What are /r/ProductManagement's favorite Products & Services?

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I like Figma’s approach to PRDs because it’s lightweight but still extremely functional.

It emphasizes a clear explanation of the problem/success metrics upfront. It also focuses on the important parts of the solution rather than the whole solution, which aids scanability.

I’ve found combining this with a product tracker to be the most efficient way to manage multiple features in flight and share context/progress with GTM stakeholders.

This is a great book:

Cracking the PM Career: The Skills, Frameworks, and Practices to Become a Great Product Manager (Cracking the Interview & Career) https://www.amazon.com/dp/0984782893/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glt_fabc_ZGJYGN2PQJVBRD9QVP73

The book I read it in was https://www.amazon.com/Product-Management-Practice-Real-World-Connective/dp/1491982276 and I'm 99% sure they go into more details in that book about specifically what they meant by it. (In general it's a pretty good book that I'd recommend)

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For me it means things like:

• When a someone (usually for me a developer or a stakeholder) says something you don't understand, don't be afraid to admit you don't understand and to ask for more details.
• When you catch wind of something that conflicts with one of the assumptions you've made, don't just ignore it. Talk to whoever you need to talk to in order to get clarity as soon as you can, even though it would probably be mentally/emotionally easier to ignore it.
• When a senior/exec stakeholder insists they need a "thing" and you don't understand why, don't let their status at the company stop you from asking about why they want "thing"

That sort of stuff.

Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows is good https://www.amazon.se/Thinking-Systems-International-Donella-Meadows/dp/1603580557

Hi Friend! Vice President of Product and hiring manager here.

Look, when I ask someone at the entry level to do something like this here's what I'm looking for:

1. Can they put the user first? Yah we want a ticket booking mobile app, but what do we have to do to make this easier for our customers? Bonus points when you specify which kinds of users and articulate that some users are different from others. Are we trying to attract young users who are more mobile friendly? Do we need to cut costs but our only rider base is older folks, so we need an app that is easy for them to use?
2. Can you put together features in a coherent way that makes some sense as to what the minimum thing we'd need first? Yah sign in with Google is nice, but maybe we can cut that for an alpha to see if people will use it without that?
   
3. Can you identify key components that we absolutely need? Probably can't have an app without some kinda login, searching across schedules and a way to pay and use the app to board? I'm just making it up?
4. Can you break things into testable releases? What's the SMALLEST thing we could try first in a limited environment? Can you think about how trying this might impact our employees who aren't tech savvy?
5. How would you tell our folks about it? How would you tell the world about it? How would you get people using it?
   

FYI this is a good PRD template- I use a modified version of this with my team: https://www.aha.io/roadmapping/guide/requirements-management/what-is-a-good-product-requirements-document-template

I hope this helps you get started. Kudos to you for asking and good luck out there.

First and foremost; I would not recommend go back to school as working experience is more valued in PM line.

You might want to leverage the B.S. In Health, find an opening as APM (Associate PM), Junior PM or start with BA(Biz Analyst) in a company/industry that related to Health. Then you can learn by working with existing PMs in that company before switching to full-time PM yourself.

Here is recent post on why BA is best way to break into PM: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProductManagement/comments/nhzrm7/one_way_to_get_into_product_management_is_by/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share

Can I ask why you're interested to go into PM? Might be a good step to read more about PM first, just to ensure you get the accurate picture and if this is a good fit for you.

Here is my curated PM articles. Please filter it by APM and "Job Description" or "Basic Skills": https://www.notion.so/9ecd35d650f54ce1952846fc83ab2df1?v=3c7e6d85edd049f0bae68e0a0e9f7e47

I decided to put this on Product Hunt :) - https://www.producthunt.com/posts/abcs-of-product-management

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Upvote if you feel so inclined :)

From Ken Norton's famous "How to hire a product manager" essay (https://www.kennorton.com/essays/productmanager.html ):

>Remember friend, nobody asked you to show up.

>Product management may be the one job that the organization would get along fine without (at least for a good while). Without engineers, nothing would get built. Without sales people, nothing is sold. Without designers, the product looks like crap. But in a world without PMs, everyone simply fills in the gap and goes on with their lives. It’s important to remember that - as a PM, you’re expendable. Now, in the long run great product management usually makes the difference between winning and losing, but you have to prove it. 

And more about saying no as a PM - focused on product strategy, but obviously the more you take on your plate, the more stressful your life will be: https://www.intercom.com/blog/product-strategy-means-saying-no/

https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/meetings/#live-doc-meetings

Document meetings live with a Google Doc. Notate questions, action items, agreed outcomes. Everyone in the meeting should have access (and there's edit history available). No more confusion.

If you haven't done so already, I would give this book a read: https://www.amazon.com/Escaping-Build-Trap-Effective-Management/dp/149197379X. It sounds like your org falls into a couple of traps explained in the book and potentially it helps you to vocalize your concerns in a compelling way.

Personally, I am a big proponent for shipping features fast and often, but only if you have a good feedback mechanism set up. Have the sales team fill in a 2-minute feedback form per deal lost/won (this can be built into most popular CRM's) detailing reasons on why this deal was lost/won, look at the adoption of new features in tool like Amplitude, Mixpanel, etc. With this information, you can go to management with a clear story.

