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

by Marty Cagan

very high failure rate of technology startups is no secret. The few that succeed are usually those that are really good at product discovery,

The point is to have a very inclusive and holistic definition of product. You are not just concerned with implementing features.

In discovery, we are tackling the various risks before we write even one line of production software.

The output of product discovery is a validated product backlog.

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.

a product manager, a product designer, and somewhere between two and about 10 to 12 engineers.

Sometimes, actually very often, we are largely defining the teams based on the architecture. This is pretty common because the architecture drives the technology stack,

head of product and the head of engineering normally get together to define the size and scope of the teams.

On the other hand, if your company is not yet set up around dedicated product teams, this is probably the most important thing for you to fix. Everything else depends on this.

The honest truth is that the product manager needs to be among the strongest talent in the company.

very demanding job and requires a strong set of skills and strengths.

technology sophistication,

business savvy,

credi...

deep customer kn...

passion for the ...

respect of their prod...

responsible for evaluating opportunities and determining what gets built and delivered to customers.

the engineers and designers want to see some evidence that what you're asking to build is truly worth building.

Good product designers use prototypes as their primary canvas for communicating ideas, both internally and externally.

Modern product designers may have different strengths but, generally, have some level of skill with both interaction and visual design.

Modern product marketing managers

are deeply engaged with the sales channel and know their capabilities, limitations, and current competitive issues.

As you'll soon see when we talk about how we do product discovery, we are continuously doing two kinds of rapid learning and experimentation. One kind of learning is qualitative, and the other is quantitative.

some of our research is generative, which is understanding the problems we need to solve;

of our research is evaluative,

which is assessing how well our solutions sol...

If your company does not have user researchers, then your product designer will typically pick up these responsibilities for your team.

They should also have a clear strategy for managing technical debt.

Specifically, you are looking for someone who is proved to be strong in four key competencies: (1) team development, (2) product vision, (3) execution, and (4) product culture.

The product leader should be an expert on modern forms of product planning, customer discovery, product discovery, and product development process, but execution also means that they know how to work effectively as part of an organization of your size.

A strong product culture means that the team understands the importance of continuous and rapid testing and learning.

architecture, engineering, quality, site operations, site security, release management, and usually delivery management.

The hallmark of a great CTO is a commitment to continually strive for technology as a strategic enabler for the business and the products.

The product vision describes where we as an organization are trying to go, and the product strategy describes the major milestones to get there.

It's usually easy to see when a company has not paid attention to the architecture when they assemble their teams—it shows up a few different ways. First, the teams feel like they are constantly fighting the architecture.

view product discovery as the most important core competency of a product organization.

it is management's responsibility to

provide each product team with the specific business objectives they need to tackle.

It is all about outcome rather than output.

There are a few product teams out there that have modified their product roadmaps so that each item is stated as a business problem to solve rather than the feature or project that may or may not solve it.

The product team asks for a little time to do product discovery before commitments are made, and then after discovery, we are willing

buying into a vision is always a bit of a leap of faith.

At this stage, you should believe it's a worthwhile pursuit.

understanding of the broader context. This starts with a clear and compelling product vision, and the

path to achieving that vision is the product strategy.

the product vision should be inspiring, and the product strategy should be focused.

product team is a cross‐functional set of professionals, typically comprised of a product manager, a product designer, and a small number of engineers. In addition, there are sometimes additional people with specialized skills included on

team, such as a data analyst, a user researcher, or a test automation engineer. Also recall that each product team typically is responsible for some significant part of the company's product offering or technology. For example, one product team might be responsible for mobile apps for drivers, another for mobile apps for riders, another might be responsible for secure payment handling, and so on.

Moreover, as an organization scales, OKRs become an increasingly necessary tool for ensuring that each product team understands how they are contributing to the greater whole, coordinating work across teams, and avoiding duplicate work.