If you haven't had the good fortune to be coached by a strong leader or product coach, this book can help fill that gap and set you on the path to success.
- Marty Cagan
How do you know that you are making a product or service that your customers want? How do you ensure that you are improving it over time? How do you guarantee that your team is creating value for your customers in a way that creates value for your business?
In this book, you'll learn a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery that will help you answer each of these questions, giving you the confidence to act while also preparing you to be wrong. You'll learn to balance action with doubt so that you can get started without being blindsided by what you don't get right.
If you want to discover products that customers love-that also deliver business results-this book is for you.
Learn to design, build, and scale products consumers can't get enough of
How do today's most successful tech companies Amazon, Google, Facebook, Netflix, Tesla design, develop, and deploy the products that have earned the love of literally billions of people around the world? Perhaps surprisingly, they do it very differently than most tech companies. In INSPIRED, technology product management thought leader Marty Cagan provides readers with a master class in how to structure and staff a vibrant and successful product organization, and how to discover and deliver technology products that your customers will love and that will work for your business.
With sections on assembling the right people and skillsets, discovering the right product, embracing an effective yet lightweight process, and creating a strong product culture, readers can take the information they learn and immediately leverage it within their own organizations dramatically improving their own product efforts.
Whether you're an early-stage startup working to get to product/market fit, or a growth-stage company working to scale your product organization, or a large, long-established company trying to regain your ability to consistently deliver new value for your customers, INSPIRED will take you and your product organization to a new level of customer engagement, consistent innovation, and business success.
Filled with the author's own personal stories and profiles of some of today's most-successful product managers and technology-powered product companies, including Adobe, Apple, BBC, Google, Microsoft, and Netflix INSPIRED will show you how to turn up the dial of your own product efforts, creating technology products your customers love.
The first edition of INSPIRED, published ten years ago, established itself as the primary reference for technology product managers, and can be found on the shelves of nearly every successful technology product company worldwide. This thoroughly updated second edition shares the same objective of being the most valuable resource for technology product managers, yet it is completely new sharing the latest practices and techniques of today's most-successful tech product companies, and the men and women behind every great product.
The foremost authority on innovation and growth presents a path-breaking book every company needs to transform innovation from a game of chance to one in which they develop products and services customers not only want to buy, but are willing to pay premium prices for.
How do companies know how to grow? How can they create products that they are sure customers want to buy? Can innovation be more than a game of hit and miss? Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen has the answer. A generation ago, Christensen revolutionized business with his groundbreaking theory of disruptive innovation. Now, he goes further, offering powerful new insights.
After years of research, Christensen has come to one critical conclusion: our long held maxim--that understanding the customer is the crux of innovation--is wrong. Customers don't buy products or services; they hire them to do a job. Understanding customers does not drive innovation success, he argues. Understanding customer jobs does. The Jobs to Be Done approach can be seen in some of the world's most respected companies and fast-growing startups, including Amazon, Intuit, Uber, Airbnb, and Chobani yogurt, to name just a few. But this book is not about celebrating these successes--it's about predicting new ones.
Christensen contends that by understanding what causes customers to hire a product or service, any business can improve its innovation track record, creating products that customers not only want to hire, but that they'll pay premium prices to bring into their lives. Jobs theory offers new hope for growth to companies frustrated by their hit and miss efforts.
This book carefully lays down Christensen's provocative framework, providing a comprehensive explanation of the theory and why it is predictive, how to use it in the real world--and, most importantly, how not to squander the insights it provides.
To stay competitive in today's market, organizations need to adopt a culture of customer-centric practices that focus on outcomes rather than outputs. Companies that live and die by outputs often fall into the build trap, cranking out features to meet their schedule rather than the customer's needs.
In this book, Melissa Perri explains how laying the foundation for great product management can help companies solve real customer problems while achieving business goals. By understanding how to communicate and collaborate within a company structure, you can create a product culture that benefits both the business and the customer. You'll learn product management principles that can be applied to any organization, big or small.
In five parts, this book explores:
The authors of the international bestseller Business Model Generation explain how to create value propositions customers can't resist
Value Proposition Design helps you tackle the core challenge of every business -- creating compelling products and services customers want to buy. This highly practical book, paired with its online companion, will teach you the processes and tools you need to create products that sell.
Using the same stunning visual format as the authors' global bestseller, Business Model Generation, this sequel explains how to use the Value Proposition Canvas to design, test, create, and manage products and services customers actually want.
Value Proposition Design is for anyone who has been frustrated by new product meetings based on hunches and intuitions; it's for anyone who has watched an expensive new product launch fail in the market. The book will help you understand the patterns of great value propositions, get closer to customers, and avoid wasting time with ideas that won't work. You'll learn the simple process of designing and testing value propositions, that perfectly match customers' needs and desires.
