Crafting a good strategy

A.G. Lafley

How Strategy Really Works is a book about strategy, written by A.G. Lafley, former CEO of Procter & Gamble, and Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Management. The book covers the “transformation” of P&G under Lafley and the approach to strategy that informed it.

This summary article about the How Strategy Book has one of the clearest explaination of strategy i have seen in a long time.

Shreyas Doshi

Shreyas Doshi top 10 leadership books for product people

There are some great books included to help us understand how to lead our teams and organization

Shreyas Doshi

Product management is about collecting the right Inputs, converting them to the right Outputs, so we can get to the right Outcomes. Like the 3X framework, this framework can help product people make better, context-sensitive observations & decisions.

A nice framework to help evaluate product managers. Whether that is in existing positions or interviewing for a position.

Rohan Rajiv

Monthly product newsletter on LinkedIn with over 30,000 subscribers. Rohan does a great job of explaining key product management concepts such as culture-building, roadmap-building, and how to attack a problem.

Rohan, a product manager at LinkedIn, does a great job of walking you through key product concepts in whiteboard fashion.

Lenny Rachitsky

A list of templates ranging from 1-page PRDs, to strategy and vision.

I've always found templates useful as it allows me to focus on the content and not how it should be structured or how it should look.

Shreyas Doshi

A product prioritization primer that also provides insights on product strategy.

A great overview of how to prioritize a portfolio and single product. Shreyas does a great job of also noting that prioritization is dependent on strategy.

Clay Christensen

This jobs to be done (JTBD) article is a classic now and written by the father of JTBD Clayton Christensen. In this article he describes that consumers hire products to do a job. Understanding is a fundamental to your companies success.

To innovate, you need to understand what jobs your customers are hiring your product for. Look beyond the obvious utility of your product. I like how JTBD emphasizes customer psychology & creative execution.

Andrei Tit

Often, bias towards actions means focusing on the trees and losing sight of the forest or vision. But it's the vision that will unite your whole team, your customers, and your prospects. In this medium post, Andrei Tit explores five different strategic messaging frameworks to help you arrive at that vision statement.

A good dive into a rare topic that sometimes gets pushed over to product marketing. Being able to create a vision and communicate is key to a successful product.

Garett Moon

When describing the difference between building a great product and an ordinary product, one of the most often used analogies pits a vitamin against a painkiller. The idea here is that painkillers fly off the shelves and vitamins don’t. Therefore, the general conclusion is that we should be focusing our effort on building painkillers and not vitamins.

A great little framework or at the very least analogy to understand the type of product you are building.

Alex Pedicini

A great collection of frameworks put together by Alex Pedicini that covers a wide range of product topics, from discovery, to prioritization to team topology. Alex not only links to these but provides some great context as well.

A single source that contains a great many product and design frameworks.

Product School

A set of templates created by experienced Product Managers from leading tech companies. You'll find three templates among nine of the most common challenges. These templates can work with CODA, MURAL and Google docs

Templates provide shortcuts so that we can focus on content and analysis as product managers. A great collection that works with some of the most popular product apps out there.

Christian Almurr

With the continuous rise in expectations from our smart devices, peers, and even ourselves, we’re creating this urge for more innovation, more impact, which are now more necessary than ever. Creativity is climbing up the ladder as a necessary requirement needed for anyone, who’s tackling anything.

It's an important piece of content, as well as practical advice, based on observations of working with several product teams.

Nimay Parekh

A great writeup on the ICE prioritization framework which stands for Impact Confidence and Ease

ICE framework may be the most popular useful framework when scaling and optimizing on shipping time, developer ROI, user retention and funnel maximization.

The quest for this deep-dive by First 1000 was to uncover the Stripe story, how they got started, how they got their early customers, and how the heck did they build such fanfare in an excruciatingly dull industry

For as much fanfare as Stripe gets, a lot of it is surface level adulation. This is a great look at the early days.

Product Beats

A thousand-member strong private community for product management. ProductBeats is the backbone for creating Products that are loved, profitable and sustainable. As a member you get access to tools, product thought leader presentations, and invites to our weekly Product Show Every Tuesday Morning at 08:27-08:57 AM Central European Time.

A European-centric product management resource.

