Inspired — a Book Review
Inspired is a book about how to “create tech products customers love.” The first edition was released in 2008, and received a major overhaul in 2017 with the second edition (I’m specifically reviewing the second edition here.) Inspired is billed as the product book, the bible for all product owners, and has over 13,000 ratings with an average of 4.24 stars on Goodreads at the time of writing.
The author is product leader, Marty Cagan. If you don’t know Marty, he’s the founder of Silicon Valley Product Group (SVPG), and has worked at a string of major tech companies. Many people in the product-sphere would look to Marty Cagan as one of the thought leaders in the space to follow.
Inspired is a wide ranging treatise on product, and probably the first book I’ve read on the topic which actually does a good job in covering the topic. It’s well written, down-to-earth, and covers modern product development practices well. An accurate description of the book might be “Modern Product Management: 101” or “An Introduction of Product Management.” It certainly gives a picture of how you might spend your time in a general tech product (it’s mostly consumer targeted, but easily generalisable.)
In some ways Inspired was a wake up call — especially the note that a product team should be able to complete 10 to 20 experiments per week in addition to their other work, because the magnitude of that work should be very small. I don’t think I’ve ever worked in an organisation that has that level of experimental nonce.
One thing that struck me about Inspired was how it jumped around. That’s almost to be expected for a book that attempts to cover all of “product” in one. Product is such a wide ranging discipline that you have to jump around to be able to cover it all — and so in some respects, that makes it a wonder that it’s possible at all. The downside of this, of course, is that the touch on many of the topics is very light — possibly too light to be useful in many instances. Without writing a 30,000 page grimoire it would be impossible to cover everything about product in detail. The disconnect here is that Inspired claims to do just that (and many of the reviews claim that also.) So as not to call out any individual review or reviewer I’ll paraphrase, but many reviews include lines to the effect of “Inspired is the only book you need on product, and is a master class,” which I think is simply untrue. Inspired is a starting point, and a very thorough one, but no more.
The author often assumes ideal working circumstances, which means that it is largely theoretical. It’s nice to be able to say you should do X and Y, but what I really want to see is “what do do when you’re prohibited from X,” or “how to take an organisation from A to Y so you can proceed the way you’d like to.” I get that this isn’t that book, and isn’t meant to be that book, but in my opinion it makes it hard to justify Inspired’s 4.26 star rating on Goodreads when few of the ideas are immediately applicable.
Inspired is often touted as the product book, the bible, the reference book to end all reference books, and I have to say that I disagree. One review of it I read stated simply that it was thorough and insightful. I don’t think any of those statements are correct. It’s good, but foundational. It touches very lightly on each of the major things a Product Person should know, but not in enough detail to start executing on it. It’s a syllabus of product skills. It’s well written, and I’d recommend it to any product person, but definitely more valuable to people just discovering product work than more established practitioners. I’d also recommend this book to people who work closely with Product Managers, such as engineers.
