INSPIRED

by Marty Cagan

  The passion for products and for solving customer problems is not something I think you can teach. That's something you either have or don't have, and it is among the first things I interview for when I'm evaluating potential product managers. I assume that you have this.

  Maybe this is a good time to be very honest with you about the demands of this role.

  The product manager position is not a 9‐to‐5 job. I'm not saying you need to be in the office 15 hours a day, but I am saying that there is a ton of work, and it follows you home every night. Pretty much any other role on a product team is better if you're looking for a good work‐life balance. Now, I know it may not be politically correct to say that, but I don't think I'm doing you any favors by misleading you. The level of time and effort required by the product manager role is extremely tough to sustain if you're not personally passionate about your products and your role.

  Perhaps the most important thing I can tell you to help you succeed is that you simply must take very seriously your preparation for this role.

  Start by becoming an expert in your users and customers. Share very openly what you learn, both the good and the bad. Become your team's and your company's go‐to person for understanding anything about your customer—quantitative and qualitative.

  Work to establish a strong relationship with your key stakeholders and business partners. Convince them of two things: (1) You understand the constraints they operate under. (2) You will only bring to them solutions that you believe will work within those constraints.

  Become an undisputed expert on your product and your industry. Again, share your knowledge openly and generously.

  Finally, work very hard to build and nurture the strong collaborative relationship with your product team.

  I'm not saying that doing all this is easy; it's not. But believe me when I tell you it's table stakes for being a successful product manager.

  Product Manager Profiles

  In addition to giving you the theory and techniques in this book, I make a point of introducing you to real people—product managers who have done their job and done it well. These individuals include:

  Jane Manning of Google

  Lea Hickman of Adobe

  Alex Pressland of the BBC

  Martina Lauchengco of Microsoft

  Kate Arnold of Netflix

  Camille Hearst of Apple

  Anyone who's ever worked in product for any amount of time knows that creating products is never easy. I selected these particular individuals to illustrate the very difficult but essential contribution that comes from a strong product manager.

  The products I highlight are all iconic, and you will immediately recognize them. But few people know the product managers behind these products, and even fewer know their backstories.

  Each of the product managers I selected went out of her way to emphasize to me just how amazing their product team was, and how in no way was the success due to their efforts alone. But hopefully these examples help make clear to you the true and essential contribution of the product manager.

  The big points I hope you take away from these examples are:

  Product management is absolutely distinct from the other disciplines. It's clearly different than the contribution of the designers, and it's also clearly not a project manager. There is some amount of project management inevitably involved, just as there is for all leadership positions. But to characterize this as a project manager is to completely miss the essence of the role. The role I would argue the product manager is most similar to is the role of the CEO. But with the obvious difference that, unlike the CEO, the product manager is not the boss of anyone.

  Like a CEO, the product manager must deeply understand all aspects of the business. The product manager must ensure a business outcome, not just ensure a product gets defined. This requires a good understanding of the many interrelated parts and constraints of the business—financial, marketing, sales, legal, partnership, service, the customer environment, the technical capabilities, the user's experience—and figure out a solution that works for the customers as well as for the business. But don't think this means an MBA is required—not one of the impressive product managers I feature in this book has an MBA—or that you need to have all these skills yourself. You must simply have a broad understanding of how a product can affect a business and work with people from your team and across your company to cover everything that's important.

  In every one of these examples, the winning solutions didn't come from users, customers, or sales. Rather, great products require an intense collaboration with design and engineering to solve real problems for your users and customers, in ways that meet the needs of your business. In each of these examples, the users had no idea the solution they fell in love with was possible.

  True leadership is a big part of what separates the great product people from the merely good ones. So, no matter what your title or level may be, if you aspire to be great, don't be afraid to lead.

  No matter what your title or level may be, if you aspire to be great, don't be afraid to lead.

  Product Manager versus Product Owner

  You've likely encountered the term product owner, and you may wonder how it relates to the product manager job.

  First, product owner is the name of the role on an Agile team for the person responsible for the product backlog. Keep in mind that Agile is used in all types of companies, not just product companies.

  In product companies, it is critical that the product manager also be the product owner.

