The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing

Inspired, wrote by Marty Cagan, is a book that I had heard about so many times when I started learning about product management, but I just read it a few months ago and I decided to summarize it to spread its valuable information and concepts about how and what successful product managers do.

The book is totally understandable for all kinds of professionals, starting to talk about responsibilities, including how to test and recruit other professionals and summarizing best practices to release great products.

Let’s see what Marty Cagan has to say for us through topics.

Key roles and responsibilities

A Product Manager has two key responsibilities: assessing product opportunities and defining the product to be built.

Deciding if it is something worth pursuing is a critical responsibility because that will be the difference moving the project forward.

A typical paper sent to PM’s is the Marketing Requirements Document (MRD), the role of this document is not to be full of features and magical solutions, but is to think around the problems that could be solved and their outspread to find the opportunity assessment.

After that, you would discover what the solution is, through things like, looking for necessary features and functionality, user experience, release criteria. This step will be described on Product Requirements Document (PRD), called by others as Product Spec or Functional Spec.

Managers should advocate for prototypes and not papers, even though, papers are a good way to keep project details, prototyping is the best way to present how users will behave with the product and features. Indeed, an important “DON’T DO” here is describing how it will be implemented, it’s a role for the engineering team in future steps.

The interaction designer will be your sidekick, working closely to discover the blend of requirements and design that meet the needs of the user. The target idea is to hit the point where the software is both usable and valuable in a simple way.

Product Management vs Product Marketing

The difference between Product Marketing Manager and the Product Manager, is that the latter is responsible for defining the product to be built, and validating that product with real customers and users. Whereas, the Product Marketing Manager person is responsible for telling the world about the product, including; positioning, messaging and pricing, managing product launch, providing tools for the sales channels to market and sell the product, and for leading key programs such as online marketing and influencer marketing programs.

Product Management vs Engineering

As product manager, you are responsible for defining the right product, and your engineering counterpart is responsible for building the product right. You need both. Involve engineers from the very beginning of the product discovery process to get very early assessments of relative costs of different ideas, and to help identify better solutions. A typical critical negotiation process is defining what’s wanted vs. what’s possible.

It’s hard but try to keep the focus on minimal product, additionally, blocking other assumptions to create another thing or add a fast feature that they think could be good for the product.

Try to minimize churn once engineering begins to develop the product, creating a high fidelity prototype, discussing with engineering about the costs and capabilities of the project and creating full stories to anyone understand what has to be built and what is required by the user.

Recruiting Product Managers

The successful product manager takes full responsibility for the product, and does not make excuses. He knows that he is ultimately responsible for the success of the product.

Everything for the product is too complicated to manage: difficulty in building, market failure, costs too much. Therefore, keep the focus on the key problem to be solved at any given moment and not succumb to creeping featurism or loud voices of a few key people or customers.

It can be dangerous for a PM to have too much domain expertise, because people that have spent a long time building their mastery of one domain often fall into another common trap: they believe they can speak for the target consumer.

Managing Product Managers

Every new product manager needs roughly three months of hard learning before you can entrust them with the responsibility of guiding a product. During this time, the new product manager needs to immerse herself with target users and customers, get educated on the relevant technologies, and study the market and the competitive landscape.

Do not focus on building the product right, because immersing on engineering may cause this problem, you should balance building the product right and the right product.

Managing up

Before the official meeting, make real meetings with key influencers and stakeholders giving them a preview of your points, listening to their issues, and ensuring that they are already on board by the time the group meeting happens. If you do this well, the group meeting should be relevant with no surprises.

“If we’re going to make this decision based on opinions, we’re going to use my opinion” — Jim Barksdale, former CEO of Netscape. Do your homework, collecting data, and your recommendations would be clear based on the facts and not opinion.

Assessing product opportunities

Just answer this:

• Exactly what problem will this solve? Value proposition
• For whom do we solve that problem? Target Market
• How big is the opportunity? Market size
• How will we measure the success? Metrics/revenue strategy.
• This is the time to think clearly and concisely about the problem you are trying to solve.
• Do you understand the economics of your product?
• Do you know your exact revenue model?
• Do you know how much you pay for each customer?
• Do you know their lifetime value to the company?
• Do you know the return your product has generated for the company?

Product discovery

You need to identify your market and validate the opportunity with your customers. Discover a product solution to this problem that is valuable, feasible and usable.

Product principles

• What is the exactly problem that are you trying to solve?
• Who exactly are you trying to solve this problem for?
• What are the goals you are trying to satisfy with this product?
• What is the relative priority of each goal?

The product council

This group is not trying to set company’s business strategy, but rather -given the business strategy- come up with a product strategy that will meet the needs of the business. The decisions this group makes will directly impact the success of the business.

Some tasks are:

• Review product strategies and product roadmaps, and initiate opportunity assessments for specific product releases.
• Review opportunity assessments and recommendations, and go/no-go decisions to driving a solution.
• Review product prototype, user testing results and detailed cost estimate, and issue go/no-go decisions to begin engineering.

Market research

Ask yourself:

• Do you understand who your users really are?
• How are users using your product?
• Can users figure out how to use your product?
• Where do they stumble?
• Why do users use your product?
• What do users like about your product?
• What do users want added to or changed in your product?

Personas for Product Management

The creation of personas should be a collaboration between the product manager and interaction designer. Whatever you do, don’t delegate this task. For the same reason that the PM needs to be present every in usability test, he or she needs to be in every user interview.

The PM needs that deep understanding of the target user that comes from talking with many users and customers as possible.

Another important thing, try hard to focus each release on a single primary persona.

Reinventing the product spec

Put functional prototype in front of actual target users and ensure that they can figure out how to use your product (usability) and also determine if they care to use your product (value).

Design vs Implementation

Once implementation begins, it becomes increasingly difficult to make the fundamental changes that will likely be necessary as you work through your user experience ideas.

Minimal Product

It’s essential that the prototype be validated with real target users, the code (software) must be tested and validated as well.

Prototype testing

Before testing your prototype know how current target users solve the focused problem, then you can figure out how to improve the prototype and start testing. When testing, you’ll want to do everything you can to keep your users in “use mode” and out of “critique mode”. The opinion of the tester is not interesting.

Gentle deployment

When deploying a new release try to invite a few users to test features and flows, it’s important to keep the support for past release and getting users to the new version by the time.

Succeeding with agile methods

PM’s and designers should always try and be one or two sprints ahead of the team. This allows the team validates difficult features with sufficient time to improve them.

Someone from engineering team has to be reviewing ideas and prototypes every step of the way to provide feedback on feasibility, costs, and insights into better solutions.

Prototypes have to be done for 3 reasons:

1. Test with real users;
2. Force to think through the issues;
3. A good way to describe to engineering what you need to build during the sprint;

Make sure that you don’t waste sprint cycles.

The new old thing

Great product leaders know that what is now possible is always changing. New technologies enable new solutions that may not have been possible or feasible until now.

Great PMs combine what is desirable with what is just now possible.

Keys to consumer internet service products

It’s critical that you segment your users into the most important personas and consider each one separately. When you create a feature, you need to examine how each persona will value and respond to that feature.

Keys to enterprise products

When the sales organization brings in a potential customer that has a big check all ready to sign if you’ll just agree to put these seven features in your product, soon you’re becoming a custom software shop.

Avoiding special features takes a lot of discipline -especially for a small company struggling to bring in some cash- but it is critical you create products that meet the needs of a wide range of customers.

Concluding, Inspired is a very interesting book for someone who wants to know what the Product Management process and its principles is really about. If you are or want to be a PM it’s a must read book.