Inspired by Marty Cagan, first published by SVPG Press in 2008 and rewritten for a second edition from Wiley in 2017, is a guide to how strong technology companies decide what to build. Cagan held product leadership roles at companies including eBay and Netscape before founding the Silicon Valley Product Group, where he coaches product teams. The second edition is the one most people read today, and it reflects how product practice changed in the decade after the first.
What is Inspired about?
Cagan’s starting point is that most product ideas do not work. Many fail to deliver value, many are too hard to use, some cannot be built in reasonable time and some do not work for the business. Companies that hand teams a list of features with deadlines discover this only after months of engineering. Strong companies, he argues, find it out in days through product discovery.
The book is organised around four themes. The first is people: the shape of a product team, with a product manager, a product designer and engineers, and the specific responsibilities of the product manager. The second is the right product: product vision, strategy and the move from feature lists to business objectives. The third is the right process: product discovery techniques, from customer interviews to many kinds of prototypes, and testing for value, usability, feasibility and viability. The fourth is the right culture: what separates teams of missionaries, who care about the problem, from teams of mercenaries, who just ship what they are told.
The second edition adds profiles of product leaders and a stronger push for teams that are trusted with problems to solve and held to results. Cagan writes plainly, with short chapters, and he names what he sees as common mistakes in large and small companies.
What are the main lessons for founders?
- Separate discovery from delivery. Use quick prototypes and customer tests to decide what to build. Then hand engineering only what has passed those tests.
- Check the four risks early. Ask whether customers will want it, whether they can use it, whether you can build it and whether it works for the business.
- Give teams problems to solve. A team asked to reduce churn by a set amount will find better answers than one told to build a dashboard.
- Involve engineers from day one. Engineers spot what is newly possible. Bringing them in only to build wastes their best ideas.
- Hire a real product manager. The role needs deep knowledge of customers, data, the business and the industry. Treating it as a project coordinator job leads to weak products.
Who should read Inspired?
It suits founders of tech startups who are moving beyond deciding everything themselves, first-time product managers, designers and engineering leads. Executives at larger companies trying to fix slow, feature-factory product teams will also find it useful. It works best once you have a product in the market and a team of at least a few people.
Very early solo founders will find much of it premature, since it assumes a team and an existing product. Founders outside software will need to translate its methods.
How do you put Inspired to work this week?
- Take the next three items your team plans to build and write down the riskiest of the four risks for each.
- Turn one of those items into a prototype you can put in front of five customers within a few days.
- Rewrite one upcoming feature request as a problem with a measurable result, and give it to the team to solve.
The free Startup Playbook module in the Fe/male Switch Startup School covers how to turn customer learning into product decisions in a young company.
Where does Inspired fall short?
The book is built on large, well-funded US tech companies, and some advice, such as staffing every team with a dedicated designer, is hard for a tiny startup to follow. Cagan’s strong opinions leave little room for other approaches, and readers working inside slow corporate structures get more diagnosis than practical advice on changing it. The first edition’s examples are now dated, so read the second. Pair it with Escaping the Build Trap for how a company reorganises around outcomes and The Lean Product Playbook for a step-by-step method.