Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love

Marty Cagan’s Inspired is the canonical description of how strong product organizations actually operate. The core argument is the gap between “feature teams” (which exist to deliver a roadmap of outputs) and “product teams” (which exist to solve problems for customers in ways that work for the business). The book details what changes when an organization makes that shift: the role of the product manager, the product trio of PM, designer, and tech lead working together on discovery, the continuous discovery practices that came to be known as dual-track, and the distinction between vision, strategy, and execution.

We reach for Inspired whenever an organization is stuck in feature-factory mode and needs language for what a product team actually is. Cagan’s follow-up, Empowered, extends the argument to leadership: how to coach product teams, how to give them topline objectives instead of feature lists, and how the product operating model differs from a project operating model.

Resources

• Marty Cagan, “Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love” (Wiley, 2017)
• Marty Cagan and Chris Jones, “Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products” (Wiley, 2020)
• Cross-functional Teams — the cross-functional decision-making unit at the center of Cagan’s model
• Outcomes Over Outputs — the mindset shift that distinguishes product teams from feature teams