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

by Marty Cagan

business objectives. In truth, as an early stage startup, you can survive without any of these for a while.

It's amazing how far you can get by focusing on meeting the needs of some early customers. However, the need for this vision and business‐objective context becomes truly serious at scale.

when using OKRs at scale, there's a larger burden on leadership and management to ensure that the organization is truly aligned,

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 right process is not any single process. Rather, it's more accurately described as a combination of techniques, mindset, and culture.

Continuous delivery is a good example of an advanced

delivery technique I find in teams that understand the importance of a series of small, incremental changes to a complex system.

It has a strong suite of automated regression tests.

Doing all this work when the

product manager isn't even sure this is the solution the customer wants or needs is a recipe for product failure and big waste.

Much of the key to effective product discovery is getting access to our customers without trying to push our quick experiments into production.

We like to use our discovery time and validation techniques for those situations in which we know there's a significant risk, or where members of the team disagree.

fall in love with the problem, not the solution.

But when embarking on a somewhat larger effort, there may in fact be multiple reasons, several customer problems to be solved, or business objectives to be tackled.

example of an effort of this size would be a redesign.

especially to their sincere passion for taking care of customers.

primarily as a framing technique.

you're being asked to invent an entirely new product.

For decades, people would create thick business plans to try to highlight these topics and how they intended to tackle them.

lightweight tools to call out these risks early and encourage the team to tackle them up front.

You can use a canvas for any product change,

but

the majority of the canvas do...

it probably makes sense for you to look at one of the earlier framing techniques.

helps to quickly highlight the key assumptions and major risks

we need to embrace product discovery as the most important core competency of the startup.

risks of monetization and scale.

Get that risk resolved first and then you can focus on the other risks.

I attribute much of the success in my own career to this technique.

They are essentially a framing and planning technique, but they are just as useful for ideation.

must‐read book for product managers: User Story Mapping: Discover the Whole Story, Build the Right Product, by Jeff Patton

Without strong products, our marketing programs require customer acquisition costs that are too high; our sales organization is forced to get “creative,” which

drives up cost of sales, lengthens the sales cycle, and puts downward pressure on price; and our customer success organization is forced to take it on the chin every day with frustrated customers.

The reason I love the customer discovery program technique so much is because it is designed to produce these reference customers. We are discovering and developing a set of reference customers in parallel with discovering and developing the actual product.

I consider it the single best leading indicator of future product success.

you would not do this program for small efforts like features or minor projects.

In the earlier chapters on product vision and strategy, we talked about the product strategy of pursuing a product vision by tackling one vertical market after another.

I do my best to persuade teams to not launch a product in the marketplace until after they have those six reference customers.

important we screen out technologists.

They need to be willing to spend time with the product team, testing out early prototypes and helping the team ensure the product works well for them.

A compromise is to have them put the money into escrow.

One of the most common techniques for assessing product/market fit is known as the Sean Ellis test.

more relevant question is, “How do we generate the types of ideas that are likely to truly help us solve the hard business problems

I'd like to be able to take it for granted that product managers already know how to do this well and do it frequently.

we want to learn whether the user or customer really has the problems we think they have, and how they solve those problems today, and what it would take for them to switch.

For everything new we add, we ensure we have the necessary instrumentation in place to know immediately if it is working as we expect,

Some people use the term design sprint

I've also been brought in to try to help with companies that are not doing so well. Startups racing to get some traction before the money runs out. Larger companies struggling to replicate their early innovation.

Good teams have a compelling product vision that they pursue with a missionary‐like passion. Bad teams are mercenaries.