Marty Cagan

How do today's most successful tech companies—Amazon, Google, Facebook, Netflix, Tesla—define, design and develop the products that have earned the love of literally billions of people around the world? Perhaps surprisingly, they do it very differently than the vast majority of tech companies. In INSPIRED, technology product management thought leader Marty Cagan provides readers with a master class in how to structure and staff an empowered and effective product organization, and how to discover and deliver technology products that your customers will love—and that will work for your business. With sections on assembling the right people and skills, discovering the right product, embracing an effective yet lightweight process, scaling the product organization, and creating a strong product culture, readers can take the information they learn and immediately leverage it within their own organizations—dramatically improving their own product efforts. Whether you're an early stage startup working to get to product/market fit, or a growth-stage company working to scale your organization, or a large, long-established company trying to regain your ability to consistently deliver new value for your customers, INSPIRED will take you and your product organization to a new level of customer engagement, consistent innovation, and business success. Filled with the author's own personal stories—and profiles of some of today's most-successful product managers and technology-powered product companies, including Adobe, Apple, BBC, Google, Microsoft, and Netflix—INSPIRED will show you how to turn up the dial of your own product efforts, creating technology products your customers love. The first edition of INSPIRED, published ten years ago, established itself as the primary reference for technology product managers, and can be found on the shelves of nearly every successful technology product company worldwide. This thoroughly updated second edition shares the same objective of being the most valuable resource for technology product managers, yet it is completely new—sharing the latest practices and techniques of today's most-successful tech product companies, and the men and women behind every great product.

How to Create Tech Products Customers Love

INSPIRED

Vankevich 

We need teams of missionaries, not teams of mercenaries.

Cassandra Tang

ouleo

The reality of startup life is that you're in a race to achieve product/market fit before you run out of money.

Friedrich Schuler

FIGURE 6.1 Root Causes of Failed Product Efforts:

Ideas → "Biz Case" → Roadmap → Requirements → Design → Build → Test → Deploy

(...) Let's connect the dots now, so we can clearly see why this very common way of working is responsible for most failed product efforts. (...)

[Beyond lean and agile] I see three overarching principles at work: 

1. Risks are tackled up front, rather than at the end.

 In modern teams, we tackle these risks prior to deciding to build anything. These risks include value risk (whether customers will buy it), usability risk (whether users can figure out how to use it), feasibility risk (whether our engineers can build what we need with the time, skills, and technology we have), and business viability risk (whether this solution also works for the various aspects of our business--sales, marketing, finance, legal, etc.). 

2. Products are defined and designed collaboratively, rather than sequentially.

 They have finally moved beyond the old model in which a product manager defines requirements, a designer designs a solution that delivers on those requirements, and then engineering implements those requirements, with each person living with the constraints and decisions of the ones that preceded. In strong teams, product, design, and engineering work side by side, in a give-and-take way, to come up with technology-powered solutions that our customers love and that work for our business. 

3. Finally, it's all about solving problems, not implementing features.

 Conventional product roadmaps are all about output. Strong teams know it's not only about implementing a solution. They must ensure that solution solves the underlying problem. It's about business results. 

You will see that I keep these three overarching principles front and center throughout this book.

If, for example, your product is an e-commerce site, then this would include the merchandise-fulfillment experience and the merchandise-return experience. In general, for e-commerce businesses, product includes everything except the actual merchandise being sold.

Similarly, for a media company, we refer to the product as everything except the content.

The point is to have a very inclusive and holistic definition of product.

Discovery and delivery are our two main activities on a cross-functional product team, and they are both typically ongoing and in parallel.

(...) We are always working in parallel to both discover the necessary product to be built —which is primarily what the product manager and designer work on every day-while the engineers work to deliver production-quality product.

To set your expectations, strong teams normally test many product ideas each week-on the order of 10 to 20 or more per week.

The purpose of all these prototypes and experiments in discovery is to quickly come up with something that provides some evidence it is worth building and that we can then deliver to our customers.

(...) This is the smallest possible actual product that meets the needs of a specific market of customers.

INSPIRED quotes

Join the club