A hitchhiker’s guide to product management

What this guide is about

This resource is meant as an introductory guide for people who are either new or
aspiring to break into the product management field. It’s focused on PM work at tech
startups, but many of the points can be applied across industries. The guide includes
some of the best resources from across the internet that I found over the years. There
are great contents out there, but they are surrounded by a hell of a lot more noise. What
this guide will hopefully do for you is to cut through all the noise and accelerate the
knowledge acquisition phase of your learning. It’s not meant to be an exhaustive list of
everything you need to know about product, nor will you become a great product
manager after reading this. Life isn’t so simple. Think of it as a giant list of what I wish I
had known when I first started product management. I hope this helps!

If you find this guide interesting, please subscribe to the blog as well. I’ll be writing
separate posts every month that deep dive into specific aspects of product management.
you can also find me on twitter @yilunzh.

Table of Content
Introduction
Basic Principles
• Core Philosophies
• Understand Customers
• Discover Product-Market Fit
• Be Bold and Ambitious
Hard Skills
• Requirement Gathering
• Writing
• Design
• Business Strategy
• Metrics and Financial Economics
• Process
• Technology
Soft Skills
• Asking Questions
• Working with Others
• On Productivity
• Others

Introduction
Product management is both easy and hard. It’s easy because being one doesn’t require
any specialized skills. If you can think, read and write like a competent human being,
you can become a product manager.
Product management is also very hard. A product manager is a jack of all trades. While
you don’t have to be an expert on any single subject, you absolutely need to be
competent in many different areas. The problem is that it takes time to learn a new skill
from scratch. Malcolm Gladwell famously said that it takes 10,000 hours of deliberate
practice to become world class in any field. Assuming that learning a new skill is your
full time job (40 hr/week), that is equivalent to 5 years of your life. At first glance, it
seems like product managers are geniuses. They are outliers that can grasp new
concepts in days instead of weeks, learn new skills in months instead of years. They are
the kids you knew in college who partied harder than you ever did yet still managed to
get 4.0s across the board.

While I wish that’s true (I would be flattered), it is simply not the case. I sort of lied
when I said that product managers don’t have any specialized skill. They do. All the
great ones I know are able to absorb and apply new information at an abnormal rate. In
the beginning, I thought they were simply smarter than me. Overtime, I came to realize
that like any other skill, it can be learned.

People often think that the pace of learning is linear. For example, if it takes 5 years to
master something, then it must take ~2.5 years to be average and 4 years to be good. In
reality, this is not the case (in a good way). I want to highlight 2 key points here:

1. The 80/20 rule applies to learning. It’s far easier to go from incompetent
to good than from good to great. With the right resources and techniques
in place, it only takes 20% of the time/effort to get 80% of mastery. I
believe that a great product manager doesn’t need to be a master at
everything, only competent to good (50-80% mark).
2. Learning takes the form of an S-curve. In the beginning, it takes a lot of
time to just get the basic theory down. You feel like you are spending a lot
of effort for very little gain. This is when many people drop off, because
they feel like they are not making any progress. Keep in mind though,
nothing worthwhile is easy. I would argue that this is the time for you to
double down and power through it. Once you get past the initial
knowledge acquisition phase and start integrating them into your
knowledge bank, you will notice that the rate of learning becomes
exponential.
There is a fair bit of content in this guide. They are categorized and ordered in a way

that I think make the most sense. Feel free to skip around and explore as you see fit

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Basic Principles
This section is to answer the most common questions people have about product
management and introduce the core principles that I think a PM should know. This is

the basics of the basics, which is fine. We all have to start from somewhere
CORE PHILOSOPHIES

To set the table, I think it’s best to take a look at what other people say about PM. I also
put an old blog post I wrote in here as well (shameless plug!). I hope you find it at least
somewhat insightful.

