Product Management Resources

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Below is a collection of resources I've used over the years to improve my thinking around product management.

 

Other related topics I've written about:

1. Product interviewing

2. How I think about my career

3. Frameworks I use for product management (for when you're in the role)

4. Cross-functional collaboration

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Are you sure this is something you actually want?

1. What motivates you in life? (video version)

   • ​Here’s what motivates me

2. Wait But Why - How to Pick a Career (That Actually Fits You)

   • I aim to reread this one at least once every few months

 

What is Product Management

1. Josh Elman - A Product Manager’s Job

   • Let's talk about Product Management​

2. History of Product Management

3. Ian McCallister - What distinguishes the Top 1% of product managers from the Top 10%?

4. Good Product Manager, Bad Product Manager

5. Good Product Manager, Great Product Manager - Shreyas Doshir

6. Kenneth Norton - how to hire a Product Manager

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Interviewing to be a PM

1. I added the interview frameworks I teach others here

2. Pick a great company to work at

3. Decent books though we need a more modern version

   • PM Interview book: Cracking the PM Interview

   • PM Interview book: Decode and Conquer

4. Interview classes and coaching (these cost money)

   • interviews.tech

   • Exponent​

5. Video guides to interviewing

   • Exponent (prep videos and mock questions)​

   • Candor (FB mock interview but generalizable)

   • Google's PM interview tips

6. Articles on how to interview

   • Facebook Product Manager Interview: What to Expect and How to Prepare

   • Decent starting point for interview frameworks

   • For root cause analysis questions, categorize and draw a diagram

   • Estimation problems

   • Adam Grant - The one question you ask in job interviews​​​

   • The 40 Best Questions to Ask in a Job Interview

 

Vision​ and Strategy

1. Jeff Bezos - Amazon 1997 Shareholder Letter

2. Larry Page and Sergey Brin - The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine

3. Elon Musk - The Secret Tesla Motors Master Plan

4. Steve Jobs - iPhone Introduction in 2007

5. John Zimmer - The Third Transportation Revolution

6. Stewart Butterfield (Slack) - We Don't Sell Saddles Here

7. Sam Altman - Startup Playbook

8. Paul Graham - Be Good

9. Mark Andreesen - The only thing that matters

10. Sarah Tavel - Taking the wrong lesson from Uber

11. Invisible asymptotes

12. When Tailwinds Vanish

13. Amazon - Working Backwards

14. Innovation versus optimization

15. Mark Zuckerberg's vision for AR / VR

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Design

1. Writing a Product Spec

2. Job stories rather than user stories

3. Julie Zhuo - Building Products

4. Tristan Harris - How Technology is Hijacking Your Mind

5. NYTimes - How Uber Uses Psychological Tricks to Push Its Drivers’ Buttons

6. Gaurav Oberoi - On Writing Product Specs

7. How Startups should use Behavioral Economics (Dan Ariely)

8. Design for people using people language

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Execution

1. Josh Elman - The only metric that matters

2. How to Run a Quarterly Product Strategy Meeting: A Board Meeting for Product

3. Proxy metrics vs North Star metrics

4. Maker time versus manager time

5. Meetings That Don’t Suck

6. Organizing a Large Product Backlog

7. Lenny Rachitsky - 28 Ways to Grow Supply in a Marketplace

8. Julie Zhuo - Metrics Versus Experience

9. Peacetime PM / Wartime PM

10. Building a product on top of existing products’ platforms

11. Chamath Palihapitiya - how we put Facebook on the path to 1 billion users

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Leadership and Collaboration

1. Brian Chesky - Open Letter to the Airbnb Community About Building a 21st Century Company

2. Ev Williams - The Job of Leadership

3. Ben Horowitz - Why Founders Fail: The Product CEO Paradox

4. Leading without Coding

5. Sachin Rekhi - The Most Underrated Product Management Skill: Influence Without Authority

6. Hadar Dor - How I think about cross-functional collaboration

7. Julie Zhuo - How to Work with Engineers

8. Julie Zhuo - How to Work with Designers

9. Julie Zhuo - How to Work with PMs

10. Better Meetings with Concise Global Context

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Miscellaneous​​

1. The Magic Loop for career progression

2. Crossing the PM Career Canyon

3. Find, Vet, and Close the Best Product Managers

4. simonpan.com/work/uber

5. How Spotify’s Discover Weekly cracked human curation at internet scale

6. The simplest explanation of machine learning you’ll ever read

7. Great reading list in spreadsheet form

8. Market sizing - The Market Curve

9. Enterprise Software Is Dead

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