The four risks, and the one everyone skips
From the book Inspired
Marty Cagan’s Inspired reduces product work to four risks: is it valuable to the user, usable, feasible to build, and viable for the business. The list is easy to memorize and easy to misuse.
The misuse is treating it as a checklist you run after building. Cagan’s actual argument is about timing: these risks should be attacked during discovery, cheaply, with prototypes — before anyone writes production code. The list is a prompt for what to de-risk first, not a rubric for grading what you shipped.
The other trap is weighting the risks equally. They aren’t equal. Teams gravitate toward usability and feasibility because those are testable with familiar tools — run a usability session, ask an engineer. Value is harder to test and easier to assume, which is exactly why it kills more products than the other three combined. A clunky product that solves a real problem survives. A polished product nobody needs doesn’t.
One more thing worth keeping: viability is broader than revenue. It’s whether the business can and will actually support the product — legal, sales channel, cost structure, brand. Plenty of products die viable-on-paper.
Four risks, then. But really: value first, discovery early, and don’t confuse “we can build it” with “we should.”