35 great things for Product Managers to read and listen to.

Photo by Alfons Morales on Unsplash

Blogs and newsletters; books; podcasts; people to follow on LinkedIn; and articles that I hope you find useful

Any list like this is going to suffer from a) being very subjective and b) not being anywhere like complete. So apologies upfront. But, hopefully this will steer you towards something or someone you find useful and inspiring. There are so many PMs out there doing great work sharing their expertise often on top of challenging day jobs.

I didn’t want to make it so long that it’s totally overwhelming; at the same time — it needs to be long enough to capture some of the really obvious choices, and throw in a few personal selections. So I’ve broken it down to lists of 5.

I’ve also limited it to things I can personally recommend, because I’ve read or listened to them. For this reason, I haven’t even started on YouTube as I don’t really watch much PM stuff on there (I’d rather watch a cop show if I have the time) and I haven’t done a list of people on Twitter — as I don’t spend a lot of time on there, and most people tend to cross post on to LinkedIn.

Most of the names on here have a lot of output: a blog, a book, a podcast, a presence on Medium or Twitter and some YouTube videos: Where possible I’ve just focussed on one thing. But if their name is on here…you should check out everything they’ve done.

UPDATE: You can also add my picture of what good product management looks like.

More suggestions very welcome.

5 Blogs and Newsletters

It’s easy to get lost down a rabbit hole of infinite links here as there’s so much good stuff. This is just a quick selection. There’s another list of good stuff here.

1. Ask Gib: Gibson Biddle’s (ex VP of Product at Netflix and prolific writer/ speaker on product management) answers his readers questions and provides great insights as a result
2. Productify: A great list by Bandan Jot Singh — which has loads of great case studies in it.
3. Product Talk: Teresa Torres is the author of Continuous Discovery Habits — this is her blog, and there’s a weekly newsletter that also has a set of great things to read from around the web.
4. Mind The Product Articles that cover the entire spectrum of product management by PMs.
5. The Ockham Bugle: OK I have to put my own little effort in here. Just starting out, but an interesting little vanity project that might go somewhere.

5 Books about Product Management

1. Cracking the PM Career: The Skills, Frameworks and Practices to Become a Great Product Manager, Jackie Bavaro and Gayle Laakmann McDowell
   This is big — and pretty exhaustive, grappling with pretty much every dimension of PM life coming out of the Google Associate Product Management program. A bit overwhelming if you’re totally new to the topic — but a great resource. Amazon
2. Inspired: How to create Tech products customers love, Marty Cagan
   An essential read — if only for the fact that anywhere that’s worth going to work, you will be interviewed by/ end up working for someone who has read this.
3. Product Roadmaps Relaunched: How to Set Direction While Embracing Uncertainty, C Todd Lombardo et al
   Great walkthrough of both the idea and implementation of ‘Outcome driven’ roadmaps. I’d say this is pretty much an essential read for anyone stepping up to a Senior/ Head of role.
4. Product Management in Practice: A real world guide to the key connective role of the 21st century, Matt LeMay
   Matt really gets the reality of day to day PM work — and the fact that you’re going to be much better off if you think of yourself as a ‘connector’ rather than ‘the ceo of the product’. In other words thinking about how you bring people together to do great work, rather than what you own. Worth checking out Matt’s writing on here; and see if you can find him on a podcast near you.
5. Product Leadership: How Top Product Managers Launch Awesome Products and Build Successful Teams, Martin Eriksson et al
   Credible and focussed and essential for those who want to lead product teams: “For many product leaders, work life is a constant tension between delivering value to one group and telling another they can’t have what they want. Shipping product, and its associated value, is the reason these product leaders get up and go to work”

5 articles on Medium

1. Naomi-isms: 8 Guidelines for good product management from Naomi Gleit, VP of product at Meta
2. Thinking about product growth in terms of outputs and inputs: By Amazon’s Shipra Kanoria — a key part of how Amazon thinks about product metrics.
3. The playbook to fix your product roadmap: There are as many opinions on roadmaps as there are PMs — this is a pretty good framework you could call on if you’re ever responsible for producing one. Hint: you don’t start with a roadmap.
4. How to produce a product strategy: Breaking my ‘one thing per person rule’ — a 12 part article that does exactly what it says on the tine.
5. How to write a PR FAQ: This is a pretty good summary of how to write an Amazon-style 6 page PR FAQ for a product proposal.