I just started and I’m in the same boat. Just remember, you would t have gotten the job if you weren’t slightly qualified. I recommend two books that have really been helping me feel more confident: Listen to Inspired by Marty Cagan on Audible. https://www.audible.com/pd?asin=B07BDQ1Y6J&source_code=ASSORAP0511160006

Every Product Manager's First 90... https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08LNNT245?ref=ppx_pop_mob_ap_share

I use a paid tier of Contacts+ https://www.contactsplus.com/

It syncs well with Google, Office 365 and iCloud, can pull info from Twitter. Unfortunately LinkedIn made changes that blocked a full sync though you can periodically download and import your LinkedIn contacts. Oh and you can scan business cards if anyone still gives you those.

I don’t do anything very sophisticated beyond tagging contacts as personal, work and work alumni, friends, family or with a specific conference where I met someone but there’s plenty of built in and custom fields to let you do more.

The important thing for me is all my contacts are available everywhere including my current company’s Outlook, and in my iphone natively via iCloud sync. I often prefer the Google Contacts UI for batch tagging. And I can use Google or Microsoft duplicate detection in addition to Contact+ flagging dupes and changes and it all stays in sync. There’s a native app for my phone and my Mac too.

Try sidekick (Chrome based browser where you can use all your favourite extensions) with session management (sort of Chrome groups you might have had before) and a sidebar tab for your most used links.

• Also suspends tabs and manages your memory
• blocks ads by default (freemium model)
• searches tabs across all sessions

You can do a lot of online collaborative exercises in Miro. Check out some of the example prioritization templates, or you could even re-create your own monopoly money in it using stickies or shapes.

You could read User Story Mapping. That's canon for PMs.

But I think you should focus your energy differently. Don't come in trying to fool people about the imposter syndrome. They hired you, and trust me you didn't fool them. I would lean into your noob-ness and play that new guy/girl card for a while.

Spend as much as time as possible using the product. Ask as many stupid questions as you possibly can. Become the smartest and most educated user of your product that there is. Go through all of the defect tickets in your backlog. Talk to as many users as possible. If you were to spend the first 30-60 days just doing that then I feel you would be viewed as a superhuman product manager. Come up with your own top issues list of what you would go fix first if you could (plot twist: you can).

Great Product Managers have a strong point of view about the roadmap for their product. The only way to develop that point of view is to use the product and talk to the users.

Me and my team use productboard - it's a product management system which lets you collect customer feedback manually or through integrations (Intercom, Slack, JIRA etc.) and then process the feedback in a smooth way to link them to products and features which you can prioritise accordingly.

I can highly recommend it!

https://www.productboard.com/

For me Miro has been the most powerful tool. Perfect fro everything:

• Facilitating workshops
• Roadmaps, planning sessions and grooming
• Sketching

I started using it with the team a bit before COVID started, I am very visual and stuff like google docs does not work for me, once we all had to start WFH we had such an advantage by having this tool with us.

No, that's more like project management or technical program management.

You can read a bit more on a PM role here: https://www.aha.io/roadmapping/guide/product-management/what-is-the-role-of-a-product-manager

I prefer Mid-Size companies because of 3 reasons:

Opportunity: Mid-Size companies put you in a unique frame where you are given sufficient space to experiment while also providing significant support. The piece that you work on has a sizeable impact and your work is recognized and helps you grow.

Career Stage: I have just started as an APM, and need to learn a lot while also earning enough to support my family. Mid-Size companies give you both: learning and earning.

Fluidity: It's a fine balance between chaos and a bureaucratic order. So, you get to define a lot of things, and do things your own way.

Basically, all the factors can be bucketed in two:

1: What do you want?

2. At what career stage you are?

Product Leadership: How Top Product Managers Launch Awesome Products and Build Successful Teams can help you in answering these two questions for yourself.

I recommend being skeptical of sensationalist attacks on new tech.

Steven Johnson has a really powerful historical analysis that shows that new tech is always initially viewed as much worse than the established tech. Then he turns it upside down to show how "wholesome" tech like books can be subjected to the same negative spin.

It's a fun read and will change the way you think: https://www.amazon.com/Everything-Bad-Good-You-Actually/dp/1594481946

I got you fam! Was in similar predicament so I made this: https://www.notion.so/9ecd35d650f54ce1952846fc83ab2df1?v=3c7e6d85edd049f0bae68e0a0e9f7e47

Tired of bookmarking every sites of useful articles, resources, template and videos. I try to organize it and tag it by PM seniority; APM/PM/Sr PM/Exec, Author and publish date. Also tagged by Area and 5-star ratings. Gotta have it handy and easily accessible if needed.

Here's the template on Airtable (a fancier Excel) I've used and improved over the past few years.

It's pretty straightforward, and the most important part is connecting your feature ideas to the feedback table. Feel free to duplicate and add your own columns.

Also, a roadmap without vision or intent will fail, it’s just a bunch of things to deliver and not a strategy. When this happens to my teams I revisit this framework: https://roadmunk.com/guides/product-prioritization-techniques-product-managers/

You could also try to write a lightweight PRD (product requirements document) to give your idea some shape besides drawing it out. Examples https://www.productplan.com/glossary/product-requirements-document/ or https://www.getshipit.com/blog/what-are-product-requirements-documents/

10 million events per month is the primary limitation. You also don't get all of the advanced analytics/collaboration features, but they're probably not too important early on. If you get traction and start needing more volume, you can also check out the scholarship program: https://amplitude.com/startups

I would suggest using something like https://calendly.com to make it as easy as possible for someone to book time with you.

