Companion pages listed to the right and also in the nav bar above cover resources and insights related to lean startup logic/methods; UX design; business development; marketing; and sales, among other topics.
Educators designing courses to train product managers may wish to review the syllabus for the Harvard Business School MBA elective, Product Management 101, in which students learn the basics of the tech PM role by designing and supervising development of a software app.
Product Management: Overview
- Dan Olsen's book, The Lean Product Playbook, describes how lean startup management practices can be applied at each stage of the product development process
- Chris Vander Mey's book, Shipping Greatness, provides practical guidance on the PM's role at each stage of the product life cycle
- Marty Cagan of Silicon Valley Product Group's Inspired (2nd edition) is a comprehensive guide to the product manager role; the SVPG blog extends the book's insights, as does the book Empowered by Cagan and Jones
- Flybridge Capital's Jeff Bussgang, NextView Venture's Rob Go and I have published an HBS course note on the product management function (sorry, this costs $7 at HBS Publishing online store; current HBS MBAs can get copy thru Baker Library)
- The podcast This Is Product Management features product professionals discussing the PM role and product development processes
- David Barrett, founder/CEO of Expensify, on "Why products suck" and how to improve them; Cagan on the same topic
- Cagan on the difference between old and new school product management
- Stefan Rossler compiles a list of 47 videos about product management
- Yilun Zhang's Hitchhiker's Guide to Product Management provides an introduction to all aspects of the PM role, with recommended readings by topic
- Good Product Manager/Bad Product Manager by a16z's Ben Horowitz
- Wealthfront CEO Adam Nash on the responsibilities of great product leaders and how the role changes over time
- Josh Elman explains the product manager role
- Product Manager, You Are… A Janitor, Essentially by Mat Balez makes the case that the notion of "PM as CEO of the product" is off target, because everyone reports to the CEO and no-one typically reports to a PM
- Ben Yoskovitz on the product manager's role
- Product Strategy Means Saying No by Des Traynor
- Dan Schmidt on the differences between product leaders who focus on users vs. technology vs. business issues
- Four Mistakes New Product Managers Make by Matt Schnitt focuses on rookie PM errors
- David Auerbach explains why CEOs should adopt the product manager's mindset, using Marissa Mayer as an example
- Marty Cagan on the pros and cons of having a startup CEO as head of product
- Andrew Chen on Square's concept of product leaders as "product editors."
- Seven Essential Skills for the Full Stack Product Person byAlex Cowan
- Do Product Managers Really Need a Background in CS? by Jackie Bavaro
- Management Cliches that Work, advice on managing communications and expectations, by ex-Microsoft executive Steven Sinofsky
- Quora Questions: 1) Product Management: What distinguishes the top 1% of product managers from the top 10%?; 2) How does one build muscle as a Product Manager? What skillset should one seek to master?
- What innate traits do great Internet product leaders share? by Chris Wetherell
- 27 Tools for Product Managers to Build-Measure-Learn by Ben Aston for The Product Manager
- User Story Mapping, Jeff Patton -- integrates agile development into a product development process that includes customer discovery and MVP testing. The book's core ideas are captured in this presentation
- InsightSquared cofounder Sam Clemens discusses product management processes
- First Round Review interview of Alex Le and Kavin Stewart, co-VPs of Product at Reddit, on product management processes and how they evolve over time
- Henrik Kniberg of Spotify explains how the company builds products
- Aaron Schildkrout, co-founder/co-CEO of HowAboutWe presents a seven-part series on product development philosophy and process
- Facebook's Julie Zhuo shares lessons learned about building products
- Ben Einstein of Bolt on hardware product development processes
- Steven Sinofsky, a former senior Microsoft executive, has written a series of posts on product development processes
- Marty Cagan of SVPG on time-boxed product discovery and on continuous product discovery as a natural extension of continuous software deployment
- Cagan on the difference between live-data prototypes and production software
- Jacques Murphy on the challenges of introducing product management to a startup
- Niniane Wang of Minted offers perspective on how to build great products
- Customer Development for Product Managers by Cindy Alvarez
- User Stories and Use Cases — Don't Use Both! Shane Hastie and Angela Wick
- SVPG's Marty Cagan calls for replacing product requirements with a focus on: 1) met vs. unrealized customer needs; and 2) customer- vs. technology-inspired solutions
- Cagan on How to Write a Good PRD
- Jared Spool says requirements gathering should be replaced with hypothesis testing
- The Specification is Dead; Long Live the Specification by Ben Yoskovitz
- Jason Moccla on Agile Requirements Definition and Management
- Quora response by Ian McAllister of Amazon on Amazon's approach to product management; Werner Vogels on the "Working Backwards" approach used by Amazon
- Adam Nash: Guide to Product Planning -- The Three Feature Buckets
- Pandora CTO Tom Conrad discusses the company's product prioritization process
- 20 Product Prioritization Techniques, by Daniel Zacarias. This long post describes and categorizes a set of techniques for prioritizing product features. In The Complete Guide to the Kano Model, Zacarias describes the Kano model for prioritizing features and offers step-by-step guidance on how to use it.
