Breaking into product

Product Management is the art of solving your customer’s problems to reach your business objectives

Getting Started

Great product management organizations help a company set product vision and road maps, establish goals and strategy, and drive execution on each product throughout its lifecycle.

Characteristics of great product managers

When hiring product managers, you should select for the following skills:

1. Product taste. Product taste means having the insights and intuition

The four types of product managers

The product manager you hire depends on the type of product your company is working on. Often companies need a mix of the below. Some people can function as more than one type of PM,

Product Management Principles

Principle #1: Take Ownership.

By taking ownership of the initial failure, We built trust with our team and our manager.

Thinking patterns for PMs

The patterns along with the checklists can help product leaders reduce the risk of being wrong.

Product Market fit

Product Market Fit is a magnetic force that attracts and binds customers to products.

Product manager vs project manager

Product management and project management—they sound similar, and there’s (literally) only two letters that separate them.

Product vision

A product vision, or product vision statement, describes the overarching long-term mission of your product.

Product Strategy

A product strategy is a high-level plan describing what a business hopes to accomplish with its product, and how it plans to do so

Product Capabilities

Product capabilities are the main abilities you need to have in order to perform the primary product function: defining a value-added product and getting it delivered. These capabilities are:

Product to distribution mindset

Startups tend to succeed by building a product that is so compelling and differentiated that it causes large number of customers to adopt it over an incumbent.

Interviewing PMs

When interviewing product managers, it is important to keep in mind the role you are hiring her for (see the previous section 

Product roadmaps

A product roadmap is a shared source of truth that outlines the vision, direction, priorities, and progress of a product over time.

User stories

A user story is the smallest unit of work in an agile framework. It’s an end goal, not a feature, expressed from the software user’s perspective.

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Weekly newsletter from product management basics to interview guides & cases

Breaking into Product management

Product management overview

Great product management organizations help a company set product vision and road maps, establish goals and strategy, and drive execution on each product throughout its lifecycle.

Bad product management organizations, in contrast, largely function as project management groups, running schedules and tidying up documents for engineers.