🚀 Successfully launching products
You should read this if you work in tech/ you are interested in creating a product or business
Book review #1: Inspired, by Marty Cagan, part 1 📚
Reading time: 2 and a half minutes 🏃♀️
There are many reasons why product launches fail: lack of product market fit, weak monetization strategy, among many others. One of the most critical reasons are weak product teams and lack of discovery phase.
In this post, I deep dive on what makes successful product launches and great product teams, based on my review of the book Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love, by Marty Cagan.
What are product teams 👭🏻
Product teams consist of a cross-functional group responsible for determining what needs to gets built. Such teams require a deep knowledge of:
Customers
Data
Business and their stakeholders
Market and industry
Sounds obvious? Yes. However, there is a great different between great and average product teams.
😉 Great product teams x 🫠 Average product teams
Client obsession 🔥
Great product teams create ideas and products based on proved customer’s struggles and researched data;
Average teams do that based on their sales teams and customers (as they don’t know what is possible).
Great teams obsess over customers; average teams obsess over competitors.
Stubborn on vision, flexible on details 💫
Great product teams focus on OKRs (objectives and key results) that they measure on a frequent basis.
Average teams use product roadmaps with specific details & product features.
“Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do, and they will surprise you with their ingenuity” — Marty Cagan
Engineering integration 🤓
Great product teams include engineers in the prototyping and discovery phase.
Average product teams show them the prototype at the end of discovery.
Customer interaction 📞
Great product teams interact with customers on a frequent basis to get insights.
Average teams think they are the customer.
Frequent releases 🚀
Great product teams understand that its better to release solutions on a smaller basis.
Average product teams release all at once to the customer.
Stability and co-location 💺
Great product teams are stable and work in a collaborative mode where they can see each others’ screens (ideally, you will have your product, design and tech leaders seating side by side).
Average teams are constantly shifting and work in silos.
Missionaries not mercenaries 🦸🏽♀️
Missionaries are true believers in the vision and are committed to solving problems for their customers.
Mercenaries build whatever they're told to build.
How to build a product team 👩🏽🚀
Minimum product team structure: 1 product manager + 2 engineers + 1 product designer (in case of a D2C product)
Great to haves: user researchers, data or Business Intelligence (BI) analysts, product marketing managers
Important note: product teams’ needs change depending on who is their customer. Example: a two‐sided marketplace with buyers on one side and sellers on the other require different product teams.
Discovery phase 💡
“Your team needs to be able to release with confidence. While you'll never have 100 percent confidence, you should not have to release and pray” — Marty Cagan
The purpose of product discovery is to test risks and prevent launch mistakes and avoid wasted efforts (time and $$$) when engineering the product.
Risks addressed in the discovery phase:
Value risk: Will the customer buy this, or choose to use it?
Usability risk: Can the user figure out how to use it?
Feasibility risk: Can we build it?
Business viability risk: Does this solution work for our business? Business viability includes financial considerations, marketing (both brand and go‐to‐market considerations), sales, legal, business development, and senior executives.