Cagan avoided naming this for two decades. Before the book, he told companies only that they could work like the best or work like the rest. No term existed for what the strong companies had in common. When he had to pick one, he took product operating model for what it does not say. Product-led and product-driven both land on the rest of the company as a power grab, so he ruled them out.
Underneath the label sit three questions. How you decide what to work on, which is product strategy. How you solve problems, which is whether anyone in the building can do discovery. It has to land on something that works for the customer and the business. And how you build, test and deploy. That is not just shipping — it's shipping in a way where you can demonstrate the outcome.
About 20 principles sit under those three, and he calls the whole thing the product model for short. None of them will surprise anyone who has worked somewhere good. That is the point: they are what stays constant across companies that otherwise look nothing alike.
He named two more in the same breath: learning is more important than failure, and principles are more important than process. The delivery principles are just as plain, and just as hard to fake. Small releases. Frequent releases. Uncoupled releases. Instrumentation of everything. Monitoring of everything.
