A DECADE+ OF PRODUCT MANAGER INSIGHTS DISTILLED
Learning Product Excellence From Others
Over the years I’ve read a lot of articles and books about product management and business. These are great resources for honing your craft and for thinking more widely about your career and impact. In my personal email I have a folder called “PM Resources” where I send myself articles and tidbits to keep and refer back to. The oldest saved message in that folder goes back to February 15th, 2008.
I believe you can learn a lot from others so reading is a daily habit for me. Below is a selection of articles spanning the last 10 years as a product manager, plus a mandatory reference to one of the best PM call to action articles of all time from Ben Horowitz and David Weiden. For each I’ve added a short summary and take-aways as I see them.
I hope these help you as much as they’ve helped me form and sharpen my views on product management. If you have a high-value source not included below, please share it in the comments or get in touch.
2020 How To Become a Peak Product Manager
by Ravi Mehta, 2020
At a glance: A fantastic all-around PM skills article for a person entering this profession, and for those who want a refresh.
This is a deep dive article into the many facets of being a PM including skills spanning execution and management. This is a comprehensive view of the full job of a PM I recommend for anyone looking at entering product management, or currently in PM.
Notable take-aways:
- PMs do whatever it takes to deliver valuable outcomes to users. You don’t just ship features.
- Ravi provides a nice framework for PMs that include Product Execution, Customer Insight, Product Strategy, and Influencing People as a way to understand what makes successful PMs. Note that he doesn’t claim even the best PMs have each and every segment in their toolkit.
- Peak PMs execute flawlessly
- PMs flock to responsibility and hold themselves accountable
You Are What You Do — Why Product Managers End Up Project Managers
by Matt Grierson, 2020
At a glance: Read to understand that what makes others happy isn’t always the job to be done.
When you excel at high-level thinking, organization, motivation, and getting things done, there is an unnatural pull by many organizations to have you focus on that which feels a lot like a program manager. People will love you for it since many are terrible or uninterested in that skill set. The problem with that is, that’s not your job, and you’ll ultimately fail as a product manager if you fall into this trap.
Notable take-aways:
- Don’t waste much time on tasks that don’t actually move the product forward. E.g. In a big company, you can spend literally all day answering questions in email and Slack, or organizing other peoples’ time; none of which help move your product.
- Without you sharing your product vision, every other team will create their own vision.
- Don’t mistake effort for progress. If you spend all your time grooming a JIRA backlog, you might be organizing deck chairs on the Titanic.
- Obsess over the problem, not the solution. Every problem could have many solutions. E.g. “I’m hungry” has many possible ways to solve it.
2019
Quote: “Hope is not a plan”
by Jennifer Rowland, 2019
At a glance: It takes a lot more than imagining a bright future world.
Jennifer is a master at getting things done. We work on a team together and this is one of my favorite sayings of hers.
Notable take-aways:
- Since this is not an article, I’ll add that ideas and good intentions are great, but at some point you need the focus, a plan, and grit to get to the goal.
- To paraphrase Josh Elman, you do need to ship the right product to users. PMs motivate ideas into action. A plan is just one important tool to get there successfully.
2018 Five Dangerous Myths about Product Management
by Noah Weiss, 2018
At a glance: Until very recently, and still quite limited, product management was not a degree you can study for. It’s still an apprenticeship career.
Notable take-aways:
- No, you’re not the CEO. It’s useful in my opinion, however, to act like the CEO. That means thinking of your product like a company and doing everything possible for it to succeed.
- You facilitate and set the pace to the team. At times you get to make decisions and calls, but the job isn’t about about being the chief decision-maker.
- You don’t need a technical degree to be a PM. That said, it can help if your product is highly technical. Apply deep curiosity instead and work with your teams to get to the right outcomes.
2017 8 Ways to Accelerate Your Product Manager Growth
by Joanna Beltowska, 2017
At a glance: There is much more in this article, but the part that resonates with me is, you must keep learning.
Notable take-aways:
- PM is a deep discipline that requires unending learning.
- Keep working out by reading books, and articles, and listening to podcasts.
Product Manager for the Digital World
by Chandra Gnanasambandam, Martin Harrysson, Shivam Srivastava, and Yun Wu, 2017
At a glance: Want to be a CEO one day? These authors posit that being a PM is the new pipeline role for future company leaders.
Notable take-aways:
- PMs operate on two speeds at all times. What’s happening now this week, and what is the next 6 mo — 1 year — 2 year roadmap.
- The authors present a very interesting set of three PM archetypes which feel very relevant to me in the past 10 years. The Technologist, the Generalist, and The Business-oriented PM. I believe the successful senior PM leader is a combination of two or more of these archetypes.
What kind of person would be a better fit for Product Manager as opposed to software engineer?
by Moisey Uretsky, via Quora 2017
At a glance: Wondering if you might be a fit for product management?
Notable take-aways:
- A product manager’s role is about critical thinking.
