Best Professional Sources for Product Managers That Rock in 2019
If you want to constantly feel like a high-class guru in product management, then you should permanently learn and “absorb” new professional information.
There are hundreds of wonderful resources nowadays that may empower product managers’ skills and knowledge and provide young talents with professional strengths and motivate them for great results. The most challenging thing is to choose what to read and listen and purposefully absorb this info.
In this post, we’ve combined the set of useful and informative sources that can provide product managers with a confident start to the top of their careers.
This list is not the ideal set, so you are free to offer more interesting sources that can complement it.
Professional online resources for product managers
This blog provides useful and relevant tips and free resources to become a great product manager. The website proposes a good collection of cases to improve product vision, processes, and practices.
The experts at Pragmatic Institute share their experience and insights on how to improve all skills you need to level up your products, your business, and your career. The website will be useful for product managers, marketers, business leaders or data scientists.
A great variety of free resources available for all levels of product managers, including eBooks, templates, whitepapers and much more. 280 Group offers product management training and consulting using its proven process.
This platform proposes relevant business information about private and public companies. Reading this source, you’ll dive into insightful articles, investments and funding info, news, mergers and acquisitions, and latest industry trends.
This is the trusted career destination for learning how to break into product management. Here you will find the insights from the largest online Slack community for product managers with thousands of global members from 500+ companies around the world.
This source will be helpful if you are a product leader, a startup founder or a UX advocate, who wants to create and manage great digital products.
ProductTalk will assist if you want to better understand your users or customers, integrate experiments into your product development process, make data-informed product decisions that drive both business and customer success.
A good source for startups, investors, and job-seekers looking to work at startups. The mission of this platform is to democratize the investment process and to help startups with their challenges in fundraising and talent.
User onboarding as the process aims to increase the likelihood that new users become successful when adopting your product. Here you’ll find onboarding cases from various companies and teams.
Authors’ blogs for product managers
- Ken Norton is one of the most creative and encouraging thought leaders in product management. He combines both product vision and a strong technical background. His blog is really appreciated in the PM community all over the world.
- Roman Pichler writes on various topics, including Scrum and Agile practices. He is an experienced product management expert specialized in digital products with more than 15 years of experience in teaching.
- Jason Fried is well known as the co-founder and president of Basecamp tool. He is also the co-author of the book Rework (about new ways to conceptualize working and creating) and co-author of several other books and the advanced speaker on entrepreneurship, design, management, and software topics.
- Steve Blank is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, known as the person who developed the Customer Development method that launched the Lean Startup movement. This blog will be appreciated by everyone who wants to know more about startups and customer development.
- Brian Balfour writes in-depth posts on growth and user acquisition that have been featured in Forbes or Hacker Monthly to help you build a growth machine. By the way, Brian is the CEO of Reforge and former vice president of growth at Hubspot. Here you will find great articles on product growth and get strategic and tactical considerations and useful tips.
Companies’ blogs for product managers
- Hygger blog — product management, project management, productivity hacks.
- Slack blog — teamwork, collaboration, and productivity hacks.
- Planview blog — resource management, product innovations, customer success.
- Axure blog — product management, business analysts, user experience trends.
- Intercom blog — project management, product design.
- First round — startups, product growth.
- Pendo blog — understanding a consumer, product management reports.
- Amplitude blog — analytics, data-informed culture.
- Insightly blog — product management, marketing, CRM trends.
- Justinmind blog — UX, User Testing and UI Design.
- Lucidchart blog — project managemnt, product management, diagramming.
- Mockingbird blog — product management for startups, marketing.
Bestseller books for product managers
The Goal
This book by Eliyahu Goldratt (a business consultant who is widely known for his multiple management-oriented works) is the source of case studies in operations management. The Goal is used in colleges to teach students about the importance of strategic capacity planning and constraint management.
Do the Work!
The book by Steven Pressfield is a fast read masterpiece that offers great advice for staying on track through any creative undertaking, including driving a new product to a successful market release.
This is a great resource for product managers where you will find unique strategies and get real value to keep moving forward on your product’s path.
Hooked
This book by Nir Eyal and Ryan Hoover is a powerful guide for developers and designers dreaming to create a product or app that will repeatedly engage its users.
The authors explain why some products capture widespread attention while others flop and what makes us engage with certain products. Thanks to consecutive “hook cycles,” these products reach their ultimate goal of bringing users back again without depending on advertising. The book is appreciated by product owners, product managers, marketers, start-up founders, designers and anyone who want to understand how products influence our behavior.
Crossing the Chasm
The traditional product management book by Geoffrey A Moore focuses on how companies can develop products that make the difficult leap from cool novelties for small groups to full-blown mass-market successes. The principles described by the author, have stood the test of time.
Reading the book, you will get a great explanation of how a successful product will make its way from early adopters to the laggards.
Lean Startup
The book by Eric Ries will demonstrate you that most startups fail but many of those failures are preventable. The Lean Startup is a new approach changing the way companies are built and new products are launched.
Eric Ries defines a startup as a company dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty. The Lean Startup approach fosters companies that are both more capital efficient and that leverage human creativity more effectively.
Make Time
The book by Jake Knapp And John Zeratsky describes the ways to find new reserves of that precious commodity for everyone. This is an excellent guide for taking control of the design of one's life.
Make Time offers a customizable menu of tips and strategies that can be tailored to individual habits and lifestyles.
The Hard Thing About Hard Things
The book by Ben Horowitz describes the major screw-ups that have occurred during his time leading corporations and how his team made decisions to turn things around.
The hard thing about hard things is full of humor and straight talk and draws from the experience of its author. The book is invaluable for entrepreneurs and everyone who’s aspiring to their own new ventures.