Shreyas Doshi

To make a major impact with your products, accelerate your career, get the opportunity to lead other PMs & create tremendous career optionality, aim to become a 10-30-50 PM: top 10% in one of the senses, top 30% in another one, and top 50% in the third.

An approach to improving your PM skills as well as accelerating your career by focusing your energies and being deliberate about where you apply your time and invest in growth.

Herbig

Learn how to measure real progress as a Product Team by utilizing Outcome OKRs from this free workshop recording from my session at one of Workpath's Quarterly Event.

Next best thing to attending the workshop, is seeing a recording of the last workshop Tim ran. Chock full of great advice and how-to. Highly recommend it

Shreyas Doshi

A basic product framework to help you develop your B2B product strategy. This will help answer the following 3 questions: 1) What customer segments are we targeting? 2) What differentiation will we create for them? 3) How will we reach these customers?

A B2B framework to help you create a product strategy.

Shreyas Doshi

A framework to help assess your PM superpower and what need a bit of tuning.

It is important for PMs to understand these senses, identify their superpower, identify any liabilities & be intentional about their growth.

The Skiplevel Program is helps product managers learn the fundamental technical software skills and knowledge to succeed in tech through an on-demand course, private community, articles, and other resources.

Becoming a more technical product manager might be something worth exploring if you are thinking of working or work on a core team, at a SAAS. It doesn't mean learning how to code however. SkipLevel offers you with a pathway to get there.

Nimbled

A list of product resources curated by the Nimbled Company. It focuses on analytics which is a topic often not deeply covered as others by product resources.

Quick videos explaining product analytics, a sometimes underrepresented topic without product management.

Jason Fried

A practical way to think & talk about tension in interface design. In your UI, what features must be obvious, what features should be easy to find, and what features should be possible to discover.

Much of the tension in product development and interface design comes from trying to balance the obvious, the easy, and the possible. Figuring out which things go in which bucket is critical to fully understanding how to make something useful.

Shreyas Doshi

A basic communications framework to use when communicating about your product (e.g. on your website, blog post, pdf case study, product video), make it easy for customers to get an answer these questions

Product communications is another subject area within Product Management that doesn't have a lot of resources. This is a great framework to get started with product communication or at the very least be able understand how to articulate the product proposition

A short but good video on psychological safety or the art of making team members feel safe to speak up. Without that sense of safety, an organization loses mindshare and early awareness of risks. This video also offers up an important tip: it starts with the leader.

Amy Edmondson - discussing Project Aristotle and Knowledge-Economy

Shreyas Doshi

Product sense has 3 components: 1. Cognitive Empathy 2. Domain Knowledge 3. Creativity To improve product sense, work on each of these.

A follow up to Shreyas 3 Essential Senses of a Product Manager is a deep dive into what Product Sense is made of

Kei Watanabe

A really great breakdown of some of the classic treatise written about product market fit for legendary founders and VCs

A really incredible dive into the various definitions of Product Market Fit

Wodtke

"Radical Focus is a must-read for anyone who wants to accomplish out-sized results. Christina does a great job showing both the why and the how of OKRs. Avoid the all-too-common mistakes by reading this book first." (Teresa Torres, author Continuous Discovery Habits)

One of the best books on OKRs for those hungry for a how-to implement guide that doesn't have a steep learning curve.

Parth Detroja

Authored by 3 Product Managers at Facebook, Google, and Microsoft, and based on interviews with 67 product leads, Product Management’s Sacred Seven is a comprehensive resource that will teach you the must-know knowledge and applied skills necessary to become a world-class PM that can get hired anywhere.

Not only is the book a great primer on 7 key dimensions within the product management discipline, but the mock interview videos made available at the end of every chapter is worth the price of the book alone

Mills Baker

The pros and cons of story thinking vs systems thinking

There has def been a lot of discussion about design systems and with them being at peak hype cycle, its only natural some alternatives are surfaced

Richard Rumelt

For Rumelt, the heart of good strategy is insight into the hidden power in any situation, and into an appropriate response - whether launching a new product, fighting a war or putting a man on the moon. Drawing on examples of the good and the bad from across all sectors and all ages, he shows how this insight can be cultivated with a wide variety of tools that lead to better thinking and better strategy, strategy that cuts through the hype and gets results.