Also, definitely offer some sort of compensation like a gift card for their time.

Produced an android application with a team of 3 developers and 2 designers.

App introduces elementary school topics like plants, animals, community, colors etc.,This provides best platform to take off language practice in kids from early stages of childhood .Multilingual kids grow up to be versatile talents. This app makes language learning easy and fun unlike other apps in market .

You can try it here. Nuronic Kids

Interactive teaching methodology; users have to submit the responses to questions through voice response. Listening and Speaking responses instead of usual typing brings more interaction and user engagement. Artificial intelligence powered Automatic speech recognition detects the voice of user and provides the feedback.

• Inspired: How to Create Products Customers Love by Marty Cagan - this is a fantastic introduction to product management. If I could recommend just a single book, this would be it.

• The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman - Norman is a cognitive scientist and usability engineer who started Apple's usability group. The Design of Everyday Things is a great introduction to usability (though Don't Make Me Think is a bit more approachable).

• The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton M Christensen - explores disruptive innovations, typically caused by lower end products that aren't as useful to current users, but which can create new larger markets.

• On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction by William Zinsser - there are a lot of good books on writing, and this is my favorite.

• Good to Great by Jim Collins - this is getting a little more toward business leadership, but almost everything described in the book is important for managing a product, or leading a product team.

• The Mythical Man Year by Frederick P Brooks Jr - again, a little bit outside of product management specifically, it's targeted more toward software project managers. However, there's overlap, and for software product managers it's good to understand what's going on over in developer land.

Soft skills are an essential topic, but one for which I haven't found a really great book. How to Make Friends and Influence People is a decent start, but isn't as comprehensive as I'd like. So I'm interested if anyone has suggestions.

I like Steve Johnson's description of the 4 domains of PM knowledge.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/four-types-product-management-skills-steve-johnson
(I'm not affiliated with Steve but have used his services in the past)

I am still compiling my own list but I figure out, good PM ships...we can always improve later right?

I started with bookmarking all recommendations but find out I am becoming links collector instead of reader. Just found out about Notion so I dump everything here and added tags for APM/PM/Sr PM, Category and star ratings so other PM can take it and start reading. It motivated me to skim thru the article and tag it in case I need to come back later in details.

Hope this help: https://www.notion.so/9ecd35d650f54ce1952846fc83ab2df1?v=3c7e6d85edd049f0bae68e0a0e9f7e47

Airtable can collect anonymous survey responses into a database, and integrates well with many other tools.

Coda also appears to be able to do forms, and I know the platform is pretty flexible. Might be able to do some kind of voting system as well.

Thank you so much for taking the time to read and respond. This means a lot.

a. I have a lot to juggle just like every PM. On top of my product team responsibilities, I have an organization-wide responsibility that probably takes up about 3 hours of my time every week. I've built my own kanban board in Notion to help keep track of all to-dos, deadlines, and priorities. Lastly, I have weekly 1:1 with my manager. I can use that time for the role play.

b. Sure. One example, my engineer and I have had repeat conversations around making sure Product, Design & Engineering (3 legs of the stool) are always in sync. The ball is on my court to take point on this. Of course, I don't do it 100% of the time. On that one time I forget just because of random factors, I am given the feedback I fail on keeping my end of the bargain and he then needs to say "THIS IS WHAT WE NEED TO DO, WE NEED TO BE IN SYNC" versus "I know you missed this, here is how it'll impact us, here is what we can do. What do you think"

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I realized that the "3 legs of the stool" might be internal to my org. This basically encompasses Engineering, Product, and Design working together towards the success of a product and the team.

Does "b" help provide context?

I tried a lot of apps.

I've stuck to notion.so for now. It helps solve multiple purposes for me: 1. Track my to dos 2. Notes from reading and meetings 3. Track progress on personal projects 4. Ad-hoc / one off stuff that I need to brain dump.

I also quite like roam research, but stuck to notion since I've been using it for a long time.

Fwiw, I use the paid version

A few PMs I've worked with has talked about Moe Ali the CEO of Product Faculty. I don't think he has a podcast or anything (might be wrong) but he has a lot of talks on youtube which might be helpful.

Dennis Chow is the VP of Product at KEV Group and has a short podcast series called Epics and Stories which is fun to listen to.

While not a person but I also like listening to Product to Product Podcast from Roadmunk. They're out of KW and they have guests from all over the world but do have folks from the Canadian PM industry.

Certificates help with credentials, but other things help with credentials either.

Get creative what are the easiest ways you can reduce the three risks and build out upside for your hiring manager?

The simple word is the lowest risk for a hiring manager is to transfer to a product team at your current company. If you have a healthy relationship with the team there is no team risk, and if you know your industry there is no industry risk—if either of those aren’t true, fix it. This is important practice for your current role.

So the two things remaining at your current company would be upside—what superpower does the hiring manager get by bringing you on the team?

And job risk. How do you signal you can do the job?

You’ve got to answer the superpower.

On job risk. Take on a pm task that you do on your own—there are a zillion things PMs rarely have an opportunity to do for example, a competitive survey would be good, an analysis of all experiments done over the last few years and what the degree of impact was done, to highlight the most sensitive levers, an analysis of the reasons for “sign up” and or “churn” of a product or core feature.

