The tried, tested & debated list of resources for the busy Product Manager

Skill development for product managers

29 Jun 2018

Getting the Product-Market fit right is tricky. Building a profitable product is even more difficult. If you ever had a chance to build, manage or ship a product, you will know what we are referring to. As a product manager - you are the one who is going to lead the product from conception to completion. More often than not, you are so swamped with your work that you can’t keep in touch with current trends and industry best practices. We get it!

Through our journey of getting the product-market fit right, scaling the product, and making it profitable - We have learnt A LOT! What you’ll find below is a list of resources we had bookmarked, and kept referring to time and again!

There are podcasts, videos, essays, stories, interviews, books, tools, ask-me-anything groups - everything that’s easy to access and refer to when the need arises!

To make it even simpler, we’ve organized them into sections, addressing each critical facet of managing a product; namely,

Strategic Planning
Execution
Skill Development For Product Managers

Bookmark them, read them, internalize them - This is your one-stop guide to being a resourceful product manager!

Strategic Planning

Strategic planning, ideally, follows a top-down approach unifying overall company objectives with the ones at the product level. It’s always better to know where you’d like to go, before you start building your way to get there!

Product Management 101

If you’re just breaking into the job of managing a product, this list could pretty well be your Bible!

A Product Manager’s Job - Josh Elman, Partner at Greylock Partners. Previously Twitter, Facebook.
Be a Great Product Leader - Adam Nash, EIR at Greylock Partners. Previously Wealthfront, LinkedIn, eBay, Apple.
What distinguishes the top 1% of PMs from the rest - Ian McAllister, Director of Alexa International at Amazon.
Let’s talk about Product Management - Josh Elman, Partner at Greylock Partners. Previously Twitter, Facebook.
PM at Microsoft - Steven Sinofsky, Veteran Product Development Leader.
How to Hire a Product Manager - Ken Norton, Partner, GV (Google Ventures). Previously, Product Manager at Google.
Good Product Manager/Bad Product Manager - Ben Horowitz, Co-founder and General Partner, Andreessen Horowitz
Great PMs don’t spend their time on solutions - Paul Adams, VP of Product, Intercom.
The DNA of Product Management - Hunter Walk, Partner at Homebrew VC. Previously YouTube, Google, Second Life.
Top Hacks from a PM Behind Two of Tech’s Hottest Products - First Round Review.
Lessons in product management with Intercom’s Colin Bentley and Brian Donohue - Intercom.

Product Vision & Strategy

The product vision represents the core essence of a product or a product line - it sets the direction for where a product is headed, or the needs a product is expected to address.

Complexity and Strategy - Terry Crowley on Hacker Noon.
If your product is Great, it doesn’t need to be Good - Paul Buchheit, Creator of Gmail.
All Markets Are Not Created Equal: 10 Factors To Consider When Evaluating Digital Marketplaces - Bill Gurley, General Partner, Benchmark Capital. Previously GrubHub, NextDoor, OpenTable.
Getting product strategy right - Des Traynor, Co-Founder & CEO, Intercom.
How to Develop Your Product Strategy - This is Product Management.
[Talk] Value Proposition Design - Alexander Osterwalder, Lead Author, Business Model Generation.
Blue Ocean Strategy - Summary by Allen Cheng, Co-founder, PrepScholar.
Are You Solving the Right Problems? Harvard Business Review (HBR).
Talk: Product strategy in 7 minutes - Des Traynor, Co-Founder & CEO, Intercom.
Vision vs Strategy - Marty Cagan - Silicon Valley Product Group.
[Talk] Job to be done - Clayton Christensen, Harvard Business School.
Know Your Customers’ “Jobs to Be Done” - Clayton Christensen, HBR

User Research

Building a deeper understanding of your users, their needs, motivations and how they intend to use your product - that’s user research for you! You will need actionable or testable data for future iterations.

