A product person primer: unpacking our discipline in 50 links
Since about 2010 I’ve been in and out of various roles that had product in their title, and many that didn’t but should have!
To me product people are those most heavily invested in the what question of what teams are spending their time on, and also the why question — the rationale of prioritisation and opportunity selection, balancing business value and user value for your organisation.
TL;DR
If you just want to keep it simple and you are new to product, try reading Pichler’s Strategize. If you want to keep it simple, but you’ve worked in product for a while, try John Cutler’s The Beautiful Mess 2020 and 8 Ways to Focus your Product Team on Impact, Not Features .
Types of product person
There are many different types of product managers or product owners. There is a sliding scale between being embedded with business functions and your day-to-day involvement with the team. It all depends on the size, structure and ways of working of the organisation. Product people have different job titles, with overlapping as well as contradictory definitions. There are also many commonalities, and to focus on those I’m trying to stick to the term product person or product people.
Becoming a product person
I’m a big fan and supporter of people who move into product from other disciplines and bring those perspectives and skills with them. Starting out in product is quite hard. Most people start in a different discipline and then transition, although some lucky people are native product people. Even harder than getting started is keeping up and staying relevant and good at your job, so I’m sharing a list of links below that may help you if you’re trying to figure out what type of product person you are and want to be.
This list
I started the list of books, videos, diagrams, blog posts and articles some years ago, when I started a product community of practice. Recently a friend asked me to share it, so I updated it a little and structured it to make it more accessible. Suggestions for updates are welcome, but please provide context and tell us why it should be included.
Defining product practice
- Roman Pichler’s book Strategize
- Todd Jackson on what product manager’s actually do
- GDS guidance and role description of product managers
- Podcast: Tom Loosemore on the product experience
On the difference between product owner and product manager
- Blog: Johanna Rothman on whether your Product Owner is really overloaded due to poor boundaries
- Blog: Luís Gonçalves on how to find out these great 20 Product Owner AntiPatterns in Scrum . If you feel your role is ill-defined, work through these to start making things better
- Blog: Brian de Haaff on The Product Manager vs. Product Owner
- Podcast/Blog: Roman Pichler on Product Manager vs. Product Owner
On becoming a product manager
- GDS course: Working level for product managers course
- Steve Messer guide on Things to do as a new product manager joining a team, incl. design your own to-do list
- Subscribe to this email series, the Product Skills Toolkit by Mind the Product
- Six Questions to Ask Before Taking That Product Manager Job
- TechNation UK course: learn how to build a product vision
On product person maturity
- Toolkit by Mind The Product (PDF): Assess your product skills and take the next step on your product learning journey
On product design
- Blog: Henrik Kniberg on making sense of MVP (Minimum Viable Product) — and why I prefer Earliest Testable/Usable/Lovable
- Video: Michele Ide-Smith on Lean UX and Product Design
- Futuregov blog by their Head of Product on Seven lessons from seven years of product design
- Blog, Katie Wishlade on whether you Are you designing a product or a service?
On prioritisation and decision making
- Ebook by John Cutler: The Beautiful Mess 2020
- Blog: Teresa Torres on opportunity mapping
- Article & video: 28 Product Backlog and Refinement Anti-Patterns
- Blog: Paul Lopushinsky on How to Remove Noise and Focus on What Matters as a Product Manager
- Book: Prioritizing Requirements by Michael Cohn
- Blog: 20 Product Prioritization Techniques: A Map and Guided Tour
- Book and video: Jeff Patton, User Story Mapping and talking about the practice at a conference
On ideas and innovation
- Course on finding the right problem to solve and how to solve it: Design Thinking and Innovation
- 8 Different Ways to Organize Your Backlog to Make it More Impactful
- Roman Pichler — Product Strategy And Product Success
- HBR article by Vijay Govindarajan and Jatin Desai Innovation Isn’t Just About New Products . It’s from 2013, but still a good read if you are thinking about innovation
- HBR article from 2015 by Gary P. Pisano on why you need an innovation strategy
- Toolkit by Nesta on developing ideas: Development Impact and You
- Book: Business storytelling by David Lowe, The Innovation Revelation
On building long-term planning and goal-oriented roadmaps
- Roman Pichler’s webinar on agile product roadmaps
- Roman Pichler’s blog on the goal oriented product roadmap
- His blog on 10 tips for creating an agile product roadmap
- Using the GIST (goals, ideas, step-projects and task) framework
- Blog: 7 ways of creating and sustaining an agile product roadmap
On problems with roadmaps
On metrics and how to use them
- Mind the Product collection of blog posts on product metrics
- Ebook by Amplitude: The North Star Playbook
- Blog: Emily Tate on the importance of metrics maturity for evidence-driven teams
- Book: Charles Wheelan, Naked Statistics
On users and customers
- Book and video: Erika Hall, Just enough research and presenting at the SF Cascade meet-up
- Book: Sense and Respond on how to create successful metrics by working iteratively and following data, by Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden
- Blog by Melanie Balke on building a basic metrics funnel: AARRR Framework- Metrics That Let Your StartUp Sound Like A Pirate Ship
On building a product team and developing a product team
- Video: Jeremy Horn facilitates a discussion on creating a Product Management Team from Scratch
On assessing your team’s maturity
- Blog: Learn, Build, Measure — John Cutler on the Journey to Product Teams
- His toolkit on assessing your product team’s current maturity level on iteration skills, focus and insight
- And another blog on a simpler approach to a Product Development Team Self-Assessment
On bringing the team along
- Blog by Rian Van Der Merwe about connecting with a new team and building a product vision and roadmap
- Video of Laura Morgan talking about Leading Product Teams with Active Listening and empathy
- Blog by John Cutler on moving from a feature team to a a high impact product team: Do This Now: 8 Ways to Focus your Product Team on Impact, Not Features
