The Product Book Quotes

“Product managers are like the conductor in an orchestra. The conductor never makes a sound but is responsible for making the orchestra as a whole sound awesome to deliver a great performance to the audience.”
― Product School, The Product Book: How to Become a Great Product Manager

“PMs manage products, not people, so they must achieve everything using soft influence, effective communication, leadership, and trust—not orders.”
― Product School, The Product Book: How to Become a Great Product Manager

“Low-effort, highly valued features or products are nearly always worth pursuing.”
― Product School, The Product Book: How to Become a Great Product Manager

“Creating a grid to compare development effort to user value is an easy way to visualize and compare different opportunities. Ideally, you will do low-effort/high-user-value tasks first (Feature A) and avoid high-effort/low-user-values tasks (Feature C) as much as possible.”
― Product School, The Product Book: How to Become a Great Product Manager

“They must know how to work with engineers and designers to get the right product built, keeping it as simple as possible.”
― Product School, The Product Book: How to Become a Great Product Manager

“They must know how to define success, for the customer and the product, by prioritizing doing what is right over doing what is easy.”
― Product School, The Product Book: How to Become a Great Product Manager

“this even means a PM getting coffee for a team that’s working long hours to show appreciation.”
― Product School, The Product Book: How to Become a Great Product Manager

“They must do whatever’s needed to help ship the product, finding solutions rather than excuses.”
― Product School, The Product Book: How to Become a Great Product Manager

“not always about how much money the company makes).”
― Product School, The Product Book: How to Become a Great Product Manager

“summed up product management by saying, PMs figure out what game a company is playing,”
― Product School, The Product Book: How to Become a Great Product Manager

“Put simply, a product manager (PM) represents the customer. No one buys a product because they want to give the company money. Customers buy and use products because the products address their needs. Done properly, the products let the customers be awesome. The end result of representing the customer is that a PM helps the customer be awesome.”
― Product School, The Product Book: How to Become a Great Product Manager

“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.”
― Product School, The Product Book: How to Become a Great Product Manager

“Now, read on to begin your journey through the wide and fascinating world of product management.”
― Product School, The Product Book: How to Become a Great Product Manager

“At a high level, company goals fall into three categories: growth, revenue, and customer satisfaction.”
― Product School, The Product Book: How to Become a Great Product Manager

“Even though it’s not always obvious what PMs do from the outside, they genuinely do a lot! PMs do so much that they’re sometimes even called “Mini CEOs.”
― Product School, The Product Book: How to Become a Great Product Manager

“Some companies are moderately successful without having a clear mission statement. But they struggle to grow because it’s be unclear to their leadership why their product was successful and how to expand the product line. The result is a product portfolio that feels very disconnected.”
― Product School, The Product Book: How to Become a Great Product Manager

“Tavel noted that there are three distinct strategy phases startups, and by extension new products, go through: engagement, retention, and self-perpetuating. Startups that go through all three tend to turn into multibillion-dollar companies, whereas startups that get stuck in one phase commonly fail. The goal of the first phase is to get customers using your product and completing the core action, like posting a photo to Instagram. This is a sign they’re engaged with your product, and we could say that completing the core action is a success metric that supports an engagement goal.”
― Product School, The Product Book: How to Become a Great Product Manager

“Your opportunity hypothesis is that fixing this bug will improve acquisition for the shopping cart page, and eventually increase revenue.”
― Product School, The Product Book: How to Become a Great Product Manager

“A low time on a screen and a high bounce rate—people who leave after viewing this content—on a page that’s supposed to be important likely indicates a mismatch between expectations and reality. The content wasn’t what the customers expected, so they left.”
― Product School, The Product Book: How to Become a Great Product Manager

“Another way of grouping data is cohort analysis. This is very similar to segmentation, but it uses a point in time as a key characteristic of the group and is often used to look at behavior over time. For”
― Product School, The Product Book: How to Become a Great Product Manager

“McClure suggests breaking down the key behavioral steps for your product into these buckets (each bucket might have more than one metric within it) and using this funnel to see how users go from discovering your product to being willing to pay. Each large dip is a potential opportunity and a metric to flag, and the ones towards the top of the funnel are the ones to address first.”
― Product School, The Product Book: How to Become a Great Product Manager

“Nearly any sequential-action group of metrics (workflow) can form a funnel, and your goal is always to look at how a user goes from initiating to completing an action. Not every customer enters your product the same way (e.g., tapping an app on the home screen to”
― Product School, The Product Book: How to Become a Great Product Manager

