A summary of “Inspired — How to create tech products customers love by Marty Cagan”

Hi everyone, today I’d like to share the book summary of one of must-read books for Product Manager (in software product area). Actually, I started read and taken some notes of it since last year, but I forgot to publish it 😂. Better late than never, right? It’s time to show you all, why many professional Product Managers and a newbie as me are highly recommend this book 🤓

In this book — Inspired, I started to read it since Nov 2022, but until now; at end of Dec 2022, I’ve completed only the second part of it. Anyways, I’d like to note some highlight things that “oh, why didn’t I read it since 2018 or before starting my software product development career”. I’d say this book is like a bible for not only product owners, I think other particular roles e.g. project managers, development team lead, marketing, business development teams also should to read it. I’ll show you why I said that by the following note on what topics or things make me think like that.

Part 1: Lesson from Top Tech Companies

In the first part, there are introduction of software product development and what was the pains and its scenarios of launching a great technology solution in the past, however, the customers or market feedback was fail. Therefore I’d like to highlight only things I’m interested in and want to note them all here.

The Root Causes of Failed Product Efforts

To be updated soon….

Beyond Lean and Agile

To be updated soon….

Key Concepts

To be updated soon….

Part 2: The Right People

In this chapter is focusing on team components, aiming at balancing skills needed to build the right things and build those things right.

Principal of strong product team

Consists of the goal of setting up a team, team composition, empowerment and their accountabilities, team size with two-pizza-rules, team scope, the importance and responsibilities for each role, and so on.

• Team of Missionaries is a team who are believers in the vision and committed to solving problems for their customers — from my opinion, I totally agree with this definition. As, I see numerous of teams in many industries (not only tech, it’s covering to countless companies that are trying to transform themself to be more tech-driven or agile look like ), always focus on delivering features and measuring the outcome with its profitabilities, then they’re now facing with the great resignation. In contrast, in many startups who are focusing on delivering the best outcome reflected by their customers satisfactions and other stakeholders’ feedback, many of their staff look happier and be more energized to overcoming the next challenges.
• Team Duration and Why It Works— it’s essential to take times for the team to go deep drive and to gain enough expertise in an particular area. Another crucial thing is to let the team feels the necessary sense of missionary-like passion together. Likewise, the good model of a product team is that every single member needs to understand the business objectives and context, feels ownership and responsibilities for the “outcome”. In other word, the one of the essential principals of a strong team is to let the team be more clear that “why” the team need to work the way they do.

The Product Manager

There are three types of product manager’s ways of work and only one of them leads to success

1. Product Manager(PM) as a backlog administrator: One of numerous companies’ ways of work that the PM have to escalate every issue and decision up to the CEO or senior managements. That is a cause of a classic issue as a bottleneck in the software product development workflow.
2. Product Manager(PM) as a roadmap administrator: A very common in large companies that the PM will do only calls a meeting to let all stakeholders to discuss then let them figure out the solutions or what should the team do next.
3. Product Manager(PM) who can do his or her job: One of a skillful staff; including has the business savvy, known his/her customers, has passion for the product. And he/she can bring a team to produce a product that worth for customers.

Key Responsibilities for the Product Managers

When a product succeeds, it’s because everyone on the team did what they needed to do. But when a product fails, it’s the product manager’s fault. — Inspired — How to create tech products customers love

1. Get to know your customers in deep: the PMs should know what customers need and why they need as well as comfortable to use data and analyze them to see what the customers do with their products.
2. Deep understanding on your business: Knows your business goals and all key stakeholders, work and build strong relationship with them, and show they that you’re building solutions that it works within the stakeholders constrains.
3. Know your market position and the movement in industry and potential technology trend to be subtaintially better. In addition, some knowledge areas are really specific, the PM can learn from and consult with “domain experts or subject matter experts”

The Product Designer

In this book describes a holistic guideline of how product managers work along with product designers or their UX/UI teams to innovate ideas and build the best user/ customer experience products. Covering from prototyping, user testing, to interaction and visual design.

The Engineer

To be updated soon….