Sample frameDay 180·Product · Discovery

Good morning. Most products that failed were built well. That was never the risk that killed them.

Product.

The Four Big Risks

5 min read·Apply by lunch

The question

For the thing sitting at the top of your roadmap right now — scoped, estimated, already promised to somebody — who inside your company owns the question of whether a real customer will choose it over what they're doing this morning, and what have they brought back so far that isn't your own team's confidence?

The idea

Marty Cagan began with a decade as a software developer at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, ran platform and tools at Netscape working directly for Marc Andreessen, and finished as senior vice-president of product and design at eBay before founding the Silicon Valley Product Group in 2001. Inspired, published in 2008 and rewritten in 2017 as Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love, starts from an uncomfortable admission: at least half the ideas on any roadmap simply won't work, and the ones that do usually need several passes before they deliver what was promised. Cagan's contribution isn't a better way to run a cheap test — Day 29 and the minimum viable product handle that — it's the observation that 'will this work' is four separate questions, taking four different kinds of evidence and answered by three owners, because the product manager carries two of them. Value: will anyone want it enough to buy it or choose it? Usability: can they work out how to use it? Feasibility: can our engineers build it with the time, skills and technology we actually have? Viability: does the rest of the business — legal, finance, sales, support, brand — work with it? The trap is that three of those can be rescued after the fact and one cannot. A confusing product gets redesigned, a fragile one gets rebuilt, an awkward one gets renegotiated. Nothing rescues a product nobody wanted.

The framework

01
Four risks, four different questions.
Most teams run one test and call it validation: they show a demo, the room nods, and the demo has quietly answered usability while leaving the other three untouched. Cagan's assignment is blunt — the product manager owns value and viability, the designer owns usability, the engineers own feasibility. Four risks, three owners: the product manager carries two, and the doubling is the assignment rather than an oversight, because value is answered outside the company and viability across the rest of it, and neither of those belongs to design or engineering. The point of naming an owner at all is that each goes looking for a different kind of evidence in a different place. Before anything else this week, write the four as four separate sentences about the thing you're building, and put a name against each one — two of them will be the same name.
02
Value is the risk you're least likely to have tested.
The other three can be settled inside your own building. A designer can watch somebody use a prototype; an engineer can spike the frightening part; finance and legal can read the terms and come back by Wednesday. Value can't be settled that way at any price, because the only person who can answer it doesn't work for you and has no interest in your quarter. That is precisely why it drifts to the back of the queue: every other risk has somebody in the office who can close it out, and value requires you to go outside and be told no.
03
Who is answering which one this week?
The four are meant to be worked at the same time, by different people, in days — not passed down a line as a document, and not deferred into delivery, where a wrong answer costs a quarter of engineering and the standing of whoever promised it. So run four tests in parallel across the three of you: the designer in front of a real user, the engineer on a two-hour spike, and both of yours — one call with legal to settle viability, and you outside the building on value. Day 29 gives you the mechanics of any single test — the threshold, the decision date. Cagan's addition is that you should be running four at once.

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