The Hungry Ant

I have a lot of respect for Marty Cagan and read his blog at SVPG.com regularly and I use a lot his of suggestions in my work. So I was very pleased when his new book “Inspired - How to create products customers love” was kindly gifted to me.

I came across Marty when I switched from running agile software teams to becoming the product owner. After about a year in the role, I came across Marty’s blog and he was talking about a lot of the problems I was facing and were not really focussed on by the agile community.

I voraciously read the blog and the first thing I tried was to create a product manifesto with the team. I was pretty nervous taking our heavily development team away from their desks to think about a manifesto. However, my doubts were unfounded, the team thought it extremely useful, we printed the manifesto large and put it on the wall next to our open plan space and I immediately noted the difference. Little ways that we behaved differently and the way that being reminded of what we were about as a team and product focussed our attention. Since then I have tried many tips from Marty and get similar results.

In this book, Marty explains the role of the product (development) manager, which in agile speak, is often the product owner, giving great practical tips and examples of how to create great usable products. He describes useful techniques, that I regularly use, like product opportunity assessments, personas and high fidelity prototypes, amongst others. But more importantly he describes where the product manager fits into the whole product development process and defines what product development is.

In fact I managed to get the BBC bring Marty over to do a workshop and he made a really big impact (even if annoyingly I had left by the time he did it!).

If there is one criticism, it is that this is essentially a digest of Marty’s blog postings. But hey, I much prefer having it to hand on my desk, and the content is very well structured.

If you are in charge of a product or starting one then I recommend you read this book. It has definitely given me a whole suite of tools that I use for every project I work on whether in a small startup or large company.

A good product manager needs to understand all parts of the software product development process. Interaction design is one of those disciplines that I find hard to explain to people and an area that I am focussing on to increase my skill set. This book was brilliant and gave me a new way to look at those brilliant apps (like google mail and flickr and lightroom) and the thinking that goes on behind them.

About Face 3 focuses on designing highly interactive apps from the perspective of fulfilling user needs and describes a number of techniques and guidelines for how to achieve this. The book has an increased relevance for web applications as the diffusion of easy Javascript libraries like JQuery and RIA technologies like Flex and Silverlight are blurring the boundaries with desktop applications. Highly recommended.