Useful Resources for Aspiring Product Managers in 2022

First and foremost, the key to ‘learning’ product management, or any other profession in the product development field(engineering, design, data, etc.), is to learn by doing. No matter how many books or blog posts you read, videos or tutorials you watch, or podcasts or talks you listen to, the proof is in the name — product development requires one to develop.

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If you truly want to accelerate your learning experience, you need to find a personal project to work on. Start small, but continue to push yourself as you progress and set realistic goals. The key here is to pick a project that interests you (bonus points if it generates an income) so that you actually stick with it, and no matter what, never pick a project because there’s a tutorial to show you exactly what to do. Yes, tutorials are essential for learning anything new to you, but you also need to get creative and push yourself to learn through research, and good old trial and error. It’s also never been so easy to bring an idea to life with no/low code solutions and tools, so one should really take advantage of new tech and get building as soon as possible.

Be that as it may, supplemental learning (i.e., anything you read, watch, or listen to) is still essential to reinforce what you’re learning through building your own personal projects. The following is a short list of some useful resources for aspiring product managers and product professionals.

(Disclosure: this is not intended to be an end-all list of PM resources (if you come across one, let me know). This list is simply made up of resources that have personally helped me.)

Blogs:

• Inside Intercom
• Product School — The Product Management Blog
• ProductPlan Blog
• Productboard Blog
• Pendo Blog
• HackerNoon
• Product Talk Blog
• Amplitude Blog
• Reforge Blog
• Silicon Valley Product Group

Books:

• Intercom on Product Management (free)
• The Product Book — How to Become a Great Product Manager
• The Lean Product Playbook by Dan Olsen
• The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman
• Zero to One by Peter Thiel
• How I Built This by Guy Raz
• The Hard Things About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz
• Inspired — How to Create Tech Products Customers Love by Marty Cagan
• Tribe of Mentors by Timothy Ferriss
• The Growth Handbook (free)

Podcasts:

• How I Built This with Guy Raz
• Masters of Scale with Reid Hoffman
• The Product Podcast
• This is Product Management
• Product Hunt Radio
• 100 Product Managers
• Product People
• Product Love

Newsletters:

• Product Hunt — stay in the loop and see what other likeminded people are working on.
• Lenny’s Newsletter
• The Beautiful Mess by John Cutler
• ProductPlan weekly newsletter
• 5-Bullet Friday by Tim Ferriss
• MorningBrew
• The UX Collective

Influential people to follow (some of the many):

• Julie Zhuo
• Marty Cagan
• Jen Yang-Wong
• Jackie Bavaro
• Aakash Gupta
• Lenny Rachitsky
• John Cutler
• Diego Granados

Again, this is not an end-all list. These are just some of the many resources out there that have personally helped me over the years.

What would you add? Please leave a comment with your suggestions below!

Interested in how to get started with personal projects? Follow us for next weeks article on resources and tools to help get you started with building your first project.

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