Another factor that dictates the dynamics of the marketplace tremendously is the uniqueness of your supply.Airbnb offers heterogeneous supply, meaning that each listing is unique. This creates a competitive moat — it is hard to replicate that supply — and an inherent advantage to Airbnb. Heterogenous supply generates cognitive load. Many other marketplaces offer homogeneous supply, meaning that one supplier’s goods are roughly indistinguishable from another’s. Unfortunately, that makes it easier to replicate the business, as the supply is not unique and can be quickly copied (think Uber)

2. Homogeneous vs. Heterogeneous Supply: Is your startup a search marketplace or a matching marketplace?

There are four key factors that shape every marketplace:<ul><li>network effects;</li><li>type of supply;</li><li>incentives;</li><li>size and frequency of interaction.</li></ul> Understanding those factors — and structuring your platform accordingly — can make the difference between a wildly successful marketplace and one that never gets off the ground.

Four key factors that shape every marketplace

All marketplaces exhibit a form of network effects, where each additional user on either the demand side or the supply side enhances the utility of the network for all users. Airbnb has global network effects because travel is global. Companies like DoorDash and TaskRabbit have root density network effects - each market grows independently of another. Supply gains little value from demand growth in another market, and demand gains little from supply developing in another market. These businesses grew from being the first mover in each market, then aggressively building supply, city by city.

1. Type of Network Effects: How will your marketplace grow?

Simplistically, a marketplace is a place where buyers and sellers meet to conduct commerce. In the online setting, that definition still holds true — online marketplaces give buyers a choice in what they would like to buy and sellers a variety of people to sell to. I classify Airbnb as a search marketplace, where the guest selects where they will stay, choosing what to “purchase” in the marketplace.In recent years, the definition of a marketplace has stretched to include on-demand models that are considered marketplaces because of the independent contractor relationship on the seller side.

Definition of a marketplace

There are two broad incentives to keep transactions on the platform: trust and convenience. Technology can bridge trust by offering:<ul><li>Identity Verification —Can I trust them?</li><li>Reviews — What do other have to say about it?</li><li>Assurance — If something happens, can I get help?</li></ul>Technology can offer greater convenience by facilitating:<ul><li>Payments — Will I get my money or the product/serivce?</li><li>Messaging — Can I easily communicate and reach out to the other party?</li><li>Transactions — Did I buy the good or service? Did it reduce the burden of going back and forth multiple times?</li></ul>

3. Two-Sided Incentives: How will you keep both buyers and sellers in the marketplace?

Heterogeneous - search marketplaces, guests are responsible for finding their desired listing. Once you have unique supply, it is up to the product team to build a compelling demand-side product experience that simplifies search, creating as much of a one-click purchasing experience as possible. Homogeneous - matching marketplaces, where demand doesn’t care which supply they receive as long as it is above the standard.Homogeneous marketplaces compete on other aspects of the product offering, like price, greater loyalty, brand distinction, or what values the marketplace ultimately stands for

Homogeneous vs. Heterogeneous - continued

The size and frequency of interaction in a marketplace are paramount to its health. Frequency of interaction determines how much liquidity there is on the platform. . Larger-dollar transactions are better for the platform because they generate more economic activity. Some businesses are high dollar but low frequency. Airbnb fits squarely in this category. Every marketplace should strive to drive higher-frequency usage. Liquidity is key. Making sure that transaction volume is thriving is more important to a new marketplace than getting the largest revenue per transaction.

4. Size and Frequency of Interaction: What are the unit economics of your marketplace?

Advantages:<ul><li>They involve low capital costs, as inventory is brought to the market from the suppliers.</li><li>The market can self-correct by offering more of the good or service as buyers demand it more, making each marketplace function like a mini economy.</li></ul> Disadvantages:<ul><li>Because marketplaces need a certain amount of supply from day one, they are super hard to start.</li><li>It is hard to control the quality of inventory.</li></ul>

Advantages and Disadvantages of marketplaces

The six years I spent building products at Airbnb, scaling the marketplace over 100X, transformed how I understand the work of starting a marketplace platform. No startup is immune to hiccups and…

entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship

startup

Startups

product

Product & Design

Four Questions Every Marketplace Startup Should Be Able to Answer

Product managers rely on data to make decisions, secure buy-in from stakeholders, and tell the story of their products. But as important as statistical analysis can be in product management, it’s all too easy to overlook what the data is really telling us. That’s why Charles Wheelan’s Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data is such a valuable read for product managers looking to up their game.

Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data

Alex Gofman and Howard Moskowitz’s book is centered on a principle the authors call rule-developing experimentation, or RDE.

Selling Blue Elephants: How to Make Great Products That People Want Before They Even Know They Want Them

Venture capitalist and Kleiner Perkins chairman John Doerr has been helping entrepreneurs succeed for almost 40 years. Doerr has long championed the concept of OKR — objectives and key results — and distills much of his knowledge and experience into his fascinating book, Measure What Matters.

Measure What Matters

Nir Eyal’s keen understanding of user psychology is what makes hooked such a compelling read. Hooked introduces the reader to broader topics about what Eyal calls “behavioral design” before illustrating those concepts with Real-World examples.

Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products

There’s a world of difference between product management and product leadership, and it’s this critical difference that forms the basis of Richard Banfield, Martin Eriksson, and Nate Walkingshaw’s Product Leadership: How Top Product Managers Launch Awesome Products and Build Successful Teams.

Product Leadership: How Top Product Managers Launch Awesome Products and Build Successful Teams

Andreessen Horowitz cofounder Ben Horowitz’s book, The Hard Thing About Hard Things, became an overnight best seller upon its release back in 2014. The world of technology has changed dramatically since the book’s first edition, but Horowitz’s seminal book is still one of the best overviews of contemporary product development and running a startup out there.

The Hard Thing about Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers

As one of Silicon Valley’s most respected experts on product development in tech and as the founder of the Silicon Valley Product Group, Marty Cagan knows more than a thing or two about product. This book, originally published more than a decade ago and recently updated for a second edition, is packed with Cagan’s observations about product development and anecdotes from his years in the field.

Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love

Many product managers will be intimately familiar with the perils of “the build trap” — the practice of focusing exclusively on output rather than outcomes by releasing one feature after another instead of focusing on the needs and desires of the user.Far too many companies fall into this rut, which is why Melissa Perri’s Escaping the Build Trap is an essential read for product managers hoping to take their career to the next level.

Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value

The idea behind Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky, and Braden Kowitz’s best-selling book is simple: Build better products, faster.They propose a an agile methodology called sprint.

Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days

The halo effect is the tendency to apply positive or negative characteristics of a whole to each of its constituent parts. For product managers, the halo effect can be particularly dangerous; if a project succeeds, it’s because the strategy, execution, and leadership all contributed to the project’s success. Offering plenty of scientific explanations and Real-World examples to support his points.

The Halo Effect . . . and Eight Other Business Delusions That Deceive Managers

The best product managers not only want to create products for their users; they also want to empower users to solve their problems and make their lives better — and Kathy Sierra’s Badass: Making Users Awesome is an actionable, hands-on blueprint on how to do just that.

Badass: Making Users Awesome

Design is arguably the most important aspect of contemporary product development. Although many product managers have a solid grasp on the fundamentals of good design, cultivating a deeper understanding of how and why good design works is critical for product managers who want to create better products. Few books illustrate these principles more effectively than Edward Tufte’s Beautiful Evidence.

Beautiful Evidence

The central premise of brand strategist and best-selling marketing author Bernadette Jiwa’s Meaningful: The Story of Ideas That Fly is “the Story Strategy,” a blueprint for building products that prioritizes the needs and desires of end users.

