Cracking the PM Career: The Skills, Frameworks, and Practices To Become a Great Product Manager

Inhaltsverzeichnis des Buches

• Foreword by Marissa Mayer
• Foreword
• The Product Manager Role
• Getting Started
• Our goal is for this book to be the guide we never had.
• Our goal is for this book to be the guide our mentees never had.
• Our goal is for this book to help more people become great product managers.
• PM Skills
• Career Skills
• PM Career Ladder
• If you're short on time...
• I'm new to product management
• I'm having trouble getting promoted
• I'm a senior product leader
• I want to develop my skills as a PM
• I want to land a product manager job
• The Product Manager Role
• The Product Triad
• The Product Life Cycle
• Discover
• Define
• Design
• Develop
• Delivery
• Debrief
• Other activities
• How do I become a great product manager?
• The First 90 Days
• The "I'm new here" advantage
• 30/60/90 day onboarding plan
• First 30 Days
• First 60 Days
• First 90 Days
• Introductory meetings
• Your manager
• Your onboarding buddy
• Executives
• Close teammates
• Getting-to-know-you questions:
• Aligning on expectations:
• Opportunities:
• Everyone else
• General questions:
• Dos
• Take advantage of your beginner's eyes
• Become the expert on your product and users
• Build credibility
• Get quick wins in early
• Look for ways to feel like you belong at the company
• Make it easy for people to give you feedback
• Don'ts
• Don't start by telling people they're doing it all wrong
• Don't shut people down—Say "yes, and…"
• Don't try to make major changes right away
• Don't assume you need to maintain all previous decisions
• Key Takeaways
• Product Skills
• User Insight
• Responsibilities
• Speak with users and potential users
• Dig beyond surface needs
• Validate your assumptions
• Plan strategic user research to look for new opportunities
• Create a user-focused cultur
• Growth Practices
• Cultivate a beginner's mindset
• Connect product choices to customer insights
• Build your user-focused intuition
• Categorize user insights by priority
• Evangelize your customer insights
• Surface the key insight that unlocks the problem
• Concepts and Frameworks
• Jobs To Be Done
• Customer Journey
• Usability Guidelines
• 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design
• User Research
• Types of user research
• Field studies
• Diary studies
• User interviews
• Surveys
• Usability tests and concept tests
• Participatory design (co-design)
• Card sorting
• Beta program
• Recruiting user research participants
• User research mistakes to avoid
• Asking the wrong question
• Leading the witness
• Too many participants for usability studies
• Not treating user researchers as partners
• Key Takeaways
• Data Insight
• Responsibilities
• Learn your company's key success metrics
• Learn how to pull data for yourself
• Create a dashboard for your team
• Review your team's metrics regularly
• Explore the data
• Shape your company's key success metrics
• P&L Responsibility
• Growth Practices
• Use benchmarks to make sense of data
• Build your data intuition
• Run better experiments
• Concepts and Frameworks
• Good metrics versus vanity metrics
• Pirate Metrics
• A/B Testing and Statistics
• What you need to know about statistics
• Confidence interval
• P-values
• Beware of p-hacking
• Statistics and experiments
• Key Takeaways
• Analytical Problem Solving
• Responsibilities
• Identify and structure ambiguous problems
• Exploratory problems
• Decision-making problems
• Look into the data yourself
• Help triage and reproduce bugs
• Systems thinking
• Growth practices
• Be curious: predict and explore
• Articulate your frameworks
• Don't just point out problems
• Optimize across products and over the long term
• Visualize how it's built
• Concepts and Frameworks
• The 2x2 matrix
• Red/yellow/green tables
• If we're optimizing for...
