Customer Obsessed Engineering

Customer Obsessed Engineering

Good product team / bad product team

Marty Cagan’s good-team / bad-team list is a decade old and still the cleanest mirror in the business. Pin it to your wall. Ask yourself how many strike too close to home.

Zac Beckman
May 21, 2026
∙ Paid
Photo by Johannes Plenio on Unsplash

Marty Cagan’s decade-old article can be a real rabbit hole. It’s genuinely hard to stop reading his blog, especially when digging up old gems like this.

Here’s something that resonates right now: “Good teams are skilled in the many techniques to rapidly try out product ideas to determine which ones are truly worth building. Bad teams hold meetings to generate prioritized roadmaps.”

Most teams I meet are funded, staffed and measured entirely around output. Hit the date, close the ticket, ring the bell for delivering on a roadmap.

Too few are paying attention to what matters: did what we shipped really make a difference for our customer?

The reorg that actually changes delivery isn’t new ceremonies. It’s moving the moment you celebrate from “we shipped” to “it delighted our customer, it actually moved what matters.”

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