Another must-read, according to Shreyas Doshi and countless others, when it comes to strategy. The great thing about this book is that it includes clear examples of what they consider good vs bad example of strategies

Marty Cagan

A nice if not short FAQ in trying to understand how the best product companies work by Marty Cagan

This FAQ is short, and has a great set of recommendations when it comes to how you can learn what FANGs are the best product companies

Chris Morgan

Lightning fast interviews with GTM operators

A newsletter where we dive deep about how founders got their first 1000 customers. With their back against the wall and very little amount of funding, it is always interesting to learn how they managed to get their companies off the ground to become a tech behemoth.

This is a great resource to see how various successful startups got their first 1000 customers.

Greg Prickril and Daniel Zacarias

Website with lots of resources for PMs career development

Lots of great curated info

Mind the Product

Every week we curate the best product and design content from across the internet into our weekly product management newsletter Prioritised.

Who doesn't love a top 10-list weekly product management newsletter Prioritised.

Usama Naseem

This framework provides useful structure for product proposals, reviews, etc.

A simple set of 5 questions to help you gain clarity around product and purpose

Sahil Bloom

A list of 20 or so intellectual techniques, framework or biases to help us frame how humans make decision or behave.

A really useful list of framework that make you think.

Sean Ellis

A 45 minutes test that upon completion will enable us to get a you personalized study plan, so that you will be able to quickly address your weak points and take your career to the next level.

A really comprehensive growth assessment test (45 Min) but well worth it. At the end you will get a personalized set of recommendations and resources to improve your growth skillset based on your answers.

Gilad

In this condensed book Itamar shares what he considers the most important factors to OKR success, based on their experience at Google and other companies. You'll find battle-tested principles, practices and tips for how to get OKRs right without the overhead and pain.

Another great resource with examples and sample OKRs to help you get on the right track to implement OKRs within your organization

Ravi Mehta

Strategy is often misunderstood. The word "strategy" has been stretched to a point where it is almost devoid of meaning. Too often, the terms "vision," "mission," "strategy," "goals," and "roadmap" get conflated into a jumbled mess—leaving product leaders without the context they need to focus their work on the difficult task of moving the company forward.

A great read that tries to surface a unified theory of strategy and outcomes. Well worth the read if you are trying to understand how to get from mission to OKRs

Jason Knight

A podcast aimed at people involved in designing, managing, building, or marketing products. Interviewees include thought leaders, authors, product leaders, practitioners, and those just starting out. This is a chance to hear their stories and get some inspiration from their experience - to help you work more effectively, build better products, be a better leader, and much more.

Great podcast from a great product guy.

Nathan Baugh

Steve Jobs said: “The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller.” Here’s the storytelling framework Jobs used (that you can too):

A nice rundown of the story telling framework Steve Jobs leveraged

Ravi Mehta

Introducing the Product Competency Toolkit, a system of 12 product manager skills you can use to level up your team and yourself.

A really nice breakdown of the skills it takes to become a principal product manager. Ravi does this by breaking down what is needed within product execution, customer insight, strategy, and influence. Ravi is quickly becoming one of my favorite authors and subject matter experts on product management

Marty Cagan

How do today’s most successful tech companies―Amazon, Google, Facebook, Netflix, Tesla―design, develop, and deploy the products that have earned the love of literally billions of people around the world? Perhaps surprisingly, they do it very differently than most tech companies. In INSPIRED, technology product management thought leader Marty Cagan provides readers with a master class in how to structure and staff a vibrant and successful product organization, and how to discover and deliver technology products that your customers will love―and that will work for your business.

Inspired is the Bible for product managers. In it, Marty collates the best practices from the top Big Tech and Silicon Valley startups and organization where product market fit is the only way to survival. He covers people, teams, vision, roadmaps, processes, techniques, and culture at the best product companies.

Porter

Quick introduction to Porter's generic strategies which are a staple of MBA schools across the U.S.

Really good and short primer on strategy fundamentals

Sachin Rekhi

Product managers require a diverse set of skills to excel at their role, including design, technical, analytical, communication, and more. Yet there is one skill that I find is often underrated but critical for the success of a product manager. And that is the skill of influence without authority.

There is no silver bullet, but this is a great introduction as to some tools to help influence decision. Especially useful as in high-functioning orgs, product managers are orchestrators vs CEOs

A.G. Lafley

How Strategy Really Works is a book about strategy, written by A.G. Lafley, former CEO of Procter & Gamble, and Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Management. The book covers the “transformation” of P&G under Lafley and the approach to strategy that informed it.