• Decision tree
• Eigenquestions
• Five Whys
• Key Takeaways
• Product and Design Skills
• Responsibilities
• Do product discovery
• Always bring things back to the goals
• Don't hide internal goals and constraints
• Drive product decisions by laying out your insights and reasoning
• Partner with your designer to come up with great solutions
• Design ethical products
• Advocate for a balanced solution
• Give great product feedback
• Create product (and/or design) principles
• Growth Practices
• Pick the fastest and best ways to test hypotheses
• Design for sticky usage
• Build product mindset
• Practice identifying and prioritizing goals
• Write down all of the business and customer goals you can think of
• Prioritize the goals
• Stay current with well-designed products
• Develop your quality bar
• Expand your perspective: Consider more radical solutions
• Concepts and Frameworks
• Wireframes, prototypes, and flows
• Opportunity solution trees
• Product teardowns
• Brainstorming
• Start with independent brainstorming before sharing as a group
• Invite people from multiple teams and roles
• Set up the brainstorming with some structure
• Key Takeaways
• Technical Skills
• Responsibilities
• Learn about how the technical infrastructure impacts the product
• If you know how to code, consider contributing to help out
• Growth Practices
• Check in with your manager and engineers
• Build your costing intuition
• How to Build Your Costing Intuition
• Concepts and Frameworks
• Technical terms and concepts
• API
• Client (also called frontend) and server (also called backend)
• Deployments and development, testing, staging, beta, and production servers
• Product analytics and logging
• SQL and databases
• Algorithms and Data Structures
• A few more terms
• What does "that's too hard to build" actually mean?
• It would be expensive to build
• The performance would be very slow or have poor scalability
• It would introduce technical debt that makes future projects take longer to build
• Key Takeaways
• Writing Product Documentation
• Use the Documentation Process to Clarify Your Thinking
• Optimize For Making the Document Easy to Read and Understand
• Use the Spec as the Focal Point for Feedback
• Be Clear When the Spec Stops Being the Source of Truth
• Focus on Outcomes
• Example Spec
• Problems
• Goals
• Use Cases
• Timeline
• Detailed Proposal
• Key Trade-Offs & Decisions
• Key Takeaways
• Execution Skills
• Project Management
• Concepts and Frameworks
• Philosophies
• Lean
• Agile
• Scrum
• Kanban
• Product Backlog
• How design and discovery fit in
• Designers work one sprint ahead of engineering.
• Engineering doesn't start until the Discovery and Design phases have gotten a large enough head start.
• Responsibilities
• Have an explicit conversation about your project management responsibilities
• Groom and prioritize the backlog
• Create milestones and checkpoints
• Write good status reports
• Check in with your team members
• Adjust plans as things change
• Share your best practices across the organization
• Growth Practices
• Be available
• Reduce dependencies
• Optimize around your team's resources
• Improve your team's processes
• Set up project management software
• Use demos as a forcing function
• Use special days to invest in areas that get overlooked
• Sniff out risks and mitigate them
• Drive quality and velocity improvements across product teams
• Consider partnerships and acquisitions
• Key Takeaways
• Scoping and Incremental Development
• Concepts and Frameworks
• Incremental Development
• Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
• Common mistakes with MVPs
• Time and Value
• Responsibilities
• Break work into incremental launches and validate early
• Don't scope too small
• Drive team alignment around lean MVPs
• Invest in systems that support incremental development
• Growth Practices
• Accept that you don't know exactly what to build
• Use your judgment to optimize for the right time frame
• Refine and simplify your hypotheses
• Encourage MVP thinking and push back against perfectionism in your org
• Key Takeaways
• Product Launches
• Concepts and Frameworks
• Launch Review
• Launch Checklist
• Go-to-Market (GTM) Strategy
• Positioning Statement
• Promotion
• Responsibilities
• Don't launch until the product is ready
• Ensure nothing falls through the cracks
• Quality assurance
• Handle any launch problems
• Celebrate and communicate back to the company
• Growth Practices
• Partner with launch stakeholders early
• Use launch reviews as a way to earn credibility
• Refine the way you think about launch dates
• Take responsibility for the end-to-end customer experience
• Get the launch strategy right
• Key Takeaways
• Get Things Done
• Concepts and Frameworks
• What does it mean to be a person who gets things done?
