Product Management Business Technology

Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love (Summary)

by Marty Cagan

What if the detailed product roadmap your company spends months creating is actually the biggest obstacle to building something customers love? Most tech companies operate like 'feature factories,' shipping a list of executive-demanded features that often fail. The alternative? Stop managing projects and start solving problems.

At Least Half Your Ideas Are Going to Fail

Cagan stresses one of the most 'inconvenient truths' of product: even with the best teams, at least 50% of product ideas won't deliver the expected value. This is why you can't just execute a plan; you must have a system for discovering what actually works.

Think of major product flops like Google Wave or Amazon's Fire Phone. These weren't failures of engineering; they were failures to validate the core idea with real users before committing millions of dollars to build them. The teams executed a plan flawlessly, but the plan itself was wrong.

Build Missionaries, Not Mercenaries

Mercenary teams are paid to build whatever they're told. Missionary teams are true believers in the vision and are given problems to solve, not features to build. The latter are the teams that create truly great products.

A 'mercenary' team is told, 'Build a one-click checkout button.' A 'missionary' team is told, 'Reduce checkout friction and increase conversion.' The missionary team has the autonomy to discover the best solution, which might not be a button at all, but perhaps integrating Apple Pay or simplifying the form fields.

Prototypes Are More Powerful Than Documents

Lengthy Product Requirement Documents (PRDs) are a slow and ineffective way to communicate an idea. A high-fidelity prototype—a clickable, realistic-looking mockup—is the fastest way to get genuine feedback from users, executives, and engineers.

Instead of writing a 40-page document to describe a new feature, a product team at Airbnb can create a realistic prototype in Figma in a few days. They can put this in front of five potential users and in a single afternoon learn more about what's confusing or delightful than they would from weeks of document reviews and meetings.

Discovery and Delivery Are Parallel Tracks

The best product teams operate on two tracks at once. In 'Discovery,' they are constantly running small, fast experiments to validate which ideas are worth building. In 'Delivery,' they are building and shipping the validated ideas with high-quality engineering.

A product team might run a 'fake door' test—adding a button for a feature that doesn't exist yet. The team measures how many users click it. If there's high interest, they've validated the idea cheaply and can move it into the delivery track. This prevents the engineering team from wasting months building something nobody wants.

Go deeper into these insights in the full book:
Buy on Amazon
Listen to the full audio book with an Audible Free Trial.
As an Amazon Associate, qualifying purchases help support this site.