Visualizing Transformed by Marty Cagan

Creating a visual overview to retain information and make it explorable

If you are just looking for the Visual Overview this way. Read on when you are interested in the process.

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Like many in the Product Community, I just finished reading the latest book by Marty Cagan and SVPG — Transformed.

This book is packed with information about the introduced Product Operation Model and how to transform an organization into such a model. Although Marty's writing is very accessible and well structured, I know I will forget about parts and need to search again for the concept details.

The same happens to me all the time with books. I remember roughly the concepts described, but I’m searching through the book to find the part that describes a certain point.

This time, I thought I would visualize the book while reading. As a result, I wanted an overview to recheck the concepts and know where to look for more details.

The result

Below is a screenshot of the whole Miro Board. But please go to the board yourself and explore it.

The process

The process was pretty straightforward. I didn’t want to spend ages distilling and remolding the whole book. I wanted to quickly get the gist of it and be able to find something specific again. Think of it like an advanced table of contents.

While reading, I wrote down headlines and essential points for me on stickies, connected them, and added the chapter. It helped a lot that the book's structure is already pretty straightforward, so I didn’t reorganize too much.

Many of the details are organized in trees. This is a pretty common information structure used for ages and makes it easier to explore a specific topic.

For example, here is the core of transformation as a tree structure:

I was thinking about cross-connecting the concepts within the book further, but I quickly found out that this would get too messy. It would need a second visualization from another perspective. Maybe I will do this later if needed.

However, to structure it further, I separated the bigger topics onto artboards and added a big sticky with a prompt to navigate quickly. See below for an example.

In some cases, I combined or broke apart chapters to organize them in a way that made more sense to my brain.

The Case Studies are completely separated onto one board. I wanted an overview of them, with a summary and attached results. They didn’t fit in the flow of the content, even if I enjoyed reading them in the dramaturgy of the book.

As a finishing touch, I added massive headlines and connections to create an even higher level of structure. Remember, my goal was to find specific information quickly from this book.

Initially, I created this just for myself. It was an experiment to see if this type of visualization would make sense for me. But after seeing it and already revisiting the board to re-assess the information, I thought, why not just share it publicly?

I love that Marty included portraits of some great Product Coaches, so I linked to their website or LinkedIn and included myself so people can reach out.

This is the Miro Board. Please feel free to use it as you please and share it with other readers of Marty’s work.

I would love to get feedback on this approach and the content extracted. Is this useful for you? Should I do this for other books I read?