• Action-oriented
• High capacity
• Reliable
• Results-oriented
• Personal productivity systems
• Getting Things Done
• Set dates for work that is important but not urgent
• Time Management
• Accept that you have more work to do than can actually be done
• Analyze your ideal vs. actual time allocation
• The 4 D's: delete, defer, delegate, and diminish
• Big rocks first
• Get out of the office to make space for uninterrupted work
• Beating procrastination
• Responsibilities
• Have a point of view
• Find ways around roadblocks
• Keep or renegotiate your commitments
• Communicate proactively
• Run multiple teams at once
• Don't be a roadblock
• Growth Practices
• Don't treat work like school
• Focus on outcomes, not deliverables
• Share work early
• Prioritize being responsive to your team
• Be intentional about how you use real-time and asynchronous communication
• Use "timeboxing" when you need to balance how long to spend on something
• Move faster
• It doesn't seem like anyone is waiting for your decision
• Creating fancy frameworks when simple judgment would do
• Too much iteration
• "Trust, but verify" during cross-functional collaboration
• Learn how to delegate well
• Hand over ownership of a full responsibility
• Understand your reluctance to delegate
• Take responsibility for defining what success looks like, and delegate the solution to your designers and engineers
• Don't treat rules as set-in-stone
• Get your team excited about what comes next
• Share your monthly priorities with your team
• Set up regular workshop time to optimize your schedule
• Clear roadblocks for your team
• Remote Work
• Key Takeaways
• Strategic Skills
• Product Strategy Overview
• What does it mean to be strategic?
• Strategic vs. not strategic
• Vision
• Competitive framework
• Strategic framework
• Alignment with company strategy
• Systems thinking
• Long-term roadmapping
• Execution
• Goal setting
• Planning ahead
• Autonomy
• Advocacy
• What is a Product Strategy?
• The product vision
• The strategic framework
• The roadmap
• Creating a product strategy
• Making the time
• The mindset shift
• Understand the importance of strategic work
• What if the engineering lead says you can't spare any time for strategic work?
• Consider quick approaches
• Creating a large strategy
• Step 1: Dive into lots of input
• Step 2: Kick it off
• Step 3: Checkpoint 1—key hypotheses
• Step 4: Checkpoint 2—draft strategies/bets
• Step 5: Checkpoint 3—declare
• Step 6: Create artifacts
• Step 7: Create a scoreboard
• Share your strategy and evangelize it
• Key Takeaways
• Vision
• Responsibilities
• Brainstorm an ambitious vision
• Make your vision concrete and inspiring
• Growth Practices
• Champion new opportunities outside of your scope
• Organize company-wide vision brainstorming days
• Frameworks
• Work Backwards
• Key Takeaways
• Strategic Framework
• Responsibilities
• Learn your business, market, and industry to spot opportunities and obstacles
• Get crisp on your target customer and pain points
• Growth Practices
• Address questions and tradeoffs in your strategic framework
• Align your strategy with the bigger picture
• Concepts and Frameworks
• Customer Purchase Decision-Making Process
• Marketing Mix (4 Ps)
• SWOT Analysis
• The Five Cs (Situational Analysis)
• Porter's 5 Forces
• Pricing Models
• Key Takeaways
• Roadmapping and Prioritization
• Responsibilities
• Prioritize and sequence work
• Estimated benefits:
• Estimated cost and constraints:
• Ensure your work aligns with the strategy
• Create a long-term roadmap for your team
• Growth Practices
• Don't overlook the obvious wins
• Learn how to say "no"
• Don't panic when executives torpedo your roadmap
• Prioritize competing goals with a balanced portfolio
• Concepts and Frameworks
• Return on investment
• Outcome-based roadmaps
• Ignore solutions
• Consider solutions but don't put them on the roadmap
• Include outcomes and solutions
• Voice of the Customer
• How to Start
• Key Takeaways
• Team Goals
• The importance of setting team goals
• Responsibilities
• Create Team Goals
• Good goals and bad goals
• Ensure the goals are met
• Growth Practices
• Include counter metrics in your goals
• Use goals to motivate your team
• Picking Targets
• What the company needs from your team
• What's achievable
• How targets impact decision-making
• Concepts and Frameworks
• OKRs
• Key Takeaways
• Leadership Skills
• Personal Mindset
• Responsibilities
• Growth Mindset
• Put aside your ego
• Intellectual humility
• Maturity