“Startup Metrics for Pirates,” where he came up with a general approach to metrics for an entire product, called AARRR metrics—although he put it together for startups, where the success of a company depends on one product, it’s useful for any product. The acronym stands for the following: Acquisition: How the user comes to your product. Activation: The user’s first visit to your product and her first happy experience. Retention: The user liked your product enough to use it again (and hopefully again and again…). Referral: The user likes it enough to tell someone about it. Revenue: The user finds your product valuable enough that she pays for it.”
― Product School, The Product Book: How to Become a Great Product Manager

“The last common method of grouping data is a funnel. This is when you measure key steps along a user’s journey towards some task and group them together, in journey order. Typically a lot of people complete the first step and far fewer complete the last; e.g., many people might go to an Amazon product page, a smaller number click Add to Cart, and a smaller number still complete the checkout. “Leakage” is when a customer stops moving forward in the funnel. Nearly any sequential-action group of”
― Product School, The Product Book: How to Become a Great Product Manager

“If you find yourself in that situation, we recommend doing an analytics audit and reassessing what data points you’re recording—removing the irrelevant ones—before using the data to make decisions. The next part is how we group metrics together so that we can spot trends and opportunities. There are three key ways: segmentation, cohort analysis, and funnels. Analytics track every customer equally and report the average behavior. For example, a new customer will use an app’s first-use tutorial—some might skip it—but a returning customer won’t even see the first-use tutorial. If you simply looked at how often a customer views the tutorial out of how many times people use the app, it’d look like very few people use the tutorial overall. It’s up to you to segment your data, which means grouping it by common characteristics.”
― Product School, The Product Book: How to Become a Great Product Manager

“your success metric is how engaged your customers are, you should track how often they complete the core “success” action and the steps that lead to it. If the right metrics aren’t there, then your first task for this iteration of the product-development life cycle is to implement analytics for those metrics.”
― Product School, The Product Book: How to Become a Great Product Manager

“To put it simply, blue-sky opportunities are about skating to where the puck will be, not where it is now. Sometimes blue-sky opportunities arise by thinking more broadly or reframing how you’re approaching a problem: Blockbuster saw its business as “video stores” and was locked into handing customers tapes and DVDs. Netflix focused on “content delivery,” and it didn’t matter if that content came from the mail or streaming video. By thinking about how to let customers watch movies and TV shows in a different way, Netflix saw a means to exceed Blockbuster’s local maxima and find a new global maxima.”
― Product School, The Product Book: How to Become a Great Product Manager

“The 5C structure is generic—useful to product, marketing, and more—whereas the way we presented the sections in this chapter is very focused on product management. It’s good to know what the “C”s stand for because you’ll likely hear 5C mentioned. Plus if you need to do a situational analysis on your feet in a meeting or interview, it’s relatively easy to remember. Company: This refers to the company’s experience, technology, culture, goals, and more. It’s similar to the material we covered in the “Why Does the Company Exist?,” “How Do We Know If Our Product’s Good?,” and “What Else Has Been, Is Being, and Will Be Built?” sections. Customers: Who are the people buying this product? What are the market segments? How big are they? What are people’s goals with buying this product? How do they make buying decisions? Where do they buy this type or product? This is similar to what we covered in the “Customers and Personas” and “Use Cases” sections. Collaborators: Who are the external people who make the product possible, including distributors, suppliers, logistical operators, groundwork support personnel, and so on? Competitors: Who is competing for your customers’ money? This includes actual and potential competitors. You should look at how they position their product, the market size they address, their strengths and weaknesses, and more. Climate: These are the macro-environmental factors, like cultural, regulatory, or technological trends and innovations.”
― Product School, The Product Book: How to Become a Great Product Manager

“What are other people building? Who are the company’s main competitors? How are their target use cases, personas, and end customers different? How are their products different? How are they winning or losing compared to another company? Are you aware of who’s out there?”
― Product School, The Product Book: How to Become a Great Product Manager

“Roadmap Companies generally collect their product plans into a roadmap. A roadmap is a document that shows what the company/product is doing now, what the company/product plans to do over the next N months, what the company/product plans to do later, roughly how much effort each high-level task will take, what products the company will create, and what features they will have, etc.”
― Product School, The Product Book: How to Become a Great Product Manager