Marty Cagan

Since computers and digital technology have become so ubiquitous in contemporary life, creating good software and technology products has become an important business function. Many (exceeding 50%) technology products fail, despite significant design, engineering, and financial efforts. How can we make this process more efficient and profitable? That’s the job of a relatively new job title: the product manager. In this book, Marty Cagan discusses how to fulfill this role in an organization so that success is realized by all parties.

Of note, this book is in a second edition, a feat that many technical books do not accomplish. And this book offers a more comprehensive and in-depth discussion about the role of product managers than any other text I’ve read to date. It discusses the critical tasks of identifying and confronting potential failure points early so that money and effort won’t be wasted. It also explores a cornucopia of niche topics that can polish the skillset of even experienced product managers.

While there is much positive in this book, I simply do not like the title. Professionally, I am a software developer who engages in many business activities, so I see much of product creation in my domain or tangential to my domain. This book talks more about structuring a business so that it can create products. Thus, it’s one step removed and focuses specifically on being a successful product manager. There’s nothing wrong with that approach, but a title about inspiring creativity seems not to correspond with the text of the book. It’s not about product creation directly and more about managing product creation.

All that said, Cagan offers readers a lot in this book. The Silicon Valley Product Group, of which he is a member, does industry-leading work in this space, so anyone interested in learning from the best can benefit from perusing this book. Those organizing a team to create tech products, whether at a small firm or an established venture, can benefit from this work. Indeed, this book is one of the few titles that can raise the game of even experienced product managers. Finally, of course, those who aspire to fill this role will find a helpful introduction here. This field and this new role continue to evolve rapidly, like the technologies, but this description of product management is one of the best, if not the very best, out there.… (altro)

This is the most useless book I've read, yet a good one. Let me explain.

The author presents here a pefect organization working in a perfect way. It all makes sense and can be something to aspire to. However, one can hardly find any tips on how to get there. What's even worse the most repeated advice here is "if your company does not work this way - change the company". There are no grays or in-betweens, you either do it like the author says or you're doing it wrong. The companies presented here were seemingly constructed this way, they got it right from the get-go. I miss transformation stories of companies that changed into this model. I'd love to know what problems needed to be solved first and how they were solved, but here everyone has the perfect setup so there are no problems.

I was wondering who is this book written for and concluded it is for executives who know there's something wrong with their product organisation but don't know how to run it in a different, hopefully better, way. They can find here a compeling description of a good way and the contact details of the author's consulting company ;)

The thing that rubbed me the wrong way the most was the only justification author provides for the entire Empowered model - "this is how the biggest and most successful companies work, so it has to be good". This completely fails to acknowledge the possibility that these companies were successful not because this model but despite of it. In 2023 we can see that many of Sillicon Valley companies praised in this book failed in a major way, either on the product strategy front (Meta), execution efficiency side (Google), or both (Twitter). Massive layoffs done by every company mentioned in this book (except Apple) might also be a sign that they didn't figure it all out as well.

I missed here a better reason to believe that Empowered model is THE way. Intuitively, it's reasonable and I could agree with a lot of described practices but having some strong principles, convincing data, experiments results, or anything else that "this is how Sillicon Valley rolls" mantra would be a great addition.

I think this book presents a valuable benchmark for how to run a product organisation. There are many bases covered (80+ chapters!), so it gives a quite comprehensive perspective on what is needed to succeed. However, quality doesn't go with the quantity in this case - everything is described on the surface level, not going very deep to understand underlying principles, problems solved to get there, and challenges of maintaining such model. There is a lot of good things here, so I guess this is a good book, but nothing really actionable, so I find it pretty useless.… (altro)