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

by Marty Cagan

User testing is broader than usability testing. Product designers and their product teams utilize the opportunity to assess the value of their ideas. Will customers use or buy the product and, if not, why not?

It's sad to say, but most products for businesses have awful design. They've been able to get away with this, however, because the user is so often not the customer—the one that buys. I'm happy to say that's now changing, and there's a new breed of B2B (business‐to‐business) companies that take design very seriously. They are displacing the old guard.

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.

There's probably no more important relationship for a successful product manager than the one with your engineers.

It's also critical that you share very openly what you know about your customers—especially their pain—the data, and your business constraints. Your job is to bring this information to your team and then to discuss the various potential solutions to these problems.

but you must constantly demonstrate to your team that you're open minded, you know how to listen, and you want and need their help in coming up with the right product.

One last thing to keep in mind: the morale of the engineers is very much a function of you as the product manager. It is your job to make sure they feel like missionaries and not mercenaries.

Not every engineer or even senior engineer wants to participate in discovery activities, and this is fine. What's not okay is to have a team of engineers in which none of them wants to engage in discovery activities.

In the best tech product companies, product marketing plays an essential role in discovery, delivery, and, ultimately, go‐to‐market, which is why they are important members of the product team.

Modern product marketing managers represent the market to the product team—the positioning, the messaging, and a winning go‐to‐market plan. They are deeply engaged with the sales channel and know their capabilities, limitations, and current competitive issues.

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.

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.

The bigger the organization, the more critical it is that the person has proven, strong skills—especially in stakeholder management and internal evangelism. The product leader must be able to inspire and motivate the company and get everyone moving in the same direction.

Good product organizations have a strong team, a solid vision, and consistent execution. A great product organization adds the dimension of a strong product culture.

Strong technology people are drawn to an inspiring vision—they want to work on something meaningful.

For a product team to be empowered and act with any meaningful degree of autonomy, the team must have a deep 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 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).

The third factor is a (very rough) estimation of how long it will take, referred to as time to market (TTM).

These are typically the three dominant factors for prioritizing your markets, but others can be important also. I typically suggest that the head of product, head of technology, and head of product marketing sit down together to work out your product strategy, balancing these various factors.

These are the 10 key principles for coming up with an effective product vision.

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.

There are several techniques to help communicate the value of what you're proposing to your team, colleagues, stakeholders, executives, and investors. Here are my top‐10 pieces of advice for product managers to sell the dream:

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)

An opportunity assessment is an extremely simple technique but can save you a lot of time and grief.

So much product work fails because it tries to please everyone and ends up pleasing no one.

I believe the major risk facing most efforts is value risk.

Another must‐read book for product managers: User Story Mapping: Discover the Whole Story, Build the Right Product, by Jeff Patton (O'Reilly Media, 2014).

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 downward spiral continues because the sales organization loses a lot of deals when they try to compete with a weak product. So, what do they do? They start yelling at you about all the features you don't have, and the competitor they lost to who does, which typically just makes the bad situation even worse. And then you start complaining about working at a sales‐driven company.

And remember—they have a quota and are paid by commission. So, without good examples, they will sell however and whatever they can. Without reference customers, this situation is not their fault—it's your fault.

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

That said, if you find you are having real trouble recruiting even four or five prospective customers for this effort, then it's very possible you're chasing a problem that isn't that important, and you will almost certainly have a very hard time selling this product.

This is one of the very first reality checks (aka demand validation) to make sure you're spending your time on something worthwhile. If customers aren't interested in this problem, you may want to rethink your plans.

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.”).

getting six reference customers in a given target market for a B2B company is perhaps the most significant, meaningful milestone business result for a product organization and something truly worth celebrating.

Let me also add that there are few things as powerful as a marketing person who's also strong at product. The combination is amazing.

Here's what I'm always trying to understand: 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?

Customers don't have to buy our products, and users don't have to choose to use a feature. They will only do so if they perceive real value.