  In product companies, it is critical that the product manager also be the product owner. If you split these roles into two people, some very common and predictable problems result—most commonly, the loss of your team's ability to innovate and consistently create new value for your business and your customers. Moreover, the additional responsibilities of the product manager are what enables good product owner decisions in a product company.

  Second, while I always encourage product managers to learn the development process their team is using, taking a class or certification on the product owner role covers a very small part of the responsibilities of a product manager.

  To summarize, product owner responsibilities are a small subset of product management responsibilities, but it's critical that the product manager covers both.

  The Two Critical Classes for Product Managers

  Product managers come to the role from any and all disciplines. Certainly, many come from computer science, while others may come from business or economics. But you'll find great product managers that come from politics, philosophy, art, literature, history—and everything in between.

  If you want to be an engineer or a designer, there is an academic education to be had that will prepare you for a career in those fields. That is not the case with tech product management. That's because what's most essential for this job is the smart, creative, and persistent qualities I've discussed.

  That said, I believe there are two specific academic courses that every product manager should take:

  Introduction to Computer Programming If you have never taken a course in a programming language, then this is your first necessary class. It doesn't really matter which language but not HTML. You can try to do this online, but I will tell you that many people struggle with learning their first programming language; therefore, an actual course for which you're accountable for turning in programming assignments every week is what it usually takes.

  You may love it, or you may hate it, but either way it will fundamentally expand your technology horizons and enable you to have much richer discussions with your engineers and designers. It will also give you a better appreciation for the power of enabling technology.

  Introduction to Business Accounting/Finance Just as you need to know the language of computing, you also need to know the language of business. If you have never done so, you need to take a course in the basics of business finance.

  You will need to
understand how for‐profit companies work and the main business key performance indicators (KPIs) that are important to your business—including, but not limited to, lifetime value of customers, average revenue per user/customer, customer acquisition cost, cost of sales, and contribution margins, among others.

  A good general marketing course will often cover these topics as well. The key is to make sure you gain a big‐picture understanding of how businesses work.

  You can easily do this through a community college course or through self‐study, especially if you ask someone in your finance department to guide you a little. This is a good thing to do in any case.

  CHAPTER 11

  The Product Designer

  In this chapter, I describe the product designer role. But I'm not trying to speak here to designers—I'm aiming this at product managers who need to learn how to work effectively with designers.

  It's amazing to me how many companies I encounter that just don't understand why having strong and talented designers is so important. They understand the need for engineers, but often will waste significant time and money because they do not understand the need for design.

  Modern product designers are responsible for the following:

  Product Discovery

  In the old model, designers took requirements or specifications from product managers and used that to create their designs. In contrast, modern product designers continuously collaborate with product managers and engineers—from discovery to delivery. Similarly, rather than sitting with fellow designers, the modern product designer sits side by side with his or her product manager, a full partner with the product manager on product discovery.

  Rather than being measured on the output of their design work, the product designer is measured on the success of the product.

  Rather than being measured on the output of their design work, the product designer is measured on the success of the product. Given this, product designers have many of the same concerns as product managers. They are deeply oriented around actual customers and the value their product brings to those customers. They also understand that the product is in service of a business and can incorporate those constraints into the design of the product. Designers further understand that the user experience is as important to customer value as is the underlying functionality.

  Holistic User Experience Design

  User experience (UX) is much bigger than user interface (UI). Some people even use the term customer experience to further emphasize the point. UX is any way that customers and end users realize the value provided by your product. It includes all the touch points and interactions a customer has with your company and product over time. For modern products, this usually includes multiple different interfaces, as well as other customer touch points (e‐mail, marketing campaigns, sales process, customer support, and so forth).

  With some products, UX also includes offline services, such as riding in a car summoned through Uber or staying in a house sourced through Airbnb.

  Good product designers think about the customer's journey over time as they interact with the product and with the company as a whole. Depending on the product, the list of touch points could be very long, considering questions as:

  How will customers first learn about the product?

  How will we onboard a first‐time user and (perhaps gradually) reveal new functionality?

  How might users interact at different times during their day?

  What other things are competing for the user's attention?

  How might things be different for a one‐month‐old customer versus a one‐year‐old customer?

  How will we motivate a user to a higher level of commitment to the product?

  How will we create moments of gratification?

