Awesome Product Management

A curated list of awesome resources for product/program managers to learn and grow.

Who’s a product manager?

By definition, a product manager is an individual who drives the product vision and has a deep understanding of customer needs. PMs generally are considered to be at the intersection of the business, technology and and design spaces - they are the experts in the problem space, and are able to learn and iterate quickly to deliver valuable experiences to consumers.

Contents

• Tools
  • OneNote
  • Bear
  • Trello
  • To-Do
  • Notion
  • Balsamiq
  • Sketch
  • Figma
  • Taskade
  • Notejoy
  • productboard
  • logchimp
• Articles
• Books
• Podcasts
• Communities
• Conferences
• Additional resources
• License

Tools

OneNote

Efficient note-taking with superior organizational capabilities. Integrates easily with team-based workflows, where notes from the same notebook can be shared with many individuals.

Bear

Note-taking in Markdown format, with tag-based organizational capabilities.

Trello

Kanban-style boards to manage work items. Integrates well with teams and other services. Has a rich extensibility platform.

To-Do

A tool to quickly manage “to-dos”.

Notion

All-in-one workspace for teams and individuals.

Balsamiq

Wireframing tool that allows building mocks without a strong focus on details. Extremely useful for situations where you don’t want others to over-index on pixels and instead focus on the content.

Sketch

Mocking and prototyping made efficient. Offers many downloadable components that can help one create high-fidelity designs for websites, apps and other experiences.

Figma

A better way to design. Design, prototype, and collaborate all in the browser—with Figma.

Taskade

Get work done with collaborative task lists, notes and video chat. Taskade is beautifully designed for remote teams.

Notejoy

A collaborative note-taking application that is simple, intuitive and allows you to focus on the notes rather than the process around those.

productboard

productboard is the product management system that helps you understand what users need, prioritize what to build, and rally everyone around your roadmap.

logchimp

LogChimp allows you to track your customers feedback to build better products.

Articles

• Want To Build An Incredible Product? Strive For The Delta Of “Wow” - By Wayne Chang.
• The Quintessential Guide For Building An Unforgettable First-time User Experience - By Wayne Chang.
• One door at a time - By Jason Fried.
• Good Product Manager/Bad Product Manager - By Ben Horowitz.
• Guide to Career Planning - By Marc Andresssen.
• Guide to Personal Productivity - By Marc Andresssen.
• PM at Microsoft - By Steven Sinofsky.
• Hiring Your First Product Manager - By Steven Sinofsky.
• 12 Things about Product-Market Fit - By Tren Griffin.
• Relentlessly Resourcefull - By Paul Graham.
• How to Be an Expert in a Changing World - By Paul Graham.
• The Time Value of Shipping - By Brandon Chu.
• Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule - By Paul Graham.
• Deadlines - By Brandon Chu.
• Ruthless Prioritization - By Brandon Chu.
• Understanding How The Innovator’s Dilemma Affects You - By Mark Suster.
• Do Things that Don’t Scale - By Paul Graham.
• Navigating Mid-Success - By Sam Altman.
• How to focus on what’s important, not just what’s urgent - By Alice Boyes.
• Speed as a habit - By Dave Girouard.
• A Comprehensive Guide To Product Design - By Nick Babich.
• Coaching Tools – The Plan - By Marty Cagan.
• The dark side of expertise - By Jake Edge.
• Remote teams - By Notion Team.
• On narratives - By Charlie Kindel.
• Is your company product-led, sales-led, or marketing-led? - By Philipp Cannons.
• So You Wanted to be a Product Manager - By Scott C. Reynolds.
• The Black Box of Product Management - By Brandon Chu.
• The Art of Persuasion Hasn’t Changed in 2,000 Years - By Carmine Gallo.
• Mastering Effective Communication as a Product Manager - By Sachin Rekhi.
• The Top 10 Deliverables of Product Managers - By Sachin Rekhi.
• Great Product Managers are “Outcome Thinkers” - By Max Bennett.
• Product Management Mental Models for Everyone - By Brandon Chu.
• How to Work with Designers - By Julie Zhuo.
• How to Work With Software Engineers - By Ken Norton.
• Breaking into Product Management — Should you even consider it? - By Shubhi Saxena.
• Virtuous Cycles, Platforms, Flywheels, Snowballs, and Tidal Waves - By Charlie Kindel.
• Do you really understand the concept of product value? - by Hubert Palan.
• How to Calculate Customer Lifetime Value - By Clint Fontanella.
• What Makes a Great Product Manager - By John Yeung.
• Getting to the Product Manager interview stage - By Glenn Gillen.
• Persuasion for Product Managers - By John Yeung.

