Cagan's point on compensation design under the product model: incentives should be structured so teams win together rather than one PM winning at another team's expense — equity or stock options where feasible, profit-sharing where equity isn't an option (e.g. some private or non-U.S. structures). The point is to explicitly avoid sales-style, competitive incentive structures between product managers, which push toward local optimization instead of collaboration.
Related: Win-Together Culture (Breaking Down Silos), One Product Team Goal Principle.
Cagan states the underlying incentive-design principle explicitly, inverting sales-style zero-sum thinking: 'I don't win unless Dan also wins.' Because product teams rarely have full autonomy from one another, financial/equity incentives should reward cross-team help rather than pit PM against PM.
'The principle is to make sure nobody wins unless we all win.'
Design incentive structures so that a team's success metric includes the success of teams it depends on or helps, not just its own isolated output.
A distinct open problem Osterwalder flags: even when incentive alignment gets a validated internal venture off the ground, designing incentives for the internal innovators after they've successfully built a large new business inside the company is, in his words, an unsolved problem. He cites Cisco's attempt at addressing this as not really working. This is a harder version of the alignment problem than pre-success incentive design — the venture is no longer scrappy and unproven, so the calculus of what founders/internal builders are owed changes, and he doesn't offer a working model for it.
Из тем: The Product Operating Model