The Product Book

The world, and especially technology, doesn’t stand still! A great PM will stay on top of the news to make sure that her company doesn’t fall by the wayside because it missed a broader force that changed!

Whenever you think about how to make a product better, your first thoughts should be about who the target personas are and what needs they have that aren’t currently being met by the product.

Success metrics are useful because they help us validate if our current strategy is working, and if it’s not we can dig into the overall metrics to come up with a hypothesis for how we could make changes to achieve our success metrics.

Day to day, a PM will need to think about what use cases they want to support for their product, which helps in finding and prioritizing opportunities.

A persona is a fictional, typical customer, and defining key personas lets you segment your customers by highlighting the things your customers care about that are relevant to your product.

As a product manager, keeping the company’s core value proposition in mind will help you understand the company’s vision.

One of the most important parts of being a product manager is knowing who your customers are and what they need.

The most fundamental part of a company, after why it exists, is who it's solving problems for. Essentially, who are the customers for your product, and why are they buying your product?

“Truly great product managers will cycle through many different personas as they consider the product’s core needs” - Jeremy Toeman, vice president of products at CNET

Think about storytelling- the "why" is the theme. What's this story about? What specific viewpoint does the writer want to share with the world that led to writing the story? #TheProductBook

One of the first things a great product manager should do before even thinking about a product is to understand the company that makes it.

One of the most important parts of being a product manager is knowing who your customers are and what they need. #TheProductBook #prodmgmt

The best roadmaps are ones where the company has set goals to achieve and then planned projects that will help it achieve those goals. #TheProductBook #prodmgmt

The best roadmaps are ones where the company has set goals to achieve and then planned projects that will help it achieve those goals. #TheProductBook

PMs manage products, not people, so they must achieve everything using soft influence, effective communication, leadership, and trust—not orders. #prodmgmt #TheProductBook

Even though it’s not always obvious what PMs do from the outside, they genuinely do a lot! PMs do so much that they’re sometimes even called “Mini CEOs.” #prodmgmt #TheProductBook

At the end of the day, we know what's most important is focusing on helping our users win. To do that we know we first have to understand our users. We know we should validate our riskiest assumptions. #prodmgmt #TheProductBook

Not every opportunity arises from something that can be quantified and measured. As Henry Ford said, 'If I had asked people what they wanted, they would’ve said a faster horse.' #ProdMgmt #TheProductBook

Truthfully, without a product manager, a company will continue to operate pretty well—to a point. Yet with a strong product manager, a company can become great. #prodmgmt #TheProductBook

Product managers are like the conductor in an orchestra. The conductor never makes a sound but is responsible for making the orchestra as a whole sound awesome to deliver a great performance to the audience. #prodmgmt #TheProductBook