Meaningful: The Story of Ideas That Fly

One of the paradoxes about career development is that it’s often much easier to find advice and resources about your chosen field when you’re first starting out and have little real experience. As…

business

Business

13 Essential Books for Product Managers

Product-Led Growth is a go-to-market strategy that relies on using your product as the main vehicle to acquire, activate, and retain customers. This is in opposition to the traditional sales model. Instead of helping buyers go through a long, drawn-out sales cycle, they give the buyer the “keys” to their product. The company, in turn, focuses on helping the buyer improve their life. Upgrading to a paid plan becomes a no-brainer.Companies like Dropbox or Hubspot are some of the companies succeeding with this approach.

What is a Product-Led Company?

Product-Led Growth means that every team in your business influences the product. <ul><li class="ql-align-center">Your marketing team will ask, how can our product generate a demand flywheel. </li><li class="ql-align-center">Your sales team will ask, how can we use the product to qualify our prospects for us? </li><li class="ql-align-center">Your customer success team asks, how can we create a product that helps customers become successful beyond our dreams? </li></ul>By having every team focused on the product, you create a culture that is built around enduring customer value.

Common product bumpers:<ul><li>Welcome Messages</li><li>Product Tours</li><li>Progress Bars</li><li>Checklists</li><li>Onboarding</li><li>Tooltips</li><li>Empty States</li></ul>Common conversational bumpers:<ul><li>User Onboarding</li><li>Emails</li><li>Push Notifications</li><li>Explainer Videos</li><li>Direct Mail </li></ul>

Common Product Bumpers

Traditionally, SaaS products sold to executives at the top. Nowadays, the tables have turned. Products are now cheaper & can be adopted without talking to sales: Slack is a perfect example, spreading organically, starting with one user who invites a colleague, then an entire team.How Product-Led Growth models fit with selling: <ul><li>Freemium & top-down selling. Rarely works, most decision-makers won’t be everyday users of the product </li><li>Freemium/free trial & bottom-up selling. Works if you help your potential buyers use the product </li><li>Free trial & top-down selling. It's a coin toss.</li></ul>

Audience: Top-Down or Bottom-Up Selling Strategy

To create a successful product-led business, you need a quick time-to-value. New users need to have a good experience quickly. There are the 4 types of users: <ul><li>Mission Impossible Users. Your user has low motivation & finds it hard to use your product. </li><li>Rookie Users. Your user has high motivation but finds it incredibly difficult to use your product. Maybe they are forced to do it.</li><li>Veteran Users. Your user has low motivation but finds it easy to use your product. </li><li>Spoiled Users. This is the outcome to optimize for. Your user has high motivation and finds it straightforward to use your product.</li></ul>

Time to Value

Product tours are one of the most effective ways to bump users toward experiencing meaningful value in the product:<ul><li>Product tours should ask users what they’re trying to accomplish in the product. </li><li>Product tours should cover important step(s) that set users up for success with the product. </li><li>High-performing product tours often use a “focus mode” that strips away unnecessary elements, like the navigation bar, until the user completes the product tour. </li><li>Product tours are typically between three and five steps. </li></ul>

Product Tours

Red-ocean companies try to outperform their rivals to grab a greater share of existing demand. As the market gets crowded, growth reduces, products become commodities, & cut-throat competition turns the bloody ocean red. Blue-ocean companies access untapped market space & create demand, so they have the opportunity for highly profitable growth. In Blue Oceans, competition is irrelevant.If you’re in a blue ocean & have a quick time-to-value in your product, use a product-led model. However, if your product is complex, start with a sales to educate your audience & create demand.

Red & Blue Oceans

As in bowling, we need two bumpers to keep our ball out of the gutter. We can use product and conversational bumpers to guide users to a key outcome.<ul><li>Product bumpers are mission critical. They help users adopt the product within the application itself. </li><li>Conversational bumpers work to educate users, bring them back into the application, and eventually upgrade their account.</li></ul>

The Two Bumpers Product Analogy

It helps you pick the right go-to-market strategy for your business: <ul><li>Market Strategy: Is your go-to-market strategy dominant, disruptive, or differentiated? </li><li>Ocean Conditions: Are you in a red- or blue-ocean business? </li><li>Audience: Do you have a top-down or bottom-up marketing strategy? </li><li>Time-to-value: How fast can you showcase value?</li></ul>

