Inspired

by Marty Cagan

Marty Cagan's book "inspired" is about how to create tech products customers love.

PART ONE - Lessons From Top Tech Companies

Behind every great product, there is an excellent PM. Great PMs are intelligent, insightful, focused, and polyglots in tech and business. PM needs to be amongst the strongest talent in the company.

Startups are in a race to achieve product/market fit before they run out of money. When they find the product/market fit, SCALING is the next challenge.

To succeed, gathering requirements and documenting them for engineers is not enough.

  • Teams should tackle the risks upfront rather than at the end.
  • Teams should collaborate while designing instead of working sequentially.
  • Teams should solve problems rather than just implementing the feature.

PART TWO - The Right People

Marty describes the roles in a cross-functional product and the principles of a strong team. 👇👇👇

  • Teams should behave as missionaries, not mercenaries. (real ownership for the product)
  • Team size should not pass 10-12 people. (2 pizza rule)
  • Teams have clear objectives and their delivery ownership.
  • Teams have a flat hierarchy. The product owner is not the boss.
  • Teams have actual long time employees instead of agencies or contractors.
  • Teams have high autonomy and low dependency.

PART THREE - The Right Product

Marty explains the problem with product roadmaps, stakeholder consensus, and ALTERNATIVES for those. 👇👇👇

  • A company needs to build a strong vision of the product.
  • OKRs (Objectives and key results) are an excellent way to set business objectives for every team considering the vision.

My notes on the OKR framework (not part of the book, but I was interested):

  • Objectives: A qualitative, far-reaching statement of what you're trying to achieve.
  • Key results: A quantitative, measurable outcome that states the impact you'll have in reaching your objective.
    OKR Best Practices:
  • 4-3 Objectives max per level (e.g., per person)
  • 3-5 Key Results max per objective.
  • Write to other people: They must clearly understand your goals.
    OKR checklist:
  • Put the customer first.
  • Don’t skimp on ambition.
  • Tie OKRs to larger company goals.
  • Just enough Os and KRs are enough.
  • If you can't measure it, it’s not a good KR.
  • KRs are outcomes – not tasks.
  • Assign KR owners.
    OKR antipatterns:
  • Your key results are just a glorified to-do list.
  • Focus on outcomes (not outputs of effort) that speak to business or customer value.

PART FOUR - The Right Process

Marty explains the process of building a product. Product discovery, planning, ideation, prototyping, and testing 👇👇👇

    Assessment:
  • What is the exact problem that this product will solve?
  • Who is it for? How big is the market?
  • What are the alternatives/competitors?
  • What are the success metrics?
  • Is this the right time?
    Validation:
  • Is your product FEASIBLE? (Can you build it?)
  • Is your product USABLE? (Can the customer use it?)
  • Is your product VALUABLE? (Can it deliver value to the customer, so they want to buy it?)

PART FIVE - The Right Culture

Marty explains how strong product culture can make a big difference. 👇👇👇

  • Good teams use vision and objectives as a north star to solve customer problems.
  • Good teams engage with customers continuously.
  • Good teams include product, design, and engineering in all phases of the product delivery cycle.
  • Good teams don't obsess over competitors.

Thanks for reading so far 🙏 The book has a great value that I cannot summarize. Make sure to give it a try if you are interested.