Marty Cagan's 10 Regrets Since Inspired, From Viability to Thinking

Key points

1. 1

   Viability was the missing risk

   Cagan opens with the regret he calls most embarrassing. The 2008 Inspired named value, usability and feasibility as the risks and left out business viability. He fixed it only in the second edition, ten years later. He blames a career in developer tools, where viability is simple. For most products, and AI products above all, he now puts it first: can you market, sell and service it, and is it legal and ethical?

   “But the embarrassing truth is in the first edition of Inspire. I didn't even talk about it as a risk.”

2. 2

   Keep problem discovery short

   He regrets how hard people ran toward problem discovery. Many product managers now act as gatekeepers who must approve a problem first. Knowing the problem is necessary, he says, and it is the easy part. When a product fails, teams blame thin demand. He says they are almost always wrong, because a rival ships a better solution and the demand appears. The time belongs in solution discovery, where the innovation happens.

   “if you spend a lot of time on that, you're not going to do the real part you're paid for, which is solution discovery”

3. 3

   Ask why people churn

   Cagan tries products all the time and churns out of most of them. Almost none follow up. He calls the answer to "why did you stop?" the key to a lot of innovation, and most teams never ask it. Usage data will not tell you. You have to talk to the people who left.

   “Almost nobody follows up anyway. Nothing. Not a survey, not a email, nothing to ask me why I churn.”

4. 4

   Predictability is the biggest regret

   He calls this maybe his biggest regret. Product people and executives both want predictability, and the want works against humility and innovation. Roadmaps and PRDs let a team believe it knows more than it does. He keeps both, with a condition. A PRD written after the team gathered evidence is a useful record. One written as requirements from a guess is the old project model. Cheap building does not save a roadmap of dated guesses, because tokens, the units AI models bill by, are not free.

   “and deeply rooted the desire for predictability was. And that's from both product people and senior executives”

5. 5

   Empowered teams need better managers

   Inspired covers product teams and discovery and says little about product leaders. Cagan says that gap did the most damage. Companies set up empowered teams with a strong product manager and expect that to be enough, when those teams also need a product strategy, which he defines as a ranked list of problems to solve. He adds that half his writing in the last three years deals with politics, and the other half with AI.

   “in empowered product teams, you don't just need less management, you need better management”

6. 6

   Process stands in for thinking

   His last regret: product work is thinking, and he underrated how far people go to avoid it. It shows up as a craving for process and frameworks. He now calls his choice to structure Inspired as people, process and product a big mistake. He worries that language models will become the next substitute for thinking, the job process already does in many companies.

   “I did not appreciate the lengths that people would go to in order to avoid thinking”