MOAT Framework to analyse market conditions 

Depending on your strategy you can find yourself in one of the 4 categories, which impact your go-to market:<ul><li>Dominant strategy: the best solution for the lowest price? Freemium works amazingly well here, but the size of the market needs to be really BIG. </li><li>Differentiated strategy: the best-customized solution for the highest price to underserved customers. Trials or demo s work best. </li><li>Disruptive strategy: Do you want to offer the simplest product for the lowest price to over-served customers? Freemium works great. </li><li>Hybrid strategy</li></ul>

Market Strategy: Freemium, Trial or Demo

A decent introduction to the strategy of product-led growth.

"Product-Led Growth is about helping your customers experience the ongoing value your product provides. It is a critical step in successful product design and this book shows you how it's done." - Nir Eyal, Wall Street Journal Bestselling Author of "Hooked"

books

Books

"Product-Led Growth is about helping your customers experience the ongoing value your product provides...and this book shows you how it's done." - Nir Eyal, Author of "Hooked" and "Indistractible""As captivating as a good novel, Product-Led Growth is an absolute must-read for SaaS business owners." - Omar Zenhom, CEO, WebinarNinja"Why did I just blow $300K promoting a whitepaper?"That's the hard question I asked myself but couldn't answer--after all, we were just following the same old SaaS playbook. Sure, sales cycles were long and acquisition was expensive, but that's how everybody grew their companies.But after I helped launch a freemium product that went from 0-100K users in less than 12 months, I realized the traditional way of selling software was deeply flawed.Hi, I'm Wes Bush, founder of the Product-Led Institute. And in Product-Led Growth, I show you how you can cut your acquisition costs and scale further than you ever thought possible...by making your product the tool that helps you acquire, convert, and retain customers.But what does it mean to be "product-led"? How do you know if a product-led growth strategy makes sense for your business? And most importantly, how do you execute it?You'll find answers to all of these questions inside this book. In addition, I'll also show you: <ul> <li>How to save 3-6 months of development and hundreds of thousands of dollars by launching a free trial in 24 hours--and why you should do it (Ch. 10)</li> <li>Which HUGE mistake ProfitWell's Patrick Campbell says can "kill your growth and set you up for long-term failure"...and how to avoid making it (Ch. 8)</li> <li>Which of the 4 most common SaaS pricing strategies is the ONLY one with long-term viability (Ch. 9)</li> <li>What the "Triple-A" sprint cycle is and how to use it to build a sustainable growth process--in just 1 month (Ch. 12)</li> <li>How to stop paying customers from slipping away (Ch. 15)</li> <li>The 3 apocalyptic "tidal waves" that are coming for SaaS companies--and what you MUST do to survive them (Ch. 1)</li> <li>How to make free trial and freemium users hunger to upgrade to paid (Ch. 9)</li> <li>The single biggest cause of leaky funnels and how to fix it, fast (Ch. 10)</li> <li>Which 7 people you need in your "tiger team" to run a successful product-led growth team (Ch. 11)</li> <li>The #1 thing to improve right now to maximize your customer lifetime value (Ch. 14)</li> </ul> Product-Led Growth also comes packed with "do this, not that" real-life examples from the industry's biggest brands--as well as a collection of high-converting email scripts you can customize and send out immediately to turn more users into customers. So if you are a SaaS founder, key decision-maker, or marketer wondering what your next strategic step should be, order your copy of Product-Led Growth today. "This is one of my favorite books of 2019." - Zeno Roch, Chief Product Office, Liferay Cloud "A must-read book for SaaS founders, especially if you have a self-serve SaaS." - Kaloyan Yankulov, Encharge "This book is epic. If you want to know more about how to build a product-led business, you need to read this. Go. Buy. It. Now." - James Gill, CEO, GoSquared

