“Inspired - How to create tech products customers love” By Marty Cagan is a highly recommended read for all product managers.
This is the third and final 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 Part1 here and Part2 here.
The primary responsibility for product managers is discovery. The bulk of the PM’s time needs to be focused on working with her product team, with her key stakeholders, and with her customers to discover solutions that her customers love and that work for the business.
The purpose of product discovery is to make sure we have some evidence that when we ask the engineers to build a production-quality product, it won’t be a wasted effort.
An opportunity assessment is designed for vast majority of product work, which ranges from simple optimization to a feature to a medium-sized project. The idea is to understand the objective, key results, customer problem and target market as part of discovery.
A customer letter is designed for larger projects or initiatives that often have multiple goals and a more complicated desired outcome. Amazon’s working backward process – the idea is that the PMs frame the work ahead of the team by writing an imagined press release of what would be like once this product launches. How does it improve the life of our customers? What are the real benefits to them?
A startup canvas for those times you’re creating an entirely new product line or a new business.
Customer Interviews - This is the one of the most powerful and important skills for any product manager and very often the source or inspiration for many breakthrough product ideas.
Concierge Test Technique - A concierge test requires going out to the actual users and customers and asking them to show you how they work so that you can learn how to do their job and so that you can work on providing them a much better solution.
The Power of Customer Misbehavior - This technique is to allow, and even encourage, our customers to use our products to solve problems other than what we planned for and officially support. If you find your customers using your product in ways you didn’t predict, this is potentially very valuable information. This could lead to very big product opportunities.
Hack Days - There are two main types of hack days – directed and undirected. In an undirected hack day, people can explore whatever product ideas they like, so long as it’s at least loosely related to the mission of the company. In a directed hack day, there’s a customer problem or business objective and we ask people from the product teams to self-organize and work on any ideas they like that might address this objective.
The major classes of prototypes:
Feasibility Prototypes - These are written by engineers to address technical feasibility risks during product discovery. The idea is for the developers to write just enough code to be able to address the feasibility risk.
User Prototypes - These are simulations. There is a wide spectrum of user prototypes – from low-fidelity user prototypes (wireframes sketched out on paper) al the way to high fidelity user prototypes.
Live-Data Prototypes - The main purpose is to collect actual data so we can prove something, or at least gather evidence – normally to find out whether an idea really works. For this we need the prototypes (i) to access our live data sources and (ii) to be able to send live data to the prototype.
Hybrid Prototypes
Testing Usability – We do usability testing in discovery – using prototypes, before you build the product – and not at the end, when it’s really too late to correct the issues without significant waste.
Testing Value - This consists of testing demand, testing value qualitatively and testing value quantitatively.
Testing Feasibility - Engineers need to be involved from the very beginning when ideas are being tried out with customers.
Testing Business Viability - It is the PM’s job to ensure that all the relevant constraints are understood and positive action is taken to work within the business teams. These groups include marketing, sales, customer success, finance, legal, business development, security, CEO/COO/GM, etc.
Hope you found these notes helpful. Do checkout Part1 and Part2 of this series too.