Ask for time with a senior pm leader (the lowest level that makes hiring decisions) and review the work, ask for feedback. Let them know you have additional capacity to do product management related work so if there is anything you can take off their plate do it.

Then no matter what, use the product, file bugs, take a stab at prioritizing the bugs based on impact ask for feedback.

Guess what? Even if you don’t get a job at your company you now have further “credentials” for your own resume about product work.

If you have specifics youd like to work through have an open office hour. https://calendly.com/praxisproduct/office-hour

Ok, sounds like you are storyboarding for your scavenger hunt event or company.

What you are calling "concepts" I would call user-stories or use-cases. These detail each targeted experience or activity that can be done in the story.

If you are just working on conceptualizing the experience and each user-story to see what the greater story looks like, I would be less concerned about "build complexity" or level-of-effort at this point. You should get your requirements down first and then figure out what it takes to build it. Often there are trade-offs you can make to reduce cost or time and still meet the same requirement (fulfill the same user-story).

But, to finally answer your question... for high-level presentation of rough estimates (regardless of metric), I like using filled in pie-chart icons. 1/4, 1/2, 3/4, and entirely filled. These allow others to quickly understand how they rank with regard to each other. These are only for comparison and not for presenting actual numbers.

Here is a link to a sample icon set: https://www.shutterstock.com/image-vector/business-graph-diagram-chart-icon-set-274263392

We have a community as well where you can chat with our team (I lead it) https://www.productmakers.com and also lots of customer education sessions — both on-demand and live https://www.productboard.com/customer-education-center/ that you can take advantage of to help map out your roadmap.

We have combination of tool: Productboard: https://www.productboard.com with in person presentations and executive summaries (of some phases etc.).

Well and voting, they can be invited to Demos, and interviewed about their expectations in the process. This way they might have impact on priorities in Backlog too :) Or they can suggest some feedback process by themselves as well.

I found the guides shared by amplitude quite useful, specially the user behavior and Behavioral Cohorting ones

https://amplitude.com/content-library?category=guides

"A Product Manger’s Daily Schedule" section from this article helps; Product Management Guide: Workflows, Daily Routines, Processes, and Tips.

No comments from me as I am still figuring out too.

I just stumble upon this on Indie Hacker; it might interest you: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-to-write-great-microcopy-40-pro-tips-dcbfabd061

I completely agree with this point. Tools are irrelevant, that is why I am more focused on "what" to define for the team--- I have some opinions about tools we can and should use, but my primary goal here is to make our Platform-- and dimensions including individual Applications-- as transparent and accessible for data discovery by as many users in our company as possible.

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To your point, I do like Segment.com because we are an existing customer and I suspect we are not using that tool to its potential

I feel sad as I write this, we have Otter.ai that does the job for us, but we also have an analyst keeping a track of decisions, and action items and maintaining them on confluence, so there is one working copy. Emails tend to pile up, and are difficult to structure in unanimity.

I run office hours around Product Management, happy to help. Feel free to schedule a chat here https://calendly.com/_justirma

I've also written a case study on a fitness app that may help for structuring your own documentation and process for building a product of your own https://medium.com/@_justirma/a-case-study-fitty-personal-trainer-app-c9a84c17d870

I'm using a simple framework that has proven to be more efficient than many others: what should someone continue doing, stop doing, start doing. If you want a bit more context around it, this template (with some tailoring) is really good: https://coda.io/@jessica-powell/jessica-powells-guide-to-great-one-on-ones

I would also recommend having a little bit of time for unstructured chats as well, that helps with better understanding of how the person is feeling and what are they worried about. And of course, none of this will work, if you aren't building trust and rapport with your teammates.

Have you tried Nuclino? https://www.nuclino.com/

We've been using it to collaborate on documentation after switching from Confluence.

Doesn't have as many formatting features (which we don't need anyway) but is a lot faster and lightweight.

I second this recommendation as this book has been recommended to me by multiple people.

Another recommendation I got is product led onboarding https://www.amazon.com/dp/1777717701/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_glt_fabc_2VH1ABHFP9DY1KF1P676

Congrats!! I just accepted mine too, I graduated in December and have been interviewing and applying ever since. Definitely following this thread as I want to know how to prep. A senior PM recommended me these books:

https://www.amazon.com/First-90-Days-Strategies-Expanded/dp/1422188612 for general prep of what to accomplish when starting a new role, and

https://www.amazon.com/Cracking-PM-Career-Frameworks-Practices/dp/0984782893

Best of luck!

I just want to amplify what a lot of folks are saying here:

1. This is a reflection of the org culture and not your ability
2. It's wise to start searching for the new role, but not bail this thing that happens to be paying your bills

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I'd say if you haven't flipped through ['50 ways to get a job' ](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B072KBX6C3/), give that a once-over.

The creator economy is picking up and I think a really great augmentation to your CV is to put out signals not only about your competence as a PM, but also about your interest in a particular vertical (fintech, healthcare, etc). So whatever you can do in terms of blog posts, tiktoks, or twitch streams will help you gain an audience and raise your profile & SEO over those who don't.

Without knowing too much, it sounds like you're supposed to make sure a hardware device gets set up so a user can use it. I could think a simple metric could be % of successful config completions. This would help you look across the funnel to see where they're falling out compared to the % of success.

