Customer Reviews

Inspired: How To Create Products Customers Love

5 star:		(85)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

It is a pity that there are only 5 stars to award the maximum appreciation for this book. There are a number of achievements that deserve, alone, five stars.

First, Marty Cagan clearly states what qualities a Product Manager must have. Not everyone is talented to be a Product Manager. The author lists unmeasurable traits, such as product passion, customer empathy, innate intelligence (there is no substitute for it, we learn), ethics, integrity and confidence. The latter is very important as the entire teams in engineering and marketing must be kept inspired. This leads to the corollary that simply training a person to be a Product Manager is not enough. One must know when an unsuitable person must look for other positions. This is something uncommon, to consider what many view a process driven function to a talent.

Second, the book asks where to place the Product Manageent function. In Engineering? In Marketing? There is a distinction between a Product Manager and Product Marketing Manager. As veteran product manager myself, I know the challenges to be part of engineering. Engineers are sometimes suspicious of marketing and their product manager becomes the "piñata" everyone beats in frustration. As part of Marketing, there is tendency to follow release processes and create demands engineering can not deliver in a logical way. Marty advocates the creation of a Product Council with equal rights as engineering and marketing

Marty says a successful product manager sees himself as the CEO of the product. This is absolutely true, but unfortunately the Directors of Engineering and those of Marketing, also see themselves as CEOs. As long as an independent product council does not exist, the product manager must be a CEO with zero authority. S/he must be a diplomat and shrewd negotiator before he can be a CEO. Yet the true blue blood product manager is the one whose skills are required for start up.

As startup is usually a one product or service company. Chapter 28 is dedicated to product management in a startup company. The challenge is a new start up is started with an idea that comes from engineering. However we must have the right product for the right audience, before "before burning through $500,000 or more in seed funding".

Every aspect of the product management function is presented.

I am an alumni of UC Berkeley Haas School Product Management executive program, one of few, if not the only program dedicated to Product Management. Berkeley program talks of portfolio management. What products to release, how many are completely new and how many are new releases of older or even very old products?

It all depends on the risk tolerance. A products portfolio must include new high risk, lottery-like winning products. This is what made Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley. After reading Marty Cagan, every professional team all over the world can produce "inspired" products. Silicon Valley and it's personalities now share all they know. But what is a low probability to create outside Silicon Valley is another Google. The Google Sequoia Capital VC's made more money in Google than all the rest of the portfolio combined over the last 20 years.

Another topic that I would have liked to see expanded in a next edition is pricing. How do we price the products in such a way that we do not leave money on the table? But this is another subject. Marty's book is both educational and thought provoking. The book self published by Silicon Valley Product Group, the company of Marty Cagan, went beyond the goal of being a reference for it's prospective v customers. It is THE BOOK for of product management, a must-read for anyone.

The idea of the product manager as a creator with talent and passion I advocated for years in my blog, "The memories of a Program Manager". It is re-assuring to see the same sentiments shared in the more comprehensive, practical and sensitive book of Marty Cagan..

Even though I'm a total "one click" junkie, and often make book recommendations to friends and co-workers, I've never taken the time to post a review until today.

So why now? I've been working in and around product management for over 10 years and I really, really wish that I could have had the benefit of a resource like this when I started. Inspired should absolutely be required reading for anyone in the product development space: product managers, UX designers, engineers, projects managers, marketing--anyone responsible for the creation of new products (or the significant improvement of existing products that are missing the mark somehow).

[Disclaimer: I've been a fan of Marty's blog and newsletter for several years now, so most of the information in the book was not new to me. I also hired Marty (twice) as a consultant--which should make this recommendation even more credible because I put my money where my mouth is regarding his insight and the value he brings to organizations!]

Even though I was already very familiar with most of the topics covered in the book, I still pre-ordered it and read it cover to cover as soon as it arrived.

