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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Marty Cagan
Read between
September 10 - September 20, 2022
Deep Knowledge of Your Business Successful products are not only loved by your customers, but they work for your business.
Deep Knowledge of Your Market and Industry The fourth critical contribution is deep knowledge of the market and industry in which you're competing.
This includes not only your competitors but also key trends in technology, customer behaviors and expectations, following the relevant industry analysts, and understanding the role of social media for your market and customers.
is not enough to have feature parity with a competitor. Rather, you need to be substantially better to motivate a user or customer to switch.
these are the four critical contributions you need to bring to your team: deep knowledge (1) of your customer, (2) of the data, (3) of your business and its stakeholders, and (4) of your market and industry.
Smart, Creative, and Persistent
The successful product manager must be the very best versions of smart, creative, and persistent.
By smart, I don't just mean raw IQ. I especially mean intellectually curious, quickly learning and applying new technologies to solve problems for customers, to reach new audiences, or to enable new business models.
By creative, I mean thinking outside the normal product box of features to solve business problems.
By persistent, I mean pushing companies way beyond their comfort zone with compelling evidence, constant communication, and building bridges across fun...
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unlike the CEO, the product manager is not the boss of anyone.
good understanding of the many interrelated parts and constraints of the business—financial, marketing, sales, legal, partnership, service, the customer environment, the technical capabilities, the user's experience—and figure out a solution that works for the customers as well as for the business.
True leadership is a big part of what separates the great product people from the merely good ones. So, no matter what your title or level may be, if you aspire to be great, don't be afraid to lead.
product owner is the name of the role on an Agile team for the person responsible for the product backlog.
In product companies, it is critical that the product manager also be the product owner.
Just as you need to know the language of computing, you also need to know the language of business.
You will need to understand how for‐profit companies work and the main business key performance indicators (KPIs) that are important to your business—including, but not limited to, lifetime value of customers, average revenue per user/customer, customer acquisition cost, cost of sales, and contribution margins, among others.
Designers further understand that the user experience is as important to customer value as is the underlying functionality.
Holistic User Experience Design User experience (UX) is much bigger than user interface (UI).
UX is any way that customers and end users realize the value provided by your product. It includes all the touch points and interactions a customer has with your company and product over time.
What other things are competing for the user's attention?
How might things be different for a one‐month‐old customer versus a one‐year‐old customer?
How will we create moments of gratification?
We need design—not just as a service to make our product beautiful—but to discover the right product.
In strong teams today, the design informs the functionality at least as much as the functionality drives the design.
we need to make design a first‐class member of the product team, sitting side by side with the product manage...
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It's also hugely important that you have an actual appreciation for the demands and complexities of the engineering job.
You want to give your engineers as much latitude as possible in coming up with the best solution. Remember, they are the ones who will be called in the middle of the night to fix issues if they arise.
It is your job to make sure they feel like missionaries and not mercenaries. You do this by involving them deeply in the customer pain you are trying to solve and in the business problems you face.
The product manager needs to be sensitive to the best way to interact.
Product marketing is most typically organized by customer‐facing product, by target market, or sometimes by go‐to‐market channel, especially for more established companies (e.g., enterprise, vertical, mid‐market).
In the best tech product companies, product marketing plays an essential role in discovery, delivery, and, ultimately, go‐to‐market, which is why they are important members of the product team.
Modern product marketing managers represent the market to the product team—the positioning, the messaging, and a winning go‐to‐market plan.
They are deeply engaged with the sales channel and know their capabilities, limitations, and current competitive issues.
The best product marketing manager and product manager relationships understand their respective roles but realize they are essential to each other's success.
qualitative learning, some of our research is generative, which is understanding the problems we need to solve; and some of our research is evaluative, which is assessing how well our solutions solve the problem.
Research
data analysts go by the name business intelligence (BI) analysts, and they're experts in the types of data that your business collects and reports.
One of the big challenges of growth is knowing how the whole product hangs together. Some people like to think of holistic view as connecting the dots between the teams.
Great product leaders are highly valued and often go on to found their own companies.
four key competencies: (1) team development, (2) product vision, (3) execution, and (4) product culture.
The bigger the organization, the more critical it is that the person has proven, strong skills—especially in stakeholder management and internal evangelism.
A strong VP product will understand the importance of a strong product culture, be able to give real examples of her own experiences with product culture, and have concrete plans for instilling this culture in your company.
There is one more thing: Your product leader must be able to work well on a personal level with the other key execs, especially the CEO and CTO.
principal product manager—a person who's an individual contributor but a rock‐star performer and willing and able to tackle the toughest product work.
product vision and strategy and connecting the dots between the product work of the many teams. This is also referred to as holistic view of product.
player‐coach role because of this dynamic of leading your own team, in addition to being responsible for coaching and developing one to three other PMs.
The hallmark of a great CTO is a commitment to continually strive for technology as a strategic enabler for the business and the products.
Ownership and Autonomy Remember that one of the most important traits of product teams is that we want teams of missionaries and not teams of mercenaries.
common services, core services, or platform teams,
technical product managers (often called platform product managers).
