Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love

Inspired, by Marty Cagan, walks product managers through how they can be most effective at their jobs. While it does a solid job explaining the role and what makes one good, the prose Cagan uses is not exactly scintillating.

Cagan highlights how important the interpersonal relationships are for product managers. They need to be able to interact with engineers, designers, customers, leadership, sales, marketing, and more to successfully grow their products.

Cagan also hits on the important ways that ideas should be generated. Realistically they can come from anywhere, but they should be tested and verified before moving into full scale development of a product.

One aspect of the book that was particularly lacking were the anecdotes from industry. While there were cool stories, none of the product managers mentioned gave unique or insightful takes.

Cagan succeeds in giving product managers a roadmap (despite the fact that he hates roadmaps) for how they can excel at their jobs. He fails at keeping the user engaged through his lackluster use of anecdotes.