Product Management in Practice: A Practical, Tactical Guide for Your First Day and Every Day After

by Matt Lemay

If there’s such a thing as a Ten Commandments of product management, it is Ben Horowitz’s “Good Product Manager/Bad Product Manager”, a document Horowitz composed as a kind of ad hoc training for Netscape product managers way back in the days of the first internet boom. “Good Product Manager/Bad Product Manager” is a short and simple document, but it accomplishes something very important: it lays out in exceptionally clear terms the day-to-day expectations for product managers at that particular organization at that particular time. “Do this, not that.” Every company should have a document like “Good Product Manager/Bad Product Manager” that spells out the responsibilities of the job in clear, instructive, behavioral terms—and explicitly names the behaviors that are to be avoided.