Having all of this information together and organized like this allows readers to get the benefit of Marty's 20+ years of experience--as an executive at some of the leading companies in Silicon Valley as well as through his consulting practice--in one concise package. This guy knows his stuff and, as a result, there's no more comprehensive resource for product managers out there--not even close!

In his Introduction Marty writes: "I chose this career because I wanted to work on products that customers love; products that inspire and provide real value... Yet most products are not inspiring, and life is too short for bad products." Amen!

So read Inspired, and give a copy to anyone else who you want to be successful in the product creation space. They'll thank you for it.

P.S. Chapter 31: Succeeding in Large Companies alone is worth the price of the book if you take his advice and start employing these 10 techniques in your current job!

I spent years as an interface designer in a risk-averse Fortune 500 company as the sole advocate for usability, wearing the additional hats of information architect, HTML coder, visual designer, and more. In that company, the developers were an abusive bunch who called the shots, fought me on every design proposal, and demanded tons of documentation before anything was ever built. I also had little access to end users. There were maybe two releases per year, and they were always painful.

I left that environment to become a user experience consultant in another Fortune 500 company. Despite the fact that I now had a fresh start in a friendlier environment with a more collaborative team of developers, I was wary and defensive. I didn't want to blow my new gig, though, so I was looking for guidance fast. I read two books that saved me: Alan Cooper's "Inmates Are Running The Asylum", and "Inspired".

Prior to these books, I'd heard the terms "waterfall" and "agile" before but never really knew what they meant. But now it was like suddenly learning the name of an affliction from which I'd been suffering. Several times while reading "Inspired" I caught myself saying, "Yes - yes, that's it! That's what happened to me!" It really was like the song by Roberta Flack: this guy knew my pain and had could have BEEN me in some of the stories he describes.

I'm not able to put into practice everything Mr. Cagan describes in an optimal environment, but thanks to this book I have a much better understanding of my hats, including ones I didn't know I was wearing. His insights have helped me learn to pace myself, and perhaps even more importantly, to forgive myself if I don't get to every single thing. I highly recommend this book to user experience professionals who are working for large organizations where it is a challenge to introduce and nurture new thinking.

Yet another collection of blog posts. This is becoming a genre of it's own. Unfortunately, there are inherent problems with this type of a book:

1) Usually, there not enough time spent in order to "arrange the material in the book into a coherent progression and logic" (quoted from Charles Petzold).

2) Some topics are not discussed deeply enough, because it was originally just a blog post and, as such, was not intended to be thoroughly researched.

3) Tendency to repetition and oversimplification, hence prose becomes extremely bulky, but with insufficient content. This is also probably due to the fact that these were originally independent posts intended to be read individually. Even the best editors can not help with it.

In addition to the problems outlined above, this particular book has some unique deficiencies:

4) Examples are not in the book, but on a separate web site. To be fair, author warns about it and apologizes for it in the introduction, but still. In author's own words: "I realize this breaks the flow of reading a book". It does.

5) Lack of real world situations. Author used to work for some of the most exciting companies in the world: eBay, Netscape, HP. I would love to hear some information on how things are/were done there.

6) I personally find the 'high-fidelity prototype' concept to be highly questionable. But it is used as a foundation for many other ideas. High-fidelity prototypes could be as difficult to build the product itself, it all depends on the product and subject matter. Yet, it is presented as a sort of a product manager's silver bullet, without any discussion on when building this prototype could be problematic.

7) Lack of 'features discussions'. It depends, but a lot of times as a product manager you are not faced with a task of creating a new product, but you have to work on improving the existing one. This topic is almost non-existent in the book - only one chapter is about it(23) and it just gives one advice - look at your metrics. This is a sound advice, but definitely not enough to cover the topic.


