Have you read Marty Cagan’s excellent book “Inspired: How to Create Products That Customers Love”? Marty Cagan has conceptualized and produced products for some of the world’s most prominent businesses, notably Hewlett-Packard, Netscape Communications, America Online, and eBay, during the last 30 years. Marty Cagan, the Silicon Valley Product Group creator, drove directly to the core of what it takes to create a great product.

Even though the book is now more than five years old, it remains a relevant and valuable guide that demonstrates how the finest companies build innovative and compelling products and how you may do the same. The book’s ideas, such as the “minimal product,” agile development, and customer discovery, are all congruent with the lean startup approach to product creation. Eric Ries’ talent was in crafting a shared language and unifying brand that sparked a global movement, putting customer value at the center of product development and building a startup-friendly approach.

Below are the essential concepts from both the lecture and the book and how you can utilize some basic methods to enable you to create great products.

Begin with a purpose

Cagan’s first rule is to start with a purpose and a passion for what you’re doing. Passion and purpose without application of intelligence, on the other hand, will lead you nowhere quickly. Make a concerted effort to achieve this, and you’ll prevent what Cagan describes as the single most common cause of product failure.

Concentrate mainly on discovery

The startup founder’s (or product owner’s) key task is to find a valuable, usable, and practical product. It’s pointless to start developing something unless you have proof that you’ve discovered the product.

Before you can solve a problem, you must first define it

It’s a good idea to learn what problem you’re attempting to solve, who you’re working to solve it for, and how you’ll know whether you’re successful before going into the answer. To ensure that the product you give has true value, you have to get to know your clients and their reality.

Establish an amazing team

The team should include members with backgrounds in business, design, and engineering. The idea is to bring in the proper individuals and give them the freedom to execute determinations. In his notes:  “You can’t create a dedicated team and then give them a top-down feature-driven roadmap of development. This yields much worse results than the alternative, which is to give that team a set of outcomes that you’re asking them to figure out.”

Create a personal charter program

 Set up a charter user program to gain a deeper understanding of your prospective customers and have excellent reference clientele at launching. Your goal is to have at least six pleased, living, and referable clients from your target market at the end of the process. The idea is to identify customers who perceive a genuine problem that needs to be solved as early as possible.

Make some product guidelines.

One of the most critical functions of a product owner is to make decisions. Create a list of product standards to help you determine and prioritize what’s important to you and gain a better understanding of your company’s identity.

From the start, hire a designer.

The user experience is crucial for most software solutions. To create a valuable, usable, and viable user experience, you’ll need to work hand in hand with an interactive designer and an engineer.

Design prototypes and put them to the test with real people

The creation of an elevated prototype is one of the most essential product discovery strategies. It causes you to study the problem in greater depth and test your concepts with real people. The absolute most significant skill for product owners recognizes how to collect feedback on new products.

Measures to help you get better

When making significant decisions, data should be used, especially when seeking to improve an established product. Optimizing a product is more than just offering features that customers want; it’s about analyzing the product’s factors that get impacts and then constantly increasing the key metrics in the proper position.

Learning when to adjust and when to give up is essential

Many product groups give up too soon. They’ve given up far too soon. Your role is to be steadfast in your goal but adaptable in your execution. But there are moments when you must discern vision from illusion; other times, it will simply never exist.