If config is really the purpose, then it sounds like you don't really care about engagement or return metrics, just making sure they can use their purchase w/o friction. Return usage, in this case, could actually be a negative metric, like maybe the device is failing.

I started as a PM a few years ago and struggled with metrics getting started (still do sometimes). A book that I really like, which is a little older but still great, is Lean Analytics. It's marketed for startups, but it is a great primer for anyone in product or marketing looking to improve their use of analytics to achieve better outcomes. One thing they espouse in the book is that ratios are better for metrics since it helps ground it in comparables and take away some of the cruft from vanity metrics. Also, less is more. One great metric is always better than a few good metrics IMO.

Good luck and happy holidays!

Thanks for sharing!

Can also recommend book by Annie Duke "Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts". Not directly about better "product decisions" but instead about better decisions in general, including an overview of common psychological biases in decision making process. I really enjoyed this one.

You should definitely check out Cracking the PM Interview

It has a chapter on PM Case Studies and if I recall correctly 10-12 odd sample questions too

If you haven’t already read it, I highly recommend the Scrum book authored by Jeff Sutherland (one of the two creators of the Scrum concept).

Additionally, be sure to read the actual Scrum guide which can be obtained for free.

https://www.amazon.com/Scrum-Doing-Twice-Work-Half/dp/038534645X

We used NNG a lot like another user pointed out. They have great articles. We also used this book Research Methods in Human-Computer Interaction https://www.amazon.com/dp/B075L1XZMW/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_OX.rFb0S4K7M7

This was for my usability coursework.

Otherwise we talked a lot about Kanneman and Taversky’s research on multiple topics. Also The Design of Everyday things which is a quick read. And I highly recommend.

Like /u/the-incredible-ape mentioned, Cracking the PM Interview is great!

The most important thing, which is similar to eng interviews, is that you need to practice the "technical" questions as much as you can. That's the main thing that's used to evaluate you during an interview.

I don't think there are any company that exclusively hires MBAs for PMs. Some, like Amazon, prefer it, but it doesn't really matter. Source: have interviewed at Amazon.

Also check out Daily Product Prep for daily product management interview prep questions. Full disclosure I help run it!

Inspired: How to Create Products Customers Love by Mart Cagan

The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman

This one is a bit unusual, but it walks through the process of listening to the customer and creating what they are looking for - http://mentalfloss.com/article/57721/101-masterpieces-air-jordan-iii

This is a list of readings from a class at Harvard Business School. There's some good stuff in there - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1TVgfxgoOtHyLwQ58T6XRnJEfXx3VhS8rU8JHDOTrQ-0/edit#gid=0

This reflects a whole school of product development. It's not universally loved, but it is killer for certain launch scenarios. Build a thin slice, start feedback loop, expect rapid and complete iteration. If your org is afraid of "rework" this won't work.

https://www.amazon.com/Extreme-Programming-Explained-Embrace-Change/dp/0321278658

Agile Product Management with Scrum is a super easy read that covers all this and more. It focuses on the PM role, but touches on a lot of others too. It's really well-explained and feels obvious once you're done reading.

https://www.amazon.com/Corporate-Confidential-audiobook/dp/B07JWKNG91/ref=sr_1_1?crid=YTOQV89HMZ90&keywords=corporate+confidential&qid=1670769110&sprefix=corporate+confid%2Caps%2C341&sr=8-1

This book by a former corporate HR executive is a good guide on navigating corporate office politics, a very real phenomenon imo.

I found this book to be very helpful for machine learning back when I was starting out https://www.amazon.com/Data-Science-Business-Data-Analytic-Thinking-ebook/dp/B00E6EQ3X4/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?adgrpid=51549931170&gclid=EAIaIQobChMI1MO86OvJ-wIV6PvICh1_Zgp6EAAYAiAAEgITxvD_BwE&hvadid=274756548427&hvdev=m&hvlocphy=9003488&a...

So I see you clarified that this is for a group of PMs. I'm a technical program manager for an internal facing SRE group on a large SaaS product's platform group. The group I'm talking about is entirely voluntary, but are my tech leads, managers, some principal engineers, and managers, plus the incident management group that can basically represent where there are any problems across our whole "customer" base.

I usually start with "What are you working on now?" and that fills out the start of the board. Then as we go along certain net new ideas will make it in. We'll discuss and argue it for a bit, and then it either gets punted right there or we start doing some discovery work. If it's something feasible, we backlog it.

As far as how do I balance them? Idk, just continue to talk about all the ideas on the board and things get shuffled organically over time. Tell the teams about political pressure or supply chain issues or silly exec asks and let them do their own prioritizing. If something really needs driven, I'll use this to know where I need to be jumping in to project manage or yell at a finance guy.

TL;DR: it's Melissa Perri's discovery/OKR process, that creates a kanban managed backlog which we review in a weekly stand up/argument hour.

Mike Watkins has some good books on your first 90 days that has some tips on navigating politics. (or read the abstract or his HBR articles)

https://www.amazon.com/First-90-Days-Strategies-Expanded/dp/1422188612/ref=asc_df_1422188612/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=266118767273&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=12902303070575494795&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvd...

Politics are the result of organizations being comprised of human beings rather than ants. It happens, just track it and embrase it. Just don't let it bring out the worst in you.

