# Inspired > Building products customers love — an AI agent skill based on *Inspired* by Marty Cagan. Published 2026-02-23 · Updated 2026-08-17 · Product & Innovation · Free and MIT-licensed Canonical: https://skills.wondel.ai/skills/inspired-product/ Source: https://github.com/wondelai/skills/tree/main/inspired-product **Install:** `npx skills add wondelai/skills/inspired-product --global` ## What is the Inspired skill? Marty Cagan’s Inspired is about how strong product organizations work, and this skill hands that model to your agent: the four risks tackled during discovery before anything is committed to delivery, teams given problems rather than dated feature lists, and a product vision and strategy concrete enough for a team to act on. ## Key concepts from Inspired your agent applies - **Empowered Product Teams** — Give teams problems to solve, not features to build. Empower them with context, trust, and accountability for outcomes. - **Product Discovery** — Separate discovery (figuring out what to build) from delivery (building it). Tackle risks before writing production code. - **Four Key Risks** — Address value risk (will customers buy it?), usability risk, feasibility risk, and business viability risk during discovery. - **Product Vision & Strategy** — Define a compelling product vision for 2-5 years out. Derive a product strategy with a sequence of focused bets. - **Prototype to Test** — Build rapid prototypes — feasibility, user, and live-data — to validate ideas before committing engineering resources. ## When to use Inspired — and when not to Reach for it when: - Your roadmap is a set of dated feature commitments and the team’s job is to deliver them on schedule. - Engineers first see a design once it is finished, and are asked how long rather than whether it is buildable. - Every release ships and nothing moves, because nobody agreed beforehand what the feature was meant to change. - You have three product managers and none of them can describe what the product should be in two years. Reach for something else when: - You want the weekly mechanics — trees, interview cadence, assumption maps — rather than the org model, so use Continuous Discovery. - The team question is really about cognitive load and flow across many teams — Team Topologies goes considerably deeper. - You are one founder with no product team to empower — Lean Startup and The Mom Test will do more for you today. - The failure is scope that never stops growing rather than teams that lack ownership — The 37signals Way caps it. ## About Marty Cagan Founder of SVPG, former VP Product at eBay and Netscape. Marty Cagan is the founder of the Silicon Valley Product Group (SVPG) and a former VP of Product at eBay, Netscape, and HP. He has advised many of the world's most successful tech companies on building great products. The book: https://openlibrary.org/books/OL28110327M/Inspired ## Example prompts - Assess the four key risks for this product idea and suggest discovery activities using inspired-product skill _(Product discovery)_ - Draft a product vision and strategy for the next 2 years using inspired-product skill _(Product strategy)_ - Design a product team structure that empowers teams to own outcomes using inspired-product skill _(Org design)_ - Create a discovery plan to de-risk our next big feature bet using inspired-product skill _(Product planning)_ ## Frequently asked questions ### How do I install the Inspired skill? Run `npx skills add wondelai/skills/inspired-product --global`. It takes about 30 seconds and needs no account. The Inspired skill then works in Claude, Claude Code, Claude Cowork, Codex, Cursor, OpenClaw and Hermes Agent — anything that reads the open agentskills.io format — and your agent loads it on its own when a task calls for it. It is free and MIT-licensed, and the source is at https://github.com/wondelai/skills. ### Which book is the Inspired skill based on? It packages *Inspired* by Marty Cagan — founder of SVPG, former VP Product at eBay and Netscape. The skill distils the book's method into instructions your agent follows while it works, covering empowered product teams, product discovery and four key risks. It sits in the Product & Innovation part of the library. ### How does this compare with The 37signals Way? They are both opinionated about how product work should run and they disagree usefully. Cagan’s unit is an empowered cross-functional team handed an outcome and held to it, with discovery running permanently alongside delivery — a model built to scale across many teams in a large company. Shape Up’s unit is a shaped, appetite-bounded bet given to three people for six weeks, with no backlog. Choose by your actual constraint: Inspired if teams are disempowered, The 37signals Way if scope never stops growing. ### What are the four risks? Value — will anyone choose to buy or use it. Usability — can they work out how. Feasibility — can we build it with the technology, people and time we have. Business viability — does it work for sales, legal, finance, privacy and the brand. The list is not the point; the sequencing is. All four are meant to be addressed during discovery by the product trio, before engineering commits. Most teams test feasibility late and viability at the launch review, which is precisely when a late objection becomes a rebuild. ### Do I need to read Inspired? No — it is sixty-odd short chapters and the skill carries the operational core: the four risks, the discovery-delivery split, the prototype types, the vision-to-strategy chain, the anatomy of an empowered team. What the book supplies is ammunition. Its chapters on why feature factories fail are the ones people quote in leadership meetings when someone asks why the roadmap has no dates, and that argument is not something an agent can have on your behalf. ### Can I use this without the authority to change how the company runs? Partly, and it is worth knowing which part. The discovery techniques — risk assessment, prototype types, testing with customers before building — you can start inside one team on Monday, and the evidence they produce is what eventually makes the larger case. Empowerment, team structure and killing date-driven roadmaps need a sponsor. Ask the skill to split its recommendations into what you can adopt unilaterally and what needs permission; that split is the honest scope of this quarter. ## Related - All Product & Innovation skills: https://skills.wondel.ai/skills/product/ - Jobs to Be Done: https://skills.wondel.ai/skills/jobs-to-be-done/ - Hooked UX: https://skills.wondel.ai/skills/hooked-ux/ - Improve Retention: https://skills.wondel.ai/skills/improve-retention/ - Lean Startup: https://skills.wondel.ai/skills/lean-startup/ - Design Sprint: https://skills.wondel.ai/skills/design-sprint/ - Continuous Discovery: https://skills.wondel.ai/skills/continuous-discovery/ - The Mom Test: https://skills.wondel.ai/skills/mom-test/ - The 37signals Way: https://skills.wondel.ai/skills/37signals-way/ - Lean Analytics: https://skills.wondel.ai/skills/lean-analytics/