Bush Wes

Product-Led Growth: How to Build a Product That Sells Itself

Product-Led Growth

To empower, decisions are pushed down to the product team level. Three Snaky rules of Decision Making:<ol><li>If you see a snake, kill it. (an important decision that has to be made)</li><li>Don't play with dead snakes. (don't revisit old decisions)</li><li>All opportunities start out looking like snakes. (opportunities often look like problems)</li></ol>

Decision Making

Collaboration is at the heart of how strong product teams work. It's a combination of skills and mindset, and it often takes active coaching by the manager to help new product people develop this capability. Characteristics of strong product teams: <ul><li>Tackling risks early</li><li>Solving problems collaboratively</li><li>Being accountable for results.</li></ul>

Collaboration

A product organization's team topology answers questions such as:  <ul><li>How many product teams should our organization have? </li><li>What is the scope of responsibility of each team? </li><li>What are the skills required for each team, and how many of each skill? </li><li>What are the dependencies between the teams?  </li></ul> Optimise team design for: <ul><li>Empowerment</li><li>Ownership</li><li>Autonomy</li><li>Alignment</li></ul>

Optimized Team Design

For product leaders, the product team is the product.  Leadership is about recognizing that there's greatness in everyone, and your job is to create an environment where that greatness can emerge. People look to leadership for inspiration and we look to management for execution.  To have truly empowered product teams, your success depends very directly on first‐level people managers. If you are wondering why there are so many weak product companies in the world, these first-level people managers would be the primary culprit.

Product Leadership

<ul><li>You are frequently shifting developers between teams </li><li>You must frequently step in to resolve dependency conflicts </li><li>Your developers complain of too many dependencies on other product teams in order to ship simple things </li><li>Teams have a very limited scope of ownership </li><li>Developers deal with too much complexity in too many areas</li></ul>

Signs Your Team Design Is Not Fit-For-Purpose

You need to move your product organization from a subservient model to a collaborative model. Four focus areas: <ul><li>The Example Starts at the Top</li><li>Focus and Strategy</li><li>Establishing Trust</li><li>Deliver on Promises </li></ul> Three steps to begin with:<ol><li>Ensure you have strong product leaders in place.</li><li>Empower product leaders with the ability to recruit and develop the staff required for empowered product teams.</li><li>Redefine the relationship with the business.</li></ol>

Start The Transformation

Leaders must focus on:<ul><li>Spending most of their time and energy on coaching the team.</li><li>Being self-aware of insecurities. Insecure managers have a particularly hard time empowering people.</li><li>Cultivating Diverse Points of View </li><li>Seek Out Teaching Moments - Many, if not most, people are not aware of their own potential. As a coach, you are in a unique position to help them see it.</li><li>Continually Earn the Trust of Your Team. Coaching efforts will be ineffective without trust.</li><li>Establishing personal rapport and trust by sharing some personal challenges.</li></ul>

Developing And Coaching: The Main Job Of A Leader

<ul><li>Empowered Product Teams. These teams are the foundations for business success. They serve customers in ways that work for the business.</li><li>Eradicate the old idea that "Technology" is in service to the business. With this mindset, your business will not transform into a great Product company.</li><li>Coaching is what turns ordinary people into extraordinary product teams. Yet so few product teams get the high-quality coaching they need. Empower Product Leadership to become great coaches.</li></ul>

Empowered: The Three Key Tenets Of The Book

The Purpose - The primary purpose is to help the product person develop and improve. The Relationship - This is a relationship that depends on trust. The Frequency - Should be no less than 30 minutes, once per week, and is sacred and not to be another one of those “You okay with skipping this week?” Sharing Context - If you are to empower you must provide the strategic context. Thinking and Acting Like a Product Person - Mainly about helping the product person learn to think and act like a strong product person.

