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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Marty Cagan
Read between
June 11 - December 16, 2022
A product team is comprised of at least a product manager and usually somewhere between 2 and 10 engineers. If you're creating a user‐facing product, you would expect to have a product designer on your team as well.
In the technology world, we generally have three stages of companies: startups, growth‐stage, and enterprise companies.
I loosely define startup as a new product company that has yet to achieve product/market fit.
Sales and marketing often complain that the go‐to‐market strategies that worked for the first product are not so appropriate for some of the new products in the portfolio.
Risks are tackled up front, rather than at the end. In modern teams, we tackle these risks prior to deciding to build anything. These risks include value risk (whether customers will buy it), usability risk (whether users can figure out how to use it), feasibility risk (whether our engineers can build what we need with the time, skills, and technology we have), and business viability risk (whether this solution also works for the various aspects of our business—sales, marketing, finance, legal, etc.).
Products are defined and designed collaboratively, rather than sequentially. They have finally moved beyond the old model in which a product manager defines requirements, a designer designs a solution that delivers on those requirements, and then engineering implements those requirements, with each person living with the constraints and decisions of the ones that preceded. In strong teams, product, design, and engineering work side by side, in a give‐and‐take way, to come up with technology‐powered solutions that our customers love and that work for our business.
Finally, it's all about solving problems, not implementing features. Conventional product roadmaps are all about output. Strong teams know it's not only about implementing a solution. They must ensure that solution s...
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The purpose of product discovery is to quickly separate the good ideas from the bad. The output of product discovery is a validated product backlog.
Specifically, this means getting answers to four critical questions: Will the user buy this (or choose to use it)? Can the user figure out how to use this? Can our engineers build this? Can our stakeholders support this?
The MVP should be a prototype, not a product.
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 typical product team is comprised of a product manager, a product designer, and somewhere between two and about 10 to 12 engineers.
Usually, everyone on a product team is an individual contributor, and there are no people managers.
To be absolutely clear, the product manager is not the boss of anyone on the product team.
There are lots of useful ways to slice up the pie. Sometimes we have each team focus on a different type of user or customer. Sometimes each team is responsible for a different type of device. Sometimes we break things up by workflow or customer journey.
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, which often requires different types of engineering expertise.
In any case, what's critically important is alignment between product mana...
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a product team is not something we create just to deliver a specific project. It's nearly impossible to have a team of missionaries when they're pulled together for a project that lasts only a few months and is then disbanded.
The honest truth is that the product manager needs to be among the strongest talent in the company. If the product manager doesn't have the technology sophistication, doesn't have the business savvy, doesn't have the credibility with the key executives, doesn't have the deep customer knowledge, doesn't have the passion for the product, or doesn't have the respect of their product team, then it's a sure recipe for failure.
It's not that unusual for people to question whether they even need a product manager. If they don't design and they don't code, why bother? This is a clear sign of a company that hasn't experienced strong product management.
He or she is responsible for evaluating opportunities and determining what gets built and delivered to customers. We generally describe what needs to get built on the product backlog.
What's hard is to make sure that what goes on the product backlog is worth building. And, today, on the best teams, the engineers and designers want to see some evidence that what you're asking to build is truly worth building.
Every business depends on customers. And what customers buy—or choose to use—is your product. The product is the result of what the product team builds, and the product manager is responsible for what the product team will build. So, this is why the product manager is the person we hold responsible and accountable for the success of the product.
there are four key responsibilities of a strong product manager; four things that the rest of your team is counting on you to bring to the party: Deep Knowledge of the Customer First and foremost is deep knowledge of the actual users and customers. To make this explicit, you need to become an acknowledged expert on the customer: their issues, pains, desires, how they think—and for business products, how they work, and how they decide to buy.
Without this deep customer knowledge, you're just guessing.
the product manager must also be an undisputed expert on your actual product.
Today, product managers are expected to be comfortable with data and analytics. They are expected to have both quantitative skills as well as qualitative skills.
A big part of knowing your customer is understanding what they're doing with your product. Most product managers start their day with half an hour or so in the analytics tools, understanding what's been happening in the past 24 hours.
the analysis of the data and understanding you get of your customer is not something you can delegate.
The third critical contribution—and the one that is often considered the most difficult by many product managers—is a deep understanding of your business and how it works, and the role your product plays in your business.
Succeeding in the job of product means convincing each key stakeholder that you understand their constraints and that you are committed to only delivering solutions that you believe are consistent with those constraints.
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,
companies understand the value in making products that are sticky, and this means that it can be difficult for prospective customers to move from your competitor to you. This is one of the big reasons why it 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.
Another reason to have a deep understanding of the competitive landscape is that your products will need to fit into a more general ecosystem of other products, and ideally your product is not only compatible with that ecosystem but adds significant value to it.
Further, your industry is constantly moving, and we must create products for where the market will be tomorr...
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To summarize, 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.
The normal case is that the product manager does need to have (or be able to learn) the necessary domain expertise.
It normally takes about two to three months of dedicated work for a new product manager to get up to speed. This assumes you have a manager who can give you the help and access you need to gain this expertise,
The successful product manager must be the very best versions of smart, creative, and persistent.
The passion for products and for solving customer problems is not something I think you can teach. That's something you either have or don't have, and it is among the first things I interview for when I'm evaluating potential product managers. I assume that you have this.
Product managers come to the role from any and all disciplines. Certainly, many come from computer science, while others may come from business or economics. But you'll find great product managers that come from politics, philosophy, art, literature, history—and everything in between.
UX is any way that customers and end users realize the value provided by your product.
In strong teams today, the design informs the functionality at least as much as the functionality drives the design. This is a hugely important concept. For this to happen, we need to make design a first‐class member of the product team, sitting side by side with the product manager, and not a supporting service.
Once you get a designer dedicated to your product team, here are five keys to a successful and healthy relationship with your designer: Do whatever you need to do to have your designer sit next to you. Include your designer from the very inception of every idea. Include your designer in as many customer and user interactions as possible. Learn about the users and customers together. Fight your temptation to provide your designer with your own design ideas. Give your designer as much room as possible to solve the design challenges him or herself.
Encourage your designer to iterate early and often. The best way you can encourage this is to not get all nitpicky about design details with the very early iterations. More generally, encourage your designer to feel free not to just iterate on the particular...
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There's probably no more important relationship for a successful product manager than the one with your engineers.
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. Don't try to shelter them from this—instead, share these problems and challenges very openly with them.
the product manager and product designer work most closely with the tech lead. In some product teams, there may be more than one tech lead, which is all the better.
It is very much in your best interest to make sure you have a product marketing manager to work with, and it's absolutely worth your time to make sure you understand the market—and your product marketing colleague understands the product—well enough for each of you to be successful.
Especially with the 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.
