Inspired - How to create tech products customers love by Marty Cagan

Inspired is one of the most well-known product management books. It is mentioned every time someone is looking for an introduction to tech product management.

Book Summary

Inspired explains how a product team should function going from discovery work to delivering products and what the different roles and responsibilities in the team are.

The average product development process

According to Cagan, in the average company, products are developed in a waterfall fashion.

1. Ideas are generated somewhere inside the company
2. A product manager creates a business case for the idea
3. The idea is put on a roadmap and product requirements are written for the idea.
4. A designer turns the requirements into a solution concept
5. The developers build the feature and QA checks that it is built according to specifications
6. The product is released

Typically the release is a failure because

• The ideas and the solution concepts are validated only after the release when the big investments have already been made.
• The waterfall process turns the team's focus to outputs - getting the feature out there - and not on the outcomes - creating something that the customers would find valuable.

Focusing on outputs turns product managers into project managers that take requirements and produce documentation for the developers. The developer's role is to take orders and deliver features - not to think about the customers and innovate.

Continuous discovery and continuous delivery

Cagan suggests adopting lean and agile methodologies instead where

1. Ideas are validated before development starts, and big risks are identified and mitigated early on.
2. Product, design, and development work side-by-side so that everyone in the development team is thinking about the actual customer problems.
3. The focus is on solving problems and delivering business outcomes, not on delivering specific features.

For a product manager, this means shifting focus from taking requirements and turning them into specs to discovering what the customer's problems are and collaborating with the development team to find solutions to them.

Cagan advocates a parallel process where continuous discovery and continuous delivery processes run side-by-side. Discovery should focus on validating the key risks:

• Value risk - customers find the product valuable enough to pay for it
• Usability risk - users understand how to use the product
• Feasibility risk - engineers can build it
• Business viability risk - the solution fits the business model, the sales incentives, the legal can accept it, etc.

My Impressions

Even though the book does advocate focusing on the problem rather than the solution, it is often quite solution-oriented. The usability, feasibility, and viability risks that a PM is supposed to mitigate are all risks related to a specific solution. Rapid prototyping is also about validating a solution, not discovering a problem to solve. Both of these main themes of the book are rather solution-oriented approaches.

Regardless, the book gives a good overview of what software product management in an agile environment should be about.

Top Quotes

About product teams

We need teams of missionaries, not teams of mercenaries. Mercenaries build whatever they're told to build. Missionaries are true believers in the vision and are committed to solving customer problems.

Product discovery

The purpose of product discovery is to quickly separate the good ideas from the bad. -- Specifically, this means getting answers to the following questions:

1. Will the users buy this (or choose to use it)?
2. Can the user figure out how to use this?
3. Can our engineers build this?
4. Can our stakeholders support this?

Product manager as a servant leader

When a product succeeds, it's because everyone in the team did what they needed to do. But when a product fails, it's the product manager’s fault.

Product discovery and delivery process

We use prototypes to conduct rapid experiments in product discovery, and then in delivery, we build and release products in hopes of achieving product/market fit, which is a key step on the way to delivering on the company's product vision.