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

by Marty Cagan

question is this: What is the scope

we want teams of missionaries and not teams of mercenaries.

it's typical to have one or more teams that provide common services to the other product teams. We often label these teams common services, core services, or platform teams,

The issue is that anytime you put a list of ideas on a document entitled “roadmap,” no matter how many disclaimers you put on it, people across the company will interpret the items as a commitment.

we need to solve the underlying problem, not just deliver a feature. CHAPTER 23

high‐integrity commitments,

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. These are called outcome‐based roadmaps. In general, when I see these, I'm pretty happy because I know the product teams are stepping up to solve business problems rather than build features.

The product strategy is our sequence of products or releases we plan to deliver on the path to realizing the product vision.

Start with why. This is coincidentally the name of a great book on the value of product vision by Simon Sinek. The central notion here is to use the product vision to articulate your purpose. Everything follows from that.

Skate to where the puck is heading, not to where it was.

Evangelize continuously and relentlessly.

vision describes the future you want to create, and the product strategy describes your path to achieving that vision, the product principles speak to the nature of the products you want to create.

it is very common to have some significant number of product teams that are there in support of the other product teams. These are often called platform product teams, or shared services product teams. They

Learn how to give a great demo.

The idea is to answer four key questions about the discovery work you are about to undertake:

What business objective is this work intended to address? (Objective)

How will you know if you've succeeded?...

What problem will this solve for our customers? (...

What type of customer are we focused on? ...

Story Map Technique

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).

reference customers.

Customer‐Enabling Tools For customer‐enabling tools, such as a new dashboard for your customer service agents, we pick six to eight well‐respected, influential internal users/employees—the individuals that the other agents look up to as thought leaders—and we work closely with them to discover the necessary product. Obviously, they are not customers and not paying anything, but instead we ask them to work closely with us through product discovery to make this tool great. Once they believe that the product is ready, we ask them to tell their colleagues how much they love the new tool.

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.

Concierge Test Technique

Remember that product discovery is all about coming up with the fastest, cheapest way to test out our ideas.

build things that don't scale