Keys To An Effective One-On-One Meeting With The Product Person

If the company is still using feature teams, as most unfortunately are, then the OKR technique is going to be a cultural mismatch, and almost certainly prove a waste of time and effort. In the vast majority of companies that are struggling to value out of OKRs, the role of leadership is largely missing in action. Three prerequisites for OKR's: <ul><li>Move from the feature team model to the empowered product team model </li><li>Stop doing manager objectives and individual objectives, and instead focus on team objectives</li><li>Leaders need to step up and do their part to turn product strategy into action.</li></ul>

Team Objectives: The Right Way

Give teams problems to solve, rather than features to build. Empower them to solve those problems in the best way they see fit.

Leadership is about recognizing that there's greatness in everyone, and your job is to create an environment where that greatness can emerge.

Three critical differences between the strongest product companies and the rest: <ul><li>How the company views the role of technology. </li><li>The role product leaders play. </li><li>How the company views the purpose of the product teams—the product managers, product designers, and engineers.</li></ul>

The Three Critical Differences

Empowered engineers are the single most important thing that you can have in a company.

<ul><li>Company Mission - The purpose of the company.</li><li>Company Scorecard - Key performance indicators (KPIs) that provide an understanding of the overall picture and health of the business</li><li>Company Objectives - Specific objectives the company is focused on for this year.</li><li>Product Vision and Principles - The product vision is how we hope to meet customers' needs.</li><li>Team Topology - Describes how each Product team will organise to deliver value.</li><li>Product Strategy - Specifically how we'll meet customer needs in ways that work for the business.</li></ul>

The Six Types Of Strategic Context

In traditional organisations, Feature Teams focus on features and projects (output), and as such are not empowered or held accountable to results. Empowered teams are given problems to solve, rather than features to build. Empowered Product teams create solutions that are: <ul><li>Valuable (customers will buy the product)</li><li>Viable (it will meet the needs of the business)</li><li>Usable (so users can actually experience that value)</li><li>Feasible (so the company can effectively market, sell, and support the solution).</li></ul>Together, the teams own the problem and are responsible and accountable for the results.

Feature Teams Vs Empowered Teams

<ul><li>Staffing</li><li>Coaching</li><li>Team Objectives</li><li>Deciding which problems should be worked on by which product teams.</li><li>Sharing Strategic Context </li></ul> The litmus test for empowerment is that the team is able to decide the best way to solve the problems they have been assigned (the objectives).  Unless leaders trust the teams this empowerment will not happen.

Management responsibilities

<ul><li>Focus on the outcome</li><li>Consider all of the risks—value, usability, feasibility, and business viability. </li><li>Think holistically about all dimensions of the business and the product. </li><li>Anticipate ethical considerations or impacts. </li><li>Solve problems creatively.</li><li>Persist in the face of obstacles. </li><li>Leverage engineering and the art of the possible. </li><li>Leverage design and the power of user experience. </li><li>Leverage data to learn and to make a compelling argument.</li></ul>

Attributes of Great Product People

<ul>
<li>The Role of Technology - Many companies still have the old IT mindset when it comes to technology. It's viewed as a necessary cost rather than the core business enabler. Technology teams are there “to serve the business”.</li>
<li>Leadership - Does not empower the Product Team. Has a command and control style leadership. Acts in service to the business stakeholders, not to the team.</li>
<li>Empowered Teams - Teams are not empowered to solve problems in ways customers love. Feature teams are responsible for pushing out features(output) rather than enabling outcomes.</li>
</ul>

The Challenges In Traditional Organizations

We’ve collected a list of our favourites on a range of topics from entry-level to expert.

