The Product Book: How to Become a Great Product Manager

by Product School

PMs manage products, not people, so they must achieve everything using soft influence, effective communication, leadership, and trust—not orders.

A large part of a PM’s job is to figure out the small number of key features to prioritize for the customer, and to lay the groundwork for long-term business viability by gracefully saying “no” to the numerous requests that don’t fit the customer’s needs.

The most common type of product manager is someone with an engineering/computer science background who became interested in business.

products are solutions to problems people encounter.

Adding features to support new use cases or making it easier to achieve current use cases is a common source of product opportunities.

there are three distinct strategy phases startups, and by extension new products, go through: engagement, retention, and self-perpetuating.

Low-effort, highly valued features or products are nearly always worth pursuing.

“The plural of ‘anecdote’ is not ‘data.’”

Every feature has an opportunity cost: working on one thing means you’re not working on something else. As a PM, you want to think strategically to make sure you’re always working on the things that matter most.

A product manager’s job includes anticipating what might cause the product to flop and addressing that risk up front.

writing a press release before you start product development forces you to explicitly write down your target market, the problem you’re addressing, how you’re solving it, and the key features of the solution—succinctly, in less than a page.

When faced with two products that solve a problem, they often picked the better-designed one.

Focus on reducing the design to its essentials, as that purity and simplicity will help make your products aesthetic, understandable, unobtrusive, and honest.

Your goal with this prioritization is to have the most important thing to work on next at the top of the backlog.

Teams often create a second list, called an icebox, for these less-immediately-relevant-but-things-you-don’t-want-to-forget stories. Stories in the icebox can be “unfrozen” and moved to the backlog, but you won’t actively work on icebox items.

Product managers should have empathy for their teams, not just for their customers.

“Launch isn’t the end of development but rather the beginning of selling.”