  How will a user share his experience with others?

  How will customers receive an offline service?

  What is the perceived responsiveness of the product?

  Prototyping

  Later in this book I explore the many techniques used to test out product ideas. Many of these techniques depend on prototypes, and most of these prototypes are created by the product designer.

  Good product designers use prototypes as their primary canvas for communicating ideas, both internally and externally. They are generally comfortable with many different prototyping tools and are able to apply the correct one for the task at hand.

  User Testing

  Good product designers are constantly testing their ideas with real users and customers. They don't just test when a prototype or idea is ready; they build testing into their weekly cadence, so they're able to constantly validate and refine ideas as well as collect new insights they might not have been looking for. It also means that they aren't as likely to become too attached to ideas before they come in contact with objective, outside opinions.

  User testing is broader than usability testing. Product designers and their product teams utilize the opportunity to assess the value of their ideas. Will customers use or buy the product and, if not, why not?

  Interaction and Visual Design

  Interaction and visual design have historically been considered separate roles. Interaction design generally includes the underlying conceptual models (e.g., a photo management application may have photos, albums, projects), task flows, and control layouts to manipulate those concepts. Visual design includes composition, typography, and how the visual brand is expressed.

  Modern product designers may have different strengths but, generally, have some level of skill with both interaction and visual design. Having a more complete tool set allows them to work quickly at different levels of fidelity, depending on the context. It also allows them to design experiences in ways that wouldn't have been natural when thinking of interaction and visual design separately. This is particularly important in mobile interfaces in which designers must often create new models of interaction fundamentally intertwined with the visual design.

  If you're building devices such as consumer electronics, there's another critical dimension to design—industrial design—which looks at materials and design for manufacturing.

  The Absence of Product Design

  Three situations in particular are incredibly common and serious problems:

  You as product manager try to do the actual design yourself. Now, this is distinct from the situation where you are a trained designer and have also taken on the product manager responsibilities. In this situation, you have not been trained in design; yet, your engineers clearly need designs, so you oblige. That usually means you provide the engineers with wireframes, and they cobble together some form of visual design themselves.

  You as product manager don't provide the designs but, rather, provide very high‐level user stories to the engineers. To begin coding, the engineers have no choice but to work out the design themselves.

  You as product manager provide the interaction design—especially the wireframes—and then you use a visual or graphic designer to provide the visual design.

  All three situations are serious problems because they rarely provide good results. They don't provide the full holistic design we're looking for.

  Apple is one of the most valuable and design‐conscious companies on the planet; yet few tech companies understand the importance of design talent. While everyone talks about the engineers at Google and Facebook—and their engineering is indeed strong—both companies have made huge investments in design talent.

  If you are building user‐facing products, it's critically important that you get a trained product designer for your team. If you're doing products for consumers, I would argue that strong design today is table stakes. If you're doing products for businesses, then this is one of your best competitive differentiators.

  It's sad to say, but most products for businesses have awful design. They've been able to get away with this, however, because the user is so often not the customer—the one that buys. I'm happy to say that's now changing, a
nd there's a new breed of B2B (business‐to‐business) companies that take design very seriously. They are displacing the old guard.

  In the case of products for small businesses, the user is typically the buyer, so the bar is set as high as it is for consumer products.

  But getting your organization to invest in design staff is only half of the solution.

  Here's why.

  Many organizations wake up one morning and suddenly realize design is important. So, they spend money to bring this talent in‐house; yet, they set up the operation like it's an internal agency. You're supposed to bring your design requests to this group of designers—often sitting together in their own little studio—and when they're done, you get the results.

  We need design—not just as a service to make our product beautiful—but to discover the right product.

  If that's the way we needed to work, we'd probably continue to use external agencies. But it's not. We need design—not just as a service to make our product beautiful—but to discover the right product.

  In strong teams today, the design informs the functionality at least as much as the functionality drives the design. This is a hugely important concept. For this to happen, we need to make design a first‐class member of the product team, sitting side by side with the product manager, and not a supporting service.

  Once you get a designer dedicated to your product team, here are five keys to a successful and healthy relationship with your designer:

  Do whatever you need to do to have your designer sit next to you.

  Include your designer from the very inception of every idea.