problemsolving

Problem Solving

leadershipandmanagement

Leadership & Management

communication

Communication

Top 7 books for Product Managers

Understanding Empowered Teams and how they function

What is it about the top tech product companies such as Amazon, Apple, Google, Netflix and Tesla that enables their record of consistent innovation? Most people think it’s because these companies are somehow able to find and attract a level of talent that makes this innovation possible. But the real advantage these companies have is not so much who they hire, but rather how they enable their people to work together to solve hard problems and create extraordinary products. As legendary Silicon Valley coach--and coach to the founders of several of today’s leading tech companies--Bill Campbell said, “Leadership is about recognizing that there's a greatness in everyone, and your job is to create an environment where that greatness can emerge.” The goal of EMPOWERED is to provide you, as a leader of product management, product design, or engineering, with everything you’ll need to create just such an environment. As partners at The Silicon Valley Product Group, Marty Cagan and Chris Jones have long worked to reveal the best practices of the most consistently innovative companies in the world. A natural companion to the bestseller INSPIRED, EMPOWERED tackles head-on the reason why most companies fail to truly leverage the potential of their people to innovate: product leadership. The book covers: what it means to be an empowered product team, and how this is different from the “feature teams” used by most companies to build technology products recruiting and coaching the members of product teams, first to competence, and then to reach their potential creating an inspiring product vision along with an insights-driven product strategy translating that strategy into action by empowering teams with specific objectives—problems to solve—rather than features to build redefining the relationship of the product teams to the rest of the company detailing the changes necessary to effectively and successfully transform your organization to truly empowered product teams EMPOWERED puts decades of lessons learned from the best leaders of the top technology companies in your hand as a guide. It shows you how to become the leader your team and company needs to not only survive but thrive.

What is it about the top tech product companies such as Amazon, Apple, Google, Netflix and Tesla that enables their record of consistent innovation? Most people think it’s because these companies are somehow able to find and attract a level of talent that makes this innovation possible. But the real advantage these companies have is not so much who they hire, but rather how they enable their people to work together to solve hard problems and create extraordinary products. As legendary Silicon Valley coach--and coach to the founders of several of today’s leading tech companies--Bill Campbell said, “Leadership is about recognizing that there's a greatness in everyone, and your job is to create an environment where that greatness can emerge.” The goal of EMPOWERED is to provide you, as a leader of product management, product design, or engineering, with everything you’ll need to create just such an environment. As partners at The Silicon Valley Product Group, Marty Cagan and Chris Jones have long worked to reveal the best practices of the most consistently innovative companies in the world. A natural companion to the bestseller INSPIRED, EMPOWERED tackles head-on the reason why most companies fail to truly leverage the potential of their people to innovate: product leadership. The book covers: <ul> <li>what it means to be an empowered product team, and how this is different from the “feature teams” used by most companies to build technology products</li> <li>recruiting and coaching the members of product teams, first to competence, and then to reach their potential</li> <li>creating an inspiring product vision along with an insights-driven product strategy</li> <li>translating that strategy into action by empowering teams with specific objectives—problems to solve—rather than features to build</li> <li>redefining the relationship of the product teams to the rest of the company</li> <li>detailing the changes necessary to effectively and successfully transform your organization to truly empowered product teams</li> </ul> EMPOWERED puts decades of lessons learned from the best leaders of the top technology companies in your hand as a guide. It shows you how to become the leader your team and company needs to not only survive but thrive.

Marty Cagan is an accomplished writer whose work has resonated with readers around the world. Marty Cagan has published several books that explore a range of topics, from fiction to nonfiction, and has received critical acclaim for the ability to weave compelling narratives. Marty Cagan's writing style is known for its depth and authenticity, and has earned quite a loyal following of readers.

Marty Cagan

EMPOWERED

<ul><li>Expanding strategic options and innovation. Jobs viewed from a customer's perspective allows for strategic development, reveals the real competition, and opens up growth opportunities.</li><li>Investing in what matters most. When employees understand what jobs they should solve, they are empowered to make better decisions.</li><li>Aligning and inspiring the organisation. Employees gain a better understanding of the organisation's value and purpose.</li></ul>

Benefits of the jobs-to-be done approach

Asking what really matters to customers helped focus the company’s priorities.

Four Questions Every Marketplace Startup Should Be Able to Answer

13 Essential Books for Product Managers

Product-Led Growth

It's time to
Read like a Pro.

EMPOWERED

CURATED BY

Four Questions Every Marketplace Startup Should Be Able to Answer

13 Essential Books for Product Managers

Product-Led Growth

It's time to Read like a Pro.

EMPOWERED

CURATED BY

It's time to
Read like a Pro.