Inspired Quotes

“We need teams of missionaries, not teams of mercenaries.”
― Marty Cagan, Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love

“It doesn’t matter how good your engineering team is if they are not given something worthwhile to build.”
― Marty Cagan, Inspired: How To Create Products Customers Love

“Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do, and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.” —General George S. Patton, Jr. General”
― Marty Cagan, Inspired: How To Create Products Customers Love

“Software projects can be thought of as having two distinct stages: figuring out what to build (build the right product), and building it (building the product right). The first stage is dominated by product discovery, and the second stage is all about execution.”
― Marty Cagan, Inspired: How To Create Products Customers Love

“Further, your industry is constantly moving, and we must create products for where the market will be tomorrow, not where it was yesterday.”
― Marty Cagan, Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love

“Keep the focus on minimal product. More on this later, but your job as product manager is not to define the ultimate product, it’s to define the smallest possible product that will meet your goals.”
― Marty Cagan, Inspired: How To Create Products Customers Love

“Winning products come from the deep understanding of the user’s needs combined with an equally deep understanding of what’s just now possible.”
― Marty Cagan, Inspired: How To Create Products Customers Love

“Product management is about insights and judgment, both of which require a sharp mind. Hard work is also necessary, but for this job, it is not sufficient.”
― Marty Cagan, Inspired: How To Create Products Customers Love

“Fall in love with the problem, not with the solution.”
― Marty Cagan, Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love

“The little secret in product is that engineers are typically the best single source of innovation; yet, they are not even invited to the party in this process.”
― Marty Cagan, Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love

“Is my product compelling to our target customer? Have we made this product as easy to use as humanly possible? Will this product succeed against the competition? Not today’s competition, but the competition that will be in the market when we ship? Do I know customers who will really buy this product? Not the product I wish we were going to build, but what we’re really going to build? Is my product truly differentiated? Can I explain the differentiation to a company executive in two minutes? To a smart customer in one minute? To an industry analyst in 30 seconds?”
― Marty Cagan, Inspired: How To Create Products Customers Love

“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 solves the underlying problem. It's about business results.”
― Marty Cagan, Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love

“What you're really seeing is Agile for delivery, but the rest of the organization and context is anything but Agile.”
― Marty Cagan, Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love

“No matter what your title or level may be, if you aspire to be great, don't be afraid to lead.”
― Marty Cagan, Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love

“In the model I'm describing, it is management's responsibility to provide each product team with the specific business objectives they need to tackle. The difference is that they are now prioritizing business results, rather than product ideas. And, yes, it is more than a little ironic that we sometimes need to convince management to focus on business results.”
― Marty Cagan, Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love

“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)”
― Marty Cagan, Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love

“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.”
― Marty Cagan, Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love

“That is, there are two essential high‐level activities in all product teams. We need to discover the product to be built, and we need to deliver that product to market.”
― Marty Cagan, Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love

“The first truth is that at least half of our ideas are just not going to work. There are many reasons for an idea to not work out. The most common is that customers just aren't as excited about this idea as we are.”
― Marty Cagan, Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love

“a quote from John Doerr, the famous Silicon Valley venture capitalist: “We need teams of missionaries, not teams of mercenaries.” Mercenaries build whatever they're told to build. Missionaries are true believers in the vision and are committed to solving problems for their customers. In a dedicated product team, the team acts and feels a lot like a startup within the larger company, and that's very much the intention.”
― Marty Cagan, Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love

“Good teams get their inspiration and product ideas from their vision and objectives, from observing customers' struggle, from analyzing the data customers generate from using their product, and from constantly seeking to apply new technology to solve real problems. Bad teams gather requirements from sales and customers.”
― Marty Cagan, Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love

“The difference between Amazon, Netflix, Google, Facebook, and the legions of large but slowly dying companies is usually exactly that: product leadership.”
― Marty Cagan, Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love

“product managers are constantly asking developers to look at the code to tell them how the system really works, then you're probably missing a principal product manager.”
― Marty Cagan, Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love

“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.”
― Marty Cagan, Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love

“Rather than being measured on the output of their design work, the product designer is measured on the success of the product.”
― Marty Cagan, Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love

“one of the most critical lessons in product is knowing what we can't know,”
― Marty Cagan, Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love

“The Objectives and Key Results (OKR) technique is a tool for management, focus, and alignment. As with any tool, there are many ways to use it. Here are the critical points for you to keep in mind when using the tool for product teams in product organizations. Objectives should be qualitative; key results need to be quantitative/measurable. Key results should be a measure of business results, not output or tasks. The rest of the company will use OKRs a bit differently, but for the product management, design, and technology organization, focus on the organization's objectives and the objectives for each product team, which are designed to roll up and achieve the organization's objectives. Don't let personal objectives or functional team objectives dilute or confuse the focus.”
― Marty Cagan, Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love

“Where a lot of novice product people go sideways is when they create a high‐fidelity user prototype and they put it in front of 10 or 15 people who all say how much they love it. They think they've validated their product, but unfortunately, that's not how it works. People say all kinds of things and then go do something different.”
― Marty Cagan, Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love

“We say if you're just using your engineers to code, you're only getting about half their value. The little secret in product is that engineers are typically the best single source of innovation; yet, they are not even invited to the party in this process.”
― Marty Cagan, Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love

“Historically, in the vast majority of innovations in our industry, the customers had no idea that what they now love was even a possibility.”
― Marty Cagan, Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love