read a book

Inspired - How to create tech products customers love by Marty Cagan


If you are a founder, consider this as a holy book. This book is for anyone who cares about creating great products. It is a must-read book for everyone working in product teams.

This book talks about the lessons from top tech companies, the mindset of a strong product team, the culture that empowers the team, building the right product, and how we can validate that.

I would love to share some of the key learnings from the book:

  1. One should always ask the following question when they find solutions for a problem: Will users buy the product? Are we providing a good user experience? Will it work for the business? Is it feasible to build it?
  2. The book has an interesting take on product roadmaps. It mentions that roadmaps are the root cause of most waste and failed efforts in product organizations. On one side, it is fair to say that roadmaps provide information on which items are of a higher priority and when the team will accomplish them. The main issue with the roadmap is that they talk more about the features that need to be built rather than mentioning the business objective that needs to be solved for the existing problem. There is no guarantee that the proposed features will work for the customers.
  3. A strong product team acts like missionaries and not mercenaries. Team members understand the business objectives and how their contribution serves the overall goal. They are empowered to find the best solution for the problem. Shared learning is alive within such teams. When they understand and witness users’ pain points, team members become more inspired to work for the cause.
  4. The difference between a strong team and a weak team is that strong teams will only be satisfied when they gain customers’ approval, whereas weak teams are happy with just delivering the features.
  5. A strong product team falls in love with the problem and not the solution. It takes a couple of iterations to get the right one. They are aware that customers are not as excited about an idea as they are. A strong product team accepts these inconvenient truths and prepares accordingly. They handle risks very well and are super fast with iteration.
  6. Strong teams test early and often. Early testing is advantageous since the risk of getting attached emotionally to the solution reduces when testing occurs early and often.
  7. Engineers should be involved in the process from the beginning. Bringing engineers late in the process will be a death sentence to the product. After all, engineers will be bringing the product to life.
  8. One needs to obsess over customers over competitors. If one gives too much importance to competitors at the cost of customer’s pain points, then it is a no-brainer that they will switch to the competitors. Blindly mimicking competitors will do more harm, especially if they have achieved a market fit. One has to be way better than them such that customers are willing to switch.
  9. If we are showcasing our prototypes of two users and both these users provide different responses, it becomes more crucial than ever to find out the why. Perhaps they have different backgrounds, different use cases, different skillsets.
  10. A strong team will always be able to justify when someone questions them on why something is being built rather than responding: “The stakeholders asked us to do it”. They understand that stakeholders are not the customers. So testing with customers is the way to go. Data rules over opinion.