Product School - The Product Book: How to Become a Great Product Manager

The Product Book: How to Become a Great Product Manager

Copyright 2017 Product School

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ISBNs

978-0-9989738-4-5 PRINTED

978-0-9989738-9-0 MOBI

book design b y The Frontispiece

published b y Product School

Thank you for picking up this book! We know your time is valuable, and we will do our best to make this book worth your while.

One of the most important parts of being a product manager is knowing who your customers are and what they need. So, who do we believe you are, and what need will this book fill? Fundamentally, you are someone whod like to know more about product management. Maybe youre a recent graduate trying to figure out if product management is the right career for you. Maybe youre an engineer actively transitioning into product management. Maybe youre a start-up founder figuring out how to build your product division. Or maybe youre already a product manager who naturally evolved into the role, seeking to fill gaps in your knowledge.

Furthermore, theres a lot of wisdom out there regarding best practices for product managers, but most of it focuses on parts of the product-development life cycle. This book will give you an end-to-end view of what goes into building a great product, as well as what product managers do each day.

The upcoming chapters will cover a mix of theory and practical advice to teach you how to identify an opportunity, and build a product successfully to address that opportunity, whether the result is a new product or a refinement of an existing product. Whether you are new to product management, or an experienced veteran, this book is here to help you learn the needed skills to be a successful and effective product leader.

A brief word of warning: Much like chess, poker, and Minecraft, product management is easy to learn, but can take a lifetime to master. If your goal is to be a product manager, consider this book the start of your journey. Becoming a truly effective product manager takes practice!

If after reading this book you still want to become a product manager, consider enrolling in Product School, the worlds first tech business school. Product School offers product management classes taught by real-world product managers, working at renowned tech companies like Google, Facebook, Snapchat, Airbnb, LinkedIn, PayPal, and Netflix. Product Schools classes are designed to fit into your work schedule, and the campuses are conveniently located in Silicon Valley, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Santa Monica, and New York.

Now, read on to begin your journey through the wide and fascinating world of product management.

Nobody asked you to show up. Every experienced product manager has heard some version of those words at some point in their career. In this case, those painfully frustrating words are from Ken Norton, partner at Google Ventures, in a blog post titled How to Hire a Product Manager. Think about a company for a second. Engineers build the product. Designers make sure it has a great user experience and looks good. Marketing makes sure customers know about the product. Sales gets potential customers to open their wallets to buy the product. What more does a company need? Where does a product manager fit into that mix?

Those simple questions are what cause not only the confusion, but also the opportunity that comes with product management. Heck, if youre transitioning into product management, these questions might make you worry that product managers are irrelevant. And if you are currently a product manager, you might feel a sudden need to justify your existence. Truthfully, without a product manager a company will continue to operate pretty wellto a point. Yet with a strong product manager a company can become great.

What Do Product Managers Do?

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.

Theres a lot behind this simple definition, though. Adam Nash, CEO of Wealthfront and former VP of product at LinkedIn, summed up product management by saying, PMs figure out what game a company is playing, and how it keeps score (hint: its not always about how much money the company makes).

Day to day, 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. They must know how to work with engineers and designers to get the right product built, keeping it as simple as possible. They must know how to work with marketing to explain to the customer how the product fills the customers need better than a competitors product. They must do whatevers needed to help ship the product, finding solutions rather than excuses. Sometimes, this even means a PM getting coffee for a team thats working long hours to show appreciation. By the way, PMs manage products, not people, so they must achieve everything using soft influence, effective communication, leadership, and trustnot orders.

Even though its not always obvious what PMs do from the outside, they genuinely do a lot! PMs do so much that theyre sometimes even called Mini CEOs.

Ironically, the thing a PM does the most is say no. Some people believe that product managers just dictate what features to build. Given everyone has lots of ideas for features, why bother with a PM? Its true that everyone has lots of ideas, some of them good, but most ideas people have are for things they want, not necessarily things customers want. For example, think of an engineer who spends her days using cryptic command-line toolsIm sure you know someone like this! This engineer probably prefers keyboard shortcuts, dislikes GUIs, and favors using code to explicitly specify meaning. Now, imagine that engineer is part of a team working on an iPad word processor for senior citizens. Do you think the features the engineer would prioritize match what the customers need? A large part of a PMs 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 dont fit the customers needs.