Well, those were the negative points, but I gave the book 3 stars, which means: "It's OK". Why is it ok? Well, this is because ideas and concepts expressed in the book are really good:

- Gentle deployment: excellent concept
- Requirements and design should be done simultaneously: excellent idea
- Roles and responsibilities of various people in the product team are outlined very nicely
- Ugly nature of the custom solutions (or as they are called in the book 'specials') is described and a solid advice is here to help product manager battle against them
- 'Opportunity statement' is, I think, a very reasonable approach to assessing product opportunities, one that achieves the goal and can implemented fairly easily.

So please, when reading the book think about the ideas and concepts, try to connect them inside your mind and you will definitely conclude that the book is OK.

Not often do you find a book that really makes sense first page to the last.
Marty keeps hitting the target page after page.

There are companies that do Product Management very well. Apple is one of them. Google has a lot of people in this function, but search is still their main revenue earner and they have failed to have a new product in their stable which accounts for double digits in their revenue stream. Most companies have talented people but do not really encourage innovation.

"Great Product Managers can be picked from engineering, IT, marketing, and a lot of times no prior experience is required except the passion to create great products."
Agreed. People with passion and ownership are responsible for great products.

Here's how the book assesses product opportunities:
1. What's the problem you're trying to solve?
2. For whom?
3. Size of the opportunity/market
4. What's the measure of success? (Revenue/Metrics)
5. Competitive landscape
6. Product Differentiators
7. Why now? Window of opportunity?
8. Go to market strategy
9. Factors critical to success
10. Based on the above -Go or No Go

If you've been in the business, you will notice that every page resonates. This book is a must buy/must read for all product managers.

As someone who has recently transitioned to product management, I have found that this book provides a very clear and concise vision of what product management should be. Not only did I learn what makes a good product manager and became more confident in my new role, but by the time I had finished the book I was also very excited about becoming a product manager. I definitely recommend this book to other people in my position who are new to product management.

I find it really hard to believe that at the time I write this review, it is rated 5 stars by close to 80 reviewers. I ordered this book and briefed through it extremely quickly. There is not a lot of substance here, barely anything of value I took out of it. And keep in mind, I'm not some tenured product manager that thinks I know everything about the discipline. I'm a management consultant with a passion for PdM, thus wanted to find a book that helped me better understand PdM best practices. The stuff written here is extremely basic and largely common sense. You're better off just doing some web research on the discipline, finding some HBR article, or finding another book out there. I normally trust the Amazon community, and normally you should too, this is an exception.

Inspired is one of the most useful and practical business books I've read in a long time. Cagan provides a very thorough and action-oriented guide to product development; including team composition, knowing what to build, and how to get it accomplished. It's written for software, but could easily be applied across other industries. A must-read for any product manager.

As the title says, I got a lot of value from reading this book. The depth is sufficient to cover the topics, but not too deep to make it a slog to read. Coming from a business-to-business background, I found the focus on consumer Internet products was helpful in understanding this world. Specifically these were my takeaways:

- Where product management fits in the engineering/marketing continuum
- Maintaining concurrent design/build streams to get out of the "feeding the engineering beast" trap.
- Using personas to prioritize releases
- Why high-fidelity prototypes are so valuable
- Using a product council to build consensus on the product vision

I can honestly say that suggestions from this book spoke directly to challegnes I have had in my product management career. I recommend it whole-heartedly.

Although Inspired doesn't really bring new concepts to the table, it does provide a nice overview of different aspects of a product managers job. Especially the first part which is a discussion about the position of a product manager within a company and answers the question what competences a good product manager should have really opened my eyes. After that the book goes off discussing different ways to accomplish successful product launches, discussing personas and interviews as tools to help with that. Then again, these are not new concepts.

The book reads really fast, you could do it in a night. Chapters are fairly short and get to the point really fast, which is a big plus to me

Critics could claim that the book is a little bit narrow minded. The way conventional development methods are put aside to replace them with agile methods without considering that parts of those methods made a lot of company a lot of money and that there could be companies out there for who those methods might work the best is especially one sided.

Still, while you shouldn't expect this book to change your world, the five stars are well deserved.