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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Marty Cagan
Started reading
May 22, 2025
we encounter serious legal, financial, or business constraints that block the solution from launch (the business viability isn't there).
The idea behind business objectives is simple enough: tell the team what you need them to accomplish and how the results will be measured,
That's a good example of a business objective for one or more product teams: “Dramatically reduce the time it takes for a new customer to go live.” And one of the measurable key results would be “Average new customer onboarding time less than three hours.”
The difference is that they are now prioritizing business results, rather than product ideas.
The second driver is the occasional need for committing to a hard date. We address this with the concept of high‐integrity commitments, used for those situations where we need to commit to a date or a specific deliverable.
For hardware or device‐centric companies, it's usually five to 10 years out.
Note that this is not the same as the company mission statement.
Mission statements are useful, but they don't say anything about how we plan on accomplishing that. That's what the product vision is for.
The product strategy is our sequence of products or releases we plan to deliver on the path to realizing the product vision.
And, sometimes, the product strategy is based on achieving a set of key milestones in some sort of logical and important order. For example, “First deliver critical rating and reviews functionality to developers building e‐commerce applications; next, leverage the data generated from this use to create a database of consumer product sentiment; and then leverage these data for advanced product recommendations.”
the most important benefit is just that you decided to focus your product work on a single target market at a time.
we demonstrate product/market fit for a new market (usually by developing an initial set of reference customers),
The idea is that our organization has a product vision, and all the product teams in that organization are helping to contribute to making that vision a reality.
The difference between vision and strategy is analogous to the difference between good leadership and good management. Leadership inspires and sets the direction, and management helps get us there.
the product vision should be inspiring, and the product strategy should be focused.
total addressable market (TAM). All things considered equal, we like big markets rather than small markets.
distribution, usually referred to as go to market
a (very rough) estimation of how long it will take, referred to as time to market
Obsess over customers, not over competitors.
This realization led to a critical principle that stated, “In cases where the needs of the buyers and the sellers conflict, we will prioritize the needs of the buyer, because that's actually the most important thing we can do for sellers.”
Where the product 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.
Senior management (CEO and executive team) is responsible for the organization's objectives and key results. The heads of product and technology are responsible for the product team objectives (and ensuring they deliver on the organization's objectives). The individual product teams are responsible for proposing the key results for each objective they've been assigned.
actual members of a cross‐functional product team. The product team has business‐related objectives (for example, to reduce the customer acquisition cost, to increase the number of daily active users, or to reduce the time to onboard a new customer), but each person on the team may have their own set of objectives that cascade down through their functional manager.
