Snippets about: Product Management
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Technology Products Cover A Wide Range
Technology-powered products that the book focuses on span a wide range, including:
- Consumer-service products (e.g. Netflix, Airbnb, Etsy)
- Social media (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter)
- Business services (e.g. Salesforce, Workday)
- Consumer devices (e.g. Apple, Sonos, Tesla)
- Mobile apps (e.g. Uber, Instagram)
The definition of "product" is very holistic, including not just features but the enabling technology, user experience design, monetization, customer acquisition, and offline experiences essential to delivering the product's value.
Section: 1, Chapter: 2
Book: Inspired
Author: Marty Cagan
Avoid 'Feature Bloat' That Overwhelms
While adding new features is important for retaining users long-term, be careful not to overwhelm them with too many options, which can decrease retention. This is called "feature bloat."
Product teams can be surprised by competitors introducing new technologies or using existing ones in novel ways. On the other hand, companies may face slowdowns if they shift their attention from core offerings to new products, excessive features, or new market ventures.
Section: 2, Chapter: 9
Book: Hacking Growth
Author: Sean Ellis
VP of Product Role Requires Specific Competencies
The head of product role is a very demanding one that has a huge impact when done well. The core competencies are:
- Talent Development - Hiring, training and coaching product managers is the most important responsibility
- Product Vision - In some companies the CEO drives the vision, in others it falls to the head of product
- Execution - Aligning the team and organization to consistently deliver on the product vision and strategy
- Product Culture - Establishing shared values and norms around customer focus, collaboration, experimentation, and business impact
Other key factors for success in the role are relevant experience, chemistry with peers, and strong collaboration with engineering and design leaders.
Section: 2, Chapter: 17
Book: Inspired
Author: Marty Cagan
Product Evangelism Inspires Customers And Colleagues
Product managers play a key role in evangelizing the product both externally and internally. This starts with having a clear, compelling product vision and strategy to share.
Specific techniques for effective evangelism include: Using prototypes to make ideas tangible and get feedback, sharing real customer pain points and stories to build empathy, and openly sharing learnings, even from failures and pivots
Evangelism is most effective when product managers spend quality time with their teams and key stakeholders to understand their needs and concerns. Applying soft skills to build relationships is as important as the hard skills of discovery and delivery.
Section: 3, Chapter: 31
Book: Inspired
Author: Marty Cagan
Ramp Up Engagement With the Triple A Framework
To craft an engaging early user experience that maximizes activation, use the Triple A framework:
- Acknowledge: Make users feel acknowledged and appreciated for signing up. Send a personalized welcome message.
- Affirm: Affirm that the user made a good choice by signing up. Reinforce your value prop and benefits. Share impressive usage stats or social proof.
- Action: Direct the user to a key action that will deliver value and help them experience the aha moment. Focus on one clear call to action.
By making users feel good about their signup while also guiding them to unleash your product's core value, you can build early engagement and improve activation rates for your product.
Section: 2, Chapter: 6
Book: Hacking Growth
Author: Sean Ellis
Good Product Managers Are 'CEOs' Of The Product
A strong product manager is critical to the product team's success. Their key responsibilities are:
- Deep knowledge of users, customers, data, the business and industry
- Defining what gets built and delivered to customers
- Ensuring what gets built will deliver the desired business results
The best product managers are smart, creative and persistent. They are technically savvy, customer-focused, and skilled at working with all parts of the organization. While they don't manage the team, they lead through influence and competence. It's a very demanding role.
Section: 2, Chapter: 10
Book: Inspired
Author: Marty Cagan
Product Efforts Fail For Consistent Reasons
Most companies follow a common product development process that is fundamentally broken and leads to failed products:
- Ideas come from inside the company or from customers, without validation
- Roadmaps are built based on these unvalidated ideas and stakeholder priorities
- Product managers gather requirements and hand them off to designers and engineers in a linear fashion
- Agile is applied only at the tail end for delivery, not upfront product discovery
- Product launches happen without sufficient customer testing and validation
- The biggest problems are building the wrong products and wasting time/money on ideas that don't work
Section: 1, Chapter: 6
Book: Inspired
Author: Marty Cagan
Personalize Your Product To Create An Emotional Connection
Use data to personalize the user experience and build a stronger relationship. Ways to personalize include:
- Customized homepages and landing pages
- Tailored product recommendations
- Behavioral triggered messaging
- Personalized offers and incentives
"With the ever-ballooning databases of customer information being built by companies and powerful new tools for analyzing that data available, a company's ability to serve customer needs and desires more precisely—even individually—has been vastly improved"
Section: 2, Chapter: 8
Book: Hacking Growth
Author: Sean Ellis
Product Strategy Delivers The Vision In Stages
The product strategy translates the high-level vision into an actionable sequence of product releases or key milestones to deliver business results. Rather than a one-time big bang, it stages the introduction of products to different markets or customer segments over time. Common product strategy approaches include:
- Focusing on one target customer persona or market segment at a time
- Expanding from one geography to the next based on product/market fit
- Delivering foundational platforms and APIs first, then solutions on top
- Sequencing delivery to align with sales channels and go-to-market needs
The product strategy should be aligned with both the product vision and business strategy. It's not a detailed roadmap, but provides focus and guides investment priorities.