Good for you for looking to improve - communicating well is difficult. One of the best (and short) books I've read and recommend is Weekend Language (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0988595613/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1).

I'd love to be able to whiteboard better but I don't find that I work well with drawing tools such as Wacom.

Instead, I'd buy a larger portable whiteboard and then get a camera which has a whiteboarding mode like this: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B826KS4B/?coliid=I1CIJP16L8PZLG&colid=2DNB1X5ZY5FRS&psc=1&ref_=lv_ov_lig_dp_it

The desk/chair setup I feel probably doesn't differ significantly from most other remote setups.

Yes. I'd read and fully digest this new book: Smart Brevity: the power of saying more with less

You need to rethink and learn "writing less"/effective synthesis in general - not in product. Then, after that, go back to "product" writing.

I'm enjoying this book on the subject so far.

Keep it simple as you can. My suggestion is star to talk with your customer following the The Mom Test rules.

The Mom Test in a nutshell is:

• Talk with your customers about their life instead of your idea
• Ask them about specifics in the past instead of generics or opinions about the future
• Talk less and listen more

It’s called The Mom Test because it leads to questions that even your mom can’t lie to you about.

Book some videocalls with 5-10 of your customers and ask them about how they use your product in their life or if they use it for a specific use case ask questions around the use case. For example if the use case is: saving money for my next vacations, some questions could be:

• How was you last vacations?
• How did you decide where to go?
• Did you define a budget for it?
• Did you saving for it?
• How did you saving for it?
• What were the implications of that?

While you are talking with them you star to notice patterns and identify needs or pains, it is a good staring point to level up your product discovery to specific topics.

Product discovery is apply a lot of differents technies and tools to discover how to build the right product, but in the end all of them look to give you an undestanding of your customer, so talk with them is the basic for that.

Consider reading The Four Agreements or something similar. If you're doing your best, then you have nothing to feel bad about or ashamed of. We're all learning and growing and need to have the space to do that successfully.

I think the most important thing to acknowledge is: your feelings are normal and valid.

The second important thing to acknowledge is: there's always value (new experiences, growth, development, etc) in the things you do even if some aspects of it make you unhappy.

I went through a similar phase and it took some time to convince myself to focus on the positives, rather than the negatives. Are you still learning new things about being a PM? Your industry? Do you still enjoy working with your colleagues? Are you learning how to manage stakeholders or complex tasks in the changing environment?

Every role (probably with some exceptions) always has value even if we're overall not happy with the situation. You can control what you focus on, but you cannot control what others do particularly in situations like layoffs where the decisions are made (hopefully) well in advance and by many layers above you.

There's a quote floating around that I like about imposter syndrome (feeling incompetent) that I really like: "If you're not uncomfortable, you're not being challenged."

My advice to you would be:

1. Write out the positives (things you're learning, how you're developing, challenges you're facing and overcoming)
2. Write out what's most important to you (e.g. supportive leadership, not being in a company with layoffs, certain attributes like trust or integrity)
3. Read back over your notes and appreciate the positives
4. Read back over your notes and consider if the things that are important to you exist at the organization and plan your next move from there

IMO focus on the supply side first is great. To approach the sellers I would choose 1 or 2 platforms as sources of possible users, maybe FB Marketplace and Heyauto.

Then I would search for around 100 sellers on the platforms to contact them. For example, I would contact sellers by FB Messenger with the excuse of learning more about the business of selling used cars with a cold message like this: Hey Bob, i have seen you have a lot of expertise in selling used car and I want to learn more about it for my [insert any excuse here(podcast, homework, etc)]. Could we chat a few minutes about it?

You will need to reach 100 sellers to get 25 calls (a great conversion rate) and try not to sell anything, remember your goal is learn.

Learn more about the types of questions you should ask in the book, The Mom Test

I'm exploring this second option. I am concerned by the additional location services that most laptops have enabled and will likely not be able to be disabled on a work laptop. Trying to see how to set up a home vpn network that I can access from abroad though. Are you referring to just using a service like ExpressVPN, or something more elaborate?

Hello guys I'm building a tool for internal feedback, It is 100% focused on feedback, you can give feedback to another teammate you can add what I ever you think about the current sprint and previous want, add topics to discuss in on coming meetings etc..
If you're interested on it, go to the Wait-list

Sure. but at least make it your target. Then you can learn how to do it.

i.e this book is a great start.

https://www.amazon.com/Self-Esteem-Cognitive-Techniques-Assessing-Maintaining/dp/1626253935

Remember you’re supposed to know the product side, not do the engineering.

Try reading the Phoenix Project and the Unicorn Project by the same author.

https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/1942788290/ref=asc_df_1942788290_nodl

1. Read this thread from last month
2. Read The 2 Hour Job Search - it revolutionized how I job search.

Hi! This is actually discussed by the author of Trustworthy Online Controlled Experiments: https://www.amazon.com/Trustworthy-Online-Controlled-Experiments-Practical/dp/1108724264

He had a follow up that was really good, showed that the top product shops like Google, Airbnb, Microsoft, etc. have an average win rate of 10-15%. So we use that internally as a general guidance for our A/B testing program.

This might differ depending on how mature your product is. The less optimized the product, the higher this percentage could be. But on average the above makes sense as a benchmark.

Hope that helps!

I read this one https://www.amazon.com/Effective-Data-Storytelling-Narrative-Visuals/dp/1119615712 on data storytelling, it's pretty good.

