“Inspired - How to create tech products customers love” By Marty Cagan is a highly recommended read for all product managers.
This is the first part of a 3-part series; the series being a summary of the key points from the book that resonated with me. You can find Part2 here and Part3 here.
The source of ideas is executives, key stakeholders, business owners, current or prospective customers. The team is not engaged at this stage.
In order to prioritized ideas into roadmaps and create business cases, one need to know how much money one will make and how much it will cost. The issue is that these are not known in the initial stages.
Companies get really excited about their product roadmaps.
The truth is that many product ideas end up making absolutely nothing.
The 2 inconvenient truths about products
a) The first truth is that at least half of our ideas are just not going to work
b) The second truth is that even with the ideas that do prove to have potential, it typically takes several iterations to get the implementation of this idea to the point where it delivers the necessary business value. This is called time to money
The issue with the role of product management.
The tasks being done by a product manager are gathering requirements and documenting them for engineers. This is more of project management than product management.
The designers are being involved too late to get real value of design.
Engineering gets brought in way too late.
Engineers are typically the best single source of innovation. So if they are not consulted for generating ideas, we are getting only half the value from engineers.
Agile is being used only for delivery (after an idea gets decided to be worked upon) resulting in teams getting only 20% of the actual value and benefits of Agile methods.
The focus is on delivering projects. Projects are output and product is all about outcome. Projects get delivered but may not meet the objectives.
The biggest flaw of the old waterfall process has always been, and remains, that all the risk is at the end, which means that customer validation happens way too late.
Opportunity cost of following this wrong process.
It’s no surprise that so many companies spend so much time and money and get so little in return.
1. Risks are tackled up front, rather than at the end.
These risks are tackles prior to deciding to build anything:
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.)
2. Products are defined and designed collaboratively, rather than sequentially.
In strong teams, products, design and engineering work side by side in a give-and-take way to come up with technology-powered solutions.
3. 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 is about business results.
Hope you found these notes helpful. Do checkout Part2 and Part3 of this series too.