This is a great review of the book and really helps demystify strategy, an often misrepresented and misunderstood word in product

Keith Rabois

As Product Managers we make or facilitate hundreds of decisions. Here is a nice framework to help communicate to the team what decision they can expect to be made independent of you and which you'd like to be consulted on.

This framework is especially useful for senior product managers & leaders to create clarity on the decisions team members can make on their own and the decisions you’d like to make with them.

Rushabh Doshi

OKRs are incredibly useful but it takes a long time for OKR usage to become effective. Shortcut your company's learning process by understanding and implementing the following ten ideas

Recommended by Shreyas Doshi. Do I need to really say more. 10 steps to better OKRs

Sachin Rekhi

Todd Jackson has been a part of product organizations across some of the best companies in the Valley, from Google to Facebook to Twitter, after it acquired his own startup, Cover. Now VP of Product and Design at Dropbox, he’s worked with hundreds of product managers — and hired dozens — over the course of his career.

Some really good insights as to what hiring managers often look for in product mamagers

Prateek Gauba

Resources curated by Prateek, from people to follow, companies to apply to and case studies.

A really comprehensive list of product resources on a diverse set of topics. This includes companies looking for product folks (in India), case studies as well as people to follow.

John Cutler

An incredible assembly of various thoughts, insights and frameworks that John Cutler has written about.

Taken directly from the document "Hope this was reasonably interesting. Many of these concepts are “common sense”, but it can be hard to put it all together in practice (especially when we’re busy)."

Jay Haynes

Imagine you are on a product team and your mission is to beat Apple and Google. How would you do it? We are excited to launch our JTBD YouTube channel today to help your product team use Jobs-to-be-Done innovation methods. Our first 15 minute video covers all the basics of JTBD and shows how you to beat Apple

Some of the most useful resources is when someone applies a framework to a real world use case. This resources looks at how we can use Jobs To Be Done to beat some world leading companies in their own space

Shreyas Doshi

A great visual as to how to move from being an operator and caring about optics to being about outcomes

Great visuals that help operators move beyond optics and delivery

Clay Christensen

The foremost authority on innovation and growth presents a path-breaking book every company needs to transform innovation from a game of chance to one in which they develop products and services customers not only want to buy, but are willing to pay premium prices for. How do companies know how to grow? How can they create products that they are sure customers want to buy? Can innovation be more than a game of hit and miss? Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen has the answer. A generation ago, Christensen revolutionized business with his groundbreaking theory of disruptive innovation. Now, he goes further, offering powerful new insights.

Clay Christensen's ideas and books are nothing short of mind blowing. The Father of Jobs to be done, this is a must on any respectable strategist enthusiast bookshelf, virtual or otherwise.

Interview Prep Site that provides a slack channel on top of the usual suspects which are video courses, questions database and peer mock interviews.

Recommended by a few Google PMs that have leveraged the tool to get a job offer.

Pete Anderson

Centralized Trello board rich with #allthethings associated with Product Management continuing education.

Pete Anderson is a transformation agent and product management, coach. He not only talks the talk, but walks the walk. This board has some of the best resources on product strategy, enterprise transformation, and how to build the best-empowered product team.

Sam Higham

The Product Management Competency Framework enables PMs and PM teams to assess their skills and have discussions about their growth, relative to their interests and the interests of their organization. We’ve taken inspiration from some of the best minds in Product Management to formulate a visual model for discussing and choosing growth opportunities. Enjoy!

Before we can truly grow, we must understand where the opportunities lie.

Adi Debel

List of product resources curated by Adi Debel to be used to fuel a continuous personal development

A nice collection of resources aimed at helping you continue your personal development journey.

Bandan Jot Singh

Assessments are great way to understand what are your product management superpowers and where opportunities lie.

3 great example of PM self assessment frameworks.

Eran Arkin

A short post that covers the different types of goals a platform team can take on

There aren't a lot of resources at all when it come to PM'ing a platform team, even though it seems we live in the age of platforms. So a great resources if you are interested in platforms and product

Gtmhub

A software platform that enables transparency and collaboration around OKR tracking. Integrates with other systems in place to provide teams with automated updates on KRs throughout the quarter.

