The State of Product Management Blogs, January 2019
Been reading lots of product management blogs and research articles lately. In this recurring series I will gather all useful ideas and insights I found in January, as well as give a general overview of the state of the discussion at the moment, so you don’t have to read all these blog posts.
Mind the Product (mindtheproduct.com)
Mind The Product is, perhaps, the best place to get PM content. They deliver content on an almost daily basis; they also have a slack community to chat with fellow product managers.
My selected article for this month is “Product Trends to watch in 2019” by Rosemary King, in which she speculates on issues which may get most attention this year. Rosemary reminds about the need to always confirm your intuition with data (evidence!), minding ecosystem of your organisation and making sure every department feeds information back, and stop using jargon words when it’s not needed.
Mapping methodologies by Simon Wardley were one of the tools discussed, and King believes they will get more recognition in the near future.
ProductPlan Blog (productplan.com)
Good checklist for continuous improvement from one of the January’s articles, as it’s always useful to reflect on current environment before taking a next step.:
- Where you struggle now,
- Where your company (or just you) is going next,
- Reinforcing your strengths,
- Reducing your weaknesses.
One of another useful things to keep in mind from the other one is not to do other people’s work, and leave UX to designers, sales demos to salespeople, schedule and resources to project managers.
A method discussed in January was Google’s HEART framework (I’ll make a separate piece about this one later).
Product Talk (producttalk.org)
In January’s piece Teresa Torres brings up the useful habit of saying no to things that are not important.
Basically you should define what you should do and what are the most important areas of your concern, and stop doing everything that’s not related to that. That was the core message.
First Round Review (firstround.com)
First Round provides deep analysis in many pieces they publish on the Review, as measured by references and volume of the material. On of the selected articles involved 30 advices for entrepreneurs which, of course, any PM can use. These advices include not being afraid of tough choices, striking critical conversations (not small talks) to get value from them, and writing product memoirs
Here’s a good investor email template from their blog that may serve for any compressed report on the work done:
One of the tools involved was this 4-question product-market fit checklist:
- How would you feel if you could no longer use *product*? A) Very disappointed B) Somewhat disappointed C) Not disappointed
- What type of people do you think would most benefit from *product*?
- What is the main benefit you receive from *product*?
- How can we improve *product* for you?
Inside Intercom (intercom.com/blog)
Inside Intercom is a good example of a corporate blog, with people from different departments producing regular quality content, and there was a lot of it in January.
Featured article is an excerpt from podcast, during which Des Traynor set down with his colleagues and discussed the results of 2018 knowledge-wise. They found out that it’s important to separate output and outcome (is your shipped product being used?), investing in setting up systems when you scale (that’s an important one), making sure your new features build on previous ones and reflecting on what people who decided not to use your product (unmet users) are saying.
Bonus: Silicon Valley Product Group (svpg.com)
Silicon Valley Product Group’s insights blog delivers a stable one article per month. In the January piece, Marty Cagan summed up common confusion areas and problems with product managers and their work.
He advocates for not being afraid of taking risks, not confusing product optimization with product management, trying to create value most of the time, not capture it.
He also emphasises the importance of talking to your potential user and mentions such methods as Opportunity Tree and Four Risks.
Ken Norton’s blog (kennorton.com) and BlackBox of PM (blackboxofpm.com) didn’t make any articles in 2019, which is a shame, because they make great content. Hope this will change in the near future. Product Coalition (productcoalition.com) is also a great community, but I did not find any particular novel thoughts in this month’s pieces.