Section: 3, Chapter: 26
Book: Inspired
Author: Marty Cagan
Identify Your Product's Smile Graph
Look at a graph of your product's retention curve over time. Ideally, it should look like a smile - retention should increase the longer a customer uses the product, as they get more value out of it over time. This is called the "smile graph." "Evernote's retention graph looks that way essentially because the service's usefulness improves over time.
The core value is enhanced the longer you use Evernote because as a note-keeping product, the more information that is saved within it, the more likely people are to return to access those ideas and notes and add more to them." If your retention curve doesn't increase over time, dig into why. You may need to add more features and value for long-term users. Analyzing cohort retention curves is key.
Section: 2, Chapter: 7
Book: Hacking Growth
Author: Sean Ellis
"Strive For 'Local Maximum' With Existing Features Before Building New Ones"
Before creating new features or products, ensure that your current features are fully optimized. Continue experimenting until you reach a "local maximum," which means achieving the best possible result within the current setup.
For instance, continuously testing a pricing page over a year may optimize its performance to a local maximum. However, to achieve even better results, you should eventually try a completely new design for the pricing page. Overcoming these local maximums is crucial for unlocking further growth.
Section: 2, Chapter: 9
Book: Hacking Growth
Author: Sean Ellis
Inspiring Product Vision Provides Purpose
"The product vision describes the future we are trying to create, typically somewhere between two and five years out. Its primary purpose is to communicate this vision and inspire the teams (and stakeholders, investors, partners—and, in many cases, prospective customers) to want to help make this vision a reality."
Section: 3, Chapter: 24
Book: Inspired
Author: Marty Cagan
Build An Engagement Loop To Drive Habit Formation
To transition users from initial retention to building a habit in the medium-term retention phase, growth teams should construct an engagement loop:
- An external trigger prompts the user to action
- The user takes the action
- They are rewarded for taking the action
- Over time, an internal trigger develops so they take the action on their own without prompting
"As users become more experienced at using your product, features they haven't used yet—and new ones being introduced—should be brought to their attention, gradually and in a way that allows them to tackle learning a new feature only after having achieved mastery of the previous one."
Section: 2, Chapter: 7
Book: Hacking Growth
Author: Sean Ellis
Rapid Product Discovery Is Critical To Success
The purpose of product discovery is to quickly address critical risks before investing in building and launching products. These risks include:
- Value risk - will customers buy this or choose to use it?
- Usability risk - can users figure out how to use it?
- Feasibility risk - can we build it with the time, skills and technology we have?
- Business viability risk - does this solution work for our business?
Strong product teams validate these risks through rapid prototyping and testing, rather than just building what's on a roadmap. They iterate quickly, knowing many ideas will fail and require multiple attempts. The goal is to maximize learning at minimal cost.
Section: 4, Chapter: 33
Book: Inspired
Author: Marty Cagan
BBC Case Study Shows Power Of Product Vision
When Alex Pressland was a young BBC product manager in 2003, he saw the potential for syndicated content over IP to expand the BBC's reach. However, there were major internal obstacles - editorial, legal, and cultural. To drive the change, Alex:
- Ran early experiments on electronic billboards to prove out the model
- Proposed a clear product vision for "BBC Out of Home" to leadership
- Socialized the vision with key stakeholders to get buy-in
- Delivered on the vision through new products and partnerships
Individual product managers empowered by a strong vision can drive transformational change, even in large organizations.
Section: 3, Chapter: 32
Book: Inspired
Author: Marty Cagan
Dedicated Product Teams Are The Core Building Block
The most important concept in the book is that everything centers around empowered, dedicated, durable product teams. These teams bring together different skills and feel real ownership over a product or substantial feature area. They have autonomy to figure out the best solutions to deliver business results. Management's role is to provide the necessary business context and guidance. The team size, composition, structure and dynamics all impact its effectiveness.
Section: 2, Chapter: 9
Book: Inspired
Author: Marty Cagan
Behind Every Great Product Lies A Strong Product Manager
Behind every great product that is loved by customers, there is someone - usually behind the scenes - who leads the product team to combine technology and design to solve real customer problems in a way that meets the needs of the business. These people usually have the title of product manager, but may also be a startup founder, CEO, or someone else who steps up. The product management role is distinct from other disciplines like engineering, design, marketing or project management.
