Inspired: How To Create Products Customers Love

It is a pity that there are only 5 stars to award the maximum appreciation for this book. There are a number of achievements that deserve, alone, five stars. First, Marty Cagan clearly states what qualities a Product Manager must have. Not everyone is talented to be a Product Manager. The author lists unmeasurable traits, such as product passion, customer empathy, innate intelligence (there is no substitute for it, we learn), ethics, integrity and confidence. The latter is very important as the entire teams in engineering and marketing must be kept inspired. This leads to the corollary that simply training a person to be a Product Manager is not enough. One must know when an unsuitable person must look for other positions. This is something uncommon, to consider what many view a process driven function to a talent. Second, the book asks where to place the Product Manageent function. In Engineering? In Marketing? There is a distinction between a Product Manager and Product Marketing Manager. As veteran product manager myself, I know the challenges to be part of engineering. Engineers are sometimes suspicious of marketing and their product manager becomes the "piñata" everyone beats in frustration. As part of Marketing, there is tendency to follow release processes and create demands engineering can not deliver in a logical way. Marty advocates the creation of a Product Council with equal rights as engineering and marketing Marty says a successful product manager sees himself as the CEO of the product. This is absolutely true, but unfortunately the Directors of Engineering and those of Marketing, also see themselves as CEOs. As long as an independent product council does not exist, the product manager must be a CEO with zero authority. S/he must be a diplomat and shrewd negotiator before he can be a CEO. Yet the true blue blood product manager is the one whose skills are required for start up. As startup is usually a one product or service company. Chapter 28 is dedicated to product management in a startup company. The challenge is a new start up is started with an idea that comes from engineering. However we must have the right product for the right audience, before "before burning through $500,000 or more in seed funding". Every aspect of the product management function is presented. I am an alumni of UC Berkeley Haas School Product Management executive program, one of few, if not the only program dedicated to Product Management. Berkeley program talks of portfolio management. What products to release, how many are completely new and how many are new releases of older or even very old products? It all depends on the risk tolerance. A products portfolio must include new high risk, lottery-like winning products. This is what made Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley. After reading Marty Cagan, every professional team all over the world can produce "inspired" products. Silicon Valley and it's personalities now share all they know. But what is a low probability to create outside Silicon Valley is another Google. The Google Sequoia Capital VC's made more money in Google than all the rest of the portfolio combined over the last 20 years. Another topic that I would have liked to see expanded in a next edition is pricing. How do we price the products in such a way that we do not leave money on the table? But this is another subject. Marty's book is both educational and thought provoking. The book self published by Silicon Valley Product Group, the company of Marty Cagan, went beyond the goal of being a reference for it's prospective v customers. It is THE BOOK for of product management, a must-read for anyone. The idea of the product manager as a creator with talent and passion I advocated for years in my blog, "The memories of a Program Manager". It is re-assuring to see the same sentiments shared in the more comprehensive, practical and sensitive book of Marty Cagan..

This week I finished reading Inspired: How To Create Products Customers Love. It's by Marty Cagan, who was formerly a big deal at HP, eBay, and Netscape. I've read a ton of books over the past year, and this has easily been the most valuable business book I've come across recently. Doing a startup can be such a confusing and hazy process: "I don't know what I'm doing!" "Am I doing the right things?" "Am I going down the wrong road?" "There's no one to give me all the answers!" True, critical thinking is a crucial skill. But this book has helped teach me how to think. I really like this one: it's staying in my library. If I ever hire a product manager, this book is going to be part of the training syllabus. Let's talk about the reasons it was so valuable: I strongly feel (and think) that I am going to be more organized in how I think about business. I feel more confident, and less like I'm in the middle of a chaotic whirlwind. Reading the book helped inspire what I think will be big improvements to my business strategy, but also real things I can implement today: A/B tests to try, concrete ways to improve my customer service/satisfaction, etc. I added about 16 lines to my long-term TODOLIST... It uses ideas that are popular in the "Lean Startup"/"Customer Development" movements and presents them in a cohesive and coherent framework. However, I have been thinking/reading/hearing about these ideas for a while, so the prior exposure (schema foundation) perhaps helped them finally fit into place. Then again, this is perhaps an example of the ATTRIBUTION ERROR: my circumstances have changed (I'm spending lots of time actually working on products rather than reading about other people doing it), and therefore have more personal-experience nodes in my semantic web, which is helping everything fit into place. Anyway, 5 stars. Google me for a more detailed summary of the book. I posted on my blog.

I am currently an MBA student doing an internship in Product Management at eBay (note that everything here is my own opinion and not the company's), and I wanted to pick up a guide to being a PM to get an additional perspective. This book came highly recommend by Amazon reviewers, so I thought I would give it a try. I wrote my full review in a post here: [...] In summary, Cagan's book serves as a great guide to someone new to the practice of Product Management as it clearly outlines the roles and responsibilities of the PM and everyone else she must work with to get the right product to the customer. In my own six weeks of experience at eBay, I have found that Cagan very accurately describes this company's version of the role. For the seasoned PM, the book offers several fresh ideas for how to better do his job, though he must think hard on which ideas would work well for his own situation.