- Take all the information available, make a conjecture, hypothesis, or estimation, then see if if turns out to be true.
- The role is about fixing ambiguous problems
by Ken Norton, 2016
At a glance: Don’t force your users to understand how your company is organized in order to get a viable, working product.
“Don’t Ship the Org” chart is one of my favorite expressions. Your customers don’t care where your area of ownership ends and another begins. When my car fails me I fume at the car maker. I don’t know and don’t care who made each component. The car is a single, whole product to me.
Ken is best known for his phrase, ‘bringing the donuts’, because it’s a great summary for how PMs show up for their teams. Here he digs into PM organization and how it impacts companies. This is a short read but I like it because customers should not care or even know what your org chart is. The product is the product.
Notable take-aways:
- Don’t carve up product ownership according to engineering teams that build components. It leads to solutions that stop at the boundary of the team that builds it. Think instead of ownership according to customer experience.
- Consider organizing PMs by discrete product mission. This might lead to org changes as each mission is completed, but orgs are never static anyway.
2015 Doers not talkers — What to look for in great PMs
by Deepika Yerragunta, 2015
At a glance: Great salient points on being hands-on and understanding your customer. Short but effective, this post was one of the first to simply say, you must be able to do the actual job, not just talk about it.
Notable take-aways:
- PMs must have user empathy in order to do the job.
- Can you get the job done personally by rolling up your sleeves to do the work? PMs need to be able to do the on-the-ground work.
- Keep reading and keep learning in order to widen your knowledge base.
by Josh Elman, 2013
At a glance: A great initial read for beginner PMs. Overall, be helpful to your entire team, but you also need to ship the product. The product may not satisfy every customer, but you also don’t have unlimited time to work on it to polished gold perfection. This is a good summary of the PM’s overall job.
Notable take-aways:
- PMs help their team ship the right product to users
- You must ship the actual product to your users. Everything before this is just planning. You must understand when it’s good enough, and when to ship.
- Listen to feedback all the time, from any source
- Josh also formatted this nicely here.
2011 What, Exactly, Is a Product Manager
by Martin Eriksson, 2011
At a glance: Great initial read for beginners. Martin must be proud that his Venn diagram (of UX, Tech, and Business) has been used hundreds of times over in other articles. His point is, PMs cover multiple, concurrent areas of expertise. You need to be conversant in each in order to know what to build, how to do it, and how the customer will experience it. This is a good, basic framework for thinking about PM.
Notable take-aways:
by Werner Vogels, 2006
At a glance: Essentially this article says, ‘Start with the end in mind’ from a customer perspective, which is also reminiscent of the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. By imagining in great detail what the end customer will get and experience, you start with the definition of success well planned out before anything else starts.
Notable take-aways:
- Start with the end in mind. This means envision the future, from the perspective of your customer. What does the press release say? The FAQ? The User Manual?
- Define the customer experience before you get started in order to reach that future. Many times have I seen projects with unclear future end states start to lean in a direction while inevitable trade-offs and compromises are made. Use the vision of a crystal clear future state to stay on course in the face of prevailing winds.
1997 Good Product Manager, Bad Product Manager
by Ben Horowitz and David Weiden, 1997
At a glance: This is the original PM bible. Read and then re-read once yearly.
Critical reading for PMs of any years of experience to understand. This is a classic because it was one of the first brutally honest assessments of what a PM should do and how they should think. If you look online, you’ll find two versions of this document. One is a summary and one is the no-holds-barred deep dive into how to succeed and fail in the role. I prefer the deep dive even though some references are naturally dated.
The original text can be found on the Khosla Ventures web site at Good Product Manager, Bad Product Manager. A newer, summarized version from 2012 can be found on the The summarized version is good, but I prefer the original because it pulls no punches. It goes deep on what successful PMs do and how bad PMs fail. It’s a must-read for anyone thinking about product management, or in the role for less than five years. I re-read it about once a year.
Notable take-aways:
- You get rewarded for your results, not your intentions, so you act like the CEO of the product which means you have vision and drive outcomes. That doesn’t mean you’re the actual CEO, but you must embrace that your job is that important.
- You will face challenges and figure it out anyway. Bad PMs make excuses.
- You know the business. I.e. You consider company goals, customer demand, do research, act with certainty, know the competition. And you know what you don’t know. There is more that can be added to this list.
- You put your requirements clearly in writing and constantly gather data.
- Know what’s important and spend your time on that. Don’t waste time.
ABOUT LUKE
Luke Congdon is a career product manager living and working in Silicon Valley since 2000. His areas of focus include enterprise software, virtualization, and cloud computing. He has built and brought numerous products to market including start-up MVPs and billion-dollar product lines. Luke currently lives in San Francisco. To contact, connect via luke@lukecongdon.com or https://www.linkedin.com/in/lukecongdon/.
Originally published at https://lukecongdon.com.
