Takeaway from Inspired by Marty Cagan Part 1
Marty Cagan, the author of the Inspired this book and also famously recognized as the thought leader for product management, especially the technology-related.
Truly, I really love how he defines the process of product development. Here I would like to share my takeaways from the concept of product discovery and product delivery.
- Product Discovery
Doing the right thing is the way more important than doing the thing right. The same applies to the product development. It doesn’t matter how good your engineering team is if they are not given something worthwhile to build. Marty gives the four factors that an ideal output of product discovery should meet as the following.
- Value: The product itself can solve the customers’ pain points.
- Usability : The process of using the product is easy to be understood and operate.
- Feasibility : This can be done with the resource a team hold.
- Viability: It’s profitable.
In addition, Marty also emphasized the importance of inviting engineers to participate in this phase. As the little secret of product development is that engineers are actually the best source of innovation. It’s suggested that a team for product discovery should comprise product, design and engineering members together. As a result, products can be defined and designed collaboratively rather than sequentially. And the other advantage to it is the effort can be directed more to solving problems, not just implementing features.
The path to a validated product usually takes several iterations. As mentioned in the book, a strong team normally test many product ideas each week, on the order of 10 to 20 or more per week. However, it’s emphasized that the iteration here is more about experiments, so typically run using prototypes rather than product spec.
Once the product discovery phase is done, then the output of it should be a validated product backlog.
2. Product Delivery
After defining the scope of the product, then comes the product delivery. Products is built and release in this phase in hopes of achieving the product/market fit. There are some required conditions for an ideal product delivery. From personal view, this can be categorized into 3 parts, which are scale (quantity), reliability and performance (quality).
- Scale: I would interpret scale as not just the quantity of manufacturing product but also how many customers it can reach, in the other words, it depends on how much product can be known or seen on the market via marketing (including distribution).
- Reliability: This would be more about product security, customer privacy, fault tolerance and reaction to customers issues.
- Performance: Product performance would be more related to if the product works as advertised or as the result of product discovery.
The above is my part-1 takeaway from Inspired talking about the product discovery and product delivery. There can be some parts incomplete or unclear, feel free to leave comments.
Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.
