Marty Cagan – Expert on all things product, founding partner of the Silicon Valley Product Group

If you have ever thought about creating or inventing ANYTHING….seriously listen to this episode.

How many ‘products’ do you think you use in a day?  Even if you just look at a small subset of your day, the list gets expansive.  Take your morning routine for example.  You probably use an alarm clock, a toothbrush, a towel, deodorant (hopefully) – the list goes on and on.  Hell, I can’t even add up how many products I use in my hair (BOOM, roasted….myself).  Now consider this.  These are just physical products.  But there is also another set of products that you probably didn’t even think of.  These are the products that my trusty sidekick Roach tends to focus his time on.  These are software products such as the Twitters, Facebooks, eBays, and Gmails of the world.  And it’s safe to assume that nearly every product, both physical and the opposite of physical (sorry – it’s been a long day) has gone through some product management lifecycle.  A process that the end users often take for granted. Somewhere along the line, the creator or creators of said product asked themselves questions such as, will people buy this, how do I make it, what should it look like.  These are very important questions that can ultimately determine the success or failure of entire companies. That’s why companies pay our guest this week a lot of money to make sure they get it right.

Marty Cagan is a founding partner of the Silicon Valley Product Group, where he helps companies create winning product strategies and develop the skills of their product organization as well as the techniques they use to create successful products. During the past 20 years, Marty has served as an executive responsible for defining and building products for some of the most successful companies in the world. He was most recently senior vice-president of product management and design for eBay, where he was responsible for defining products and services for the company’s global e-commerce trading site. Prior to that, Marty was vice-president of product at AOL and Netscape Communications, and a software engineer at HP Labs.  Marty wrote an awesome book that dives into product management titled, Inspired: How to Create Products That Customers Love.