Curated Bookmarks

What makes a strategy great

Most so-called "strategies" are vague, wishful thinking, written once and never seen again. Don't do that. These are the characteristics of great strategy.

longform.asmartbear.com

The roadmap to Product/Market Fit… maybe

This eight-step process brought WP Engine from an idea to a Unicorn. While there are other roads to Product/Market Fit, consider copying some of these ideas.

longform.asmartbear.com

The Magic Loop

A framework for rapid career growth

www.lennysnewsletter.com

Master Technical Interviews

You need to prepare if you want to perform well in technical developer job interviews. We just published a course on the freeCodeCamp.org YouTube channel that will guide you through every aspect of the technical interview process, as well as prepare you for the type of questions you might get

www.freecodecamp.org

Product/Market Fit: Experience & Data

Companies that achieve Product/Market Fit -- both self-funded and VC-funded -- exhibit the same prototypical metrics curves and subjective experiences.

longform.asmartbear.com

6 Superpowers to Seek Out as a Product Manager

Advancing in today’s environment means honing one or two of these skills

theskip.substack.com

Outpace: Unlock Your Product Manager Potential

pitch.com

TBM 8/52: Top 1% Product Managers

Why is product management so obsessed with tropes and bromides like "Top 1% Product Managers" and "Good Product Managers _____ Great Product Managers______"? Is it something unique about the profession? About people drawn to the profession? About broad curiosity about the role? Or all three? Or something else? 🤷🏼‍♂️

cutlefish.substack.com

Outpace.co: Question: How do I successfully build a product roadmap?

The core function of a product roadmap is to be a source of truth for the product vision, goals, metrics, priorities and progress over time. The efficacy of a product roadmap depends on multiple factors ranging from the definition of goals, metrics to measure the progress towards goals and clarity of scope, impact and priority of features.

www.outpace.co

What separates top product managers from the rest of the pack

What separates the best product managers from the rest of the pack? In this article, we look at tech product management best practices from top performers.

www.mckinsey.com

The Top 1-5% PM Growth Equation

Lessons from my time at Gojek and Booking.com on how top PMs consistently get promoted and what works for them.

productify.substack.com

How To Become a Peak Product Manager

COVID-19 is putting enormous pressure on #product teams to adapt to a new world and putting pressure on PMs to perform at their peak - at their companies or searching for a new role. Today, I'm launching a toolkit to help you meet the challenge.

www.ravi-mehta.com

A New Way to Think About Product-Market Fit

I made my team waste two years of their lives building and refining the wrong product. Yes, we had a good time and we learned a few things, but nobody wishes to spend two grueling years on something that doesn't matter. What went wrong? I had an oversimplified understanding of product-market fit.

www.erezdruk.com

Reflecting on a Career in Product Management

I turned fifty earlier this year. The thing about getting older that nobody warns you about is that you always feel like you're the youngest person in the room until suddenly you're the oldest. There's never a noticeable moment where you look around and think, "huh, my age is about average."

newsletter.bringthedonuts.com

The Power of Product Thinking - Future

In many design, product management, engineering, or even venture capital interviews and pitches, you'll be assessed on a dimension called "product thinking," sometimes also called "product sense." If you're a builder aspiring to create something new and valuable (or someone who invests in such builders), having well-honed product thinking will help you - and the...

A UX Research Crash Course for Founders - Customer Discovery Tips from Zoom, Zapier & Dropbox

The window when founders are pre-product, exploring ideas is one of the most consequential periods in company building. There's plenty for aspiring entrepreneurs to focus on in these nascent stages - from finding startup ideas and linking up with the right co-founder, to talking to users and shipping an MVP as quickly as possible.

review.firstround.com

The Top 10 Deliverables of Product Managers

Mastering the craft of product management is no easy task. Much of the literature that defines the role as the intersection of business, technology, and user experience isn't particularly helpful for practitioners who are left wondering what skills they need to learn versus the fine people they work closely with in actual business, technology, and user experience roles.

The Skills Product Managers Need in 2021

The needs of tech companies ebb and flow with the times, and never more so than now. That means that the most sought after product manager skills also need to change with the times. Whether you're already established, or looking to break into the industry for the first time, knowing what 2021 will demand from product professionals will help to boost your career.

GitHub - ProductHired/open-product-management: A curated list of product management advice for technical people.

A curated list of product management advice from frameworks, interviews, experts, resources, books, products, career preps, and much more. The list is divided into cores such as product management, resources, interviews, case Studies, sample products/projects, communities, open source projects, free and paid services.

github.com

The Growing Specialization of Product Management - Reforge

Design, Engineering, and Marketing have specialities, but Product has not yet defined theirs. We talk about problems that arise when we assume all Product Managers are created equal, different types of product work, PM specialities (Core, Growth, Platform, Innovation), and emerging product specializ

www.reforge.com

Visual guide to the best books on product management - Delibr Blog

This is a reading guide for you as a product manager. It is a curated list of the best book on product management. But it not just a numbered list of books to read (There are a lot of listicles out there on "The 7/13/25 Best Books on Product Management").