David Packles

Hear how Peloton leveraged the usage patterns of a few users aka emergent behaviors to act as a guide when thinking of a feature that had broad appeal.

A great hack when trying to achieve product market fit or to see how your product is being used in a way that wasn't intended and can lead to growth by looking at a subset of your users.

MediaMath

A great explainer on how to measure causation vs correlation.

It's hard to find resources on this topic that not only make it easy to understand but also run you through what steps you would need to take to implement measuring impact within your org

Marty Cagan

A rundown of some of the most common problem areas Marty Cagan has run into in his role as a consultant. By identifying them, we can watch for them, and more aggressively and intentionally try to tackle them.

It's important to not only understand how great teams do their work, but also what are some common pitfalls in products that should be avoided.

Stewart Butterfield

The memo was sent to the team at Tiny Speck, the makers of Slack, on July 31st, 2013. It had been a little under seven months since development began and was two weeks before the launch of Slack’s ‘Preview Release’

A rare and incredible valuable look at the inner workings of a startup about to launch a preview of their software. This is a master class on product development, on finding product market fit, often its about creating that market and not settling for optimization of what users want, but rather communicating a better way to do their job and therefore transform it.

Shreyas Doshi

Shreyas Doshi is a product manager at Stripe. He has worked previously at Twitter, Google, Yahoo. He tweets often about product, strategy, and on frameworks & mental models on products, product culture, strategy, execution, and organizational psychology.

Shreyas Doshi's tweets are almost without exception useful and insightful

Kei Watanabe, Kazuki Nakayashiki

Article lists on product management. It covers product managers' career path, roles and skill, network effect, growth, and prorduct-market fit.

Each article is very long and covers the big picture of the topic. So, when you want to learn and remember it, it provides a good guide.

Hamilton Helmer

A review of 7 Powers Book. It’s about competitive strategy, and more specifically moats. Moats fascinate me, and I know my understanding of them still has important deficiencies.

Never hurts to read a book recommended by Peter Thiel and Patrick Collison

Shishir Mehrota

A view out how Youtube's leadership team structured their week. It was based on 4 kinds of meetings, decision-making, information-sharing, tag-up ie project 1on1s, 1on1s.

It's one thing to read about it, it hits different when you see how your calendar could be structured

Martin Gallardo

Website and book with a loot of templates and processes for complete product lifecycle management

Seems like a great resource

Dan Arieli, Kirsten Berman

8-week self-paced online course with Slack community and a few hands-on exercises. This virtual bootcamp designed by world-famous behavioral economics professor Dan Arieli

I took it: it was very helpful to understand basic behavioral economics and design principles, in order to understand and influence user behavior.

Aakash Gupta

Aakash Gupta's top 10 resources covering product roadmap which is one of the more popular topics. Aakash covers everything from basics, to best practices and the all important templates

A great set of resources to help product teams and leaders improve their roadmaps

Tom Leung

Director of Product at Google and executive career coach Tom Leung interviews other Product leaders and asks them questions about pretty much everything from career progression, OKRs, execution, and delivering results in both large and small orgs. New videos release every 2 weeks.

Tom is a former manager of mine and is a super empathetic and experienced Product leader. The content so far is great - he gets over an hour with former Google PMs turned CEOs, asking them lots of great questions about everything product-related. The channel is relatively low traffic so far and he's mainly marketing it from his LinkedIn connections so its a great gem IMO.

Perri

To stay competitive in today's market, organizations need to adopt a culture of customer-centric practices that focus on outcomes rather than outputs. Companies that live and die by outputs often fall into the "build trap", cranking out features to meet their schedule rather than the customer's needs.

This book is a must read as many of the companies Product Managers work within are in the build trap. They are stuck on delivering and not achieving. This is a great explainer of how to move from a feature factory to a product-led organization

Multiple

Examples of behavioral science techniques, processes and case studies in product development.

Excellent source of behavioral science techniques in product development and design.

Transforming an organization from being a project to product-led is an incredibly difficult challenge. This 96-page PDF (registration required) goes into great details on how to approach transform each of the seven domains (culture, architecture, product taxonomy etc etc).

A thorough, if not scientific, breakdown of the various organizational components involved in digital transformation with recommendations and approaches surfaced.

Shreyas Doshi

A product metrics primer.