• Equanimity
• Growth Practices
• Don't let Impostor Syndrome hold you back
• Build Internal Strength and Confidence
• Concepts and Frameworks
• The Drama Triangle and Shifting Above the Line
• Key Takeaways
• Collaboration
• Responsibilities
• Treat people like partners
• Create Psychological Safety
• Resolve conflicts peacefully
• Growth Practices
• Make time to bond with coworkers
• Optimize for long-term relationships
• Concepts and Frameworks
• The Big 5
• The Enneagram
• Key Takeaways
• Influencing Without Authority
• Responsibilities
• Build relationships
• Earn Credibility
• Drive decisions
• Take responsibility for making the decision
• Assert your decisions tactfully
• Move quickly
• Growth Practices
• Choose the right time to share your ideas
• Include people in the creation to get their buy-in
• Build cross-departmental trust
• Concepts and Frameworks
• Stakeholder management
• Step 1: Deeply understand your stakeholders and their goals
• Step 2: Clarify the decision-maker and other roles
• Step 3: Explain the process and communication plan
• Step 4: Make each stakeholder feel heard
• Key Takeaways
• Communication
• Responsibilities
• Learn what your audience thinks and cares about
• Get clear about what you want to say
• Growth Practices
• Tailor your communication for your audience and goals
• Catch miscommunications as they happen
• Redirect conversations to the right issues
• Concepts and Frameworks
• Best practices for written communication
• Best practices for live conversations
• Best practices for running meetings
• Best practices for presentations
• Key Takeaways
• Motivation and Inspiration
• Responsibilities
• Keep your teammates motivated
• Inspire executives and people across the company to believe in your team's work
• Recruit people to your team
• Growth Practices
• Build up your internal conviction
• Use motivation to hit deadlines, but sparingly
• Get clear on the reasons it's worth it to work harder now
• Ask in the right way
• Look for ways to make the extra work fun
• Concepts and Frameworks
• Intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation
• Autonomy
• Mastery
• Purpose
• Key Takeaways
• Ownership Mentality
• Responsibilities
• Fill in the whitespace
• Take responsibility for the full customer experience
• Proactively share your team's progress, challenges and accomplishments
• Growth Practices
• Find the answers for other people
• Dig into the details yourself
• Contribute to the broader PM team and company at large
• Concepts and Frameworks
• What does it mean to act like an owner
• Taking responsibility for all of the components that drive success
• Identifying what needs to be done and doing it
• Being the primary representative for your team
• Key Takeaways
• Mentoring
• Finding people to mentor
• Responsibilities
• Teach your mentee about the company and product
• Mentor through apprenticeship
• Give your mentee feedback to help them grow
• Gather peer feedback for your mentee
• Be a sponsor, not just a mentor
• Growth Practices
• Get comfortable giving easy developmental feedback
• Positive feedback
• Small corrections
• "Next level" feedback
• Giving negative feedback
• Don't use a feedback sandwich
• Handling a first offense
• Addressing a pattern
• Get feedback on your mentoring
• Guide your mentees to figure out solutions on their own
• Refine the way you give developmental feedback
• Concepts and Frameworks
• Reviewing and critiquing work
• Mentoring someone with impostor syndrome
• Key Takeaways
• Working With Other Departments
• Working with Designers
• Have a direct conversation about working together
• Treat your designer like a partner
• Bring your designer problems, not solutions
• Speak in terms of user benefit, not business benefit
• Set your quality bar high and don't pull a bait-and-switch
• Invest appropriately in design debt and design systems improvements
• Working with engineers
• Treat your engineers like partners
• Understand and respect technical constraints
• Never commit to dates for your engineers
• Respect their process
• Avoid wasting their work
• Working with executives
• Work for founders and executives that you respect
• Seek to understand
• Validate ideas from executives
• Be prepared for your meetings with executives
• Protect your team from thrash
• Don't use "because the executive said so" as your reason
• Don't throw away their ideas; build on them
• Key Takeaways
• People Management Skills
• Becoming a People Manager
• Do you really want to be a people manager?