Section: 1, Chapter: 1
Book: Inspired
Author: Marty Cagan
Concierge Tests Yield Crucial Customer Insights
In a concierge test, instead of just interviewing customers about a problem space, you or someone from your team actually tries to solve the customer's problem manually. This requires:
- Getting the customer to train you on their specific workflow and needs
- Doing the actual work the customer needs done, as they would
- Looking for opportunities to streamline steps and provide a better solution
By being a "concierge" and performing the customer's job, you build deeper empathy for their situation and identify pain points you may not find through interviews alone. The insights gathered can shape your product discovery and lead to more relevant solutions.
Section: 4, Chapter: 42
Book: Inspired
Author: Marty Cagan
Don't Let Your Customer Outgrow You
As your customers grow, some will develop needs and ambitions beyond what your product can fulfill. If you try to satisfy them by tacking more and more onto your product, you can wind up with a complicated, overbuilt mess none of your customers can use.
Don't underestimate the continuing market for "simple." Let advanced customers graduate to more complex products when they must. Stay true to your product vision. Keep your product clean, simple and narrowly focused so new customers can always get started easily.
Section: 1, Chapter: 7
Book: Rework
Author: Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson
Product Roadmaps Done Wrong Derail The Organization
Most product roadmaps are a prioritized list of features and projects with estimated timelines for delivery. While this is meant to provide predictability, it often leads to major problems:
They ignore the reality that at least half of ideas won't work, requiring multiple iterations. They turn product teams into "feature factories" detached from real customer problems. Stakeholders treat roadmap items as firm commitments and deadlines, and product teams are demotivated and not fully empowered
Holding product teams accountable to business results rather than a roadmap of outputs enables them to deliver better solutions. Specific high-integrity commitments are made only after validating the solution through discovery.
Section: 3, Chapter: 22
Book: Inspired
Author: Marty Cagan
Customer Misbehavior Signals Unmet Needs
Many innovative products are shaped by observing how customers creatively use existing products to solve needs in unintended ways. Examples include:
- eBay's "Everything Else" category leading to significant new verticals
- Facebook users finding unexpected uses for the platform and APIs
- Airbnb hosts renting out extra space in creative ways
When customers "misbehave", they often signal a new use case or market opportunity ripe for innovation. Resist the urge to shut this behavior down. Instead, study it carefully and engage those customers to understand what problem they are solving. Then adapt your product and business model to serve the need.
Section: 4, Chapter: 43
Book: Inspired
Author: Marty Cagan
The Three Phases Of Customer Retention
There are three key phases of retention that growth teams should focus on:
- Initial retention (first few days/weeks after acquiring a customer)
- Medium-term retention (solidifying the customer relationship and making product usage a habit)
- Long-term retention (continuing to provide value to retain the customer over many months/years)
Different tactics should be used in each phase to optimize retention. In the initial phase, focus on getting the user to the aha moment quickly. In the medium-term, build habits around using the product. For long-term, keep adding features and value to retain the customer.
Section: 2, Chapter: 7
Book: Hacking Growth
Author: Sean Ellis
Product Managers Drive Continuous Discovery
In an effective product organization, product managers spend most of their time on product discovery, not just backlog administration. This requires hands-on comfort with a wide range of discovery techniques.
As a product manager, you should be allocating your time to:
- Observing users and customers weekly to identify pain points
- Testing prototypes with 5-10 users per week to validate concepts
- Analyzing product metrics daily to assess how the product is performing
- Interviewing stakeholders to understand business constraints
- Iterating on solutions with design and engineering in short cycles
Section: 4, Chapter: 57
Book: Inspired
Author: Marty Cagan
Strong Product Cultures Blend Innovation With Execution
The strongest product companies have a culture that combines two critical capabilities: consistent innovation and excellent execution.
Elements of a strong innovation culture include:
- Customer-centricity and user research to identify unmet needs
- Empowered teams that can make decisions quickly to test ideas
- Psychological safety to take smart risks without fear of failure
- Collaboration across product, design and engineering
Elements of a strong execution culture include:
- Accountability for results, with teams that feel true ownership
- High-integrity commitments that teams take seriously
- Sense of urgency balanced with sustainable work practices
- Recognition for customer impact, not just velocity of delivery
Companies like Amazon, Netflix and Airbnb get this mix right. They innovate rapidly based on customer insights, but also execute with a level of operational excellence that's rare.
Section: 5, Chapter: 65
Book: Inspired
Author: Marty Cagan
Great Products Start With Customer Obsession
"Good teams obsess over their reference customers. Bad teams obsess over their competitors."
Section: 5, Chapter: 64
Book: Inspired
Author: Marty Cagan
Great Products Require Saying No
Making a great product is as much about what you leave out as what you put in. Extraneous features, options and preferences make products confusing, diluted, and bloated. They require more work and maintenance. And they bury the product's true purpose. So be a curator, not a hoarder. Constantly trim and prune. Limit your product to the essential. Learn to say no to additions that don't support the product's core use or value. When in doubt, leave it out.
Section: 1, Chapter: 5
Book: Rework
Author: Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson
