Inspired
General information
- 👤 Author: Marty Cagan
- 🔗 Links: Goodreads | Audible 🇩🇪
Review
This book contains a quite a few specific pointers on how to develop engaging products and how to best create a product-oriented culture.
It achieves this by relying in the authors vast experience and knowledge about the the field.
The underlaying question this books tries to answer is:
How do you create successful tech products?
This book doesn’t provide you a magic formula but it gives you insight and strategies how you can come up with a successful tech product. One big insight is that in the beginning almost all ideas suck and you should focus on finding holes in ideas as soon as possible.
I can recommend this book to everyone in tech. Even engineers can learn a great deal. Because I think almost everyone is a product designer from time to time. Yes even a CLI tool or internal tool or library could benefit from the principles and strategies in this book.
Key lessons
The author describes three overarching principles which help overcome root causes of failed product efforts:
- Risks are tackled upfront, instead of at the end
- Products are defined and designed collaboratively, rather than sequentially
- Finally, it’s all about solving problems, not implementing features
“Continuous Discovery and Delivery” is a great way to translate these three principles into a process and mindset for people to adhere too.
Quotes
We need teams of missionaries, not teams of mercenaries.
It doesn’t matter how good your engineering team is if they are not given something worthwhile to build.
Software projects can be thought of as having two distinct stages: figuring out what to build (build the right product), and building it (building the product right). The first stage is dominated by product discovery, and the second stage is all about execution.
Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do, and they will surprise you with their ingenuity