Product manager meetup in San Francisco Google Ventures and Greylock Partners invited more than 250 product managers to the top floor of Google’s San Francisco office to meet and learn from one another. We also held a conversation with a panel of founders, CEOs, VCs, and execs who started their careers in product management: Josh Elman (General Partner, Greylock), Adam Nash (COO, Wealthfront), Johanna Wright (VP Product Management, Google) and Craig Walker (CEO & Founder, Firespotter Labs). The 5 Books that made me a better Product Manager by @__tosh In this post I’d like to highlight the 5 books that deeply influenced the way I think about Product Management. They were written by people who truly understand and love their craft and cover diverse topics like economic decision making, positioning, marketing, usability design & programming. Here we go … The Principles of Product Development Flow Speed, quality, cost – pick three. The book busts traditional product management myths and introduces well-known concepts from Lean Manufacturing to the world of software development. Reinertsen shows how economic decision making, managing queues, reducing batch size & applying work-in-progress constraints help to create better products faster. Reinertsen manages to not only explain the how but also the why. via Karl Scotland, Agile Coach at Rally Software Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind This book is an easy to read introduction to product & brand positioning and comes with a ton of illustrative examples. Tested Advertising Methods
Product management best practices This video is only for employees of GV portfolio companies. Sign in The most requested topic for a Startup Lab workshop this year is product management. Several of you asked that we dive into best practices for defining a product, clearly communicating with engineering, balancing feature requests with bug reports, and measuring success (or failure) individual features. Whether you have a dedicated product team, you’re a CEO who is responsible for owning product, or you’re part of the engineering team trying to work with your PM counterparts, it’s clear that many of you want to hear from a PM who’s figured this out. Google Drive PM Scott Johnston is going to join us in what promises to be a highly engaging workshop.
Take Charge Product Management: Take Charge of Your Product Management Development; Tips, Tactics, and Tools to Increase Your Effectiveness as a Product Manager eBook: Greg Geracie: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store This was exactly what I needed. Our group is going through a transition and having a book that details the right way to do things was invaluable. What was so unique was Geracie was actually teaching through a fundamental tool that all product managers should know, "the user persona / user story". You don't really recognize it until you are a majority of the way through the book, where you have the realization that you were just walked through a user story of the role that you are playing in real life. If only more text books were like this, I think learning would be easier, more relevant, and much more enjoyable. This was especially helpful and more relevant as we transitioned to Agile - using the user story. Besides the unique format, Geracie's depth on certain topics makes this an essential read. I found it refreshing that tips and tools were provided through each step of the Product Management process.
The Product Manager's Survival Guide: Everything You Need to Know to Succeed as a Product Manager: Amazon.co.uk: Steven Haines Book Description Publication Date: 1 Jun 2013 The world of business is moving at breakneck speed. Written by one of today's leading Product Managementthought-leaders, Steven Haines, The Product Manager's Survival Guide provides best practices, practical on-the-job advice, and a step-by-step blueprint for succeedingin Product Management. With this practical guide in your hands, you have the most powerful tool available for increasing your productivity quickly and dramatically--in a way that is noticeable and measurable. The Product Manager's Survival Guide is conveniently organized into four sections: I. The only way to excel as a product manager is to develop a strategy for the long run. Frequently Bought Together Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought Product Description About the Author Steven Haines is the founder of Sequent Learning Networks and The Product Management Executive Board. What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item? 5.0 out of 5 stars Format:Hardcover
The World is a Product People think about what they do and the world around them being as about a process or a project. Both in everyday life and in business. And this is a problem that to my great surprise few people are talking about or trying to solve. I’ll try to convince you why product thinking is usually much more relevant to your goals and why process-oriented thinking could be a real problem. Have you ever noticed how few online resources are dedicated to product management? The authors of project management books (especially those for novices) love to start with the idea that the world is made up of projects. Of course, a musician hears music at each turn in everyday life, a cameraman analyzes the composition of the frame and a hairdresser gets to know people by their hairdo. We made projects at school. Sometimes we gladly argue about the best methodology (agile or otherwise) and we spend time choosing the best collaboration tool and searching for the best practices in project management. So What?! 1.
Product Focused vs. Customer Focused Product Management: What’s the difference? Recently I found myself having a debate with a colleague over what it means to be a Product Focused and Customer Focused organization. The conversation became a sort of brain buster that continued to linger in the back of my mind. The more I thought about the two approaches, the more they began to blur into one, and I started to wonder if there really is a difference between the two. And if there is a difference, is one approach really better than the other? Before I drove myself slightly crazy trying to think through these deep, deep philosophical questions on my own, I thought I’d open up the conversation to all of you and get your thoughts on the topic as well. To structure the conversation, let me start with how I’m defining both approaches. In my mind, a Product Focused organization is one that has a roadmap and even vision for the product based on delivering something that the team believes will meet market demand – whatever the market may be. Here’s where I start to get confused.
The Top 5 Technical Skills Every Product Manager Should Know | UserVoice Blog “You are kind of the mini-CEO – with all of the responsibility…but without any of the authority.”-Josh Elman – Partner at Greylock, former Product Manager at Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn Any “soft” skills or “hard” skills you need as a Product Manager all boil down to one core skill: Empathy. I worked for 4 months with a fellow Product Manager before ever realizing he used to be a developer. He never mentioned anything technical, at all! “Software is a team sport” I have been the least technical person on a very technical team and the most technical person on a fairly non-technical team. Being technical can have its pitfalls: “When you are an engineer going into product [management] and your engineer says to you, ‘Oh, that’s really hard to do.’ Now that the soft stuff is out of the way, let’s get down to it. “Trace a user issue (or set of issues) back to the underlying problem.” The Top 5 Technical Skills Every Product Manager Needs to Know: 1. Why What to learn SQL. How to learn it 2. Why Why
Product managers for the digital world Product managers are the glue that bind the many functions that touch a product—engineering, design, customer success, sales, marketing, operations, finance, legal, and more. They not only own the decisions about what gets built but also influence every aspect of how it gets built and launched. Unlike product managers of the past, who were primarily focused on execution and were measured by the on-time delivery of engineering projects, the product manager of today is increasingly the mini-CEO of the product. As more companies outside of the technology sector set out to build software capabilities for success in the digital era, it’s critical that they get the product-management role right. Why you need a product manager who thinks and acts like a CEO The emergence of the mini-CEO product manager is driven by a number of changes in technology, development methodologies, and the ways in which consumers make purchases. Data dominates everything Products are built differently