Finding Your Success as a Tech Product Manager with Inspired

Building great products is hard, but being a product manager is extremely challenging. You have many responsibilities managing deadlines, team alignment, and balancing different responsibilities, though you’re not the boss of anybody. However, it is a great role to build leadership skills through great partnerships with various stakeholders. When I read this book called <inspired> by Marty Cagan. I found answers to some of the biggest questions about being a product manager at a top tech company. So I decided to write this review blog post to help you find Your Success as a Tech Product Manager with ‘inspired’ .

All begins here

This book is about creating tech products that customers love. Marty shares many personal stories of building successful products and offers insights into real-life product organizations like HP, Apple, Google, and Netflix.

The book begins with a raw definition of technology-powered products and services. Traditionally, people view tech products as consumer-service products built with technology, such as e-commerce sites like eBay and Amazon, social media platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn, or technology services like Salesforce and Microsoft Office. However, in Marty’s vision, which is very relevant today, this definition expands to most products in our daily lives, even if we don’t always realize it. Technology-powered products don’t have to be purely digital. They can be as simple as finding a ride through a mobile service, chatting with friends online, or watching a movie with family on a streaming platform.

Check out the following video containing a more detailed review of this book and thought process about Inspired on my Youtube channel: CloudMelonVis as the following :

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The vision of the book is to focus on the unique issues and challenges associated with building technology-powered products, services, and experiences.  

Part I: Lessons from top tech companies 

The root cause of failed product efforts is directly related to how an individual product team works.  A failed product team focuses on the output rather than the impact aka key results, the output is the outcome of each step in the process of how they build products.  The traditional process includes having ideas, building business cases, and analyzing the requirements, then jumping into the product-building process, which covers the product life cycle sequentially from designing, building, testing, and deployment. 

Streamlining the processes

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This process often leads teams to act as mercenaries, not missionaries, as Marty states throughout the book. Without validating new ideas, there’s no way to ensure feasibility and true customer value. When integration takes time, and the outcome may end up as a product the company wants rather than what the customers need.

However, successful product teams are more agile, flexible, and customer-driven. 

Do what matters

• Customer-driven means the product team deals with risk which includes the value proposition, usability, feasibility, and business viability, before they build their solutions, the process would contain a couple of iterations in different areas,  user research,  design discussions, and engineering discussions. Sometimes the design discussion and engineering discussion will be escalated to a broader team to get feedback, learn, and share experiences so product efforts could be reused next time if other teams are building similar features.  

• Team collaboration. More importantly, those discussions are fully embodied by both Product, design, and engineering teams side-by-side so they collaboratively define the product vision and product definition.  

• Business impact. The solutions that solve underlying problems brought by those discussions are measured by key results,  the business impact of the product feature. 

This approach appeals to top tech companies today. Being agile, flexible, and customer-driven allows quick reactions to customer needs. They can adapt to the ever-changing market quickly. Many companies use Minimal Viable Product (MVP) to evaluate if customers love the product. They do this through focus groups and customer interviews. Therefore, a key part of a product manager’s role is working with the right people.

Part II: The Right People 

A successful product team consists of missionaries, not mercenaries. Being a product manager involves coordinating with various teams and individuals.

According to Marty, an excellent product manager must be a true believer in the product vision. This belief energizes the team and helps overcome challenges. A product manager needs both qualitative and quantitative skills. They should be data-driven and deeply understand their business, market, industry, and customers. Working with the right people aims to achieve product success.

Part III: The right product 

The product is built on top of the product vision,  in Marty’s view the product vision has a time horizon of 2-5 years, a product vision is unlike the company mission but it is pervasive enough to be a future that inspires the team to want to help make this vision a reality. There comes a product strategy to help the team come close to the product vision.  

An aspirational goal breaks down to a few sets of small goals and each goal is measured by the key results. The notion of Objective Key Results aka OKR is widely used in top tech companies. The OKR technique is a tool for management, focus, and alignment, it measures performance by results and drives the team towards product success.  About OKR, there’s also a great book called Measure what matters by John Doerr,  it describes how OKR works in those giant organizations or small agile startups with concrete use cases and scenarios. I will write another review about it ( check out this review called OKRs ( Objective Key Results ) – A million-dollar idea to help startups drive 10x growth and help you work smarter here ), stay tuned! 

Part IV: The right process 

A product manager acts as a bridge to all processes. This book describes how to scale the product management process effectively. It covers product discovery, framing, planning, ideation, prototyping, and testing techniques. These methods help prove product value, convey ideas clearly, validate hypotheses, and develop solutions with the team.

Marty explains that a product manager must spend time with the engineering team, stakeholders, and customers. This ensures the final product works for all customers on a large scale. This process helps the product team build a successful product that customers love.

Part V: The right culture 

Building the right culture requires the right people and product team. Work with organizations that measure product success with key results. Innovation suffers when organizations lack a customer-centric culture, misplace product vision, or lack visionary product managers. Stable teams are also crucial.

A good product manager empowers the team by fostering success in others. This helps establish a strong product culture. Great products delight customers, which goes beyond just product success. Successful products fuel the success of tech giants like Google, Apple, and Microsoft. For these companies, customers are their source of energy.

In the next blog post or two, we’ll review the Measure What Matters by John Doerr. Check out that book here, let’s stay tuned !