Excuse the PM cliche but, how about you start with WHY -

Why do you need the estimates in the first place?
Well, maybe because you need planability and you need efforts to correspond with business priorities.

Where I work now, I implemented ShapeUp for this reason and it's been great because in ShapeUP it works the other way around - define the bsns priorities and plan the work accordingly, I'll explain:

The main advantage IMO is that you have full control over how much time is invested/spent on features.Usually, the answer is anywhere between 2 and 6 weeks. Then, your engineering team needs to come up with a version that fits the timeframe you set - sounds weird, I know, it takes time to get used to.

The main advantage IMO is that you have a full control for how much time is invested/spent on features.

Hope that helps!

Further reading:
https://basecamp.com/shapeup/shape-up.pdf

>As a product owner what are some key things I need to deliver to my team to make their life easier when building software?

Constant communication. It's really helpful when PMs/POs are there to always discuss:

• the outcome that a piece of work is trying to achieve and whether there's a quicker and easier way to achieve it. This is where that kick off meeting is really important
• what we can rule off as out of scope. Engineers can fall into this trap of considering every possible edge case known to mankind and stressing over it
• aligning expectations on how quickly something needs to be delivered, how thorough it needs to be, what are the nice to haves vs must haves.
• helping sequence work. This is mostly driven by an engineer but it helps when a PO is there to breakdown a large feature into smaller meaningful deliverables. Here's a great article on it
  

The team getting distracted sounds like they're trying to solve multiple things at the same time vs shipping on specific thing asap. Seeing the bigger picture unfortunately comes down to engineers not having good product acumen.

With the competitors find what unique levers the company may have (factual or assumptions) over competitors then look for possible verticals or opportunities with minimal, some, maximum effort.

i.e. for a caller id/CRM product with large network of infrastructure hospitality, healthcare, airlines are great industries to tap.

From their you can Google ballpark studies and statistics on the individual markets, choose which is best, etc

nice article for gtm

I love Trello for roadmaps (see that link 👈 for an example of Trello's own 'released' roadmap - nice dogfooding!).

• Nice visual overview
• Easy to move cards around when you adapt priorities
• Detailed view available if needed

Some tips

1. Set your pages to Full width + small text (top right corner). The original setting gives too little space to display a table/database.
2. Linked databases are extremely powerful. You could create an overall backlog and use a linked database to display a subset of the database. This allows you to separate projects using the same template.
3. It tends to get a bit cluttered once you add more columns to a database. Do reduce it by hiding them.
4. Some of my favourite shortcuts are # + space for headers, / + cal for callouts, Ctrl/Fn + E for inline code.

I actually read this really cool blog post from Notion, where they demonstrate how Notion's product org uses Notion. Might be a good place for you to start:

https://www.notion.so/blog/notion-product-management-system-align-every-team

I've used Notion personally for a while, keeping track of projects, notes and tasks, coming from Confluence, and it's a big step up in how you can organize your stuff and create different views (as opposed to Confluence kinda forcing you to do everything in a page tree hierarchy).

>Great point, I only learned of Little’s Law recently and hadn’t yet considered applying it to software dev yet so thanks for opening my mind to this idea!

I recommend reading The Pheonix Project and The DevOps Handbook

>How do you account for variations in ticket size so that the metric isn’t artificially inflated by delivering a bunch of small stories/tickets instead of a few big ones?

Bigger tickets can still be broken into subtasks - do this where possible. Also, you can segment your reporting by ticket type; typically, the only tickets that are >5 points are spike tasks (research, PoCs, etc). Those are infrequent and often undefined, so it doesn't make sense to include them in this analysis.

Once you adjust for those things, the 'artificial inflation' will be negligable.

I'll also add that once your team is working effectively, you can stop tracking this stuff. The effort isn't going to reveal anything super useful that you can't see just by looking at the sprint board once/day.

A healthy way of thinking (and somewhat directly linked to Stoicism, which I'm finding more and more invaluable to my work with each passing day as a product manager) is that you aren't sometimes a product, but you actually are a product. In a biological sense, you are the outcome of your parents and their respective sets of ancestors, over multiple generations.

As a result, the best way to spend your life is by devoting yourself to doing good, perfecting your craft and yourself. If you're interested, I'd highly recommend getting this and reading a page a day and really thinking about the contents of each page you read for a few minutes each day. It might seem trivial at first, but when it all clicks it begins to make so much more sense.

No problem - also, when it comes to hard conversations - When I was in Customer Success, my boss at the time recommended a book to me that I find is extremely useful with effective conversation in awkward, high temperature situations. It's called Crucial Conversations and is something I also recommend reading through as well.

Back when I was in that role, my boss (probably one of the better ones I have had in my life) used to encourage us as CSM's to do roleplay scenarios in a workshop that had us pick scenarios out of a hat and he'd pretend to be a generally hostile customer that was demanding a feature request be honoured or they're churning the business, for example.

While not quite as entertaining as the outcome from a classic Office scene, it was actually really beneficial for practice to show how to keep yourself collected and apply the rules from that book to conversations and de-escalate.

Yeah, it's hard to tell without the context – I find a lot of value in recalling historical information (as long as the context is still intact). That's why I prefer note-taking tools like roam research and why I'm building Vistaly for product orgs.

