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. 



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