In addition the book gives you exclusive access to an online companion on Strategyzer.com. You will be able to assess your work, learn from peers, and download pdfs, checklists, and more.
Value Proposition Design is an essential companion to the Business Model Canvas from Business Model Generation, a tool embraced globally by startups and large corporations such as MasterCard, 3M, Coca Cola, GE, Fujitsu, LEGO, Colgate-Palmolive, and many more.
Value Proposition Design gives you a proven methodology for success, with value propositions that sell, embedded in profitable business models.
A good product roadmap is one of the most important and influential documents an organization can develop, publish, and continuously update. In fact, this one document can steer an entire organization when it comes to delivering on company strategy.
This practical guide teaches you how to create an effective product roadmap, and demonstrates how to use the roadmap to align stakeholders and prioritize ideas and requests. With it, you'll learn to communicate how your products will make your customers and organization successful.
Whether you're a product manager, product owner, business analyst, program manager, project manager, scrum master, lead developer, designer, development manager, entrepreneur, or business owner, this book will show you how to:
Do your products take too long to get to market?
The Rapid Learning Cycles framework is an approach to product development that has helped hundreds of teams get their products to market faster.
When you can get your product into customers' hands faster, you see your vision brought to life sooner. You can beat any competition to market with your best ideas. You can shorten the time it takes before your company begins to earn money from your ideas. You can reduce development costs, making it easier for investors, executive teams and program sponsors to buy into your ideas. If your idea is meant to fail, it will fail faster, freeing you up to go on to your next idea. All along the way, you'll build knowledge that will accelerate your progress now, and speed up the teams that will develop the next product even more.
The Rapid Learning Cycles framework was developed experientially, building on Katherine's work with four different companies in four different industries that all needed to get their best ideas to market faster. Then Katherine began teaching this framework to teams all over the world. She followed up with every early adopter team, and used her observations to continue to refine the framework into a flexible approach to help teams get tangible products to market faster.
Agile is not enough for tangible products.
Agile software development experts may say that hardware teams should just use Agile or just use Scrum. But hardware teams have not had consistent success with this approach, because some of the assumptions of Agile Software Development don't apply to products that must obey the laws of physics, chemistry and biology.
Software and service teams can roll out updates that impact current customers immediately, and decisions can be reversed if they don't work as expected. When your product requires a supply chain, production process and distribution network, you will make decisions that you will live with, as long as you have products in the field that are under warranty. Software can be built and re-built every day; hardware prototypes can take months, even with 3D printing and other rapid prototyping tools. In this environment, teams need to think beyond accelerating build activities with Agile.
Rapid Learning Cycles is Agile for hardware and other tangible products.
The Rapid Learning Cycles framework addresses the ways that product development gets slowed down:
The 2nd Edition expands upon the concepts in this book with more details on key framework elements like the Core Hypothesis, the Learning Cycles Plan and how to prioritize Knowledge Gaps. It includes major revisions, based on our field experience, to the chapters on structuring the learning cycle, metrics, program leadership and using Rapid Learning Cycles to accelerate a Lean Startup with many knowledge gaps to close. It captures the state-of-the-art best practices to help you get your best ideas to market faster.
Register your book to gain access to Readers' Resources help you jump right into some experiments to help you test the Rapid Learning Cycles framework in your product development organization. The instructions are in the back of the book.
The Law of Market Failure: Most new products will fail in the market, even if competently executed.
Using his experience at Google, his remarkable success as an entrepreneur and consultant, and insights from his lectures at Stanford University and Google, Alberto Savoia's The Right It offers an unparalleled approach to beating the beast that is market failure.
Millions of people around the world are working hard to bring to life new ideas. Some of these ideas will turn out to be stunning successes that will have a major impact on our world and our culture: The next Google, the next Polio vaccine, the next Harry Potter, the next Red Cross, the next Ford Mustang. Others will be smaller, more personal but no less meaningful, successes: A little restaurant that becomes a neighborhood favorite, a biography that does not make the best-seller list but tells an important story, a local nonprofit to care for abandoned pets. At this very same moment, another group of people is working equally hard to develop new ideas that, when launched, will fail. Some of them will fail spectacularly and publicly: like New Coke, the movie John Carter, or the Ford Edsel. Others will be smaller, more private, but no less painful failures: A home-based business that never takes off, a children's book that neither publishers nor children have any interest in, a charity for a cause that too few people care enough about.
