Inspired
Building products customers love
Build products customers love using Marty Cagan's product management philosophy from SVPG. This skill equips your AI agent with product team structures, product discovery techniques, and the mindset shift from feature factories to empowered product teams.
Inspired
npx skills add wondelai/skills/inspired-product --global This skill is compatible with Claude, Claude Code, Claude Cowork, Codex, Cursor, OpenClaw, Hermes Agent, and other agentskills.io-compatible agents.
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.
Example prompts for the Inspired skill
Assess the four key risks for this product idea and suggest discovery activities using inspired-product skill
Product discoveryDraft a product vision and strategy for the next 2 years using inspired-product skill
Product strategyDesign a product team structure that empowers teams to own outcomes using inspired-product skill
Org designCreate a discovery plan to de-risk our next big feature bet using inspired-product skill
Product planningInspired vs the other Product & Innovation skills
All 10 Product & Innovation skills are free and install the same way — the only question is which framework fits the job in front of you.
| Skill | Based on | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Jobs to Be Done | Competing Against Luck — Clayton Christensen | JTBD framework for product innovation |
| Hooked UX | Hooked — Nir Eyal | Habit-forming product design |
| Improve Retention | Tiny Habits — BJ Fogg | Behavior design for user retention using B=MAP |
| Lean Startup | The Lean Startup — Eric Ries | Build-Measure-Learn methodology |
| Design Sprint | Sprint — Jake Knapp | 5-day process for validating ideas through prototyping |
| Continuous Discovery | Continuous Discovery Habits — Teresa Torres | Habits for continuous product discovery |
| Inspired | Inspired — Marty Cagan | Building products customers love |
| The Mom Test | The Mom Test — Rob Fitzpatrick | Customer conversations that reveal the truth |
| The 37signals Way | Shape Up — Jason Fried & DHH | Lean, opinionated product development from Getting Real to Shape Up |
| Lean Analytics | Lean Analytics — Alistair Croll & Benjamin Yoskovitz | Startup metrics and the One Metric That Matters |
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.
Guides that use this skill
Install Inspired
Free, open-source, and ready in 30 seconds.
npx skills add wondelai/skills/inspired-product --global MIT Licensed · Works with Claude, Claude Code, Claude Cowork, Codex, Cursor, OpenClaw, Hermes Agent & other agentskills.io agents · No account needed
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