I have always been interested in how great software products are built. In the early 90's, I took several "software engineering best practices" courses at Boston University as part of my doctoral studies and since then I have read many books and articles and have lead many software product development and product management teams. Now I even teach a course at Stanford on product management and the software product lifecycle. Marty's Cagan's book is by far the best book I have ever read on software product management, or really on how to build great products. His general theme of discovering products that are "valuable, usable, and feasible" is brilliant. He discusses the role of the product management including contrasting it to product marketing, project management, design, and engineering. He lays out a guideline for product management processes including how to succeed with agile methods, waterfall processes, in a start-up, and in large companies. It is hard to believe he covers so many useful topics (cutting features vs. slipping dates, market research, innovating in large companies) and classic problems (confusing product management with product marketing) in this relatively short, very straightforward, and very readable book. If you are a product manager or just want to learn how to build great software products, but this book! Then buy one for everyone on your team, for everyone around you, and especially for your CEO. (Oh, you are the CEO? then what are you waiting for?)

Yet another collection of blog posts. This is becoming a genre of it's own. Unfortunately, there are inherent problems with this type of a book: 1) Usually, there not enough time spent in order to "arrange the material in the book into a coherent progression and logic" (quoted from Charles Petzold). 2) Some topics are not discussed deeply enough, because it was originally just a blog post and, as such, was not intended to be thoroughly researched. 3) Tendency to repetition and oversimplification, hence prose becomes extremely bulky, but with insufficient content. This is also probably due to the fact that these were originally independent posts intended to be read individually. Even the best editors can not help with it. In addition to the problems outlined above, this particular book has some unique deficiencies: 4) Examples are not in the book, but on a separate web site. To be fair, author warns about it and apologizes for it in the introduction, but still. In author's own words: "I realize this breaks the flow of reading a book". It does. 5) Lack of real world situations. Author used to work for some of the most exciting companies in the world: eBay, Netscape, HP. I would love to hear some information on how things are/were done there. 6) I personally find the 'high-fidelity prototype' concept to be highly questionable. But it is used as a foundation for many other ideas. High-fidelity prototypes could be as difficult to build the product itself, it all depends on the product and subject matter. Yet, it is presented as a sort of a product manager's silver bullet, without any discussion on when building this prototype could be problematic. 7) Lack of 'features discussions'. It depends, but a lot of times as a product manager you are not faced with a task of creating a new product, but you have to work on improving the existing one. This topic is almost non-existent in the book - only one chapter is about it(23) and it just gives one advice - look at your metrics. This is a sound advice, but definitely not enough to cover the topic. Well, those were the negative points, but I gave the book 3 stars, which means: "It's OK". Why is it ok? Well, this is because ideas and concepts expressed in the book are really good: - Gentle deployment: excellent concept - Requirements and design should be done simultaneously: excellent idea - Roles and responsibilities of various people in the product team are outlined very nicely - Ugly nature of the custom solutions (or as they are called in the book 'specials') is described and a solid advice is here to help product manager battle against them - 'Opportunity statement' is, I think, a very reasonable approach to assessing product opportunities, one that achieves the goal and can implemented fairly easily. So please, when reading the book think about the ideas and concepts, try to connect them inside your mind and you will definitely conclude that the book is OK.

Disclaimer: I'm a software engineer. I write code for fun, and profit. This book, while great, is based around a simple idea: to write good software, you have to approach it logically. Obviously, if you decide to make a product--it will likely end up failing (in a variety of areas) unless you: - Identify what problem you're trying to solve. - Talk with users who experience this problem, and watch what they do. - Design a solution that will help these users. - Prototype this design. - Allow your users to test this design, and look at how they interact with it. - Build your product. There are many stages to product development--but at its core, it is really about analyzing what you're trying to do, and then doing it. This is a great book because it carefully explains each step of the product development process. Sometimes, especially if you're just starting something new, the temptation to just start building software can become overwhelming, and people (like me) often give in. This book is really written to combat that temptation, and remind you of the proper steps to building great software. The only thing I really disliked about this book was that it goes into great depth discussing company roles. It seems that this book is geared primarily towards middle managers in large organizations, which I find unfortunate, because it could be easily simplified and usable by a much wider audience if that were not the case. Overall, however, this was a great book. If you're thinking about starting work on a new piece of software sometime soon, you should seriously consider giving this a read--if for no other reason than to reinforce your motivation and keep you on track.

The book is an easy read. Lots of examples and references especially for the web development industry. If made such an impact on me (although not all were revolutionary ideas, but those that weren't were great reminders for staying on track). Here comes the downside... after reading and loving this book, I streamlined my thinking process with the updated information and began to implement and ease into the "better" direction. However, neither my boss nor my subordinates were aligned with the new initiatives I was trying to carry forward. I had numerous grinding headaches/debates trying to manage my boss to allow me to pursue things in the "better" direction. I actually saw it coming. Before I began to implement anything, I purchased a copy for my boss and my dept. manager. And yet, it wasn't enough (either they didn't read it yet or are not as inspired as I was). Therefore, believers please beware to pace and manage your "implementation" and "change" process as I had to learn the hard way. Don't let it end up your working relationship. If I could do it over again, I wouldn't just hand them the book without an immense amount of marketing upfront. That's how good the book is. The book is now my bible!

As the title says, I got a lot of value from reading this book. The depth is sufficient to cover the topics, but not too deep to make it a slog to read. Coming from a business-to-business background, I found the focus on consumer Internet products was helpful in understanding this world. Specifically these were my takeaways: - Where product management fits in the engineering/marketing continuum - Maintaining concurrent design/build streams to get out of the "feeding the engineering beast" trap. - Using personas to prioritize releases - Why high-fidelity prototypes are so valuable - Using a product council to build consensus on the product vision I can honestly say that suggestions from this book spoke directly to challegnes I have had in my product management career. I recommend it whole-heartedly.