Product Manager Advanced Lessons
Product management is a rapidly evolving discipline in the technology industry as it has emerged from its “jack of all trades” origins into being owners of a product or general managers of a business. These are some great books, articles, podcasts, and videos for early to mid career PMs, mostly focused on ICs or young managers. Even good AI ML PM managers need to master these basic to intermediate lessons.
STRATEGY
Perri, Melissa. Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value. O'Reilly Media, 2018.
Martin, Roger. Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works. HBR Press, 2013.
Rumelt, Richard. Good Strategy/Bad Strategy: The difference and why it matters. Profile Books, 2017.
EXECUTION
Slootman, Frank. Amp It Up: Leading for Hypergrowth by Raising Expectations, Increasing Urgency, and Elevating Intensity 1st Edition. Wiley, 2022.
Bryar, Colin and Carr, Bill. Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon. St. Martin's Press, 2021.
TEAM, COMPANY, & CAPACITY BUILDING
Grove, Andrew. High Output Management. Vintage, 1995.
Mantle, Mickey and Lichty, Ron. Managing the Unmanageable: Rules, Tools, and Insights for Managing Software People and Teams, 2nd Edition. Addison-Wesley Professional, 2019.
Cagan, Marty. Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products. Silicon Valley Product Group, 2020.
Below are some pointed articles for each session; they are highly recommended, but optional. They are short and typically written by general managers or product managers. Some of them you can skim and file for later when you need really clear, functional information on doing something.
1. Overview of PM Role in Large Orgs + Product Vision, Strategy, and Business
Good Product Manager, Bad Product Manager - Ben Horowitz
Let’s talk about Product Management - Josh Elman
Be a Great Product Leader - Adam Nash
Product Management Was Born 90 Years Ago Today - Ken Norton
PM at Microsoft - Steven Sinofsky
Good Product Managers, Great Product Managers - Shreyas Doshi
Customer Development - Steve Blank
10 Things I've Learned About Customer Development - Cindy Alvarez
2. Internet Economics; Planning; People Strategy
Not all good products make good businesses - Des Traynor
All Revenue is Not Created Equal: The Keys to the 10X Revenue Club - Bill Gurley
Apple Product Strategy (2011 Offsite Agenda) - Steve Jobs
Distribution - Ben Horowitz
What Is Disruptive Innovation? Clayton M. Christensen et al.
How to Be a Digital Platform Leader - Martha Lagace
Come for the tool, stay for the network - Chris Dixon
Good Intentions Don’t Work (Mechanisms Do) - Nick Foy
Setting goals and OKRs - Google Rework
A History of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) - Plai
3. Exploring Solutions: Design and Usability
Product Designers: Artists of the Intangible - Chrys Bader
1 hour of research saves 10 hours of development time - Joshua Porter
Know Your Customers' Jobs to Be Done - Clay Christensen
Babe Ruth and Feature Lists - Ken Norton
Working Backwards - Werner Vogels
The Kind of Creative Thinking That Fueled WeChat’s Success - Julian Birkinshaw
If your product is Great, it doesn't need to be Good - Paul Buchheit
Building Products - Julie Zhuo
Ten principles for good design - Dieter Rams
UX Crash Course: 31 Fundamentals - Joel Marsh
On Writing Product Roadmaps - Gaurav Oberoi
4. Execution, Experimentation, and Go-to-Market
16 Startup Metrics - Jeff Jordan
Startup Metrics for Pirates - Dave McClure
Everything a product manager needs to know about analytics - Simon Cast
Controlled experiments on the web: survey and practical guide - Ron Kohavi
Metrics Versus Experience - Julie Zhuo
SMART Metrics - George T. Doran
The only metric that matters - Josh Elman
? - when the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right - Julie Bort
Connecting the Dots: From Vision to Execution - Deb Liu
Speed as a Habit - Dave Girouard
A Minimum Viable Product Is Not a Product, It's a Process - Jim Brikman
How to Work With Engineers - Julie Zhuo
Great Products Don’t Happen By Accident - Jon Lax
The Right Way to Ship Software - Jocelyn Goldfein
Development Cadence - Megan Quinn
Microsoft's Go-to-market Strategy for Azure in India
5. Growth and Monetization; Wellness and Inclusion
What's next in growth? - Andrew Chen
What Are Growth Teams For, and What Do They Work On? - Casey Winters
Product Channel Fit Will Make or Break Your Growth Strategy - Brian Balfour
The Growth Pyramid Revisited - Sean Ellis
Indispensable Growth Frameworks from My Years at Facebook, Twitter and Wealthfront - Andy Johns
How Technology Hijacks People's Minds - from a Magician and Google's Design Ethicist - Tristan Harris
Bad Managers Talk, Good Managers Write - Walter Chen
Product Reviews - Avichal Garg
Don't create a sense of urgency, foster a sense of purpose - Kimber Lockhart
The Most Underrated Product Management Skill: Influence Without Authority - Sachin Rekhi
PM Your Career Like You PM Your Product - Deb Liu
Further Reading
Catmull, Ed and Wallace, Amy. Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration. Random House, 2014.
