In the mid‐1980s, I was a young software engineer working for Hewlett Packard on a high‐profile product. It was a time (the first time) when artificial intelligence was all the rage, and I was fortunate enough to be working at what was then one of the industry's best technology companies, as part of a very strong software engineering team (several members of that team went on to substantial success in companies across the industry).

Our assignment was a difficult one: to deliver AI‐enabling technology on a low‐cost, general‐purpose workstation that, until then, required a special‐purpose hardware/software combination that cost more than $100,000 per user—a price few could afford.

We worked long and hard for well over a year, sacrificing countless nights and weekends. Along the way, we added several patents to HP's portfolio. We developed the software to meet HP's exacting quality standards. We internationalized the product and localized it for several languages. We trained the sales force. We previewed our technology with the press and received excellent reviews. We were ready. We released. We celebrated the release.

Just one problem: No one bought it.

The product was a complete failure in the marketplace. Yes, it was technically impressive, and the reviewers loved it, but it wasn't something people wanted or needed.

The team was of course extremely frustrated with this outcome. But soon we began to ask ourselves some very important questions: Who decides what products we should build? How do they decide? How do they know that what we build will be useful?

Our young team learned something very profound—something many teams have discovered the hard way: It doesn't matter how good your engineering team is if they are not given something worthwhile to build.

When trying to track down the root cause of our failure, I learned that the decisions about what to build came from a product manager—someone who generally resided in the marketing organization and who was responsible for defining the products we built. But I also learned that product management wasn't something HP was particularly good at. I later learned that most companies weren't good at this either, and, in fact, most still aren't.

I promised myself that never again would I work so hard on a product unless I knew the product would be something that users and customers wanted.

Over the next 30 years, I have had the very good fortune to work on some of the most successful high‐tech products of our time—first at HP during the rise of personal computers; then at Netscape Communications during the rise of the Internet, where I worked as vice president of platform and tools; later at eBay during the rise of e‐commerce and marketplaces, where I served as the senior vice president of product and design; and then as an adviser to startups working with many of what have become today's most successful technology product companies.

Not every product effort has been as successful as others, but I am happy to say that none were failures, and several became loved and used by millions of people around the world.

Soon after I left eBay, I started getting calls from product organizations wanting to improve how they produced products. As I began working with these companies, I discovered that there was a tremendous difference between how the best companies produced products and how most companies produced them.

I realized that the state of the art was very different from the state of the practice.

Most companies were still using old and inefficient ways to discover and deliver products. I also learned that there was precious little help available, either from academia, including the best business school programs, or from industry organizations, which seemed hopelessly stuck in the failed models of the past—just like the one I worked in at HP.

I have had some great rides, and I am especially thankful that I have had the chance to work for and with some of the best product minds in the industry. The best ideas in this book are from these people. You will find a list of many of them in the acknowledgments. I have learned from them all, and I am grateful to each one of them.

I chose this career because I wanted to work on products that customers love—products that inspire and provide real value. I find that most product leaders also want to create inspiring and successful products. But most products are not inspiring, and life is too short for bad products.

My hope in writing this book is that it will help share the best practices of the most successful product companies and that the result will be truly inspiring products—products that customers love.

It is my strong belief, and the central concept driving this book, that behind every great product there is someone—usually someone behind the scenes, working tirelessly—who led the product team to combine technology and design to solve real customer problems in a way that met the needs of the business.

These people usually have the title product manager, but they might be a startup co‐founder or CEO, or they might be someone in another role on the team who stepped up because they saw the need.

Further, this product management role is very distinct from the design, engineering, marketing, or project manager roles.

This book is intended for these people.

Within modern technology product teams, the product manager has some very specific and very challenging responsibilities. It's a tremendously difficult job, and anyone who tries to tell you otherwise is not doing you any favors.

The product manager role is usually very much a full‐time assignment. I don't personally know many who are able to do what they need to do in less than 60 hours a week.

It's great if you're a designer or an engineer who also wants to serve as a product manager—there are some real advantages to that. But you'll find out pretty quickly that you're taking on an immense amount of work. If you're up for that, however, the results can be impressive.

A product team is comprised of at least a product manager and usually somewhere between 2 and 10 engineers. If you're creating a user‐facing product, you would expect to have a product designer on your team as well.

In this book, we explore the situation wherein you might have to use engineers or designers in a different location or from an agency or outsourcing firm. But regardless of how you assemble your team, this job and this book assume you have a team assigned to work with you to design, to build, and to deliver a product.

There are many kinds of products out there, but in this book, I concentrate exclusively on products that are powered by technology.

Some of what we explore in this book may help you if you're building non‐tech products, but there are no guarantees in that case. Frankly, there are already a wide variety of readily accessible resources for non‐tech products such as most consumer packaged goods, and for product managers of these non‐tech products.

My focus is on the unique issues and challenges associated with building technology‐powered products, services, and experiences.

Some good examples of the sweet spot that we explore are consumer‐service products, such as e‐commerce sites or marketplaces (e.g., Netflix, Airbnb, or Etsy), social media (e.g., Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter), business services (e.g., Salesforce.com, Workday, or Workiva), consumer devices (e.g., Apple, Sonos, or Tesla), and mobile applications (e.g., Uber, Audible, or Instagram).

