More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Marty Cagan
Read between
September 10 - September 20, 2022
Structure Is a Moving Target Realize that the optimal structure of the product organization is a moving target. The organization's needs should and will change over time.
The overall product vision The specific business objectives assigned to each team
Lea then began a sustained and exhausting campaign to communicate continuously with leaders and stakeholders across the entire company. To Lea, there was no such thing as over‐communication. A continuous stream of prototypes helped keep people excited about what this new future would bring.
It's easy to see how big companies with lots of revenue at risk would hesitate to make the changes they need to not only survive but thrive.
Lea tackled these concerns and more head‐on with a clear and compelling vision and strategy and clear and continuous communication to the many stakeholders.
product roadmap as a prioritized list of features and projects your team has been asked to work
These product roadmaps are usually done on a quarterly basis, but sometimes they are a rolling three months, and some companies do annual roadmaps.
The issue is that anytime you put a list of ideas on a document entitled “roadmap,” no matter how many disclaimers you put on it, people across the company will interpret the items as a commitment.
The product teams need to have the necessary business context. They
The idea behind business objectives is simple enough: tell the team what you need them to accomplish and how the results will be measured, and let the team figure out the best way to solve the problems.
outcome‐based roadmaps.
The Product Vision The product vision describes the future we are trying to create, typically somewhere between two and five years out.
vision is not in any sense a spec. It's mainly a persuasive piece that might be in the form of a storyboard, a narrative such as a white paper, or a special type of prototype referred to as a visiontype.
Strong technology people are drawn to an inspiring vision—they want to work on something meaningful.
The difference between vision and strategy is analogous to the difference between good leadership and good management. Leadership inspires and sets the direction, and management helps get us there.
the product vision should be inspiring, and the product strategy should be focused.
The first is market sizing, usually referred to as total addressable market (TAM).
The second factor concerns distribution, usually referred to as go to market (GTM).
Different markets may require different sales channels and go‐to‐market strategies.
The third factor is a (very rough) estimation of how long it will take, referred to as time to market (TTM).
Principles of Product Vision These are the 10 key principles for coming up with an effective product vision. Start with why. This is coincidentally the name of a great book on the value of product vision by Simon Sinek. The central notion here is to use the product vision to articulate your purpose. Everything follows from that.
Fall in love with the problem, not with the solution. I
Don't be afraid to disrupt yourselves because, if you don't, someone else will. So
The product vision needs to inspire. Remember that we need product teams of missionaries, not mercenaries. More than anything else, it is the product vision that will inspire missionary‐like passion in the organization.
Create something you can get excited about. You can make any product vision meaningful if you focus on how you genuinely help your users and customers.
Determine and embrace relevant and meaning...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Skate to where the puck is heading, not to where it was.
Focus on one target market or persona at a time.
Obsess over customers, not over competitors.
We can't ignore the market, but remember that customers rarely leave us for our competitors. They leave us because we stop taking care of them.
Customer not competition
Communicate the strategy across the organization.
Where the product vision describes the future you want to create, and the product strategy describes your path to achieving that vision, the product principles speak to the nature of the products you want to create.
business objective–based system known as MBO—management by objectives.
Andy Grove at Intel. Today, the primary business objective management system we use is known as the OKR system—objectives and key results.
John Doerr brought the technique from Intel to a very young Google, and a couple decades after Dave Packard attributed much of HP's success to MBO, Larry Page said essentially the same thing about the importance of the OKR process on Google's success.
“Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do, and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.”
“When performance is measured by results.”
The first principle is fundamentally about how to empower and motivate people to get them to do their best work, and the second is about how to meaningfully measure progress.
The OKR Technique The Objectives and Key Results (OKR) technique is a tool for management, focus, and alignment.
Objectives should be qualitative; key results need to be quantitative/measurable.
Key results should be a measure of business results, not output or tasks.
Keep the number of objectives and key results for the organization and for each team small (one to three objectives, with one to three key results each is typical).
objectives do not need to cover every little thing the team does, but they should cover what the team needs to accomplish.
It's common to define a score of 0 (on a scale from 0 to 1.0) if you essentially make no progress, 0.3 if you just did the bare minimum—what you know you can achieve, 0.7 if you've accomplished more than the minimum and have really done what you'd hoped you would achieve, and 1.0 if you've really surprised yourselves and others with a truly exceptional result, beyond what people were even hoping for.
If you deploy OKRs for your product organization, the key is to focus your OKRs at the product team level.
top two objectives for the company are to improve customer lifetime value and expand globally.
platform product teams, or shared services product teams.
Product evangelism is, as Guy Kawasaki put it years ago, “selling the dream.” It's helping people imagine the future and inspiring them to help create that future.
Use a prototype. For many people, it's way too hard to see the forest through the trees. When all you have is a bunch of user stories, it can be difficult to see the big picture and how things hang together (or even if they hang together). A prototype lets them clearly see the forest and the trees.
Share the pain. Show the team the customer pain you are addressing. This is why I love to bring engineers along for customer visits and meetings.