Schmidt, Eric and Jonathan Rosenberg. Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley's Bill Campbell. Harper Business, 2019.
Banfield, Richard et al. Product Leadership. O’Reilly, 2017.
Cusamano, Michael et al. The Business of Platforms. Harper Business, 2019.
Schmidt, Eric and Jonathan Rosenberg. How Google Works. Grand Central Publishing, 2014.
Schlender, Brent and Tetzeli Rick. Becoming Steve Jobs. Crown Business, 2015.
Lawson, Jeff and Ries, Eric. Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century. Harper Business, 2021.
Magretta, Joan. Understanding Michael Porter: The Essential Guide to Competition and Strategy. HBR Press, 2011.
Marsh, Joel. UX for Beginners: A Crash Course in 100 Short Lessons. O’Reilly, 2016.
Lidwell, William Lidwell; Holden, Kristina; and Butler, Jill. Universal Principles of Design, Revised and Updated: 125 Ways to Enhance Usability, Influence Perception, Increase Appeal, Make Better Design Decisions, and Teach through Design. Rockport Publishers, 2010.
Eyal, Nir. Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products. Penguin Business, 2014.
Constable, Giff et al. Talking to Humans. Giff Constable, 2014.
Supplementary Content
In addition to readings, consider these podcast and video content available, tailored for audio-visual learning preferences. These will typically be interviews or talks by expert builders. You can Google these:
Session 1
Video: “Apple - iPhone Introduction, Steve Jobs.” - 2007
Video: “LinkedIn - The Economic Graph - Jeff Weiner.” 2014
Video: “Blue Origin - Going to Space to Benefit Earth Jeff Bezos.” 2019
Video: “Tesla Cybertruck, Elon Musk.” 2020
Podcast: “#243 - Kevin Systrom: Instagram | Lex Fridman Podcast.” November 23, 2021.
Podcast: “How I Built This. Lyft: John Zimmer.” February 13, 2017
Session 2
Podcast: “Business Breakdown. Facebook: The Trillion Dollar Listing.” June 30, 2021
Podcast: “Business Breakdown. Ethereum: Into the Ether.” May 19, 2021
Podcast: “How I Built This. Stitch Fix: Katrina Lake.” April 2, 2018
Podcast: “How I Built This. Slack: Stewart Butterfield.” July 30, 2018
Podcast: “How I Built This. Shopify: Tobias Lütke.” August 5, 2019
Video: “Andy Grove on OKRs.” Date Unknown.
Session 3
Podcast: “Business Breakdown. Calm: The Sleeping Giant.” May 12, 2021
Video: “Hartmut Esslinger - Advice For Designers.” 2013
Podcast: “How I Built This. Rent The Runway: Jenn Hyman.” August 7, 2017
Podcast: “How I Built This. Bumble: Whitney Wolfe.” October 16, 2017
Session 4
Podcast: “How I Built This. Atari & Chuck E. Cheese's: Nolan Bushnell.” February 27, 2017
Podcast: “1) Product Development.” “2) Product focus.” - Steve Jobs September 19, 2016
Podcast: “How I Built This. Spanx: Sara Blakely.” July 3, 2017
Session 5
Video: “How we put Facebook on the Path to 1 Billion Users - Chamath Palihapitiya.” 2013
Video: “Ep35: Nir Eyal, Author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products”. September 24, 2018
Video: “How better tech could protect us from distraction, Tristan Harris” 2014
Other Recommended Podcasts
How I Built This, Invest Like The Best, Business Breakdowns, Freakonomics, Planet Money, Hidden Brain, The Look & Sound of Leadership, Wizard of Ads, Masters of Scale