The Best Product Management Reading List For 2023
"Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body." - Joseph Addison
History of Product Management
Modern product management started in 1931 with a memo written by Neil H. McElroy at Procter & Gamble. He started as a justification to hire more people (sound familiar to any product managers out there?) but became a cornerstone in modern thinking about brand management and ultimately product management.
Overview
The following section includes posts that cover the fundamentals of what product management is, what the role entails, and gives you a high-level understanding of the skills you need to succeed as a product manager.
Good Product Manager, Bad Product Manager - Ben Horowitz
Let’s talk about Product Management - Josh Elman
How to Hire a Product Manager - Ken Norton
Be a Great Product Leader - Adam Nash
PM at Microsoft - Steven Sinofsky
What Distinguishes the Top 1% Product Managers from the top 10%? - Ian McAllister
Vision
One of the key responsibilities of a product manager is to define and evangelize the vision for their product. A compelling vision articulates how the world will be a better place if you succeed. I've found the best way for a product manager to learn to articulate a vision is to immerse themselves in a collection of compelling product visions as inspiration for their own. Below is a collection of my favorite vision narratives from a variety of successful technology companies over the past two decades.
Amazon.com - Shareholder Letter, 1997 - Jeff Bezos
Google - The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, 1998 - Larry Page & Sergey Brin
PayPal - Speech to Employees, 1999 - Peter Thiel
Tesla - The Secret Tesla Motors Master Plan, 2006 - Elon Musk
Apple - iPhone Introduction, 2007 [Video] - Steve Jobs
Bitcoin - A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System, 2008 - Satoshi Nakamoto
Slack - We Don't Sell Saddles Here, 2013 - Stewart Butterfield
LinkedIn - The Economic Graph, 2015 [Video] - Jeff Weiner
Lyft - The Third Transportation Revolution, 2016 - John Zimmer
Zuck on the messenger ecosystem Mark Zuckerberg outlines how he thinks FB messenger should be monetized.
Strategy
Another incredibly important aspect for product managers to master is defining and iterating on your product's strategy. A compelling strategy details exactly how you'll dominate your market and is constantly refined until you find product/market fit. This collection of posts cover many dimensions of putting together a compelling strategy for your product.
Steve Jobs "Top 100" Steve Jobs talking about his agenda for Apple's top 100 leaders internal event.
The only thing that matters - Marc Andreessen
How Superhuman Built an Engine to Find Product/Market Fit - Rahul Vohra
Distribution - Ben Horowitz
Not all good products make good businesses - Des Traynor
Taking the wrong lesson from Uber - Sarah Tavel
Niche to Win, Baby - Dave McClure
Distribution vs Innovation - Alex Rampell
Design
Design is the third critical dimension of product management. A compelling product design delivers a useful, usable, and delightful experience to your customers. A product manager complements the work of the designers they work closely with by facilitating customer research, generating and prioritizing a roadmap, gathering and spec'ing functional requirements, and everything in between. This collection of essays sheds light on each of these aspects of the product manager's role in designing great products.
Themes: A Small Change to Product Roadmaps with Large Effects - Jared M. Spool
Babe Ruth and Feature Lists - Ken Norton
Using The Kano Model To Prioritize Product Development - Martin Eriksson
Position, Position, Position! - Ryan Singer
Know Your Customers' Jobs to Be Done - Clay Christensen
Working Backwards - Werner Vogels
Bad Managers Talk, Good Managers Write - Walter Chen
Engineering
Things to Know About Engineering Levels by Charity Majors
The Mindset and Focus of the Role by Joy Ebertz
Execution
The final but most important dimension of product management is execution. Relentless execution ultimately determines whether you'll make your vision a reality. This involves everything from core project management responsibilities, to leveraging analytics for making data-driven decisions, to leading the overall R&D team, and so much more. This collection of essays provides an overview of each of these execution activities.
The only metric that matters - Josh Elman
Everything a product manager needs to know about analytics - Simon Cast
Speed as a Habit - Dave Girouard
Putting on the shipping goggles - Jason Fried
27 Tools for Product Managers to Build-Measure-Learn by Ben Aston for The Product Manager
Guide to Product Planning -- The Three Feature Buckets by Adam Nash:
Truly Great Products are Built by People Who Say Yes - Jonathan Sherman-Presser
How to Work With Engineers - Julie Zhuo
Growth
We can't simply build a product and hope users will come. Instead, we need to take a systematic approach to attracting the right users to our product and continually optimize our experiences to deliver value to those users faster. These essays explore exactly how to go about building your product's growth engine.
Video: How we put Facebook on the Path to 1 Billion Users - Chamath Palihapitiya
What's next in growth? - Andrew Chen
Product Channel Fit Will Make or Break Your Growth Strategy - Brian Balfour
The Growth Pyramid Revisited - Sean Ellis
A Career in Product Management
Starting and then navigating a career in product management still remains fairly amorphous for many. These essays dive into the details of getting your first product management role and ultimately navigating a career path.
Be ready to talk about your favorite physical/digital product for yourself or for other people and do a proper “product tear-down”. Use the ‘CIRCLES’ method from Lewis Lin, by far the most useful mental model.
Know the “SAR” (or STAR or SPAR or similar) structure and the “pyramid principle” for organising your thoughts and answers. S, T, P, A, R refer to situation, task (or problem), action, result. Basically: some context, what was the problem, what did you do about it, and what happened? The pyramid principle developed by Barbara Minto, a consultant, refers to grouping your answers into themes that are easier to digest.
It also helps to know a few frameworks — 3C, 4P, Porter’s 5 forces, Market Entry, etc at the back of your mind.
“My Personal Formula for a Winning Resume” by Laszlo Bock
Jackie’s PM Interview Tips - Jackie Bavaro
Getting to "technical enough" as a product manager - Lulu Cheng
Find, Vet and Close the Best Product Managers - Todd Jackson
Jackie Bavaro’s Quora page: ‘The Art of Product Management’
Go to Lewis C. Lin’s website: 90 Product Manager Interview Questions
