New to Product Management : Here's what to read and learn

Interesting can get overwhelming... 

New to PMHood? 

Here are some posts that summarise my learnings over the years in product management. Some links are from my own blog and some are from original awesome articles that I could never improve upon. The articles have been listed to make it look logical - however, the order actually does not matter.   

Product Management is NOT what you think it is.

Begin with a jolt. This post was picked by NextBigWhat for republishing. A lot of new PMs wrote to me saying they could relate to it and asking for the help on what they could do about their predicament. 

Then, what is product management?

• Basics: I tried covering the basics in my first ever video recording. It is not terrible and has been rated by 1000+ product enthusiasts as 4.4/5 stars, so I can assume it is worth your 30 minutes.  
• Also, another post was a bit on the fun side but again appreciated by a whole bunch of people who thought this was highlighting the right things. It is about how we product managers are kind of double agents.

Bread & Butter: How to write a good PRD?

The silicon valley product group came up with how to write good use cases. Who can beat this?
And here's a PRD Template, if you don't want to cook up your own format. I and my team uses this format. 

How to gather requirements?

Your customers/users can't tell you what they want. You can't do surveys and find this shit on the internet. Brainstorming and clever imagination also don't help. You'd have to go out of the building and talk to humans. This e-book is my favorite when it comes to understanding how one can talk to people in a way that helps in gathering their needs and understanding their hopes, dreams, and fears. It's Simple and drives the point home really well.  

How to create Roadmaps? 
This is something I created from scratch. I use it, and I recommend it to everyone I have taught so far. 

• Step by Step process of creating a data-driven roadmap
• Prioritization based on Product Lifecycle 
• Frameworks to use for building a comprehensive data-driven roadmap

How to evolve a development process everyone loves?

As you scale your teams, processes become extremely important. I've been in that situation multiple times and have figured that the best way to design a process is to evolve it with the team. This post is about one such situation and how we were able to create a new process together. 

Some Psychological Biases and How we can leverage them?

• Biases part 1 
• Biases part 2 

What are the potential pitfalls and how to avoid them?

If "Adrak ho gaya hai ye aadmi" rings a bell and you have similar thoughts about the product then you should totally learn about ginger growth. 

Physics for product managers

A little revision of elementary Physics and how it still affects us as PMs. Thanks, HC Verma. 

Books and other resources
Here are some free ebooks that you can read. 
Books: (It may look cliched, but there's a reason everyone suggests these books) 

• Zero to one (General perspective about technology products/startups)
• Non-Designer's Design Book (Quick & Interesting read, helps you know enough design to be able to talk to designers)
• Design of Everyday things (To develop a perspective on how the world works, very critical for product thinking)
• Don't Make Me Think (Absolute essential for basic concepts of good UI design)
• Lean Startup (Good value, essential for learning the parlance popular in startup/product world ) 
• Thinking fast and slow (how user psychology plays a role)
• Checklist Manifesto (a good book to learn the importance of processes)
• Crossing the Chasm (a gem of a book if you are in an early growth stage and scaling)

These are the books that I've found useful as a PM. However, as you grow it will help if you'd read more books on economics, marketing and scale.  

Other than these, "This is Product Management" is a good podcast to subscribe to. 
I recently (Aug' 2019) started hosting a podcast at TheProductManagement. 

Economics for product managers

Just for starters, you should at least know about the Game theory.  

And it helps in more ways than one to know how we reached where we are today  - World History in 20 mins is a great start. History is arguably a very interesting subject and if you dig into the potential reasons for historic events, you'd find them very revealing. 

Learning is endless, practically you could learn from Movies and Anime, but, I'd rest the list here. You already have a load to cover. All the very best. 



If you found this useful, you should totally leave a comment below. 

Product Management: Dreams & Heartaches

A whole bunch of newbie product managers and wannabe PMs are a victim of content marketing.