If you are currently working to develop a new idea, whether on your own or as part of a team, which group are you in? Most people believe that they either are, or will be, in the first group--the group whose ideas will be successful. All they have to do is work hard and execute well. Unfortunately, we know that this cannot be the case. The law of market failure tells us that up to 90 percent of most new products, services, businesses, and initiatives will fail soon after they are launched--regardless of how promising they sound, how much we commit to them, or how well we execute them. This is a hard fact to accept. We believe that other people fail because they don't know what they are doing. Somehow, we believe that this does not apply to us and to our idea--especially if we've experienced victories in the past.
Filled with detailed case studies, a lesson on creating your own hard data, a strategy for market engagement, and an introduction to the concept of a pretotype (not a prototype), The Right It is a groundbreaking, entertaining, and highly practical book delivers a proven formula for turning ideas, products, services, and businesses into successful endeavors.
As Alberto writes, make sure you are building The Right It before you build It right.
The Innovator's Toolkit is an essential companion for every innovator, innovation team leader, operations manager, and corporate change agent who needs to drive organic growth. Written and presented in an easy-to-use reference format, the book helps users understand why, when, and how to apply each technique for maximum benefits and results. The fifty-plus tools and techniques in this book are organized around a framework for identifying innovation opportunities, generating new and unusual ideas, selecting the best ideas for further refinement, and implementing new solutions that better meet customer expectations.
This updated and revised edition of The Innovator's Toolkit simply helps innovation leaders, managers, and specialists do their jobs better than ever before--giving them more confidence, greatly reducing the chance of expensive failures, and packing more practical innovation knowhow under one cover than ever before.
Research shows that most of what we build creates little or no value for our users and the business. To break away from this harsh reality, you need to adopt a different system, one that combines human judgment with evidence.
In this book, Itamar Gilad presents an actionable model to bring evidence-guided development into your organization. Combining tried-and-tested methods with tools created by the author, Evidence-Guided offers a systematic approach-the GIST model (Goals, Ideas, Steps, and Tasks)-to help you create high-impact products. You'll learn how to choose the right outcomes, prioritize ideas, build and learn at a fast pace, and collaborate more effectively with teammates, managers, and stakeholders. The book provides principles, models, tools, and processes, all demonstrated through real-world examples and infused with nuance gained through years of practice.
The methods presented in Evidence-Guided can be used by individual contributors, team leads, and managers. They apply to companies of all sizes and life stages. If you're looking to build high-impact products, this book is for you.
Attempts to steer research, innovation and business in desirable directions have failed to meet expectations. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) and responsible research and innovation (RRI) seem to be losing ground, while the challenges they sought to address remain. Despite their shortcomings, these concepts remind us of the need to take responsibility for what we as researchers and entrepreneurs bring into the world, and to keep questioning the given framework.
Drawing from the experience of the AFINO project, a unique attempt to bring together RRI and CSR and to promote networks, learning and skills building in Norway, this book contextualises and explores the practical challenges of actualising responsible practices even in the propitious Norwegian context. Readers interested in RRI, CSR, transdisciplinarity, and in the governance of research and innovation will find extensive information and insights about the challenges of steering research and business practices towards desirable ends and how to address them.
Serial Innovators: How Individuals Create and Deliver Breakthrough Innovations in Mature Firms zeros in on the cutting-edge thinkers who repeatedly create and deliver breakthrough innovations and new products in large, mature organizations. These employees are organizational powerhouses who solve consumer problems and substantially contribute to the financial value to their firms.
In this pioneering study, authors Abbie Griffin, Raymond L. Price, and Bruce A. Vojak detail who these serial innovators are and how they develop novel products, ranging from salt-free seasonings to improved electronics in companies such as Alberto Culver, Hewlett-Packard, and Procter & Gamble. Based on interviews with over 50 serial innovators and an even larger pool of their co-workers, managers and human resources teams, the authors reveal key insights about how to better understand, emulate, enable, support, and manage these unique and important individuals for long-term corporate success. Interestingly, the book finds that serial innovators are instrumental both in cases where firms are aware of clear market demands, and in scenarios when companies take risks on new investments, creating a consumer need.
For over 25 years, research on innovation has taken the perspective that new product development can be managed like any other (complex) process of the firm. While a highly structured and closely supervised approach is helpful in creating incremental innovations, this book finds that it is not conducive to creating breakthrough innovations. The text argues that the drive to routinize innovation has gone too far; in fact, so far as to limit many mature firms' ability to create breakthrough innovations. In today's economy, with the future of so many large firms on the line, this book is a clarion call to businesses to rethink how to nurture and thrive on their innovative workforce.