A Practical Guide to User Needs - Julia Mitelman, Amazon Fashion.
What is User Research - Timothy Embretson, Invision.
10 Things I’ve Learned About Customer Development - Cindy Alvarez, Author, Lean Customer Development.
How to choose the right UX metrics for your product - Kerry Rodden, Google, YouTube.
Get the most out of your research with storytelling - Jillian Wells, Senior Product Researcher, Intercom.
How Do Users Really Hold Mobile Devices - Steven Hoober, UX Matters.
How to Design Your Customer Validation to Maximize Product/Market Fit - Sachin Rekhi, Notejoy.
Exploratory Research is Product Management - Teena Singh, Director Of User Experience, ADP.
How To Run A User Interview - Emmett Shear, Founder and CEO of Justin.tv and Twitch.

Competitor Research

As a product manager, you are often advised to focus purely on the customer. But, a smart product manager will always keep an eye on the competitor! It’s just good sense to know what your competitors are up to - their product visions, their marketing strategies, the language used to describe their products to the market, the core problems that their products solve, etc.

Doing a competitive analysis - Open Classrooms.
Real competitive analysis is about learning to love your competitor - Chris Butler, Director of AI at Philosophie NYC.

Customer Journey

A customer journey map, in plain simple words, helps you build a better product. It is a graphic or narrative representation of the customer’s relationship with a company, product or service. It shows the overlap between the customer’s expectations and the requirements of the business!

Customer Journey Mapping: Everything You Need to Know - SailThru.
How to Create a Customer Journey Map - UX Mastery.
A Step By Step Guide To Building Customer Journey Maps - ConversionXL (CXL).
Journey Mapping Powers Better Design Thinking - Jay Melone, Invision.
How to Run an Empathy & User Journey Mapping Workshop - Harry Brignull, Head of UX, Smart Pension. Previously Spotify and Clearleft.

Execution

This next phase is all about getting your product built, tested and delivered to the market! As a product manager, this is when you roll up your sleeves and get the product out there where it needs to be.

Product Design

Product design involves owning the entire process of sketching, collaborating, designing, writing CSS rules and structuring everything in a proper manner - something developers can integrate into their workflow without compromising on the design quality. What’s in it for a product manager? Product managers are responsible for the overall development of the product - this might include adding additional functionalities to the product, or making it simpler!

Design Thinking 101 - Sarah Gibbons, Nielsen Norman Group.
Product Designers: Artists of the Intangible - Chrys Bader.
Invisible design: why is less more? - Intercom.
Crafting The First Mile Of Product - Scott Belsky, Founder, Behance.

Wireframing & Specs

A wireframe is a static, low-fidelity representation of different layouts that form a product - a visual representation of an interface, to communicate the structure, content and functionality. Product specs include user stories, user personas, functional specs, and a business case to communicate the value the product will create for the user and the business.

UX Crash Course: 31 Fundamentals - Joel Marsh, The Hipper Element.
Wireframing for UX: What it is and how to get better at it - Ben Rowe, UX Mastery.
How to get value from wireframes - Dustin Senos, Former Head of Design, Medium.
Working Backwards - Werner Vogels, CTO, Amazon.com.

Roadmapping

A product roadmap is a high-level visual summary of the vision and direction of your product offering over time. It’s best created with cross-functional inputs from the engineering, sales and marketing teams, as well as the management!

Before You Plan Your Product Roadmap - Des Traynor, Co-Founder & CEO, Intercom.
The 666 Roadmap - Paul Adams, VP of Product, Intercom.
Guide To Product Planning: Three Feature Buckets - Adam Nash, EIR at Greylock Partners.
How To Build A Product Roadmap Everyone Understands - Andrea Saez, ProdPad.
This Product Prioritization System Nabbed Pandora 70 Million Monthly Users with Just 40 Engineers - Tom Conrad, Pandora CTO.
Themes: A Small Change To Product Roadmaps With Large Effects - Jared M. Spool, Founder of @UIE.
The 80/20 Rule in User Experience - Arin Bhowmick, Global VP Design, IBM.
The One Cost Engineers and Product Managers Don’t Consider - Kris Gale, VP Engineering, Yammer.
What Are The Best Ways To Prioritize A List Of Product Features? - Quora.

