Inspired Book Summary - Inspired Book explained in key points

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Inspired summary

Name: Inspired
Rating: 4.4 (466 reviews)
Author: Marty Cagan

Marty Cagan

How To Create Products Customers Love

4.4 (466 ratings)

17 mins

Brief summary

Inspired by Marty Cagan is a guide for product managers and teams focusing on creating successful digital products. It offers insights and techniques for aligning teams, identifying customer needs and delivering value.

Topics

Hiring Entrepreneurship Product Management

Table of Contents

Inspired
Summary of 9 key ideas

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Key idea 1 of 9

Great product managers are intelligent, focused and “bilingual” in technology and business.

Nine out of ten product releases are failures: they fail to meet their objectives. Mostly this is because the product manager’s role has been poorly defined or the person is incapable of filling that role. Hence, many CEOs wonder what characteristics to look for when hiring product managers.

In fact, a wide array of attributes and skills is needed. Essentially, product managers solve customers’ problems, and this requires them to understand their customers and empathize with their problems as well as be intelligent and insightful enough to come up with solutions.

Product managers must also be engaging and versatile communicators. They must interact with lots of different stakeholder groups from engineers to executives, and hence need to be “bilingual” in the sense that they understand both the technology and business sides of the product.

Finally, product managers bear full responsibility for delivering products as promised. They face long hours at work and a constant overload of tasks, so they need to have a strong work ethic and good time-management skills. Above all else, they must know how to prioritize. Their mantra is: “The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.”

So where can you find such people?

A great and obvious source is within your own company, where it is easier to find and assess candidates just by asking around. Look everywhere: Great future product managers can be waiting in virtually any department, from engineering to customer service to marketing. Typically, they will have already expressed some interest in playing a stronger role in the product. Once you find them, train and mentor them to fill the role successfully.

Great product managers are intelligent, focused and “bilingual” in technology and business.

Product managers need product teams around them with clearly defined roles.

A product manager has two main responsibilities: evaluating product opportunities and defining the products to be built to address those opportunities. To allow her to focus on these tasks, the product manager needs a product team around her, much like a CEO needs a management team to run a company.

This team comprises several well-defined roles:

Make user experience design a priority: Build a complete UX team and help them contribute.

Good user experience (UX) is a vital component of good products. The iPod, for example, owed much of its success to the pleasant and effortless UX.

To create a good UX, the product manager must work intensively with a UX design team, which ideally comprises four essential roles:

A product manager must constantly seek out and assess product opportunities.

Opportunities for new products are everywhere around us, and new ideas, innovative technologies and shifting competitive landscapes create fresh opportunities every day. They exist even in seemingly saturated markets. Remember AltaVista and Infoseek? Their dominance of the search engine market seemed unassailable until Google came along.

In this endlessly shifting landscape, a product manager must constantly and quickly evaluate product opportunities and decide which ones to pursue. To help achieve this, she should answer a list of questions used to help define and communicate such opportunities, called a Product Opportunity Assessment (POA):

Product discovery: Validate that your product is valuable, usable and feasible by defining and testing a minimal product.

To be successful, a product must be:

All three criteria need to be tested and validated before building the product. To facilitate this, the product manager and her UX interaction designer should first come up with a minimal product prototype: one that has the bare minimum functionality necessary to be valuable, and yet delivers a realistic enough user experience for real users to test.

Use high-fidelity prototypes to convey product specs effectively and to test your product on real users.

A key responsibility of a product manager is to deliver accurate product specifications to the engineering team. The most effective way to do this is to build a high-fidelity prototype: a prototype with minimal functionality, but a realistic user experience. In the case of simple websites, for example, the prototype may just comprise clickable buttons that lead to different pages.

The end-goal is a prototype that anyone can easily interact with to understand the product, without necessarily having to look at any product specs.

Use a charter user program to understand your customers and gain references for your launch.

If you’re a product manager, understanding customers is a critical part of your job. In fact, it’s so important that you should attend every site visit, customer interview and usability test as well as use whatever market-research tools are available to really gain a deep understanding of customers.

Note, though, that customers are notoriously poor at expressing what exactly they want from a product. Therefore, don’t let their input directly steer the course you take with your product. Instead, stay focused on identifying customer needs, and think for yourself how to address those needs.

Product management is about making choices: Use personas and product principles to help you with this.

Effective product management means constantly prioritizing and making choices: Which product opportunities should be pursued? Which features should be included in the product? Which tasks are most important? These decisions are difficult because, typically, every stakeholder in the company will feel strongly and differently about them.

To help resolve these tradeoffs, you should define a set of product principles: your beliefs of what’s truly important to the strategy of this entire product line and the company. In the case of a start-up, the company’s mission statement often embodies these principles.

When you make changes to your product, think carefully about what you want to achieve and deploy them gently.

When improving existing products rather than launching new ones, many product managers fall into a modus of just fixing bugs and adding features as requested. But bolting on features indiscriminately to please specific customers often makes the product less appealing to the rest of the market, hurting its success in the long run.

Just as with new products, product improvement should start with an understanding of what your goals are. You must understand the product’s most important business metrics and gear any improvements toward affecting those metrics. Say your product is a website where a key metric is what percentage of visitors become customers – currently 5%. You may then introduce a new feature to raise that percentage, like an easier sign-up process. If the percentage rises to 10%, you’ve just added a very valuable feature!

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What is Inspired about?

Inspired describes the best practices of creating successful software products and explains the most common pitfalls and how to avoid them. The lessons are applicable in a range of product environments, from fledgling start-ups to large corporations.

Who should read Inspired?

Anyone interested in a behind-the-scenes view of how great software products are created
Anyone working or wishing to work in software product management
Anyone hoping to build innovative software products

About the Author

Marty Cagan has been involved in defining and building some of the most successful products of our time at eBay, AOL and Netscape Communications. He is a founding partner at Silicon Valley Product Group, where he helps companies develop their product organizations and strategies to create great products.

Categories with Inspired

Management & Leadership Entrepreneurship Motivation & Inspiration

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