One thing that jumps out about your comment that may be worth exploring. If the same opportunity (customer pain point or desire) recently resurfaced;

1) Was it ever solved?

2) Has there been a change in the world to make your product's previous solution irrelevant?

3) Was it half-assed when implemented initially? This usually isn't a ding on the product team. One of the most significant contributors to this problem is misguided pressure from a management layer to move on to the next thing too soon. Therefore, the team didn't have time to understand the opportunities well enough, or the design/engineering team did not have enough time to implement the solution well enough.

I think it's very much possible and should be the standard to aim for. Most meetings are a signal of poor organization and gaps in the processes, imho.

Basecamp are know to be evangelists of asynchronous communication, among other things.

https://basecamp.com/guides/how-we-communicate

For a team brainstorm to put together a roadmap, usually prepare questions along the angle of how might we X (X being something we think customers want) and what jobs we're being hired to do today vs. what we could be hired to do tomorrow

Here's a template I use

Would ask your manager how the company delineates PO vs. PM, then set up 1:1s with your PO to make sure you guys are on the same page.

Here's a checklist you can also use for your first 90 days as a new PM

Ideally, once a week. But practically, more like once a month to do research for big launches

Here's a template I use for interviewing customers

In terms of resources, you may check https://www.notion.so/mvpwgrowth/MVP-Workshop-Blockchain-Knowledge-Library-f0f75dbbc70d425e8305e78a7e861271 and https://www.useweb3.xyz/

My general recommendation is to put focus on consistency & adjust the methodology to your own preferences and rhythm. Explore new products from the Web3 space (at least) every week, perform safari research, listen to some podcust, follow Discord and Telegram communities and get involved - look for the way to contribute.

DM me if I can help somehow further.

You don’t need to understand code, but you have to understand concepts enough to speak the language and understand technical trade offs. I found this book helpful when I was getting started.

Swipe to Unlock: The Primer on Technology and Business Strategy (Fast Forward Your Product Career: The Two Books Required to Land Any PM Job) https://www.amazon.com/dp/1976182190/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_32ZWQ9J1R8J311Z9ZZPT?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1

Also, as you hear technical concepts during eng discussions, take note of words and phrases you don’t know and learn them. It’s like learning Spanish by moving to Spain. The initial learning curve is high, but you’ll get conversational soon enough.

In all honesty, Product manager's desk reference by Steven Haines is not bad at all. It is big and thick but there is a lot of good knowledge there.

Teresa Torres' "Continuous discovery" is great too.

Before giving other recommendations. What is your background? Technical, not so? what kind of jobs did you before landing a job of product person? What are your strongest skills now and what do you find to be your weakest spots?

Are you wanting to have a similar table, or the same table but just with a filtered set of data?

Have you considered using Notion's linked databases feature?

https://www.notion.so/guides/using-linked-databases

Hey, thanks! Copying the edit of the post: Given the feedback I made this form (https://www.notion.so/Talk-To-Your-Users-Podcast-Update-me-form-906659fe1f344b4893f3ef3142340531) so I can update you guys. I made the artwork really quick (based on another project of mine's artwork) and recorded a quick trailer: https://anchor.fm/talktoyourusers (iTunes was nice and approved it within minutes... wow? didn't know that's possible)

Hey, thanks! Copying the edit of the post: Given the feedback I made this form (https://www.notion.so/Talk-To-Your-Users-Podcast-Update-me-form-906659fe1f344b4893f3ef3142340531) so I can update you guys. I made the artwork really quick (based on another project of mine's artwork) and recorded a quick trailer: https://anchor.fm/talktoyourusers (iTunes was nice and approved it within minutes... wow? didn't know that's possible)

Hey, thanks! Copying the edit of the post: Given the feedback I made this form (https://www.notion.so/Talk-To-Your-Users-Podcast-Update-me-form-906659fe1f344b4893f3ef3142340531) so I can update you guys. I made the artwork really quick (based on another project of mine's artwork) and recorded a quick trailer: https://anchor.fm/talktoyourusers (iTunes was nice and approved it within minutes... wow? didn't know that's possible)

Since you mentioned SVPG, you can look into their risk framework since you are pretty early on with your product. Combine that with Teresa Torres’s continuous discovery framework and you should have the framework to quickly focus on a prioritized list of what to build with first after you’ve derisked all your ideas and hypotheses on what to build.

Competitive landscaping and user research/concept testing will probably be your best bet here early on. Map our your customer journey, identify painpoints, and then identify opportunities. Use the assumption mapping framework from Teresa and use that to drive what you define as your MVP to build with a prototype and get that in front of your potential users as soon as you can.

Rather than pointing at resources which would prove your side of the argument, I'd suggest reading Think Again by Adam Grant because it talks about the pitfalls of all the ways we try to convince people by going into preacher, prosecutor or politician mode but in reality, it's better to find common ground. There's a real danger that he'll dig his heels in further if you push because he strongly believes in this approach. You've a better chance of moving forward if you can understand why he believes that, because people find it very easy to ignore evidence that contradicts what they believe so all the evidence in the world isn't going to help here :/

In the middle of reading Super Thinking. Very dense book on hundreds of mental models

Super Thinking: Upgrade Your Reasoning and Make Better Decisions with Mental Models https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07FRXC3KN/ref=cm_sw_r_apan_gl_K92ZTZ9JDJ1D4GBBXFTE