Book Review: Inspired- How to Create Products Customers Love by Marty Cagan

We tend to think that AI will solve everything and that we can give AI the role of thinking, and we follow whatever comes from the LLM models. The question we must ask ourselves is this: when creating products, especially digital ones, what skills and understanding should we maintain to ensure that the solutions we create are something the market desires?

I have spent almost half of my career building products with excellent software teams as head of development and product manager, and the other half as a workshop facilitator, envisioning software solutions with leading global ISVs (independent software vendors). The number is in hundreds. One thing that I still remember vividly from my early software product manager career was how naive my thinking was when it came to understanding what the customer really wanted us to build. We had "cool" technology and assumed that the customer would immediately buy into our vision of the solution. Not so. Later in my career, I began to realize what truly matters, and I suppose that things come with age.

What I wanted to do in this article is to review and suggest a best-selling book by Marty Cagan, who is a well-known authority within the tech industry. This book, " Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love," is the first of three books that he has published. The second is "Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products," and the third is "Transformed: Moving to the Product Operating Model". I will revisit these latter ones in later reviews.

The book "Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love" is a seminal work in product management, serving as a comprehensive guide for creating products that genuinely delight customers. It focuses on team culture, discovery methods, and customer-centricity.

Book Synopsis and Why It Matters

Inspired outlines why successful tech companies like Amazon, Google, and Apple are distinct: they build customer-first cultures, empower product teams, and continually refine their product processes. Cagan shares actionable techniques for assembling effective teams, embracing rapid experimentation, and fostering cross-functional collaboration. The book matters because building tech products is often a messy process plagued by waste, miscommunication, and failed launches—but by applying Cagan’s framework, companies can dramatically increase product impact and innovation.

Key Topics Covered

• Empowered Product Teams: Teams should be motivated “missionaries” with deep ownership and mission over the product, not “mercenaries” executing top-down orders.
• Continuous Discovery: Always test assumptions early—through customer interviews, prototyping, and rapid experimentation—to reduce wasted effort and late-stage surprises.
• User-Centric Design: Focus relentlessly on solving real user problems, not just building flashy tech features.
• Collaboration and Outcomes: Engage engineers, designers, and stakeholders deeply in discovery, and measure success with outcomes—not just outputs.
• Risks in Product Development: Address risks (value, usability, feasibility, and business viability) upfront to avoid investing heavily in solutions that may not be viable.

Main Audience

The book is primarily written for product managers, tech leads, and those responsible for building digital products, but it’s equally useful for startup founders, engineers, designers, and organizational leaders seeking to foster a product-driven culture. Its lessons are especially relevant to anyone involved in scaling products, leading teams, or driving innovation in a tech-focused environment.

Why Readers Should Care

Readers should care because Inspired provides practical frameworks to avoid common mistakes and deliver meaningful value to customers. Adopting these principles leads to higher organizational motivation, greater market success, and vastly reduced waste in tech development. It’s a must-read for anyone seeking to build lasting products rather than short-lived tech fads.

Importance for AI and LLM Product Development

I also want to emphasize that we should NOT forget the importance of the foundational learnings in product development and management. We are witnessing an era that none of us has experienced before. The pace of development and release of new features is breathtaking, and regular users have a hard time coping with the change. As AI and LLMs become increasingly central to new tech products, Inspired’s principles remain crucial. The following elements come to my mind as to why the learnings from the Inspired book still matter:

• Customer-First AI: Successful AI products solve real human needs, not just showcase powerful models. Teams must validate ideas with users early, despite the allure of algorithmic prowess.
• Cross-Functional Teams: AI requires tight collaboration between product, engineering, research, and design—mirroring the team culture Inspired advocates.
• Addressing Risks: With AI, value risk is high—products may impress technically but flop in usability or real-world utility.
• Ethical and Responsible Innovation: Inspired insists on team ownership and mission—critical for developing responsible AI that earns user trust.

Common Mistakes in the AI Era

When it comes to building solutions, we need to keep in mind some of the most common mistakes that we have seen and read about. Some of them are as follows:

• Building solutions before understanding real user problems (solution-first, not problem-first).
• Not involving cross-functional teams (e.g., developers and stakeholders) early in discovery.
• Focusing on outputs over outcomes—shipping features rather than customer value.
• Validating ideas too late, leading to wasted resources and missed opportunities.
• Assuming more tech (e.g., larger LLMs) equals more product value without customer validation.

By grounding the wild possibilities of AI in Inspired’s human-centered, rigorous product development practice, teams can create technology that everyone loves, not just technology that’s impressive on paper.

Regardless of where you are in your product development journey, and especially if you represent the new upcoming generation that has not witnessed the prior eras of technology, you should check out the book by Marty Cagan to learn some of the core concepts. Remember that sometimes we get overly excited about the technology and start to build something without really understanding product-market fit, and might end up building something that nobody wants to have.

I have used and educated thousands of professionals and hundreds of organizations on the use of the Business Model Canvas, and if you consider the nine building blocks within the canvas. In the middle, you have the value proposition, and to the right, you have the market segment. I often get asked which one to focus on first. Should one start with the value proposition or market segmentation? I won't go into the details on that, but when you work through the canvas, you can pretty quickly see if your business model and idea make any sense.

Yours,

Dr. Petri I. Salonen

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