- Estimating, by Mitch Lacey. Comprehensive description of different methods for software project cost estimation
- Slack PM Kenneth Berger on prioritizing user feedback
- Quora: How to Prioritize a List of Product Features
- Gojko Adzic presents a case study of using the Attribute Component Capability Matrix to guide exploratory testing and control the risk of software updates, resulting in a big performance boost
- Before You Plan Your Product Roadmap, by Des Traynor. How/why to conduct a feature audit that shows the fraction of users who use each feature and their frequency of use.
- Product Prioritisation 101, by Martin Eriksson. Describes a scoring system that centers on KPIs.
- The Alternative to Roadmaps, by Marty Cagan. Makes the case for OKRs instead of roadmapping.
- Agile Estimating and Planning, by Mike Cohn. Presentation that covers the basics of agile planning and estimation.
- Jaclyn Perrone on design critiques at Pivotal Labs
- 9 Rules for Running a Productive Design Critique, by Jake Knapp, focuses on internal presentations on product work in progress
- Kathy Sierra on managing expectations and securing useful feedback with a product demo
- Your Product Demo Sucks Because It's Focused on Your Product, First Round Review interview of Monetate's Robert Falcone
- How to Make a Product Demo That Stands Out, by Oscar Santolalla
- Nine Things Product Managers Should Know About Supporting Sales, by Daniel Shefer, focuses on the PM role in sales pitches that entail product demos
- Demo This! How to ROCK Your Product Demo, by Tami Riess (34-minute video)
- Lessons Learned from Scaling a Product Team - Paul Adams
- The Product Death Cycle - Andrew Chen
- Juggling Multiple Platforms by Steven Sinofsky; Sinofsky on how incumbents should react to startups in their space offering novel features
- Everyone Starts with Simplicity; No One Ends There (And That's Okay) - Steven Sinofsky
- Product management vs. Project management - Jeff Lash
- Project Manager vs. Product Manager - Esther Ham
- Making Things Happen: Mastering Project Management by Scott Berkun. This book is a practical and funny guide to project management and navigating organizational politics in a big tech company by a Microsoft veteran
- Product Marketing and Product Management, by Dave Gerhardt
- Growth vs. Marketing vs. Product, by Brian Balfour
- Martina Lauchengco of Silicon Valley Product Group on the role of product marketing
- Ries on sources of engineering-marketing friction
- Steve Johnson: Help! I'm a Demo Boy for Sales
- Steve Johnson: Is Product Marketing the Same As Marketing?
- Facebook's Julie Zhuo has written a trio of posts on how to work with product managers, designers, and engineers -- in each case, from the perspective of one of the other disciplines (Julie has worked in all three)
- Presentation deck on working with developers from my course Product Management 101
- Creating a Customer-Driven Product Machine by David Cancel discusses how to organize and motivate a product team
- Brian de Haaff advises product managers on how to avoid annoying/alienating engineers
- Ellen Chisa: Engineers: So your PM Sucks? Here's How to Fix It
- Michael Woloszynowicz on how non-technical managers should give feedback to developers.
- Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures on challenges in product and engineering as startups scale
- Raffi Krikorian on the VP of Engineering role: responsibilities and skills required; Twilio co-founder Evan Cooke on how to succeed as a CTO
- Brian de Haaff of Aha! describes factors that can lead to an engineering "death spiral" -- an inability to deliver a great product -- and what to do about them
- Ries on using Toyota-style "five whys" analysis to diagnose product development/performance problems
- First Round Review interviews Yammer's Kris Gale on how features create complexity cost in engineering
- The following books shed light on how developers think and work:
- Peter Seibel, ed., Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming is a collection of interviews with world class developers
- Joel Spolsky, Joel on Software is a collection of essays by this renown developer-turned-blogger
- Frederick Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month is a timeless classic on software project management by the "father of the IBM 360" -- one of history's riskiest and most successful tech product development efforts
- MIT Sloan Professor Michael Cusumano, The Business of Software; see especially Ch. 4, "Best Practices in Software Development."
