Resources to help you grow.
Here is a compilation of resources that have continuously aided me throughout the years.
Product Management
Product management is the process of overseeing the development, marketing, and lifecycle of a product from ideation to retirement. It involves various tasks such as conducting market research, defining product requirements, creating product roadmaps, collaborating with cross-functional teams, and measuring product success. The goal of product management is to create products that meet customer needs and deliver value to the business. Ultimately, you are responsible for the speed and quality of your decisions.
Shining light on the PM discipline by Brandon Chu, legendary product leader. My favorites are Managing and Developing Product Managers, Ruthless Prioritization and Making Good Decisions as a Product Manager.
Lenny was a product lead at Airbnb and has since created a newsletter and podcast for all things product management. You can probably answer just about any pm question by studying his resources.
April Dunford is a master on positioning! Positioning defines how your product is different and better than alternatives for a particular set of customers. Strong positioning is the foundation of great marketing and sales and is the starting point for a company’s messaging, branding, lead generation, and sales strategy.
Gibson Biddle, Former VP/CPO at Netflix/Chegg, has written series of short essays that provide a step-by-step approach to define your product strategy. If you're starting at a new company and your tasked with developing a product strategy, go on a long walk and think about these 3 question 1) How will the product delight customers?, 2) What will make the product hard to copy?, 3) What are the business model experiments required to build a profitable business?.
All-in-one collection of planning checklists, tips, guides, resources, tools and lifetime access to Product Hunt experts community. Available for Airtable, Google Sheets, and Notion.
"7 Twitter threads that will teach you more than any course on Product Management".
Jobs to be Done (JTBD) is a theory for understanding what motivates customers to buy your product. People want their lives to be better. They have a vision of where they want to go. But there are obstacles in their path. Customers hire products to help them move forward; to make progress towards their vision of a better life.
Lenny's favorite templates and frameworks.
“As a [persona], I [want to], [so that].”
A “Great” PRD adds more thoughts and depth: Where should we play in this problem space?
Why are we uniquely positioned to “win” this? Why now? What drives the urgency? What user insights give us the conviction? What are some product principles we follow? What are the key trade-offs & decisions? What are the risks & their mitigation plan? What are the riskiest assumptions? What must be true for this idea to work?
I love customer journey maps, the effort is worth the impact. A customer journey map tells the story of your customer's experiences with your brand, company, and experience across all its touch points. A customer journey map may include different touch points a customer will experience. Such as pain points, actions, touchpoints, and more. In a customer journey map, these triggers will normally be placed in a timeline order. Building a customer journey map can help you understand the reasoning behind your users choices and design the best product experience to meet your customer's needs.
Tip: Get multiple teams involved to help you with the part of the experience they "own". Make it fun and then present it back to everyone and put that shit up on the wall. Do this exercise quarterly.
John Kotowski, whom I had the pleasure of working with at #paid, dives deep into product lead growth monetization. PLG Monetization is anything in the self-serve product experience that helps in converting a free user to a paid customer or gets them to spend more by increasing their product usage.
An in depth playbook that will show you how to discover your North Star.
How to choose your North Star Metric by Lenny Rachitsky. A North Star metric is a single, crucial metric that best captures the core value that your product delivers to [its] customers. This metric is a leading indicator of sustainable business results and customer value.
Dan Shipper built a Lenny chat bot using GPT-3.
Pitch deck template (duplicate and create you're own). Video breakdown here if you need additional guidance.
Notion database template compiling 390+ ready-to-use Product Discovery questions.