• Reasons you might not want to be a people manager
• People management can be emotionally draining
• People management can be isolating
• You can't be entirely honest
• You need to get work done through other people
• You have to disappoint people
• You need to put in a lot of hours and have a lot of meetings
• You are responsible for process
• Recruiting becomes a big part of your job
• You don't need to be a manager to mentor people
• Becoming a manager is not always the best way to advance your career
• You don't need to become a manager to make a huge salary
• Reasons you might want to be a people manager
• You can have a bigger impact
• You have more strategic influence
• It expands your perspective
• It can be very rewarding to support people and build a well-functioning team
• It takes time to build people management skills, so it helps to start early
• How to become a people manager
• The organization has a need for a new manager
• You are senior enough and performing well enough
• Leadership thinks you would be interested in (and good at) people management
• Myths about becoming a people manager
• Managing your former peers
• Key Takeaways
• New Leadership Skills for PM Managers
• Responsibilities
• See yourself as a member of the leadership team
• You speak on behalf of the company
• Hold people accountable
• Set strategy for your team
• Keep your teams connected to the strategy
• Review and approve work
• Obsolete yourself
• Growth Practices
• Build up a support network
• Maintain authenticity
• Set healthy boundaries
• Avoid micromanaging
• Be intentional about velocity
• Ensure that your reports feel full ownership over their work
• Look out for decisions with broad or long-term impact
• Intentionally create transparency
• Concepts and Frameworks
• The "Do, Try, Consider" framework for product feedback
• Editing Framework
• Key Takeaways
• Coaching and Development
• Responsibilities
• Set expectations
• Look at their work, even if you're not the approver
• Co-create personal development plans
• Find opportunities for your reports to stretch their skills
• Scope projects based on experience level
• Growth Practices
• Build a strong relationship with your reports
• Set aside dedicated time for coaching
• Make it their responsibility to communicate proactively with you
• Solicit feedback from your reports' peers and partners
• Create plans to counteract implicit bias
• Concepts and Frameworks
• Compensation and promotions
• Managing underperformance
• Do I believe I can turn this around?
• Have I given clear feedback on the problem?
• Do they really want to improve?
• Is there a different role where they'd be likely to succeed?
• Where is your time and energy best spent?
