#20. BOOK REVIEW: “Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love”.
How do you discover what product to build, deliver it to market, and mitigate risks?
INTRODUCTION
I first read Inspired by Marty Cagan a year ago, and last Saturday I decided to read it all over again. I have always been impressed by how concise and actionable it is. Today, digital products touch every aspect of our daily lives. It is important to create digital products that solve the desired problem and are easy to use.
This one is for Entrepreneurs, Product Managers, Developers, and Designers.
STRUCTURE
The book is separated into 5 parts: Lessons from Top Tech Companies, The Right People, The Right Product, The Right Process, and The Right Culture.
It begins by emphasizing that behind every great product – there is someone behind the scenes ‘leading the product team to combine technology and design to solve real customer problems in a way that meets the business needs’ – The Product Manager.
Cagan then outlines different product discovery and delivery techniques available to solve customer and business problems.
To start let’s look at Cagan’s take on the “root cause of failed product efforts”
The Root Causes of Failed Product Efforts
A lot of companies still use a sequential, “Waterfall” type approach to build products. This involves a pre-planned roadmap of which features would be built.
This is done across different quarterly or annual planning sessions.
Below is Cagan’s list of the top 10 biggest problems that companies using a Waterfall type approach suffer:
Stakeholder-driven products: This a top-down approach which leads to other stakeholders driving product ideas rather than the product team which is familiar with the customer and the problem. The impact of this is that the product team is only there to implement rather than come up with product ideas.
Fictitious Business Cases: Cagan is right that at this point the two main business case inputs – how much money we’ll make and how much it will cost – are completely unknown. ‘We can’t know how much money we’ll make because that depends entirely on how good the solution turns out to be’. “One of the most critical lessons in product is knowing what we can’t know, and at this point we can’t know how much money we’ll make”.
Product Roadmaps – These traditional, feature-driven roadmaps have two problems. Firstly, half of our product ideas are just not going to work. Most times this is because customers just aren’t as excited about this idea as we are. Secondly, even the ideas that prove to have potential, it typically takes several iterations to reach the point where they deliver significant business value.
It’s not about gathering requirements for engineers to implement – “This is 180 degrees away from the reality of modern tech product management”. Rather than just implementation, engineers should be involved in an earlier stage of ideation.
UX designers are getting involved way too late – Just as above with engineers, involving designers earlier would enable them to add more value
Engineers are getting involved way too late – If you’re just using your engineers to code, you’re only getting about half their value. The ‘little secret’ that Cagan shares with us is that “engineers are typically the best single source of innovation.” This is so true!
Agile for delivery only – According to Cagan, this approach where the product development team works in an Agile fashion, but the rest of the organization doesn’t is “Agile for delivery”. They are getting only 20% of the value of Agile methods.
Project-centric processes – The company usually funds projects, pushes projects through the organization, and finally launches projects. Unfortunately, projects are output, and product is all about outcome.
Customer validation happens way too late – Cagan argues that the biggest shortcoming of the old waterfall process, is that all the risk is at the end and that customer validation happens way too late. Instead, customer validation or discovery should be continuous and needs to happen earlier in the process, to support improvement of the product.
Opportunity Cost - Finally, while money and time is lost in this approach, the biggest drawback is the opportunity cost of what the organization could have otherwise achieved.
THREE PRINCPLES
To combat these issues, Cagan offers 3 helpful principles –
Risks are tackled upfront, instead of at the end.
Products are defined and designed collaboratively, rather than sequentially.
Its about solving the problem, not implementing features.
To translate these 3 principles into a process and action, we need to DISCOVER the product to be built, and to DELIVER that product to market. Using ‘Continuous Discovery and Delivery’,
Cagan translates the steps from the traditional waterfall approach into 3 continuous stages:
Objectives – Discovery – Delivery
Ultimately, this process would enable you to answer 4 critical questions associated with building any product:
Will the users buy this (or choose to use this)? Value risk
Can the user figure out how to use this? Usability risk
Can our engineers build this? Feasibility risk
Can our stakeholders support this? Business viability risk
Cagan also emphasizes the business context and its two main components:
The product vision and strategy
The business objectives
BUSINESS RISK
Interestingly, my favourite aspect of this book was on identifying and mitigating risk early and often. This increases the chances of product success.
Some common business risks identified by Cagan are:
Financial risk – Can we afford this solution?
Business development risk – Does this solution work for our partners?
Marketing risk – Is this solution consistent with our brand?
Sales risk – Is this solution something our sales staff is equipped to sell?
Legal risk – Is this something we can do from a legal or compliance perspective?
Ethical risk - Is this solution something we should do?
CONCLUSION
I believe this book will appeal to everyone who is working on a product(idea) and provides a framework to discover the product to be built, deliver that product to market, and identify and mitigate risks.
Goodluck!
I hope you found this informative and relevant.
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