Review: Inspired — Marty Cagan
9/10 Product Encyclopedia · 6/10 Enjoyable
2008 Wiley · Revised edition in 2017
Overview
If you’ve worked in product management for more than five minutes, someone’s probably told you to read Inspired. The book contains the recipe for organizing product teams that has become the industry gold standard.
It’s written by Marty Cagan, a member of the startup intelligentsia who earned his stripes under Marc Andreessen at Netscape. Cagan went on to lead product at eBay before founding Silicon Valley Product Group (SVPG), a small but elite consultancy that has quietly shaped the playbooks of companies like Google, Netflix, and Airbnb.
Inspired is part product encyclopedia, part call to arms. It tells you how great product teams work, and makes you wonder why yours doesn’t. But the writing often feels overprocessed — as if through too many cycles of feedback its personality was stripped away. It suffers from an abundance of Silicon Valley tech jargon, a reliance on prescriptions without explanations, and a style that might be the solution to your insomnia.
That said, Inspired remains essential reading for product managers everywhere and it answers an impressive number of questions for those trying to understand the job.
Despite the jargon, Cagan comes across as a strong and compassionate leader. He writes with earned authority and a heartfelt desire to help. His critiques of “most” companies are all the sharper because you can almost hear him saying, “I’m not mad; I’m just disappointed.”
Tech-Speak
Opening the book is a bit like putting on an episode of HBO’s Silicon Valley — you’re entering the tech bubble; the only things missing are the jokes.
Ever wondered what a feasibility prototype, a discovery coach, or a user story map is? Cagan will tell you. Though they may sound like the hallucinations of a product chatbot, these terms actually take on surprising power and clarity from Cagan’s definitions.
Cagan has a gift for making the buzzwords make sense. He becomes our guide, ferrying us past the eye-rolls of our non-techy friends into a world where phrases like “autonomous product missionaries” can be said non-ironically.
Product Encyclopedia
The chapters are short and highly distilled. Most include numbered lists. The book is packed with definitions and designed to serve as an easy reference guide long after an initial read.
And while the writing can occasionally appear like an org chart — or the credits of a Marvel movie — for those unfamiliar with the dizzying array of terminology surrounding product teams, it’s a lifeline.
Cagan gives us the blueprints that are used across the industry. We’ve finally found the source of the bullet points we’ve seen in countless job postings.
He opens a window into the inner workings of the modern tech company and equips you to swim in the product sea, navigating with ease around terms like OKRs, A/B tests, and viability risk.
Received Wisdom
It’s a little hard to believe that all the concepts Cagan describes are actually used in common practice. I wouldn’t blame you for suspecting at least a few of them were invented by Cagan himself — visiontype? Startup canvas? (Don’t confuse this with a canvas startup — though that might be a good entry point into the home oil-painting market.)
Cagan makes it sound like, in the right circles, these terms are all common knowledge. We might even feel a little embarrassed if we don’t know them already.
Instead of “I love A/B tests,” he writes, “We love A/B tests.” Readers have to hope that we refers to the partners of SVPG — not the product manager mafia.
And surprisingly, for someone so steeped in the design-thinking ethos of Silicon Valley — where problems are king and solutions must be tested — Cagan often gives prescriptions without much explanation. He tells you what to do, but not why to do it; how things should be, but not why that’s better. The most he gives us is an assertion that this is how it’s done at top product companies (think FAANG+), and a handful of short profiles of product leaders.
Maybe he considers this book a product that has already been tested and proven. Still, it’s still a little disappointing to find we’re not allowed behind the curtain to see the trial and error behind the formulas.
Coffee Recommended
Cagan’s book can feel a little dry and impersonal. There’s a textbook-like power to that, and the book is certainly packed with information — but some sections are hard to get through. Cagan misses an opportunity to make this book more approachable and engaging by sharing more of himself and his experiences. It also doesn’t help that he takes almost half the book to get to the point.
In a nod to the product gospel, he opens with a problem: a software project early in his career that, despite following best practices at the time, ultimately ended in wasted time and effort.
Then he writes 32 chapters without giving us the solution.
Maybe he’s trying to make us eat our vegetables before dessert, but I imagine more than a few busy PMs have put the book down around the chapter on OKRs and missed the punchline entirely.
Call to Action
Still, if we can find the determination to carry on, our patience is rewarded. The most satisfying section is Part IV; here, Cagan makes his core argument and solves the problem he started with.
Cagan builds up to this moment with several exhortations for PMs to “do their job,” and in Part IV, we finally understand what that means. To Cagan, a product manager’s job is to discover what to build — by running an ongoing series of tests and experiments.
He expects more than just data analysis and internal meetings. He pushes us to bare our untested ideas to the scrutiny of strangers. He instructs us to regularly meet with users and ask them to interact with prototypes we’ve built. He demands courage — but it’s clear how valuable this first-hand feedback can be.
In the most powerful line of the book, Cagan says he would fire PMs who fail to observe “as many users as possible, first hand, interacting with and responding to [their] team’s ideas.”
This is his core idea. This is how he believes we overcome value risk. While it’s a hopelessly jargony term, value risk is Cagan’s name for the fundamental product question: Will people want this?
Cagan’s approach boils down to learning first-hand “if the user really has the problems we think they have, how they solve those problems today, and what it would take for them to switch.”
He offers a couple rules of thumb that feel spot on: find at least six reference customers for each target market, and spend at least two hours a week meeting directly with users. Even though he doesn’t explain why, we likely find ourselves writing these down.
Conclusion
While it can feel impersonal and has a notable jargon problem, for a book with only 368 pages Inspired packs a textbook-level punch. It’s not just a crash course in product terminology; it also gets deep, calling out PMs who aren’t brave or vulnerable enough to get raw feedback on their ideas.
It’s no surprise that teams at Netflix, Apple, Google, and Airbnb have hired Cagan’s consultancy. He’s selling a cutting-edge operating system for modern product teams.
However, Cagan isn’t totally raw and vulnerable with his readers. His big idea is to be brave and share your incomplete ideas with your customers, yet his thoughts here are polished to the point of being sanitized. We finish the book feeling like we barely got to know him and we are a little sadder because of it.
Quinn Mitchell is a product manager in Brooklyn, NY writing about business strategy, product theory, and technology. More at LinkedIn.