Sprint Planning

A sprint is a set period of time during which specific work has to be completed and made ready for review. Each sprint begins with a planning meeting between the product owner (manager) and the development team. Agile is a commonly known group of software development methodologies where sprint cycles are used.

20 Product Prioritization Techniques - Folding Burritos.
The Next Feature Fallacy - Andrew Chen, General Partner, Andreessen Horowitz.
The Time Value Of Shipping - The Black Box of Product Management.
Babe Ruth And Feature Lists - Why Prioritized Feature Lists Can Be Poisonous - GV Library.

Prototyping

Prototypes are simply a snapshot of the product or service at that ‘point in time’. Prototyping helps reduce business risk, communicate and demonstrate the solution to the business, obtain customer feedback and gain insights into whether the product is doing its job!

Wireframing, Prototyping, Mockuping - What’s The Difference? - Marcin Treder, CEO, UXPin.
What Is A Prototype: A Guide To Functional UX - Jerry Cao, UXPin.
6 Steps To Superior Product Prototyping: Lessons From An Apple And Oculus Engineer - Caitlin Kalinowski, First Round Review.
Designing Interactive Experiences - The ‘What, When and How’ Of Interactive Prototyping - Eder Rengifo, Product Designer, Able.

Product Development

This is the phase where everything comes together - product design, wireframing, specs, roadmapping, prototyping and all the steps that lead to the creation of the final product!

Speed As A Habit - Dave Girouard, CEO, Upstart.
Peacetime PM/Wartime PM - Noah Weiss, Head of Search, Learning, Intelligence, Slack.
Metrics VS Experience - Julie Zhou, Product Design VP, Facebook.
Putting On The Shipping Goggles - Jason Fried, Co-founder, Basecamp.
The Right Way To Ship Software - Jocelyn Goldfein, Former Engineering Executive, Facebook and VMware.
Amazon’s Friction-Killing Tactics To Make Products More Seamless - First Round Review.

Feedback Loop

A ‘continuous’ customer feedback loop designed well, maximises the benefits of gathering, recording and synthesizing feedback!

What You Can Do To Simplify Your Products - Ameet Ranadive, Entrepreneur.
Designing Your Product’s Continuous Feedback Loop - Sachin Rekhi, Notejoy.
A Minimum Viable Product Is Not A Product, It’s A Process - Yevgeniy Brikman, Y Combinator.
Slack’s First Product Manager On How To Make A Firehose Of Feedback Useful - Kenneth Berger, Slack, First Round Review.

Data & Analytics

Product management is data-driven! Analytics helps understand user behaviour, is a great tool to measure the progress of a product, to check if the product is viable, make informed product decisions, and also provides future inspiration for product work! It influences all the decisions leading to product development, including roadmaps, product design, wireframing, etc.

Everything A Product Manager Needs To Know About Analytics - Mind The Product.
The Only Metric That Matters - Josh Elman, Partner at Greylock Partners. Previously Twitter, Facebook.
Lean Analytics - Hiten Shah, Co-founder, Kissmetrics.
Lean Analytics - A Workshop By Google Ventures - Alistair Croll.

Skill Development For Product Managers

Product management is an ongoing process - there is always room for innovation, and improvement! Product managers can learn a lot simply by observing their contemporaries, understanding the market, analysing the best practices of their competition, and upgrading their functional knowledge.

Collaboration

One of the key features of a successful product manager - the ability to work in a collaborative way across different teams and departments to bring in new products, and increase the profitability of existing products!

How To Work With Engineers - A Cheat Sheet For Designers - Julie Zhou, Product Design VP, Facebook
Top Hacks From A PM Behind Two Of Tech’s Hottest Products - First Round Review.
The Job Of Leadership - Ev Williams, CEO, Medium.
How To Present Designs - Julie Zhou, Product Design VP, Facebook.

Communication

As a product manager, most of your time will be spent communicating ideas, plans, tasks, designs, etc.! There’ll be mails, presentations, specs and bug tickets!