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by
Marty Cagan
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September 10 - September 20, 2022
“The art of Product Management is the art of life itself. Surround yourselves by great people, focus on your mojo, build great stuff with integrity, hold strong opinions but lightly. And Marty is one of the best teachers of this art.” —Punit Soni, Founder and CEO, Robin, Former Google APM
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.
In the first edition, I focused more on startups. In this edition, however, I wanted to expand the scope to look at the challenges of growth‐stage companies and how product can be done well at large, enterprise companies.
Second, there are many people looking for a recipe for product success—a prescriptive guide or framework to how to create products customers love. While I understand the desire, and I know I'd likely sell many more copies if I positioned this book that way, the unfortunate truth is that's just not how great products are created. It is much more about creating the right product culture for success, and understanding the array of product discovery and delivery techniques so that you can use the right tool for the specific issue you are facing.
It doesn't matter how good your engineering team is if they are not given something worthwhile to build.
the state of the art was very different from the state of the practice.
products that are powered by technology.
My focus is on the unique issues and challenges associated with building technology‐powered products, services, and experiences.
Startups: Getting to Product/Market Fit
In the technology world, we generally have three stages of companies: startups, growth‐stage, and enterprise companies.
The reality of startup life is that you're in a race to achieve product/market fit before you run out of money.
Growth‐Stage Companies: Scaling to Success
replicate our earlier successes with new, adjacent products and services. At the same time, we need to grow the core business as fast as possible.
Product teams complain that they don't understand the big picture—they don't see how their work contributes to the larger goals, and they're struggling with what it means to be an empowered, autonomous team.
Enterprise Companies: Consistent Product Innovation
Product teams complain about the lack of vision, lack of empowerment, the fact that it takes forever to get a decision made, and product work is turning into design by committee.
Leadership is likely frustrated, too, with the lack of innovation from the product teams.
they resort to acquisitions or creating separate “innovation centers” to incubate new businesses...
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projects are output and product is all about outcome.
it's all about solving problems, not implementing features.
FIGURE 8.1 Continuous Discovery and Delivery
Will the user buy this (or choose to use it)? Can the user figure out how to use this? Can our engineers build this? Can our stakeholders support this?
Minimum Viable Product
product is defined as something that your developers can release with confidence, that your customers can run their business on, and that you can sell and support).
MVP should be a prototype, not a product.
The Right People Every product begins with the people on the cross‐functional product team.
A product team is a group of people who bring together different specialized skills and responsibilities and feel real ownership for a product or at least a substantial piece of a larger product.
John Doerr, the famous Silicon Valley venture capitalist: “We need teams of missionaries, not teams of mercenaries.”
Mercenaries build whatever they're told to build. Missionaries are true believers in the vision and are committed to solving problems for their customers.
typical product team is comprised of a product manager, a product designer, and somewhere between two and about 10 to 12 engineers.
A product team is not about reporting relationships—it has an intentionally flat organizational structure.
Co‐location means that team members literally sit right next to one another.
there is a special dynamic that occurs when the team sits together, eats lunch together, and builds personal relationships with one another.
what's critically important is alignment between product management and engineering.
The bottom line is that we try hard to keep teams together and fairly stable.
Another reason that durability is important is that it can take some time to gain enough expertise in an area to innovate.
Team Autonomy If we want teams to feel empowered and have missionary‐like passion for solving customer problems, we need to give them a significant degree of autonomy.
The product manager can escalate every issue and decision up to the CEO.
The product manager can call a meeting with all the stakeholders in the room and then let them fight it out. This is design by committee, and it rarely yields anything beyond mediocrity. In this model, very common in large companies, the product manager is really a roadmap administrator.
The product manager can do his or her job. The honest truth is that the product manager needs to be among the strongest talent in the company.
this is a very demanding job and requires a strong set of skills and strengths.
If the product manager doesn't have the technology sophistication, doesn't have the business savvy, doesn't have the credibility with the key executives, doesn't have the deep customer knowledge, doesn't have the passion for the product, or doesn't have the respect of their product team, then it's a sure recipe for failure.
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.
Every business depends on customers. And what customers buy—or choose to use—is your product. The product is the result of what the product team builds, and the product manager is responsible for what the product team will build.
the product manager is the person we hold responsible and accountable for the success of the product.
there are four key responsibilities of a strong product manager; four things that the rest of your team is counting on you to bring to the party:
Deep Knowledge of the Customer
To make this explicit, you need to become an acknowledged expert on the customer: their issues, pains, desires, how they think—and for business products, how they work, and how they decide to buy.
Deep Knowledge of the Data Today, product managers are expected to be comfortable with data and analytics. They