• Now what? (How to let go)
• Key Takeaways
• Building a Team
• Responsibilities
• Find and attract candidates
• Evaluate candidates fairly and effectively
• Growth Practices
• Source and refer a lot of candidates
• Learn how to successfully pitch candidates
• Put a personal touch into closing candidates
• Concepts and Frameworks
• PM Archetypes: Builders, Tuners, and Innovators
• Optimizing for Signal and the Candidate Experience
• What Makes a Good Process
• Designing a PM interview process
• Align on what you're looking for in a PM
• Identify qualities that are hard to teach (and therefore need to be assessed in the interview)
• Put together an interview process that tests for all of the skills, experiences, and traits that you're looking for
• Write up rubrics for your questions
• Key Takeaways
• Organizational Excellence
• Responsibilities
• Build your team culture
• Get your team the resources and support they need
• Establish product processes
• User research debrief
• Spec review
• Design review
• Eng design doc review
• Experiment results review
• Launch review
• Build out a product planning process
• Publish the planning timeline to the whole company
• Consider the "W framework" for planning
• Make an open call for requests
• Host strategy days with your team
• Growth Practices
• Use deadlines effectively
• Allocate people efficiently
• Concepts and Frameworks
• Horizontal tasks
• Org design
• By product
• By short-term project
• By engineering codebase
• By user type
• By use case (or problem)
• By objective
• Key Takeaways
• Careers
• The Career Ladders
• Levels and Ladders
• A Typical Ladder
• Advancement
• Scope, Autonomy, and Impact
• The Levels
• Associate Product Manager (APM)
• Typical Scope, Autonomy, and Impact
• To get from APM to PM 1
• PM 1 and 2
• Typical Scope, Autonomy, and Impact
• To get from PM 2 to senior PM
• Senior PM
• Typical Scope, Autonomy, and Impact
• To get from senior PM to PM Lead
• To get from senior PM to principal PM
• Principal PM
• Typical Scope, Autonomy, and Impact
• PM Lead
• Typical Scope, Autonomy, and Impact
• To get from PM lead to director
• PM Director
• Typical Scope, Autonomy, and Impact
• To get to head of product
• Head of Product
• Typical scope, autonomy, and impact
• Levels In Practice
• Scenario 1: Customers complain about ease of use
• Scenario 2: PMs feel that there's too much "process"
• Scenario 3: Annual Planning
• How Level Impacts Your Career
• Compensation
• Expectations
• Project Allocation
• The pressure to advance—and when it stops
• People Management
• Leveling During the Hiring Process
• Key Takeaways
• Career Goals
• Figuring out what matters
• Visualization Exercises
• Zone of Genius
• Imagining your ideal job
• Preferences and Tradeoffs
• What stage of company do you prefer?
• Are you drawn to a particular type of product, or do you mostly want to go where you can make the largest impact?
• What salary range would you need to feel comfortable?
• How important is keeping your options open?
• "Live to work" or "work to live?"
• What is your risk tolerance now, and in the future?
• Creating a personal development plan
• Key Takeaways
• Skills for Career Growth
• Working with your manager
• Managers are only human
• Empathize with your manager's mindset
• Partner with your boss on your career goals
• Sponsorship
• Buddy with your boss on their work
• Make sure your manager knows how your work is going
• Ambition and self-advocacy
• Learning from feedback
• Notice, Assess, Improve
• Soliciting feedback
• Building relationships with your manager's peers
• Choosing the right place at the right time
• Top-reputation companies
• Fast-growing companies
• Startups
• Choosing the right team
• Moving on at the right time
• Negotiation
• Naming a Number
• Optimizing Review Cycles
• Manager Discretion vs. By Committee
• Timing
• Goals and OKRs
• Self-Review
• Peer Feedback
• Networking
• Broadly reach out with small requests
• Build genuine relationships with people who can mentor you and might help you
• When networking goes wrong
• Bad situations
• Recoverable and unrecoverable situations
• Manager Problems
• Negative performance feedback and Performance Improvement Plans (PIPs)
• Failed project
• Failing company
• Burnout
• General advice for switching companies
• Key Takeaways
• Extended Learning
• Courses
• Coaches
• MBA
• Beyond PM
• General Manager
• Venture Capital
• Angel Investor
• Founder/CEO
• Chief of Staff
• Product Coaching and Consulting
• Product Leader Q&A
• Q&A with Dylan Casey
• Q&A with Brian Ellin
• Q&A with Osi Imeokparia
• Q&A with Bangaly Kaba
• Q&A with Sara Mauskopf
• Q&A with Ken Norton
• Q&A with Anuj Rathi
• Q&A with Sachin Rekhi
• Q&A with Teresa Torres
• Q&A with Oji Udezue
• Q&A with April Underwood
• Additional Reading
• Types of PM Roles
• Landing a Product Manager Role
• Networking for Introverts
• The Paradox of Autonomy and Recognition
• 10 Rules for Negotiating a Job Offer
• Appendix
• Key Phrases to Learn
• TLAs and Other Acronyms
• Acknowledgements
• Index