound like challenges, but they're identity-affirming for executives. Transformed lets the leader stay the hero of the change story, and challenges the org without directly threatening the leader's self-image. Change is often about creating conditions where people can negotiate with their self-identity and still find a path forward.

"You're the kind of leader who takes product seriously."

"This is what great companies do, and you aim to be great."

"You already care about this. Here's how to do it better."

And all the while, Cagan is telling teams, "You're not crazy; this is how it's supposed to work."

Genius. SVPG is genius.

Lessons for Change Agents

The Messenger Matters

There's a lesson in this for internal change agents. The truth is, many of you have been saying these things for years and have been routinely discounted. Not because you were wrong or because your message lacked substance, but because inside an organization, the truth isn't always enough.

At the highest levels, change often hinges on peer signaling, external legitimacy, and narrative timing. It's not just what is said; it's who says it, when, and how it's framed. The messenger matters. If you're internal, that fact alone may have quietly disqualified your message. I wish this weren't true. I wish the content alone could carry the day. But this dynamic is real, and recognizing it doesn't diminish your work and efforts.

You can use this to your advantage.

Stay observant. Watch the tides of change. Pay attention to the industry narratives your leaders are tracking, the peers they admire, the signals they’re receiving from conferences, consultants, and competitors. The trick is to stay alive to timing, framing, and the social currents that determine when the truth gets heard. Do what you can locally and pick your moment.

Surf Simple

And the second lesson.

When chatting with companies about the impact of SVPG, I often hear that while companies (and individuals) get a lot of value out of the interactions, they're often left trying to figure out many of the details around how to actually lead the change. But this is by design.

Imagine if Cagan's message explored the mess, politics, fear, power shifts, and emotional cost of change. Imagine if it dove into budgeting battles, incentive misalignment, rearchitecting monoliths, and fragile founders. Imagine if it explored how dysfunctional some of the best tech companies are, or examined companies that achieved wild success without following these practices.

What if the book was peppered with quotes similar to this one from my friend who works at one of the highlighted, highly-regarded companies in the latest book:

I know we get held up as one of the good examples, and we do a lot right. Teams have real problems to solve, we push hard on discovery, and strategy guides our work. But it's not some utopia.

There are still quarters where delivery pressure takes over, or we fall back into project-thinking without meaning to. We care about outcomes, but outputs still matter—sometimes more than we'd like to admit. It's better, for sure. But it's not clean or easy.

Would the response and demand be as strong? Probably not.

In fact, after reading that, you'd probably see many people justifying the status quo instead of letting the advocacy seep in. Making the mess too visible too soon gives people permission to disengage.

"See? Everyone's struggling. Maybe we're fine."

But the clean version? The aspirational version? That sticks. It creates just enough tension.

That's the thing about change. You often need to embrace different motions at once. If someone (or something) can get through to senior executives, for the love of god, take it. Take it, even if it leaves out half the things you wish it didn't. If someone's figured out how to tap into the executive zeitgeist, leave your pride and love of nuance at the door for a minute. There will be time for complexity later. But first, you need the door to open.

Granted, this isn't exactly my specialty. I mean, the newsletter is called The Beautiful Mess. Exhibit A. But I know it when I see it. SVPG's work gives leaders something they can say out loud—and gets them moving. That's no small thing.

(Note: Your best bet at learning about the real world everywhere is to join communities and hang out with people outside your company. Not podcasts. Not books. Not this newsletter.)

Thoughts on Putting This Into Action

Here are some final thoughts about the nitty-gritty details.

"Dual Track"

Your biggest challenge is leading a major change effort while keeping the organization running. That's a huge burden, and it's not one to take lightly. It's like a chef rebuilding the kitchen during a Friday dinner rush. You can do it, but it takes intention and pacing.

That tension—of trying to change while keeping everything afloat—is something many people don't want to admit out loud. Because if they say it's hard, the default framing becomes: "Well, it's hard because people aren't skilled yet." And sure, there's probably some truth to that. But it's also hard because it's emotionally exhausting, politically risky, and structurally messy. When the struggle gets framed purely as a skills gap, it becomes harder to talk about the real reasons it isn't easy, and people stay quiet instead of getting the support they need.