Technology‐powered products do not need to be purely digital. Many of the best examples today are blends of online and offline experiences—like finding a ride or a room for the night, getting a home loan, or sending an overnight package.

It's my belief that most products today are transforming into technology‐powered products, and the companies that don't realize this are rapidly being disrupted. But, again, I'm only focused here on technology‐powered products, and those companies that believe they must embrace technology and consistently innovate on behalf of their customers.

In the technology world, we generally have three stages of companies: startups, growth‐stage, and enterprise companies. Let's briefly consider how we characterize each one of these stages, and the challenges you are likely to face in each.

I loosely define startup as a new product company that has yet to achieve product/market fit. Product/market fit is an extremely important concept that I'll define in the pages that follow, but for now, let's just say that the startup is still trying to come up with a product that can power a viable business.

In a startup, the product manager role is usually covered by one of the co‐founders. Typically, there are fewer than 25 engineers, covering a range of from one product team up to maybe four or five.

The reality of startup life is that you're in a race to achieve product/market fit before you run out of money. Nothing else much matters until you can come up with a strong product that meets the needs of an initial market, so most of the focus of the young company is necessarily on the product.

Startups usually have a limited amount of early funding, intended to determine if the company can discover and deliver the necessary product. The closer you come to running out of money, the more frantic the pace and the more desperate the team and the leadership becomes.

While money and time are typically tight, good startups are optimized to learn and move quickly, and there's normally very little bureaucracy to slow them down. Yet the very high failure rate of technology startups is no secret. The few that succeed are usually those that are really good at product discovery, which is a major topic of this book.

Working at a startup—racing toward product/market fit—is usually stressful, exhausting, and risky. But it can also be an amazingly positive experience, and if things go well, a financially rewarding one too.

Those startups skilled and fortunate enough (it usually takes both) to get to product/market fit are ready to tackle another equally difficult challenge: how to effectively grow and scale.

There are many very significant challenges involved in growing and scaling a startup into a large, successful business. While it's an extremely difficult challenge, it is, as we say, a good problem to have.

In addition to hiring lots more people, we need to figure out how to replicate our earlier successes with new, adjacent products and services. At the same time, we need to grow the core business as fast as possible.

In growth stage, we typically have somewhere between about 25 and several hundred engineers, so there are many more people around to help, but the signs of organizational stress are everywhere.

Product teams complain that they don't understand the big picture—they don't see how their work contributes to the larger goals, and they're struggling with what it means to be an empowered, autonomous team.

Sales and marketing often complain that the go‐to‐market strategies that worked for the first product are not so appropriate for some of the new products in the portfolio.

The technology infrastructure that was created to meet the needs of the initial product is often bursting at the seams, and you start to hear the term “technical debt” from every engineer you speak with.

This stage is also tough on leaders because the leadership style and mechanisms that worked while the company was a young startup often fail to scale. Leaders are forced to change their roles and, in many cases, their behaviors.

But the motivation to overcome these challenges is very strong. The company is often in pursuit of a public offering or, perhaps, becoming a major business unit of an existing company. As well as the very real possibility of having a significant and positive impact on the world can be very motivating.

For those companies that succeed in scaling and that want to create a lasting business, some of the toughest challenges still lie ahead.

Strong tech‐product companies know they need to ensure consistent product innovation. This means constantly creating new value for their customers and for their business. Not just tweaking and optimizing existing products (referred to as value capture) but, rather, developing each product to reach its full potential.

Yet, many large, enterprise companies have already embarked on a slow death spiral. They become all about leveraging the value and the brand that was created many years or even decades earlier. The death of an enterprise company rarely happens overnight, and a large company can stay afloat for many years. But, make no mistake about it, the organization is sinking, and the end state is all but certain.

It's not intentional, of course, but once companies reach this size—often becoming a publicly traded company—there are a tremendous number of stakeholders throughout the business working hard to protect what the company has created. Unfortunately, this often means shutting down new initiatives or ventures that could re‐create the business (but potentially put the core business at risk), or putting up so many obstacles to new ideas that few people are willing or able to drive the company in a new direction.

The symptoms of this are hard to miss, starting with diminished morale, the lack of innovation, and how much slower it is for new product work to get into the hands of customers.

When the company was young, it likely had a clear and compelling vision. When it achieves enterprise stage, however, the company has largely achieved that original vision and now people aren't sure what's next. Product teams complain about the lack of vision, lack of empowerment, the fact that it takes forever to get a decision made, and product work is turning into design by committee.

Leadership is likely frustrated, too, with the lack of innovation from the product teams. All too often, they resort to acquisitions or creating separate “innovation centers” to incubate new businesses in a protected environment. Yet this rarely results in the innovation they're so desperate for.

And you'll also hear lots of talk about how it is that large, enterprise companies such as Adobe, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Netflix have been able to avoid this fate. The organization's leadership team wonders why they can't do the same. The fact is they could do the same. But they'll need to make some pretty big changes, and that's what this book is about.