Learn what qualities to look for in an exceptional product manager
Good Product Manager/Bad Product Manager | Andreessen Horowitz
Warning: This document was written 15 years ago and is probably not relevant for today’s product managers. I present it here merely as an example of a useful training document. Good product managers know the market, the product, the product line and the competition extremely well and operate from a strong basis of knowledge and...
Bob Moesta - Jobs-to-be-Done Find Out the Why!
Q&A: Can non-technical product managers be successful? - The Intercom Blog
Being a great product manager isn't about past experience. It comes down to understanding customer problems and how teams work, and great communication.
The Product-Minded Software Engineer
Product-minded engineers are developers with lots of interest in the product itself. They want to understand why decisions are made, how people use the product, and love to be involved in making product decisions. They're someone who would likely make a good product manager if they ever decide
Evolving and explaining how we run our company
As we write in “It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work”, you should treat your company as a product too. To improve a product, you listen, learn, (re)consider, concept, and iterate. …
How to Talk to Customers: 5 Lessons to Improve Communications
Whether you call them product owner, evangelist, or community manager, every company should have someone talking to their customers regularly. They should be the goto for any "What-Ifs” and “I wonders” from the product team.
Not all good products make good businesses - The Intercom Blog
It's easy to assume that solving a real problem with a good product magically creates a successful software business. Sadly that’s never guaranteed.
How to not screw up your product strategy | Jade Rubick - Engineering Leadership
An overview of common mistakes people make while developing a product strategy, tips for creating a successful strategy, and how to communicate and execute on a product strategy.
Mektup #32: Product Shouldn't Be Left to Product Managers
Hunting timeless insights into humans and software and helping others on the way.
Obviously Awesome: Comprehensive Book Summary
April Dunford's book on product positioning is awesome, and has some overlap with those of us who are interested in positioning an individual career.
Bring a Product Manager Mindset to Your Next Engineering Job
The age of AI demands strong ideas, data driven methods, and experimentation
How to Be Great? Just Be Good, Repeatably
A thought piece on what it takes to truly be great and what that even means in the first place.
The Product Picnic
Writing on UX and product management to connect today's discourse with classic insights that the industry forgot.
Know Your Customers’ “Jobs to Be Done”
Firms have never known more about their customers, but their innovation processes remain hit-or-miss. Why? According to Christensen and his coauthors, product developers focus too much on building customer profiles and looking for correlations in data. To create offerings that people truly want to buy, firms instead need to home in on the job the customer is trying to get done. Some jobs are little (pass the time); some are big (find a more fulfilling career). When we buy a product, we essentially “hire” it to help us do a job. If it does the job well, we hire it again. If it does a crummy job, we “fire” it and look for something else to solve the problem. Jobs are multifaceted. They’re never simply about function; they have powerful social and emotional dimensions. And the circumstances in which customers try to do them are more critical than any buyer characteristics. Consider the experiences of condo developers targeting retirees who wanted to downsize their homes. Sales were weak until the developers realized their business was not construction but transitioning lives. Instead of adding more features to the condos, they created services assisting buyers with the move and with their decisions about what to keep and to discard. Sales took off. The key to successful innovation is identifying jobs that are poorly performed in customers’ lives and then designing products, experiences, and processes around those jobs.
Work Smarter: The Cocktail of Simplicity, Manageable Adversity, and Muntzing
Sometimes deliberate roadblocks can be a good thing to get more efficient and effective products and workflow. Here's how.