They've imagined a discipline/role that is not practical. Their world view is based on the enormous amount of reading material, the free ebooks, the blogs, the podcasts that they get free access to. The material may be actually helpful and well received by the known thought leaders across the world. However, if one looks at the most popular material on the web, it is either from companies selling their culture or companies selling their courses. And guys who are consuming this without much context of product management practice are setting themselves up for disappointment.

I'd add two instances that triggered this rant:

Case - 1: A techie, say Kriti, is doing a formal product management course but can't see the similarity between what she sees the product managers do in her current organization versus what she thinks they should be doing based on what she is being taught. She is confused about whether she has picked the wrong course or whether her colleagues are doing it wrong. Both could be possible, but, since she's not the only one finding that disconnect, I can see that something is broken.

Case - 2: A startup maverick, Vivan is an energetic fellow. He joins a mid-sized company and he wants to become a product manager, knows a lot about what's happening around in the world of product management. The source is, of course, the internet and the articles from the product course companies and SaaS companies which have built their story on content marketing. That's the world view he comes with and when he gets a real opportunity he is not able to match it up with the imagination. He thinks there are things that PM would be doing and certain things he would not be doing. Which ideally should be the case, but, as a PM you gotta fill a lot of white space. You need to get shit done. But, he is confused. Within the first few weeks, he starts to think about whether he is in the right role.

And then I ran a quick poll on twitter to see if there are others suffering. More than 50% think they aren't doing what a PM should be doing. 

Product Management articles look so perfect. But...

Honest enough?
A lot is written in retrospect by content writers, who have to come up with a story that sells. Even when it is based on true events they can always sequence the events and modulate certain sections to make it presentable. Makes for great reading, also drives the insights home, readers can definitely learn from it. I love reading them and drawing from them. However, as an existing PM, I can imagine the missing details. Those who haven't really done product management - have no way to read what's left between the lines.

One part of the story
They tell you what they did, what was the philosophy behind it and how it turned the tide. Some may also occasionally talk about what didn't work. All carefully drafted and showcased. What you definitely miss out on is that what you see is just tail of the elephant (sorry tip of the iceberg is too cliched). There is Chaos, Failures, Frustrations that are usually summarised in a line for completeness. In fact, there is no use of writing about or reading up the gory details of things that did not work. But, since you are inspired by reading just one part of the story over and over, you are set to be disappointed by reality.

Race to the bottom
As someone who's selling a course or a certification program, you have to meet your numbers. Which means you have to get more people to the top of the funnel, get you excited about "Product Management". So they try to make it look cooler. They have to build upon the imagination of others to stay relevant and capture more market. And that's where they're setting people up for disappointment.

The predicament 

The excitement about Product Management among youth is palpable. Everyone from non-Techie technology graduates (at the IITs) to management trainees from IIMs/ISBs and even people with 10+ years of domain experience is trying to get into this field. Some of the hype is justified and some are not. And there are various articles that bust the myths around product management as well.

However, in my 14 years of experience in the industry and those 6 kickass years as a product guy - I've come to realize that any role at a progressive organization is a lot about hustling and getting-shit-done.

And it is not all about the newbies being at fault. Many startups, organizations also create PM function without much deliberation. They see a gap as they scale and think what they need is Product Management to fill it up. The lack of understanding is evident if you just have a look at the PM JDs on job portals. There is an eerie similarity in all of them, and most of them are quite disconnected with what the real job would be like. E.g. A 2 years PM experience guy  - JD says should be experienced in creating Strategy and Roadmap  - really? (Note that they are an e-commerce site being used by millions of users)

Here are some samples of JDs for an e-commerce company, a fintech, and an ed-tech company:

 

 

 

They are themselves so unsure of what they want. All they seem to be looking for is a person with some proven logical, analytical capacity and communication skills - In short, an MBA from Top Tier institute, preferably with Engineering background. How do you reckon your unsure employers will provide with certainty and job satisfaction?

There are Dreams and there are Heartaches associated with the Product Management function across the board. Anyone planning a career in this needs to be more objective and better informed. It's cool, but, there's a lot of dirt under the rag. If you aren't up for it, find something better.

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