A great overview of 6 types of product metrics, when to use them and why

Itimar Gilad

OKRs are a great way to set goals and measure progress. They’re a good way to keep your team focused on the right things. But they’re not a silver bullet.

Love the confidence meter concept buried within this OKR discussion - It feels like it could reinforce actual behavior change.

Chris Dixon

An extremely useful concept that has grown popular among startup founders is what eminent entrepreneur and investor Marc Andreessen calls “product/market fit”, which he defines as “being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market”. Andreessen argues persuasively that product/market fit is “the only thing that matters for a new startup” and that ”the life of any startup can be divided into two parts: before product/market fit and after product/market fit.”

It's really good to study the classic writeup on product market fit. Although I tend to side with Shreyas Doshi that PMF is something that evolves and is not binary

Shreyas Doshi

There are 3 levels to product work. When leaders, PMs & their team are fixated on different levels, often there is conflict.

Understanding the three level of product work is one of those insights that will quickly help you understand what leadership vs your team are interested in understanding.

Shreyas Doshi

Very effective for proactively & rigorously addressing Eng/Design/PM conflict when building a product.

Instead of litigating 100s of details just before launch, discuss upfront the quality level you are aiming for (and why)

Matt Green and Moshe Mikanovsky

A podcast that talks about products for Product people. The hosts talk about different categories of products, and bring guests product people that use these products on a daily basis, to learn from their experience.

Experiential conversations gives a more intimate understanding of tools leveraged at various companies.

Daniel Zacarias

A blog authored by Daniel Zacarias, a product management consultant based in Lisbon

It’s a great resource for prioritization methods. I love his Periodic Table

Andrew Yi

An illustrated take on Shreyas Doshi's thread on Product Metrics. It is applicable to PMs at all levels and provides non-obvious actionable steps.

An illustrated version of a masterful thread by Shreyas Doshi on product metrics? What's not to love. Andrew Yi's illustration make product metrics feel even more accessible.

Toby Rogers

As a product manager, your product is decisions. Here are 9 mental models guaranteed to help you make sure the right decisions get made

Some good basic frameworks as well biases to be on the look out for

Marty Cagan

Marty Cagan is at his best describing in great detail the terrible ways the vast majority of product teams work ie waterfall with a sprinkle of agile. But as he says fret not, as he does offer best practices to counter these bad habits.

Marty breaks down the issues that come with traditional prioritization and build practices, creating a Top-10 list of reasons why these ways of working cause failure

Reforge

A blog post describing how to reverse Interview: A method to gain more information and shape the company's perception of you. Post provides sample questions across five dimensions including culture, role, team topology, role history and perception of you.

Having been the interviewee and the interviewer, this method really hit a nerve with me in a good way. Stop asking what the company culture is and ask questions that will demonstrate what the company culture is. The sample questions are worth their weight in gold.

Alex Pedicini

This is the simple framework Facebook has developed to guide their product thinking. After examining their product successes and failures they have distilled their process down to three questions.

Three questions to guide how you build your product. Why make it any more complicated then that.

Gtmhub

A podcast featuring interviews prominent product and strategy leaders.

This podcast is laser focused on applying OKRs the right way

John Doerr

Legendary venture capitalist John Doerr reveals how the goal-setting system of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) has helped tech giants from Intel to Google achieve explosive growth - and how it can help any organization thrive. In the fall of 1999, John Doerr met with the founders of a start-up whom he'd just given $12.5 million, the biggest investment of his career. Larry Page and Sergey Brin had amazing technology, entrepreneurial energy, and sky-high ambitions, but no real business plan. For Google to change the world (or even to survive), Page and Brin had to learn how to make tough choices on priorities while keeping their team on track. They'd have to know when to pull the plug on losing propositions, to fail fast. And they needed timely, relevant data to track their progress - to measure what mattered.

The Father of OKr, John Doerr treaty on how to measure performance is a must-have companion for strategy as it allows us to understand how to define and measure success.

Shreyas Doshi

The "lowercase-p product" is the pixels you're directly working on. But that is not necessarily "The uppercase-p Product", the main that makes or breaks the user value proposition.

A thread made up of 5 simple questions to help us understand what the true value proposition of a service is. Hint its not what you think it is

[FEE]Site that provides a set of resources to ace that big tech PM interview

An extensive set of mock questions, videos and strategy teardown if not a bit pricey.

Sachin Rekhi

The three types of Product Managers according to Sachin Rekhi. They are: 1) Builders 2) Tuners 3) Innovators

Both as the PM and the hiring manager, its great to understand what type of PM you are or are looking for and is best suited for the role.

Shreyas Doshi

A B2B/SaaS product framework to elicit what problems truly matter for your customers. It isn't enough that your product solves a problem for the customer. You need to understand where that problem ranks.

A simple but powerful way to understand your customers needs and their relative importance to each other with a focus on SAAS / B2B product is winner in our books.

Shishir Mehrota

YouTube’s hypergrowth was a rollercoaster, but the team stayed grounded with a clear set of rituals. While it didn’t happen overnight, the team gradually settled into the planning and meeting pattern you see in this diagram.

Once again, we learn that good habits promote excellence and success. Interesting to note that this pattern was perfected before and continued after being acquired by Google.

Swapnil

One product management article every weekday, hand-picked & delivered to your inbox along with a 60 words summary that smart product managers shouldn't miss!

Over 300+ product managers subscribed to the newsletter from just 3 months of starting it. Subscribers love getting something to read every week without them having to skim through the ocean of PM content available on the internet thus making their life a bit easier!

DJ Patil

The note was one of several similar notes written on White House stationery by DJ Patil, the nation's first Chief Data Scientist. It was included as one of several photos released from a meeting between Mr. Patil, President Obama and others during Obama's term in 2016.

While seemingly simple, this note from DJ Patil really encapsulates in a single page what as Product Managers we should strive to emulate. The note touches best practices, for impact, planning and efficiency

Melissa Perri

Melissa Perri brings in a consultative view and also is the author of "Escape the Build Trap"

Questions are tackled for all ranges of product experience and across industries.

Shreyas Doshi

An incredible thread on product frameworks (think strategy) started by Shreyas, but with contributions from Marty Cagan and

A great thread because it mentions some of the most popular product management framework. Contributions from Gibbs and Cagan also amp up the value.

Melissa Perri

A great podcast on the product management discipline focused on leadership.

PM & Leadership guidance

Marty Cagan

While Inspired by Marty Cagan described the roles and responsibilities of a modern digital product manager, Empowered is clearly aimed at helping leaders to empower their team and organizations. Some of the leadership focus include coaching, interviewing, and team topologies.

Second book by Cagan - this one targeted at Product Leadership roles

Hiten Shah & Patrick Campbell

A show tailored toward product pros—created by ProfitWell's Patrick Campbell and FYI's Hiten Shah—addressing the biggest tradeoffs SaaS companies make

A really great podcast where Hiten and Patrick break down product decisions by a couple of industry veterans. It's rare to have this access and see how these veterans assess other products.

Joan Magretta

Competitive advantage. The value chain. Five forces. Industry structure. Differentiation. Relative cost. If you want to understand how companies achieve and sustain competitive success, Michael Porter’s frameworks are the foundation. But while everyone in business may know Porter’s name, many managers misunderstand and misuse his concepts. Understanding Michael Porter sets the record straight, providing the first concise, accessible summary of Porter’s revolutionary thinking. Written with Porter’s full cooperation by Joan Magretta, his former editor at Harvard Business Review, this new book delivers fresh, clear examples to illustrate and update Porter’s ideas.

What is better than Michael Porter's treaty on strategy and is getting an explainer guide. This is a must-read for anyone wanting to deepen their strategic chops or wanting a refresher course

Des Traynor

All startups go through three distinct phases – birth, growth, and survival. You start by making the product work, then you have to grow the product, and then, crucially, you have to focus on survival – on keeping it relevant

The practical examples of a burning platform are startling - and relevant

[FEE]Site provides a great way to practice for that big tech product manager interview, complete with a great list of product design, insight and strategy questions.

Recommended by internal Google PM recruiters. What more do you want?

Felipe Castro

Article detailing how to use OKRs in tandem with KPIs in a product management setting to empower faster innovation and better collaboration.

Bandan Jot Singh

The inside / not-so-known reasons why decent candidates could get rejected for Product / Tech interviews

A good overview of what are some of the dimensions that go into interviewing at big tech

Michael Porter

A nice little visual as to why it pays to go deeper then generic labels when segmenting audiences.

