Marty Cagan > Quotes

“We need teams of missionaries, not teams of mercenaries.”
― Marty Cagan, Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love

“It doesn’t matter how good your engineering team is if they are not given something worthwhile to build.”
― Marty Cagan, Inspired: How To Create Products Customers Love

“Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do, and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.” —General George S. Patton, Jr. General”
― Marty Cagan, Inspired: How To Create Products Customers Love

“Software projects can be thought of as having two distinct stages: figuring out what to build (build the right product), and building it (building the product right). The first stage is dominated by product discovery, and the second stage is all about execution.”
― Marty Cagan, Inspired: How To Create Products Customers Love

“Keep the focus on minimal product. More on this later, but your job as product manager is not to define the ultimate product, it’s to define the smallest possible product that will meet your goals.”
― Marty Cagan, Inspired: How To Create Products Customers Love

“Winning products come from the deep understanding of the user’s needs combined with an equally deep understanding of what’s just now possible.”
― Marty Cagan, Inspired: How To Create Products Customers Love

“Further, your industry is constantly moving, and we must create products for where the market will be tomorrow, not where it was yesterday.”
― Marty Cagan, Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love

“Product management is about insights and judgment, both of which require a sharp mind. Hard work is also necessary, but for this job, it is not sufficient.”
― Marty Cagan, Inspired: How To Create Products Customers Love

“Fall in love with the problem, not with the solution.”
― Marty Cagan, Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love

“The little secret in product is that engineers are typically the best single source of innovation; yet, they are not even invited to the party in this process.”
― Marty Cagan, Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love

“Is my product compelling to our target customer? Have we made this product as easy to use as humanly possible? Will this product succeed against the competition? Not today’s competition, but the competition that will be in the market when we ship? Do I know customers who will really buy this product? Not the product I wish we were going to build, but what we’re really going to build? Is my product truly differentiated? Can I explain the differentiation to a company executive in two minutes? To a smart customer in one minute? To an industry analyst in 30 seconds?”
― Marty Cagan, Inspired: How To Create Products Customers Love

“Great teams are made up of ordinary people who are inspired and empowered.”
― Marty Cagan, Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products

“In the model I'm describing, it is management's responsibility to provide each product team with the specific business objectives they need to tackle. The difference is that they are now prioritizing business results, rather than product ideas. And, yes, it is more than a little ironic that we sometimes need to convince management to focus on business results.”
― Marty Cagan, Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love

“You can't take your old organization based on feature teams, roadmaps, and passive managers, then overlay a technique from a radically different culture and expect that will work or change anything.”
― Marty Cagan, Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products

“What you're really seeing is Agile for delivery, but the rest of the organization and context is anything but Agile.”
― Marty Cagan, Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love

“Finally, it's all about solving problems, not implementing features. Conventional product roadmaps are all about output. Strong teams know it's not only about implementing a solution. They must ensure that solution solves the underlying problem. It's about business results.”
― Marty Cagan, Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love

“No matter what your title or level may be, if you aspire to be great, don't be afraid to lead.”
― Marty Cagan, Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love

“Similarly, product managers must be problem solvers as well. They are not trying to design the user experience, or architect a scalable, fault‐tolerant solution. Rather, they solve for constraints aligned around their customer's business, their industry, and especially their own business. Is this something their customers need? Is it substantially better than the alternatives? Is it something the company can effectively market and sell, that they can afford to build, that they can service and support, and that complies with legal and regulatory constraints?”
― Marty Cagan, Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products

“one of the most critical lessons in product is knowing what we can't know,”
― Marty Cagan, Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love

“If you find that you are having real trouble recruiting charter users and customers, then it’s very likely you are chasing a problem that isn’t that important, and you will probably have a very hard time selling this product. This is one of the very first reality checks to make sure you are spending your time on something worthwhile.”
― Marty Cagan, Inspired: How To Create Products Customers Love

“We need a product that our customers love, yet also works for our business.”
― Marty Cagan, Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products

“The first truth is that at least half of our ideas are just not going to work. There are many reasons for an idea to not work out. The most common is that customers just aren't as excited about this idea as we are.”
― Marty Cagan, Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love

“To summarize, these are the four critical contributions you need to bring to your team: deep knowledge (1) of your customer, (2) of the data, (3) of your business and its stakeholders, and (4) of your market and industry.”
― Marty Cagan, Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love

“The Objectives and Key Results (OKR) technique is a tool for management, focus, and alignment. As with any tool, there are many ways to use it. Here are the critical points for you to keep in mind when using the tool for product teams in product organizations. Objectives should be qualitative; key results need to be quantitative/measurable. Key results should be a measure of business results, not output or tasks. The rest of the company will use OKRs a bit differently, but for the product management, design, and technology organization, focus on the organization's objectives and the objectives for each product team, which are designed to roll up and achieve the organization's objectives. Don't let personal objectives or functional team objectives dilute or confuse the focus.”
― Marty Cagan, Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love

“The famous computer scientist Melvin Conway coined an adage that is often referred to as Conway's Law. It states that any organization that designs a system will produce a design whose structure mirrors the organization's structure. Another way to say this is to beware of shipping your org chart.”
― Marty Cagan, Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products

“The difference between Amazon, Netflix, Google, Facebook, and the legions of large but slowly dying companies is usually exactly that: product leadership.”
― Marty Cagan, Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love

“If the first time your developers see an idea is at sprint planning, you have failed. We need to ensure the feasibility before we decide to build, not after. Not only does this end up saving a lot of wasted time, but it turns out that getting the engineer's perspective earlier also tends to improve the solution itself, and it's critical for shared learning.”
― Marty Cagan, Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love

“product managers are constantly asking developers to look at the code to tell them how the system really works, then you're probably missing a principal product manager.”
― Marty Cagan, Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love

“That is, there are two essential high‐level activities in all product teams. We need to discover the product to be built, and we need to deliver that product to market.”
― Marty Cagan, Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love

“Where the product vision describes the future you want to create, and the product strategy describes your path to achieving that vision, the product principles speak to the nature of the products you want to create.”
― Marty Cagan, Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love