Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love (Silicon Valley Product Group)

by Marty Cagan

Share the vision. Make sure you have a very clear understanding of your product vision, product strategy, and product principles. Show how your work contributes to this vision and is true to the principles.

Share learnings generously. After every user test or customer visit, share your learnings—not just the things that went well, but share the problems, too.

Share credit generously. Make sure the team views it as their product, not just your product.

Learn how to give a great demo. This is an especially important skill to use with customers and key execs.

We're trying to show them the value of what we're building.

Be the undisputed expert on your users and customers. And be the undisputed expert on your market, including your competitors and the relevant trends.

Be genuinely excited. If you're not excited about your product, you should probably fix that—either by changing what you work on or by changing your role.

Absolutely be sincere, but let people see you're genuinely excited. Enthusiasm really is contagious.

Learn to show some enthusiasm.

If your company is midsize to large, then it's normal to have product marketing play the role of evangelist with your customers and your sales force.

the best thing you can do for your customers is to provide them with a great product.

With large enterprise companies, it's never easy to drive substantial change, but this is exactly what strong product managers figure out how to do.

The purpose of product discovery is to address these critical risks: Will the customer buy this, or choose to use it? (Value risk) Can the user figure out how to use it? (Usability risk)

Can we build it? (Feasibility risk) Does this solution work for our business? (Business viability risk)

The most important thing is to establish compelling value. It's all hard, but the hardest part of all is creating the necessary value so that customers ultimately choose to buy or to use.

To quote Marc Andreessen, “The most important thing is to know what you can't know,” and we can't know in advance which of our ideas will work with customers and which won't.

ensure the team is all on the same page in terms of clarity of purpose and alignment.

identify the big risks that will need to be tackled during the discovery work.

one of the most important lessons in our industry is to fall in love with the problem, not the solution.

Opportunity Assessment Technique

What business objective is this work intended to address? (Objective) How will you know if you've succeeded? (Key results) What problem will this solve for our customers? (Customer problem) What type of customer are we focused on? (Target market)

in the format of a customer letter written from the hypothetical perspective of one of your product's well‐defined user or customer personas.

The letter—sent to the CEO from a very happy and impressed customer—explains why he or she is so happy and grateful for the new product or redesign. The customer describes how it has changed or improved his or her life.

customer letter variation is very similar to Amazon's imagined press release, and it is intended to drive much the same type of thinking. A press release version includes a customer quote as well.

the customer letter does an even better job of creating empathy for the customer's current pain and more clearly emphasizes to the team how their efforts can help the lives of these customers.

the major risk facing most efforts is value risk.

Story Map Technique Story maps are one of the most generally useful techniques I know. They are essentially a framing and planning technique, but they are just as useful for ideation.

what set of stories constitutes a meaningful milestone or a release?

User Story Mapping: Discover the Whole Story, Build the Right Product, by Jeff Patton

Customer Discovery Program Technique Our job in the product organization is to create products that can sustain a business.

The Power of Reference Customers First, we need to talk about the nearly magical power of a happy reference customer. There are few things more powerful to a product organization than reference customers.

For products and services aimed at businesses, I was taught years ago that the key number is six reference customers.

develop six references for the financial services industry, then six for the manufacturing industry, and so on.

geographically in this same manner (for example, first develop six references for the United States, six for Germany, and then six for Brazil, and so on).

Coming up with the right set is normally something the product manager does in tight collaboration with the product marketing manager.

Your job is to dive deep with each of the six customers and identify a single solution that works well for all six customers.

You need to make sure your customers are truly from your target market and not more than one target market. A big benefit of this program is focus, and that means the customers are from a single target market.

Product/market fit shows up in terms of happier customers, lower churn rates, shortened sales cycles, and rapid organic growth.

One of the most common techniques for assessing product/market fit is known as the Sean Ellis test. This involves surveying your users (those in your target market that have used the product recently, at least a couple times, and you know from the analytics that they've at least made it through to the core value of the product) and asking them how they'd feel if they could no longer use this product. (The choices are “very disappointed,” “somewhat disappointed,” “don't care,” and “no longer relevant because I no longer use.”). The general rule of thumb is that if more than 40 percent of the users would be “very disappointed,” then there's a good chance you're at product/market fit.

Are your customers who you think they are? Do they really have the problems you think they have? How does the customer solve this problem today? What would be required for them to switch?

Frequency. Establish a regular cadence of customer interviews. This should not be a once‐in‐a‐while thing. A bare minimum would be two to three hours of customer interviews per week, every week.

If you find your customers using your product in ways you didn't predict, this is potentially very valuable information. Dig in a little and learn what problem they are trying to solve and why they believe your product might provide the right foundation.

A user prototype—one of the most powerful tools in product discovery—is a simulation. Smoke and mirrors. It's all a façade.

want to emphasize the most important point for technology companies: If you stop innovating, you will die. Maybe not immediately, but if all you do is optimize your existing solutions, and you stop innovating, it is only a matter of time before you are someone else's lunch.

Using Money to Demonstrate Value One technique I like for gauging value is to see if the user would be willing to pay for it, even if you have no intention of charging them for

If it's an expensive product for businesses—beyond what someone would put on a credit card—you can ask people if they will sign a “non‐binding letter of intent to buy” which is a good indicator that people are serious.

Using Reputation to Demonstrate Value But there are other ways a user can “pay” for a product. You can see if they would be willing to pay with their reputation. You can ask them how likely they'd be to recommend the product to their friends or co‐workers or boss (typically on a scale of 0–10).

You can ask them to share on social media. You can ask them to enter the e‐mail of their boss or their friends for a recommendation (even though we don't save the e‐mails, it's very meaningful if people are willing to provide them).

discovery A/B testing, we usually have the current product showing to 99 percent of our users, and the live‐data prototype showing to only 1 percent of our users or less.

It's also important for tech product managers to have a broad understanding of the types of analytics that are important to your product. Many have too narrow of a view. Here is the core set for most tech products: User behavior analytics (click paths, engagement) Business analytics (active users, conversion rate, lifetime value, retention) Financial analytics (ASP, billings, time to close) Performance (load time, uptime) Operational costs (storage, hosting) Go‐to‐market costs (acquisition costs, cost of sales, programs)