By Marty Cagan · svpg.com · LinkedIn
Marty Cagan argues that the common belief that great products come from listening to customers is a myth for technology products, because customers often cannot imagine what is possible or what they want until they see it. He contends that true innovation more often originates with engineers, and that teams using engineers only as coders capture about half their value. He illustrates this with stories of Amazon's Alexa, Disney's MagicBand, Google Translate, the iPhone, and Workiva, each showing technology-enabled reinvention rather than feature requests. He closes with six practices for engaging engineers in discovery, which matter because they determine whether a company can achieve disruptive innovation at all.
01Key takeaways
- Do not treat customer requests as the blueprint; observe customer pain and let technology inform the solution.
- Share vision, strategy, analytics, and constraints with engineers so they can solve the underlying problem well.
- Bring engineers into customer observation and prototyping before committing to a full build.
- Translate requirements into constraints to give the engineering team more degrees of freedom.
- Align engineer and product manager goals and OKRs so the whole product team works toward the same outcomes.
- Hire engineers who are passionate missionaries and pair them with a product manager who collaborates rather than pretends to know everything.
02Key sections
- Why customers rarely drive true innovation
- Customers cannot anticipate what technology makes possible, so asking them for what to build tends to yield incremental ideas rather than breakthroughs. Engineers are often the true source of disruptive innovation.
- Innovation stories from Amazon, Disney, and Google
- Alexa began with an engineer's prototype, the MagicBand came from designers and engineers responding to guest frustration, and Google Translate improved after engineers applied machine learning.
- The iPhone and focus-group trap
- Rival phone makers relied on focus groups that told them to drop the touch screen, while Apple used the technology to meet needs customers could not articulate.
- Workiva as a smaller-company example
- Workiva's founders observed finance professionals' pain and made early bets on cloud and rich web front-end technologies, producing exceptionally high customer satisfaction.
- Six keys to leveraging engineers
- Share business context, expose engineers to customer pain, convert requirements into constraints, give time in discovery, measure the whole team together, and staff teams with competent product managers.
03From the post
“A partnership dedicated to teaching best practices to product teams and product leaders”
04Frameworks mentioned
Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.