Books:
- Measure What Matters, John Doerr - summary
- The Lean Startup, Eric Ries - summary
- Lean Analytics: Use Data to Build a Better Startup Faster, Alistair Croll and Benjamin Yoskovitz - summary
- Inspired, Marty Kagan - summary
- Cracking the PM Interview, Gayle Laakmann McDowell - summary 1 / summary 2
- An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management, Will Larson - summary
- Sprint: How To Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days, Jake Knapp - summary
- Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time, Jeff Sutherland - summary
Podcasts:
- The Product Podcast - Interviews with various figures in the product world. Some of them are duds, some are great.
- Invest Like the Best - Not exclusively product by any means, but Patrick has great guests in and out of tech that touch on a lot of the themes you’ll run into during your product career
Newsletters:
- Silicon Valley Product Group - https://svpg.com/articles/
Articles:
- Anything Paul Graham: http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html
Figure out how to use your current tasks to understand the broader context/big picture concepts that you will use throughout your career (e.g. performing manual QA should be informing your understanding of Acceptance Criteria, Functional Requirements, Product Usability, UX/UI, etc.)
Try to stay in the mindset of the Why, rather than the What
- Discovery (Why) driven product development rather than featureset (What) driven (agile vs. waterfall)
- Place yourself closer to discovery processes than feature builds it’s important that you come away from this with an understanding of how to build, and validate products, not features)
Figure out what you like about the job
- This is what you should look for emphasizing in a future role Team size, company structure, business vs. tech employee ratio, leadership background, vc vs. bootstrapped, etc.
- Think about:
- Management structures you prefer
- Product organizational structure preference
Figure out what you’re good at
- Is it broadly applicable to product roles outside of your current company
Figure out what you aren’t good at
- If it’s something you think you’ll need to improve upon to either be successful at current company or elsewhere, get better at it, preferably through practice
Things I hope to focus on in a future role:
- Worked more on validating products after release (measure usage, define KPIs and be sure we can measure them before product release to get baseline). Releasing features is not the measurement of a successful product team; achieving business objectives through product, however, is.
- Spend much more time focused on Discovery, Iteration, and MVP solutions rather than feature-request driven ideation, documentation, QA and deployment. Feature release interferes with the actual product work, the goal of which is to address business needs. Releasing a feature does not always solve a business need, there’s a chance it might, but without measurement and monitoring you cannot be certain.
Long Term
- Get a feel for the tech stack, start talking to engineers as much as possible. If you can speak
Engineer, you can work anywhere - Learn about devops. Learn about docker, AWS, instances, server size, all that good stuff
- SQL. Learn how to query a database to find usage information you need
- Understand what each language is (e.g. Ruby, GraphQL and REACT), and why your company uses it.
- What are their strengths, what are their weaknesses?
- REACT and GraphQL are the present and future of mobile-centric web app development
- Keep track of the things you do, go through the list every once in a while and see if you can identify product theory underpinning what you’ve worked on.
- The goal here is to affirm that you are building broader product skills through your day to day. This will help in two areas: 1 so that you can feel confident that you’re growing as a PM, and two so that you can talk about this experience using PM-vernacular.