Use business intelligence to power corporate growth, increase efficiency, and improve corporate decision making. With this practical book featuring hands-on examples in Power BI with basic Python and R code, you'll explore the most relevant AI use cases for BI, including improved forecasting, automated classification, and AI-powered recommendations. And you'll learn how to draw insights from unstructured data sources like text, document, and image files.
Author Tobias Zwingmann helps BI professionals, business analysts, and data analytics understand high-impact areas of artificial intelligence. You'll learn how to leverage popular AI-as-a-service and AutoML platforms to ship enterprise-grade proofs of concept without the help of software engineers or data scientists.
Are you a product leader looking for advice on how to be certain that every product manager on your team lives up to their full potential? Do you want to make sure your product people are competent, empowered, and inspired, and would you like to know how you can best help them on this journey? If you answered yes to any of these questions, then this book is for you
By the end of this book, you will understand:
- Why you need to focus on the personal development of every product manager-and of the team as a whole-to unlock their full potential.
- Why coaching is an important part of your job, and how to do it in the most effective way.
- How you can define what a good product manager looks like.
- How you can accurately assess product managers and provide them with valuable, actionable, and helpful feedback on their current performance that will help them perform even better.
- Which methods/frameworks you can use to make sure product managers learn what they need to know to be more effective-enhancing their people skills.
And you will be able to:
- Reflect on your own coaching personality and define your own areas for development.
- Efficiently prepare and use one-on-ones as your main coaching tool.
Digital technology is simultaneously friend and foe: highly disruptive, yet it cannot be ignored. Companies that fail to make use of it put themselves in the line of fire for disintermediation or even eradication. But digital technology is also the biggest opportunity to reposition incumbent product-making businesses by thinking about how they conceive, make, distribute and support the next generation of goods in the marketplace.
Reinventing the Product looks at the ways traditional products are transforming into smart connected products and ecosystem platforms at a rate much faster than most organizations think. Eric Schaeffer and David Sovie show how this reinvention is made possible: by AI and digital technologies, such as IoT sensors, blockchain, advanced analytics, cloud and edge computing. They show how to deliver truly intelligent, and potentially even autonomous, products with the more personalized and compelling experiences that today's users, consumers and enterprises expect.
Reinventing the Product makes a stringent case for companies to rethink their product strategy, their innovation and engineering processes, and the entire culture to build the future generations of successful 'living products'. Featuring case studies from global organizations such as Faurecia, Signify, Symmons and Haier and interviews with thought leaders and business executives from top companies including Amazon, ABB, Tesla, Samsung and Google, this book provides practical advice for product-making companies as they embark on, or accelerate, their digitization journey.
Measuring Up: Personnel and Organizational Assessment is a foundational text that examines issues related to personnel and organizational performance, and addresses how to effectively assess individuals, teams, and whole organizations. While many standard texts focus primarily on techniques, theories and research on personnel selection, Measuring Up connects people, whether individuals or groups, to the organization on a larger scale and discusses the impact of these connections and relationships.
The book covers work and job analysis, personnel recruitment and selection, personnel tests, individual and team performance evaluations, assessments of training and professional development, organizational process and performance, and business organizations in today's cultural and global contexts.
Providing a comprehension introduction to work behavior and organizational dynamics, Measuring Up is well-suited to courses in organizational systems and behavior, personnel psychology, industrial-organizational psychology, and human resource management. Practical and applicable, it is also an excellent reference for professionals involved in recruiting, assessing, training and developing employees.
Charles Tatum earned his Ph.D. in experimental psychology at the University of New Mexico. A professor in the Department of Psychology at National University, Dr. Tatum's research interests include applied measurement technology, survey construction and analysis, individual and group performance, and adult learning and accelerated instruction. He has published extensively in a variety of journals including the Journal of Education Research and Behavioral Sciences, the International Journal of Psychology and Counseling, and the Journal of Research in Innovative Teaching. In addition to his teaching and research activities, Dr. Tatum has worked as an organizational consultant for private and government organizations. Dr. Tatum's most recent book is Learning-learning: Facts, Theories, and Principles. He is a member of the Association for Psychological Science.
Decision intelligence (DI) has been widely named as a top technology trend for several years, and Gartner reports that more than a third of large organizations are adopting it. Some even say that DI is the next step in the evolution of AI. Many software vendors offer DI solutions today, as they help organizations implement their evidence-based or data-driven decision strategies.
But until now, there has been little practical guidance for organizations to formalize decision making and integrate their decisions with data.
With this book, authors L. Y. Pratt and N. E. Malcolm fill this gap. They present a step-by-step method for integrating technology into decisions that bridge from actions to desired outcomes, with a focus on systems that act in an advisory, human-in-the-loop capacity to decision makers.
This handbook addresses three widespread data-driven decision-making problems: