Key Takeaways from "INSPIRED" by Marty Cagan

19 Oct, 2020

Overall I thought "INSPIRED: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love" by Marty Cagan was a great read. It's a great job description for product managers as it breaks down the job. The book comprises five important areas of product management in a company: 1) Lessons from top tech companies, 2) The right people, 3) The right product, 4) The right process, and 5) The right culture. In the following I will briefly summarize the areas and then follow-up with some of the most important insights on my end.

In the first part, the book starts by describing companies at different stages where different decisions are more critical. For example, for a startup, where you want to find product-market fit for your product and try to survive, to a big corporate where it is of utmost importance to make innovation part of the culture. It further dives into how different the role of a product manager is at different company stages.

• "It doesn't matter how good your engineering team is if they are not given something worthwhile to build."
• "I discovered that there was a tremendous difference between how the best companies produced products and how most companies produced them."

The second part focuses on people that a product manager works with and how you should work together. As a product manager, you are the information hub for the product. You bring together the opinions and try to involve the right people at the right moment. During the product development process, the product manager is not the person who should propose solutions but try to define the problem that the team should solve. The book highlights each individual's strengths in a product team and how a product manager should collaborate and enable people to work together. One of the aspects that stuck out was that it is essential to share learnings with your team. Where you are not only responsible for bringing insights to the team but rather to let the team learn the same things that you learned.

• "It's about shared learning. One of the keys to having a team of missionaries rather than a team of mercenaries is that the team has learned together. They have seen the customer's pain together, they have watched together as some ideas failed and others worked, and they all understand the context for why this is important and what needs to be done."
• "Nothing else much matters until you can come up with a strong product that meets the needs of an initial market, so most of the focus of the young company is necessarily on the product."
• "The little secret in product is that engineers are typically the best single source of innovation. "
• "We need teams of missionaries, not teams of mercenaries."

The third part is about how to find and build the right product. What is the "right" product? The definition of right is that your work is adding value for customers. The book makes the point that your product should solve problems for your customers. To find the right product, you need to identify and work together with the customers (i.e., the people you want to solve problems for). As a product manager, it is your responsibility to understand what the customer wants. Hence, you need to study your customers and get to a point where you are confident that you know what they expect. The book focuses not only on empathy and predicting what customers want but also on involving customers in the product discovery process as soon as possible. It is a vital aspect of delivering valuable products.

• "The first truth is that at least half of our ideas are just not going to work. ... If that's not bad enough, the second inconvenient truth is that even with the ideas that do prove to have potential, it typically takes several iterations to get the implementation of this idea to the point where it delivers the necessary business value. We call that time to money."
• "The biggest flaw of the old waterfall process has always been, and remains, that all the risk is at the end, which means that customer validation happens way too late."
• "Skate to where the puck is heading, not to where it was. An important element to product vision is identifying the things that are changing—as well as the things that likely won't be changing—in the time frame of the product vision."
• "Evangelize continuously and relentlessly. There is no such thing as over‐communicating when it comes to explaining and selling the vision."
• "We can't ignore the market, but remember that customers rarely leave us for our competitors. They leave us because we stop taking care of them."

The fourth part focuses on the process of building good products. The book describes a scientific approach to product management. Every product discovery starts with a model of reality, which you then successively try to improve through experiments. You come up with hypotheses that you then challenge with qualitative and quantitative experiments. A product manager needs to iterate as fast and as often as possible to improve this reality model. Here you find a lot of useful methodological approaches for how to collect insights from customers. One very important method is customer interviews, where the product manager tries to study how a customer works with the product. The goal is to intervene as little as possible. Furthermore, the book emphasizes how important it is to share these learnings with your product designers and engineers. The goal is to share learnings and let the team participated in this learning process. You want to involve everyone (i.e., the team and the customer) as closely as possible when you build a product.

• "The overarching purpose of any form of prototype is to learn something at a much lower cost in terms of time and effort than building out a product."
• "Ask any good salesperson the single best tool you can provide to help her do her job, and she'll say, “happy reference customers.”"
• "Frequency. Establish a regular cadence of customer interviews. This should not be a once‐in‐a‐while thing. A bare minimum would be two to three hours of customer interviews per week, every week."

Finally, the book gives further insights into building the right culture for product teams to strive. One of the most important drivers of success for a product manager is building trust and engaging the people involved in the product development process.

• "The lack of a strong and capable product manager is typically a major reason for slow product."