A vital product strategy lesson that many PMs miss: your customer segmentation should be tailored to your product & its category. Generic axes (e.g. SMB vs enterprise) are usually not super-useful.

Shreyas Doshi

Creating timeless products requires timeless insights. In this exclusive session, @Shreyas Doshi shares the mental models required to build great products, followed by a chat with Kunal Shah where they reveal the insights they rely on the most.

Learning Product Sense from Shreyas Doshi is a no-brainer

Kent McDonald

While discovering and fine-tuning for product-market fit is important and difficult, the launch of your product can create a huge boost and positive momentum if done right. If not done right, a less than stellar launch can set a product back in terms of adoption and awareness.

Nice collection of four or five articles focused on product launch - an oft-underserved topic.

Gibson Biddle

In this newsletter, Gibson Biddle tackles what an outcome roadmap would look like versus a project roadmap at Netflix. This isn't a typical outcome that is awesome and features suck discussion but rather a nice distillation of the difference between the approaches.

Gibson Biddle and his experience at Netflix, a product powerhouse, offers a balanced view as the pros and cons of outcome vs feature roadmaps. A great read, especially with the translation of the same roadmap as an outcome or project-based.

Jeff Patton

Minimum Viable Product is one of the most misunderstood, misused, and abused terms in contemporary software development. In this talk, Jeff will explain the misunderstandings made by thought leaders that lead to the confusion we all deal with today. You'll learn the counter-intuitive concepts hidden in the term and why really using them is so hard. You'll learn about techniques that will ultimately help you find smaller successful releases, test your ideas faster, develop higher quality software more predictably, and release more confidently than ever before. Because hidden in this nasty little term are clues that can help you do all that.

It's Jeff Patton, need we say more? Well if we did, we'd say that he is really one of the original product mindset coaches and advocates and his voice continues to be needed

Shreyas Doshi

Great Twitter thread by the one and only Shreyas on why products fail. Hint it's not because they are late.

Another gem of a thread by Shreyas Doshi. This one examines some of the reasons behind why products fail to gain traction and what biases Product Managers carry that contribute to less than great outcomes.

Bruno Bergher

The central premise of this article is quite straightforward. That the lone wolf nature of product managers has in some ways stunted the speed of our growth. The answer, PMs could still develop faster if learning as a team. I’ve seen it with designers before.

As a guy with a Bachelor's in Art, the concept of critique is practically innate to my being. I'm used to pouring myself into something, then putting that something on the table for others to shred with feedback. Separating the thing you made from who you are is insanely freeing and a powerful step. So why not help each other the same way as Product folks? Check out the attached - absolutely love the concept (and embarrassed I didn't proactively come up with it myself)

Shreyas Doshi

The fifth stages of strategy at a company

Shreyas lists out the 5 stages of strategy at a company

Porter

Understand how these 5 forces shape the market your product operates in: 1. Buyer bargaining power 2. Supplier bargaining power 3. Existing competitor rivalry 4. Threat of new entrants 5. Threat of substitute products

Another really good and short primer on a foundational strategy for products

Bandan Jot Singh

Product Management is a vast field and the only way to learn about it is to build a community. When you subscribe, you become part of the community. I will not only be writing articles but also sharing the best people, links, books and more that you should follow to 10x your product career and learning. Subscribe, and let’s do this.

A good newsletter on product. Looks like it has an emphasis on interviewing

Shreyas Doshi

A framework created to help improved the quality of your life as a PM & your work by helping you prioritize tasks and challenges you are faced with.

Shreyas states that this decision framework has helped him more than any other he has encountered. That's enough for me to understand that tasks are not created equal.

Adam Thomas

Product teams often know that a project needs to change direction, but they don’t have a way to make that change safely and quickly. Survival Metrics empower them to do just that.

Product Managers and Product Teams can have a difficult time understanding when to push forward, when to pivot, and when to stop an initiative completely; especially in 2021 with more remote teams than ever. By implementing processes rooted in psychology, I built a roadmap for success to help these corporate teams understand what to focus on, and when to focus on it, to streamline processes and allocate resources.

Kent Beck

A product can be in one of three stages and as a product leaders its extremely important to understand which stage so the appropriate decision can be made.

A great framework to develop better decision-making and sensing as a product manager. It Will help with creating a good structure to understand problems and being better at communicating ideas and solutions