5 people to follow on LinkedIn

All of these post regularly on LinkedIn — and you will find them on Twitter

1. Aakash Gupta, Group Product Manager at Affirm (and responsible for the Product Growth newsletter)
2. Diego Granados, Senior Product Manager at LinkedIn
3. Tim Herbig, in his words: ‘Helping Product Teams find their own path to focus on Outcomes by connecting the dots of Strategy, Goals, and Discovery’. Tim is rich in frameworks and very structured approaches to discovery; strategy and roadmapping.
4. Felix Watson Jr: Product @ Google | Founder @ The PM Mastermind
5. Peter Yang: PM from Reddit, and author of the excellent Creator Economy newsletter. As well as The Principles of Product Management (which I’d recommend as a book — but haven’t read it)

5 podcasts

Perhaps the best way to hear other PMs talking about the day to day reality of their jobs. There’s a lot out there, but five I can recommend..

1. The Product Experience — a weekly walk through of all things product from Mind the Product (Spotify)
2. Dreams with Deadlines — From GTMHub who provide software to create and track OKR’s so this is heavily skewed towards OKRs. Good, but mostly I just love the title.
3. The Science of Change — From Kristen Berman of behavioural science specialists Irrational Labs …so lots about behavioural science here.(Spotify)
4. Product Magic — From Ronke Majekodunmi, PM at Paypal — great conversations on general PM skills and with a skew towards diversity and inclusion. (Link)
5. How to succeed in Product Management. — a weekly set of round table themed product conversations. Always good to hear how others work.(Spotify)

5 more things to read

1. A Guide to breaking into Product Management by Lucila Rey on Mind the Product from 2020
2. Introducing Intercom’s Product Principles from Intercom’s product blog — which both talks about their principles and gives great guidance on how and why principles help.
3. List of Biases and Heuristics: More a resource than an article — this is a complete (I think) list of behavioural science biases. Great distillation.
4. Why there’s no single way to do product discovery (pt1):From Teresa Torres Because as you know — there’s no single way to do anything in product management. But always lots of wrong ways.
5. What it takes to become a great product manager: From 2017 — from Julia Austin at the Harvard Business School. Building on many of the points from Martin Eriksson’s book aboe.

5 general books

At this point, I’m deep into subjective territory. This could get very long, but I’ve decided to focus on a few that have really impact how I work and think.

1. Measure what matters: OKRs: The Simple idea that drives 10x growth, John Doerr
   The core text on OKRs. Similar to Marty Cagan’s book — anyone worth working for will have already read this. Even if they don’t explicitly use OKRs where you work — the principles behind them for setting objectives are still incredibly valuable
2. How to lie with statistics by Darrell Huff
   This slim classic (from 1954) — is definitely worth your time. We love data, but we have to be careful how we — and others use it. On this theme — this is also great.
3. The Undoing Project: A Friendship that changed the world by Michael Lewis
   There’s so much to read about behavioural economics. The classic work is Danny Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow. Our you could try Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational. But instead, to start, I’d recommend this by Michael Lewis which looks at the working relationship between Kahneman and Amos Tversky; and gives you an insight into how their breakthroughs happened as well as talking you through the main theories.
4. Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers By Geoffrey Moore
   In a nutshell: those early adopters aren’t your typical customers; and if you want to go into the mainstream, you need to tick a whole load of other boxes.
5. Leadership Is Language: The Hidden Power of What You Say and What You Don’t by David Marquet
   Marquet was in the US navy and turned around the performance on one of its submarines — without changing any of the personnel. A blueprint for leadership focussed around listening and asking questions rather than barking orders.

What/ who have I missed? Let me know..