Marty Cagan

The Comprehensive, Proven Approach to IT Scalability–Updated with New Strategies, Technologies, and Case Studies In The Art of Scalability, Second Edition, leading scalability consultants Martin L. Abbott and Michael T. Fisher cover everything you need to know to smoothly scale products and services for any requirement. This extensively revised edition reflects new technologies, strategies, and lessons, as well as new case studies from the authors’ pioneering consulting practice, AKF Partners. Writing for technical and nontechnical decision-makers, Abbott and Fisher cover everything that impacts scalability, including architecture, process, people, organization, and technology. Their insights and recommendations reflect more than thirty years of experience at companies ranging from eBay to Visa, and Salesforce.com to Apple. You’ll find updated strategies for structuring organizations to maximize agility and scalability, as well as new insights into the cloud (IaaS/PaaS) transition, NoSQL, DevOps, business metrics, and more. Using this guide’s tools and advice, you can systematically clear away obstacles to scalability–and achieve unprecedented IT and business performance. Coverage includes • Why scalability problems start with organizations and people, not technology, and what to do about it • Actionable lessons from real successes and failures • Staffing, structuring, and leading the agile, scalable organization • Scaling processes for hyper-growth environments • Architecting scalability: proprietary models for clarifying needs and making choices–including 15 key success principles • Emerging technologies and challenges: data cost, datacenter planning, cloud evolution, and customer-aligned monitoring • Measuring availability, capacity, load, and performance

Rapid iteration, A/B testing, and growth hacking--these buzzwords have everyone's attention in product management today. But while they dominate the current discussion, something even more significant has been lost in their limelight: long-term value creation for the customer. Product advisors Rajesh Nerlikar and Ben Foster believe that consistently delivering meaningful outcomes requires a deep understanding of your customer's definition of success. Combine a bold customer-centric vision with a practical execution strategy, and you have a recipe that reveals product development priorities and the pathway to innovation. In Build What Matters, Rajesh and Ben introduce you to their methodology for becoming a product-driven company. Through their tested strategies and stories of success, you'll learn how Vision-Led Product Management helps you achieve company objectives by meeting both current and future customer needs.

"Radical Focus is a must-read for anyone who wants to accomplish out-sized results. Christina does a great job showing both the why and the how of OKRs. Avoid the all-too-common mistakes by reading this book first." - Teresa Torres, author Continuous Discovery Habits "This book is useful, actionable, and actually fun to read! If you want to get your team aligned around real, measurable goals, Radical Focus will teach you how to do it quickly and clearly." - Laura Klein, Principal, Users Know The award-winning author of The Team That Managed Itself and Pencil Me In returns with a new and expanded edition of her landmark book on OKRs. If you’ve ever wanted to know how to use OKRs, or why yours might not be working, Radical Focus teaches you everything you need to achieve your goals. The author pulls from her experience with Silicon Valley’s hottest companies to teach practical insights on OKRs in the form of a fable.When Hanna and Jack receive an ultimatum from the only investor in their struggling tea supply company, they must learn how to employ Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) with radical focus to get the right things done. Using Hanna and Jack’s story, Wodtke walks readers through how to inspire a diverse team to work together in pursuit of a single, challenging goal, and how to stay motivated despite setbacks and failures.Radical Focus has been translated into six languages and sold more than 50,000 copies. Now, the second edition of her OKR manifesto proves that Wodtke’s business strategies are essential in a world where focus seems to be a more and more unreachable goal. The updated version includes 22,000 words of all-new material designed to help OKR users in larger companies create, grade, and manage OKRs in ways that accelerate success and drive rapid organizational learning.Ready to move your team in the right direction? Read this book together, and learn Wodtke’s powerful system for attaining your most important goals with radical focus.

Ben Horowitz, cofounder of Andreessen Horowitz and one of Silicon Valley's most respected and experienced entrepreneurs, offers essential advice on building and running a startup—practical wisdom for managing the toughest problems business school doesn’t cover, based on his popular ben’s blog. While many people talk about how great it is to start a business, very few are honest about how difficult it is to run one. Ben Horowitz analyzes the problems that confront leaders every day, sharing the insights he’s gained developing, managing, selling, buying, investing in, and supervising technology companies. A lifelong rap fanatic, he amplifies business lessons with lyrics from his favorite songs, telling it straight about everything from firing friends to poaching competitors, cultivating and sustaining a CEO mentality to knowing the right time to cash in. Filled with his trademark humor and straight talk, The Hard Thing About Hard Things is invaluable for veteran entrepreneurs as well as those aspiring to their own new ventures, drawing from Horowitz's personal and often humbling experiences.

