Product Management Career

Product management has become a critical connective role for modern organizations, from small technology startups to global corporate enterprises. And yet the day-to-day work of product management remains largely misunderstood. In theory, product management is about building products that people love. The real-world practice of product management is often about difficult conversations, practical compromises, and hard-won incremental gains.

Product management has become a critical function for modern organizations, from small startups to corporate enterprises. And yet, the day-to-day work of product management remains largely misunderstood. In theory, product managers are high-flying visionaries who build products that people love. In practice, they're hard-working facilitators who bring clarity and focus to their teams. In this thoroughly revised and expanded edition, Matt LeMay provides real-world guidance for current and aspiring product managers.

What is it about the top tech product companies such as Amazon, Apple, Google, Netflix, and Tesla that enables their record of consistent innovation? Most people think it's because these companies are somehow able to find and attract a level of talent that makes this innovation possible. But the real advantage these companies have is not so much who they hire, but rather how they enable their people to work together to solve hard problems and create extraordinary products.

Product management plays a pivotal role in organizations. In fact, it's now considered the fourth most important title in corporate America - yet only a tiny fraction of product managers have been trained for this vital position. If you're one of the hundreds of thousands of people who hold this essential job - or simply aspire to break into a new role - Product Management for Dummies gives you the tools to increase your skill level and manage products like a pro.

The Lean Product Playbook is a practical guide to building products that customers love. Whether you work at a start-up or a large, established company, we all know that building great products is hard. Most new products fail. This book helps improve your chances of building successful products through clear, step-by-step guidance and advice.

In this book, Melissa Perri explains how laying the foundation for great product management can help companies solve real customer problems while achieving business goals. By understanding how to communicate and collaborate within a company structure, you can create a product culture that benefits both the business and the customer. You'll learn product management principles that can be applied to any organization, big or small.

A good product road map is one of the most important and influential documents an organization can develop, publish, and continuously update. In fact, this one document can steer an entire organization when it comes to delivering on company strategy. This practical guide teaches you how to create an effective product road map, and demonstrates how to use the road map to align stakeholders and prioritize ideas and requests. With it, you’ll learn to communicate how your products will make your customers and organization successful.

This insightful book presents interviews with nearly 100 leading product managers from all over the world. Authors Richard Banfield, Martin Eriksson, and Nate Walkingshaw draw on decades of experience in product design and development to capture the approaches, styles, insights, and techniques of successful product managers. If you want to understand what drives good product leaders, this book is an irreplaceable resource.

Lean UX has become the preferred approach to interaction design, tailor-made for today’s agile teams. In the second edition of this award-winning book, leading advocates Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden expand on the valuable Lean UX principles, tactics, and techniques covered in the first edition to share how product teams can easily incorporate design, experimentation, iteration, and continuous learning from real users into their Agile process.

How do today's most successful tech companies - Amazon, Google, Facebook, Netflix, Tesla - design, develop, and deploy the products that have earned the love of literally billions of people around the world? Perhaps surprisingly, they do it very differently from the vast majority of tech companies. In Inspired, technology product management thought leader Marty Cagan provides listeners with a master class in how to structure and staff a vibrant and successful product organization and how to discover and deliver technology products that your customers will love.

This book will help you become a better product leader. Benefitting from Roman Pichler’s extensive experience, you’ll learn how to align stakeholders and guide development teams even in challenging circumstances, avoid common leadership mistakes, and grow as a leader. Written in an engaging and easily accessible style, How to Lead in Product Management offers a wealth of practical tips and strategies. Through helpful examples, the book illustrates how you can directly apply the techniques to your work. 

We're in the midst of a revolution. Quantum leaps in technology are enabling organizations to observe and measure people's behavior in real time, communicate internally at extraordinary speed, and innovate continuously. These new, software-driven technologies are transforming the way companies interact with their customers, employees, and other stakeholders.

If you're looking for an effective and proven approach to product management - one that recognizes that the majority of product managers enter the field with little or no training and must learn through trial and error - this is the book for you. Take Charge Product Management guides you step-by-step along the product management path with tips, tactics, and tools to make you and your products more successful.

AI for Marketing and Product Innovation offers creatives and marketing professionals a non-tech guide to artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) - twin technologies that stand poised to revolutionize the way we sell. This book helps you lean into the curve and take advantage of AI's unparalleled and rapidly expanding power. More than a simple primer on the technology, this book goes beyond the "what" to reveal the "how".

"No one asked you to show up." Every experienced product manager has heard some version of those words at some point in their career. Think about a company. 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 get potential customers to open their wallets to buy the product. What more does a company need?

Renowned business author David Magee fuses both the interesting history and philosophy of one of America's most well-known companies in this entertaining aid for business management. While other American businesses are crumbling under low-cost foreign competition, John Deere Company thrives by maintaining such ideas as building the best product, being open to change and innovation, listening rather than leading, and keeping virtuous business practices.

How do you develop products that people will actually use and buy? This practical guide shows you how to validate product and company ideas through customer development research - before you waste months and millions on a product or service that no one needs or wants. With a combination of open-ended interviewing and fast and flexible research techniques, you’ll learn how your prospective customers behave, the problems they need to solve, and what frustrates and delights them

The standard text on innovation advises would-be innovators to conduct creative brainstorming sessions and seek input from outsiders - users or communities. This kind of innovating can be effective at improving products but not at capturing bigger opportunities in the marketplace. In this book, Roberto Verganti offers a new approach - one that does not set out to solve existing problems, but to find breakthrough experiences. There is no brainstorming - which produces too many ideas, unfiltered - but a vision, subject to criticism.

In The Naming Book, Bullhorn Creative founder and partner Brad Flowers presents a clear framework for crafting and choosing the name that sticks. With a five-step blueprint that takes you from brainstorming to trademarking, this book is the ultimate guidebook to naming anything. You'll learn how to: set clear goals for your name and brand before you start, craft a brainstorming list based on your business mission, build a brand unique to you by creating your own word, find the balance between "cool" and clear, and narrow down your list of names with five easy tests.

People often spend years on working on startup ideas that fail - and they could have known long before, had they asked the hard questions earlier. Five-time tech founder Dave Parker has been there, and in Trajectory: Startup he offers a path to get you from ideation to launch and revenue in just six months. Parker shares advice on: what makes a good idea that makes money; recruiting and working with cofounders; asking customers what product they want (customer development); how to build a tech product even as a non-tech founder; and more.