- Paul Glen, Leading Geeks, discusses how developers think, what motivates them, and how to manage them
- Jim McCarthy, Dynamics of Software Development, practical guidance from a Microsoft veteran on best practices for managing software engineering professionals and projects at each stage of the development process
- Detailed accounts of specific—and unsuccessful—software development projects include Scott Rosenberg's Dreaming in Code, focused on Lotus 1-2-3 founder Mitch Kapor's effort to build a novel personal information manager to challenge Outlook, and Fred Moody's I Sing the Body Electronic, focused on a death march at Microsoft aimed at building a children's multimedia encyclopedia
- Extreme Programming Explained by software guru Kent Beck and Cynthia Andres provides a good introduction to the advantages and key practices of agile software development
- Agile Product Management with Scrum, Roman Pichler -- another overview of agile principles and practices, this one written from the product owner's perspective and centered around the Scrum method
- User Stories Applied, Mike Cohn -- the what, why and how of drafting user stories for agile software development projects
- Presentation deck on agile software development from my course, Product Management 101
- How user experience design cab be integrated into agile product development processes: Getting Real About Agile Design by Cennydd Bowles
- An Introduction to Agile Software Development - Serena Corp.
- Agile Development Primer - Derek Winter
- Ries on the merits of continuous deployment; a case study from Ries of continuous deployment
- Design firm slicedbread on when continuous feature/fix releases are good and bad for users
- Waterfall vs. Agile - Mary Lotz
- Pros and Cons of Waterfall and Agile - Quora thread
- When is Agile Development a Bad Idea? - Quora thread
- Eric Ries on the product manager's lament with waterfall software development
- How Do You Integrate Agile Into a Waterfall Culture? - Quora thread
- Martin Fowler on using agile methods with an offshore team
- Jayson DeMers of AudienceBloom on outsourcing pitfalls
- Vivek Wadhwa on the pros and cons of outsourcing product development
- Nick Kishfy on questions to ask when hiring a development firm
- Mark Liu on how to hire a freelance developer
- Martin Fowler: Technical Debt; John Doran on the same topic
- Maiz Lulkin: Technical Debt 101
- Dan Milstein, co-founder of Hut 8 Labs, comments on how to survive a ground-up rewrite
- Eric Ries on technical debt
- Jeff Atwood on paying down technical debt
- Jon Evans on managing technical debt; One Medical Group CTO Kimber Lockhart on the same topic
- Steve McConnell explains technical debt and how to manage it; Chris Cairns and Sarah Allen on the same topics
- Joel Spolsky on why you should avoid a rewrite
- Joel Spolsky on the costs of different types of software inventory
- Paul Adams on how the "mobile first" concept is evolving
- Lean Startup Conference's Lisa Regan interviews Xanadu's Mariya Yao on how to manage rapid iterative development processes for mobile apps
- Meng To on designing for mobile first
- Farhan Thawar on mistakes startups make when designing for mobile
PM Recruiting and Career Issues
- Some statistics on careers in product management from Ben Aston and The Product Manager blog.
- Cracking the PM Interview, a book by Gayle McDowell and Jackie Bavaro, includes chapters on how the PM role differs at several big tech companies; career positioning tips; and lots of sample interview questions
- How to hire a product manager by Ken Norton; Norton on when to hire your first PM and on what a new PM should do in their 1st 30 days
- Julie Babb on 29 attributes that Pivotal Labs seeks in PM candidates
- First Round Review interview of Dropbox VP Product Todd Jackson on recruiting PMs
- Alon Porat on the backgrounds of PMs -- degrees, 1st job, etc.; Mike Belsito on the backgrounds of product VPs at high growth startups
- In PM: The Person, The Situation, and The Style by Ellen Chisa provides a framework for assessing fit between a candidate and a company's PM function; Chisa discusses when to hire a PM and offers tips on interviewing PM candidates
- Mira Wooten shares 10 interview questions for PM candidates
- Hunter Walk on PM career issues and what it takes to be a product leader