Marc Andreesen once said that "markets that don't exist don't care how smart you are." Whether you're a startup founder trying to disrupt an industry, or an intrapreneur trying to provoke change from within, your biggest risk is building something nobody wants. Lean Analytics can help. By measuring and analyzing as you grow, you can validate whether a problem is real, find the right customers, and decide what to build, how to monetize it, and how to spread the word. Focusing on the One Metric That Matters to your business right now gives you the focus you need to move ahead--and the discipline to know when to change course. Written by Alistair Croll (Coradiant, CloudOps, Startupfest) and Ben Yoskovitz (Year One Labs, GoInstant), the book lays out practical, proven steps to take your startup from initial idea to product/market fit and beyond. Packed with over 30 case studies, and based on a year of interviews with over a hundred founders and investors, the book is an invaluable, practical guide for Lean Startup practitioners everywhere.

User story mapping is a valuable tool for software development, once you understand why and how to use it. This insightful book examines how this often misunderstood technique can help your team stay focused on users and their needs without getting lost in the enthusiasm for individual product features. Author Jeff Patton shows you how changeable story maps enable your team to hold better conversations about the project throughout the development process. Your team will learn to come away with a shared understanding of what you’re attempting to build and why. Get a high level view of story mapping, with an exercise to learn key concepts quicklyUnderstand how stories really work, and how they come to life in Agile and Lean projectsDive into a story’s lifecycle, starting with opportunities and moving deeper into discoveryPrepare your stories, pay attention while they’re built, and learn from those you convert to working software

From inside Google Ventures, a unique five-day process for solving tough problems, proven at thousands of companies in mobile, e-commerce, healthcare, finance, and more. Entrepreneurs and leaders face big questions every day: What’s the most important place to focus your effort, and how do you start? What will your idea look like in real life? How many meetings and discussions does it take before you can be sure you have the right solution? Now there’s a surefire way to answer these important questions: the Design Sprint, created at Google by Jake Knapp. This method is like fast-forwarding into the future, so you can see how customers react before you invest all the time and expense of creating your new product, service, or campaign. In a Design Sprint, you take a small team, clear your schedules for a week, and rapidly progress from problem, to prototype, to tested solution using the step-by-step five-day process in this book. A practical guide to answering critical business questions, Sprint is a book for teams of any size, from small startups to Fortune 100s, from teachers to nonprofits. It can replace the old office defaults with a smarter, more respectful, and more effective way of solving problems that brings out the best contributions of everyone on the team—and helps you spend your time on work that really matters.

Learn to design, build, and scale products consumers can’t get enough of How do today’s most successful tech companies―Amazon, Google, Facebook, Netflix, Tesla―design, develop, and deploy the products that have earned the love of literally billions of people around the world? Perhaps surprisingly, they do it very differently than most tech companies. In INSPIRED, technology product management thought leader Marty Cagan provides readers with a master class in how to structure and staff a vibrant and successful product organization, and how to discover and deliver technology products that your customers will love―and that will work for your business. With sections on assembling the right people and skillsets, discovering the right product, embracing an effective yet lightweight process, and creating a strong product culture, readers can take the information they learn and immediately leverage it within their own organizations―dramatically improving their own product efforts. Whether you’re an early-stage startup working to get to product/market fit, or a growth-stage company working to scale your product organization, or a large, long-established company trying to regain your ability to consistently deliver new value for your customers, INSPIRED will take you and your product organization to a new level of customer engagement, consistent innovation, and business success. Filled with the author’s own personal stories―and profiles of some of today’s most-successful product managers and technology-powered product companies, including Adobe, Apple, BBC, Google, Microsoft, and Netflix―INSPIRED will show you how to turn up the dial of your own product efforts, creating technology products your customers love. The first edition of INSPIRED, published ten years ago, established itself as the primary reference for technology product managers, and can be found on the shelves of nearly every successful technology product company worldwide. This thoroughly updated second edition shares the same objective of being the most valuable resource for technology product managers, yet it is completely new―sharing the latest practices and techniques of today’s most-successful tech product companies, and the men and women behind every great product.