Books

• Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard - By Chip Heath and Dan Heath.
• Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die - By Chip Heath and Dan Heath.
• The Startup Owner’s Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company - By Steve Blank and Bob Dorf.
• Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers - By Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur.
• Value Proposition Design: How to Create Products and Services Customers Want (Strategyzer) - By Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur.
• The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses - By Eric Ries.
• The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers - By Ben Horowitz.
• The Four Steps to the Epiphany - By Steve Blank.
• The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail (Management of Innovation and Change) - By Clayton M. Christensen.
• Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products - By Nir Eyal.
• The Lean Product Playbook: How to Innovate with Minimum Viable Products and Rapid Customer Feedback - By Dan Olsen.
• Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration - By Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace.
• Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs - By John Doerr.
• The Design of Everyday Things: Revised and Expanded Edition - By Don Norman.
• Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity - By Kim Scott.
• Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days - By Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky, Braden Kowitz.
• Creative Selection - By Ken Kocienda.
• Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love - By Marty Cagan.
• The Customer-Driven Playbook - By Jessica Rich and Travis Lowdermilk.
• Escaping The Build Trap - By Melissa Perri.
• The Manager’s Path - By Camille Fournier.
• Intercom on Product Management
• An Elegant Puzzle - By Will Larson.
• The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn - By Richard W. Hamming.
• Shape Up - By Ryan Singer.
• Outcomes over Output: Why Customer Behavior Is the Key Metric for Business Success - By Joshua Seiden.

Podcasts

Podcast	Hosts	URL	Description
	Reid Hoffman	https://mastersofscale.com/	How do companies grow from zero to a gazillion? Legendary Silicon Valley investor / entrepreneur Reid Hoffman tests his theories with famous founders. Guests include Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg & Sheryl Sandberg, Netflix’s Reed Hastings, Google’s Eric Schmidt, Spanx’s Sara Blakely. With original music and hilariously honest stories, the show sounds like nothing you’ve ever heard.
	Multiple	https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-product-podcast/id1219400787?mt=2	This is your Product Management podcast featuring PMs from Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Spotify, Twitter and other tech companies/ startups. Tune in if you’re a manager, designer, engineer, entrepreneur or marketer who wants to learn the latest best practices.
	Multiple	https://www.gimletmedia.com/startup	The business origin story you never get to hear.
	Guy Raz	https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510313/how-i-built-this	Guy Raz dives into the stories behind some of the world’s best known companies. How I Built This weaves a narrative journey about innovators, entrepreneurs and idealists—and the movements they built.
	Multiple	https://www.gimletmedia.com/the-pitch	Where real entrepreneurs pitch to real investors—for real money.
	Multiple	https://rework.fm/	A podcast by Basecamp about the better way to work and run your business. We bring you stories and unconventional wisdom from Basecamp’s co-founders and other business owners.

Communities

• Women in Product (using Facebook)
• Product School (using Slack)
• The Product Coalition (using Slack)
• Product Collective (using Slack)
• Ladder

Conferences

• Industry - Over 3 days, attendees will learn from renowned product leaders and share the latest methods, tools, and frameworks that they use to build, launch and scale world-class software products. Building world-class software products is hard. At INDUSTRY you will see how others manage product in different environments, from fast-paced startups to complex large enterprises.
• ProductCon - Organized by Product School, ProductCon takes place five times a year with events in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Seattle and London. The speaker lineup features product leaders from Google, Slack, Amazon, Airbnb, Netflix, Facebook and more. You’ll learn best practices behind the most successful products, and new trends in AI, VR, IoT and Blockchain. You’ll also have the opportunity to interact with all our sponsor companies interested in recruiting PMs.

Additional resources

• Stratechery by Ben Thompson - Product and strategy insights from the industry.
• Mobbin - Hand-picked collection of mobile app design patterns.

License

Licensed under the Creative Commons CC0 License.