(Last updated: 2022.02.22)
Over the course of the last few months as we've revamped the product management department at Pager, I've found myself sharing a number of product management guides to the broader team to help them think through and understand what product management is.
Anyone considering a career in product management or is just generally interested in what product management is and how it works might end up finding something of value here. Enjoy!
Who is a Product Manager?
- The Role of a PM
https://medium.com/swlh/the-role-of-a-product-manager-e0354b4b6845 - A16Z: Good PM, Bad PM
https://a16z.com/2012/06/15/good-product-managerbad-product-manager/ - You’re a janitor
https://medium.com/all-things-product-management/product-manager-you-are-664d83ee702e - Four levels of product management:
https://www.heavybit.com/library/blog/kwans-hierarchy-of-product-needs-the-four-levels-of-product-managers/ - Product management and iterated taste (CommonCog)
Managing Yourself
- Two types of work: "Squisy, Crunch"
https://drmaciver.substack.com/p/two-types-of-work - On managing your priorities & energy
https://lethain.com/frameworks-decision-making/
Product Culture
- What makes a strong product culture (Bring the Donuts)
- Product leadership at Pandora (First Round Review)
- Building products at Stripe (Bring the Donuts)
- Building products at AirBnB (Bring the Donuts)
- Agile as trauma
- How Spotify Builds Products
- How Figma Ships Products
On Hiring Product Managers
- https://www.bringthedonuts.com/essays/productmanager.html
- Growing product teams at different stages of a company’s growth
https://review.firstround.com/how-to-craft-your-product-team-at-every-stage-from-pre-product-market-fit-to-hypergrowth - Product Management Career Paths & Competencies
On Strategy & Prioritization
- Confidence & ICE Framework for Prioritizing Projects (Itamar Gilad)
- ICE Prioritization Done Right (short eBook) (Itamar Gilad)
- “Users first, business needs second, operations third, technology fourth” (Roman Design Co)
- How to Do Rapid Prototyping and What It Can Help With (Rostislav Roznoshchik)
- When is the right time for SWOT analysis during your strategic planning? (Roger Martin)
- What you need to know about supply-demand-operations (three mental models for running business) (CommonCog)
- Paul Worthington on Strategy:
Things Not To Do
- The Big Project Syndrome
Not everything will be solved with a single magic giant project. (Itamar Gilad) - Things you should never do: full system rewrites (Joel on Software)
- How to be led astray by your analytics (Roger Martin)
Analytics without hypotheses you're testing will always describe the past. The search for complete confidence about the future is an expensive fallacy.
Design Thinking
- What is Design Thinking, and how can you use it? (Rostislav Roznoshchik)
Product Management Artifacts
- Writing user stories using the Gherkin method
- A collection of templates and guides
- "Jobs to be Done" - The Intercom book
- On writing compelling product briefs
On Process
- How Big Tech runs projects, and the absence of scrum (Pragmatic Engineer)
- Different kinds of planning and planning cycles, including notes (Kool Aid Factory)
- Why Limiting WIP works (Will Lethain)
- More on limiting Work in Progress
- The law of triviality, aka the "Bike-Shed Problem" (Wikipedia)
Simple projects will get disproportionally more input (including personal and emotional input) because it's easy to have an opinion and everyone wants to show a contribution / their value to a problem.
Estimating Projects:
- Why your estimates will be wrong (DevelopSense)
- Software estimates are hard but we have to do them anyway
https://jacobian.org/2021/may/20/estimation/ - Estimate based on smallest possible tasks, overall uncertainty, and complexity multipliers
https://jacobian.org/2021/may/25/my-estimation-technique/ - "Unanticipated Futures" - Some common planning fallacies (Roman Design Co)
Working With and Understanding Engineering
- Silicon Valley-style engineering versus traditional engineering (Pragmatic Engineer)
SV-style engineering teams focus on engineering enablement as problem solvers, while traditional teams cut engineering out of the strategic decision making process and emphasize task/ticket completion. - The Agile Manifesto - 12 Principles (Agile Alliance)
- How Scrum Works (Scrum Guides)
- Working with engineering (Segment)
- Architecture, Expediency, and Balls of Mud:
http://laputan.org/pub/foote/mud.pdf - Types of engineering org design: Feature-Centric vs Code-Centric
https://medium.com/engineering-operations/engineering-org-design-code-centric-vs-product-goal-centric-61788c571296 - Choose boring technology
http://boringtechnology.club/ - All the best engineering advice I stole from non-engineers
https://bellmar.medium.com/all-the-best-engineering-advice-i-stole-from-non-technical-people-eb7f90ca2f5f - A discussion of things every engineer (and thus product manager) should know (Hacker News)
- What is your engineering organization's half life?
https://mobile.twitter.com/willdemaine/status/1379844845536223235
Performance and Evaluation
- Measuring engineering impact (Will Lethain)
- The McNamara Fallacy (on making sure you measure the right things)
Launching Things
Learning from Customers
- How to build a customer advisory board (First Round Review)
On Managing Change
Books
- The Phoenix Project
- Kill it With Fire
- F.I.R.E.: Fast, Inexpensive, Restrained, Elegant
- The Design of Everyday Things
- Legacy
- What You Do Is Who You Are
- Content Design
- Five Disfunctions of a Team
- Good Services: How to Design Services That Work
- Good Strategy, Bad Strategy
Thanks for reading
Useful? Interesting? Have something to add? Shoot me a note at roman@sharedphysics.com. I love getting email and chatting with readers.
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Who am I?
I'm Roman Kudryashov -- technologist, problem solver, and writer. I help people build products, services, teams, and companies. My longer background is here and I keep track of some of my side projects here.
Stay true,
Roman