Structural Change

A lot of things don't change until things structurally change. If your team can't deploy at will, that's a constraint. If you're supposed to be data-informed, but have to jump through hoops to instrument a metric—and then another set of hoops to even see the dashboard—that's a constraint. If accessing customers requires five people's permission, it probably won't happen. If engineers are incentivized for individual accomplishments instead of shared outcomes, you'll end up with too much work in progress and not enough finished value. If your team's work is discussed at length in a meeting you're not even in, and that kicks off a game of telephone instead of clarity—that's a constraint too. Constraints add up.

At Dotwork, my day job, our favorite thing is working with forward-thinking operations people who understand that their job is to remove friction and foster the conditions for the right kinds of interaction and collaboration. Leaders, managers, and teams are their customers.

I bring this up because it's tempting to see the shift to the product operating model purely as a competency shift—a matter of teaching new skills or hiring different kinds of people. But that's only part of it. The deeper, messier work is often about constraint smashing, friction smashing, and clearing out the invisible blockers that make even the most capable teams feel stuck.

To be clear, this isn't just a problem in legacy orgs or companies "still figuring it out." It's alive and well inside the tech companies people put on a pedestal. The difference is often just less accumulated baggage. There are fewer entrenched systems, fewer approvals, and fewer layers of process calcified over time. Teams are rarely given the space or time to work down this kind of operational debt.

Proximity To Revenue

Even in well-known tech companies, it's not equally easy for every team. If you're close to revenue, and/or sell a digital product, connecting the dots between funding a team and growing the business is much easier. But even in those companies, it can be tough for internal platform teams, infrastructure, developer experience, compliance, you name it. They still have to fight for time, clarity, and attention.

Now, imagine you're in a large enterprise that doesn't sell digital products. For most teams, you're playing on hard mode. Unless you're in a clear revenue-adjacent zone—like ecommerce, or tech that directly supports the core offering (say, high-frequency trading platforms or in-car software systems)—you're likely dealing with way more skepticism, translation overhead, and structural drag. The product operating model can still work. However, it takes serious adaptation and much more effort to prove the value of the work.

Continuous Improvement

Something that's rarely talked about is how many high-performing tech companies aren't exactly bastions of continuous improvement. Not in the Toyota / kaizen sense. And that's not a criticism; it just reflects how these environments tend to work.

First, they benefit from a lot of positive inertia: product-market fit, momentum, brand. Second, they've invested heavily in team independence, meaning teams can optimize locally without banding together to fix systemic issues. Third, incentives often reinforce staying in your lane, not tending to the whole system. Fourth, because these companies are usually scaling fast, there's this low-key assumption that everything will break soon anyway, so why waste time "tending the garden"? Fifth, especially in the current climate, after layoffs, reorganizations, and shifting priorities, trust levels aren't high enough to support the kind of open information flow you need for continuous improvement to work.

So why bring this up? Because product management, as a profession, doesn't have a theory of change (especially not for organizational change). Outside of "treat it like a product," and “lead well”, there's not much. And many PMs are anti-process by reflex, which means continuous improvement often gets dismissed as "process improvement," something for someone else to worry about.

What that means is that if you're genuinely trying to transform your organization, you're attempting something hard even for the companies you're trying to emulate. Don't expect a playbook for this part from SVPG, beyond its hard work, the CEO must be fully bought in, start with a few empowered teams, and bring in experienced leaders or coaches to fill the gaps. All of that is solid advice. But you need to cast a wider net.

Keywords: Lean Thinking, Human Factors, Ergonomics, Operations Research, Service Design, Industrial-Organizational Psychology, Safety Science, High-Reliability Organizations, Cognitive Load, etc.

On Change

Cagan offers one compelling view: that leaders are the stewards of change. It's their job to create the environment, clarity, and constraints that let empowered teams do great work. Without their full commitment, the transformation doesn't stand a chance.

But it's not the only perspective.

Other traditions approach change differently. They see it less as stewardship and more as navigating tensions, sensemaking, learning, or even healing. They focus less on decisive motion and more on the conditions that let motion emerge. They recognize that change often happens despite plans, not because of them. And that success sometimes looks like a system shifting just enough to allow something new to take root.

These views are slower. Messier. Harder to pitch. But they're no less real.

If you're doing this work, you'll probably pull from these perspectives over time. Some days, the executive-as-steward story will be the one that opens the door. Other days, you'll need something quieter, deeper, or more subversive to keep things moving. And that's okay. Real change doesn't come from a single model. It comes from being able to hold more than one truth at once.