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

Marty Cagan's "Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love" is the go-to product management guide for anyone in software development. A short but just-enough-detailed book, it preaches discover over premature building, flat product teams, cross-team collaboration, and staffing the product organization with missionaries who speak the language of both commercial, and engineering teams.

Unlike older product management books like Steven Heines' "The Product Manager's Desk Reference" or "The Product Manager's Survival Guide", "Inspired" does not bring you back to a 90s and early 2000s corporate office. Following a waterfall product management is strongly discouraged, agile and lean are fully embraced.

Unlike startup books like "The Lean Startup", "Hooked" or "Crossing the Chasm", "Hooked" focuses exclusively on product teams and their cross-team collaborations. It does not give you one single main thesis (build lean, create hooks in your product, act according to your market maturity) but rather acts as a detailed guide about specific product management practices, roles, tools, techniques.

Below are the top 10 takeaways from "Inspired".

Top 10 takeaways from "Inspired"

• Never build the wrong thing the right way
• Fail fast
• Discover and test before writing a single line of code. Test for desireability (do people want it?), feasibility (can it be done?), viability (should it be done? can it be profitable?), usability
• Build a team of product missionaries not mercenaries
• Cooperate with design, business and engineering
• Learn and use your prototyping techniques
• Be lean and agile
• Have a flat organization
• Understand the firm’s business objectives and its product vision and strategy.
• Introduce “discovery sprints”

If you are not a book person, you can enjoy Marty Cagan's talk "Product is Hard".