Reddit reviews Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love

Great to hear that you're looking to get into product ownership, it's a great career with a bunch of learning opportunities and career options. Understanding agile and the various frameworks is a great start. It sounds like you have some technical understanding (although not a must, it can help tremendously) and also domain expertise...again more ticks. At its heart a PO is responsible for ensuring that what your team build is the correct thing. This can be summarised as the following

1. value risk (whether customers will buy it or users will choose to use it)
   
2. usability risk (whether users can figure out how to use it)
   
3. feasibility risk (whether our engineers can build what we need with the time, skills and technology we have)
   
4. business viability risk (whether this solution also works for the various aspects of our business)
   
   This work is often called 'Discovery' and learning how to ensure that these 4 critera are meet and then suitably broken down to stopries which can be consumed for your dev/qa team is keys. As with everything there is a host of methods/frameworks out there, but here is some articles i've found good.
   
   https://www.gov.uk/guidance/content-design/user-needs - a comon method for creating initial stories, and most improtantly makes you consider why you're creating the story as you need to talk to the benifit. (the british government's digital transformation is actually a great case study for PO's)
   
   https://www.devbridge.com/articles/how-to-set-up-dual-track-scrum-in-jira/ -Dual track scrum is a framework for creating a design framework which preceeds the dev/test sprint.
   
   I'd suggest trying to find out which agile methodology your company uses (Scrum, kanban etc) and then spending time gathering more info on the specific methodology. If Scrum then the key ceremonies a PO is needed for is Sprint Planning and Demos & Retrospectives. Learn what is expected of you during these ceremonies.
   
   A couple of books that i found useful:
   
   https://www.amazon.co.uk/Lean-Startup-Innovation-Successful-Businesses/dp/0670921602/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1541540223&sr=8-1&keywords=lean+startup - Lean Startup....kinda product mangement/owner essential reading
   
   https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sprint-Solve-Problems-Test-Ideas/dp/0593076117/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1541540263&sr=8-1&keywords=sprint - Sprint. A practical guide toi how to solve big problems. As you only have a week heres a 90 second video on it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2vSQPh6MCE
   
   https://www.amazon.co.uk/Inspired-Create-Tech-Products-Customers/dp/1119387507/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1541540364&sr=8-1&keywords=inspired - Inspired - A great book specifically on Product manangement but is also usefuil for PO's
   
   Once you become a PO, the trick is applying the host of diffrent frameworks and understanding what works best for your team is the tricky part. If you can find yourself a mentor it's a great help to do so as they can help you navigate potential hurdles.
   
   Hope this helps and good luck with the interview
   
   PS i didn't continue with education post GCSE, don't let that worry you.
   
   ​

I hope it's OK to repost my answer to a very similar question. The short answer is: it depends. Below is my long answer.

I have done product design for startups for 20 years. You have quite a long road ahead. Here is my suggestion:

• First validate that people want your product and will pay for it
  
• Build a prototype and put it in front of your core audience. My suggestion for a low cost way to do this is to use Balsamiq. If you have a better budget and good design skills, I suggest UXPin. Working with either of these will force you to start thinking about minor details of the product.
  
• If you struggle with design and flow and the product isn't working or you aren't happy with the design, hire a UI/UX designer. Have them create a few screens for you. Learn from their work. This should cost you $40-$85/hour.
  
• Now you are ready to see if your product is wanted. Sit down 1 on 1 with a person who is your core audience. Show them the product. Record the experience. I suggest using Screencastomatic. It records the screen interactions and records the person speaking with the webcam. It's free to start. Test your design with at least 10 people, 15-20 if you can. Make sure these people are not friends or family. Don't tell them you created the product. You want them to tell your their real thoughts. You don't want them to afraid to hurt your feelings. Offering a $15-$50 gift card for 1-2 hours of their time is typical in the industry. You might want to rent a conference room at a coworking space to have a professional and comfortable environment to conduct the testing.
  
• Before testing write a script. Here is a good article that will guide you to write the script.
  
• Listen hard to what people have to say. If there is a way to ask for money at the end of the test, do it. This is the real question, will someone pay for what you are building.
  
• Now you should start your marketing. You need to be marketing BEFORE you have a finished product. Create a simple, coming soon website. Have a single CTA (call to action) for the site. Use Wix or Squarespace or maybe even simply a Typeform embedded on single webpage. Collect an email or phone # with your CTA so that you can reach back out when your product is ready.
  
• To do marketing right you will need a logo and overall brand. These need to be good enough that people are confident in your product and marketing from your brand. But you can probably get a logo for less than $500. I would suggest 99 designs. They have a package for social media headers and logo for $399.
  
• You will need a domain that also has the social media accounts available for your brand name. Your product design should match for branding.
  
• Now start posting about product on social media regularly. Make sure you are building a following. You will need this for when you have finished the product.
  
• When you learn things from the user testing go back and make changes to the design.
  
• Now you will need to hire a developer. This will cost money. Only do this IF you have been successful in the previous steps. If you can't get people interested in your product from marketing and testing, don't build it. It costs too much to build before you have proven you can reach an interested audience.
  
• You can hire a freelancer or an agency. But either way make sure you hire someone who can show you their products in the App and Play stores if it is a mobile app. Ideally you won't be leading this on your own. You likely aren't qualified to know what is the right path and what is a reasonable cost and time. Things like whether you should build a PWA vs Native vs hybrid apps will be very important in the direction of the build. Each developer will be more skilled in one or the other. They will likely push what they're best at. If you can find someone to partner with who is technically skilled, you should, but that is hard to do. Take your time hiring this developer. If you happen to be in Dallas, I can recommend people. If not, try to build connections in your city in the tech community. So, when the time comes, you will at least have people to help guide you.
  
  
• Lastly, I'd recommend you read Inspired by Marty Cagan. This book will give you an idea of the venture you are undertaking.
  
  Good luck!

A lot of people recommended this book to me: Inspired. More relevant to Product Management than programming, but the concepts are probably useful to anyone in tech.