www.delibr.com

Grow Your Career Like You Grow A Product - Reforge

Elena Verna is a Reforge EIR and Partner on the Experimentation and Monetization Deep Dive programs. Elena is a Growth Advisor to Miro, MongoDB, Maze, and others. She was formerly SVP for Product & Growth at Malwarebytes, and also an SVP at SurveyMonkey. She has a breadth of experience

www.reforge.com

The Mindset That Kills Product Thinking

My friendMarty Cagan released two articles, this one and this one, describing some of the challenges to product thinking. You should read them. He's right. This article is about something more fundamental than that. It's about the service provider anti-pattern baked into our processes. It's baked into the governance of most large companies.

www.jpattonassociates.com

Behind Every Great Product | Silicon Valley Product Group

When I first decided to start The Silicon Valley Product Group, I had just left eBay and had some very strong opinions about what makes great product teams, and great product cultures, and while there were more than a few important thinkers and leaders on these topics, one area that I felt was under-represented was the role of product management.

svpg.com

Top 100 Resources for Product Managers

I'm often asked what's the best way for a new product manager to learn the fundamentals of the role or for an experienced product manager to continue to master their craft. Most folks are looking for a pointer to a book or a class they can take on product management, but I always reply with a collection of blog posts from practitioners sharing their best practices.

Is Product Management For You?

You may already have an idea of how awesome a job in Product Management can be.

www.linkedin.com

What Is The Most Underrated Product Management Skill?

The skills needed by good Product Managers are of course linked to what Product Managers have to do day to day. And there are some very typical skills that you're likely to see on a job posting, or be asked about in an interview. These are the skills everyone knows and loves.

productschool.com

Building Products at Stripe

This is the next part of my ongoing series about product culture. If you missed it, check out my previous piece about Airbnb and my article on strong product cultures that kicked everything off. This month we're going deep on Stripe. As you're about to learn, "going deep" is a core product principle at Stripe.

newsletter.bringthedonuts.com

Indispensable Growth Frameworks from My Years at Facebook, Twitter and Wealthfront

Imagine you asked your finance team about how money enters and moves through your company, and they couldn't tell you exactly where each dollar goes and is spent. You'd probably fire them all. So why aren't a company's users held to the same standard?

review.firstround.com

Core concepts of modern product management

I often come across companies that don't really understand what strong product management is about, mostly because they just never have been exposed to it. So I decided to share a few fundamental product management concepts to help aspiring product people build a better product. First, what's the purpose of the product team?

uxdesign.cc

13 Top Product Management Blogs And Websites Of 2020 - The Product Manager

Reading project management blogs from top industry professionals is a great way to keep up to date on new trends, best practices, strategies, and any news related to your product. A quick Google search for product management blogs provides an overwhelming number of options, so we've rounded up our favorites to make life a little easier for you.

theproductmanager-com.cdn.ampproject.org

Product Leaders to Follow on LinkedIn

To become the best, you have to surround yourself with the best. And since you're here, you know a great place to do that is LinkedIn! If you're an aspiring product manager looking to stay up to date on the latest in product thought leadership, this is the place to be.

www.linkedin.com

Getting to "technical enough" as a product manager

"Why are you the product manager for search if you're not technical?" The question was posed with the blunt earnestness you come to expect of social interactions in the Valley. And it was a fair one, to the asker's credit, though maybe not something I would have fired off within the first five minutes of meeting someone.

medium.com

PM Library

thepmlibrary.com

3 Types of Product Managers: Builders, Tuners, Innovators

As the product management role has become far more popular here in Silicon Valley and at technology firms in general, we've started to see specialization in the role begin to emerge.

Good Product Managers, Great Product Managers

There are Good Product Managers and there are Great Product Managers. There are also Okay Product Managers and Bad Product Managers, but we will focus on the Good and the Great here.

www.linkedin.com

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 ...

a16z.com

Product Manager vs Product Owner

It's an interesting question and one that takes time to unpack. Let's look at where these terms and disciplines originated from and how some common frameworks explain them. When I started my career, I was called a Business Analyst. I did very little "business analysis" as we would look at it in traditional IT companies.

medium.com

What's Your Shape? A Product Manager's Guide to Growing Yourself and Your Team

In How To Become a Peak Product Manager, I introduced the 12 skills PMs must learn to build products that are valuable to their customers and their companies.

www.ravi-mehta.com

PF#56: Product Manager Assessment

This is my first new article back on Substack after a brief adventure into using ConvertKit and Wordpress. If this is your first article in a while it is because my emails weren't getting through and I hope coming home to Substack solves that.

productstride.substack.com

What Is the Most Important Product Management Skill?

A few months ago I decided to tap into the Twitterverse and ask what my next topic to write about should be. Lots of interesting thoughts came through, but the one that caught my attention was Josh Pitzalis' answer: Twitter Thread with Josh Pitzalis This got me thinking - is there really a single most important product management skill above all others?

airfocus.com

Why Design Thinking Works

Idea in Brief The Problem While we know a lot about what practices stimulate new ideas and creative solutions, most innovation teams struggle to realize their benefits. The Cause People's intrinsic biases and behavioral habits inhibit the exercise of the imagination and protect unspoken assumptions about what will or will not work.

hbr.org

A brief history of product management

A short article on how product management started, evolved over the years and where it might be headed next. Often when I'm curious about any topic, I try reading about its history. Reading its history broadens my perspective and helps me better understand why things are how they are today.

medium.com