The Product Book: How to Become a Great Product Manager

by Product School

PMs must understand both business strategy and execution. They must first figure out who the customers are and what problems the customers have. They must know how to set a vision, finding the right opportunities in a sea of possibilities, by using both data and intuition. They must know how to define success, for the customer and the product, by prioritizing doing what is right over doing what is easy.

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

There’s some bad news you should know up front. Generally, less than 50% of ideas you’ll execute—even awesome ideas—improve the metrics they’re supposed to improve. Amazon tests all its new ideas and has data to back up this 50% figure.

Someone else once said that “data-driven optimization taken to its extreme just leads to porn.”

one of a PM’s challenges is to weigh the overall value of fixing a bug against that of not fixing the bug and doing something else instead. Quality’s always important, but not every bug is a high enough priority to go fix immediately.