Questions to ponder:

• What’s the role of a PM? How does it fit within the larger
team/organization?
• How does a PM spend his/her day?
• What makes a good PM?
• What makes a shitty PM?
Readings:

• What other PM say about PM

http://www.quora.com/What-makes-someone-a-great-product-
manager-at-Google
• What people that invest in startups say about PM
http://www.khoslaventures.com/wp-
content/uploads/Good_Product_Manager_Bad_Product_Manager_KV.pdf
• What Ken Norton (Partner at Google Ventures) say about PM
https://www.kennethnorton.com/essays/productmanager.html
• What someone who teaches PM say about PM
https://medium.com/@matbalez/product-manager-you-are-
664d83ee702e
• What I say about PM
https://yilunzh.com/2015/05/14/i-am-a-product-manager-i-do-a-
bunch-of-things-just-not-any-real-work/
Exercise:

• Reach out to someone who is currently a PM and ask him for a piece of
specific advice on a topic you want to learn about.
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UNDERSTAND CUSTOMERS

If there’s one thing you need to do better than anyone else at the company, it’s to
understand your customers. To the engineers and designers, you are the voice of the
customer. In order to clearly articulate the requirements to your team, you need to
understand their pain points and needs more than anyone else.

This section doesn’t get into any of the tactical advice about conducting customer
research (that’ll come later). It’s more about building a foundation and a framework in
your mind about how to approach the problem.

Questions to ponder:
 • What should you focus on when trying to understand your customer?
• How should you treat a feature request from existing users?
• Why is cycle time for learning important?
Readings:

• YC lecture 4 – Building Product, Talking to Users, and Growing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yP176MBG9Tk
• Steve Blank’s customer delivery process
http://steveblank.com/2014/06/28/customer-discovery-the-search-for-
productmarket-fit-2-minutes-to-see-why/
• How to Test Drive Your Business Idea Before Quitting Your Job (Concept
applies for testing any new major products/ideas)
https://blog.ladder.io/business-idea
Exercise

• If you work in a B2C company, listen to some customer service calls and
writeup your learnings.
• If you work in a B2B company, reach out to a few customers and get their
feedback on your product. Again, writeup your learnings.
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DISCOVER PRODUCT-MARKET FIT

Product-market fit has become quite a buzzword in recent years. I think it’s often mis-
used and misunderstood. Marc Andreessen, the founder of Andreessen & Horowitz,
defines it as “being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market”. Steve
Blank, who you’ll read extensively later, refer to it as the step between customer
validation and customer creation. To me, finding product-market fit means solving a big
enough problem for a subset of people that they are willing to pay you money AND tell
everyone how great you are.

Regardless of how you word it, the core idea behind product-market fit is to understand
the conditions that your product must meet in order to become a viable and scalable
business (i.e. Is the market big enough? Is the problem painful enough? Is the solution
good enough? Does the economics work? etc.). These are the questions that you have to
clearly articulate whenever you are pitching for resources.

Questions to ponder:

• How do you define product market fit?

• Why is product market fit important?
• How do you know if you have achieved product market fit?
• How do you find product market fit?
Readings:

• Getting to product market fit

http://andrewchen.co/when-has-a-consumer-startup-hit-
productmarket-fit/
 • Doing things that don’t scale
http://paulgraham.com/ds.html
• Growth
http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html
• How to get ideas
http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html
Exercise:

• Research a tech startup that’s currently growing exponentially (e.g. Uber,

Airbnb, Dropbox etc.). Answer the following questions:
• Why do you think they were able to achieve this level of
growth?
• What big hurdles did they have to overcome?
• How did they overcome them?
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BE BOLD AND AMBITIOUS

This sounds a bit cliche, but it’s one of the most common traits among successful
entrepreneurs and PMs I know. To be more specific:

• They tend to have a healthy disrespect towards traditions. “Because that’s

how it’s always been” is not an acceptable answer.
• They view problems as opportunities. The bigger the problem, the more
lucrative the opportunity.
• They are inherently optimistic and have incredible confidence in their
own ideas and abilities. They have so much confidence that they can’t
fathom the possibility of failure.
Being bold is contagious. Peter Diamandis, the founder of X Prize, stresses the
importance of launching your idea/product above the line of super credibility. His point
is that the best ideas are those that are so crazy, but so amazing that people want to
actively help you make it happen.

Questions to Ponder:

• Why do people continue to underestimate human progress in the long

term, even though all the science and historical data suggest otherwise?
• How can you train yourself to break out of that habit?
• What are some major technology trends right now? How do you think
those things will change your life in 10 years?
Readings:

• Exponential thinking
http://www.kurzweilai.net/the-law-of-accelerating-returns
• 10x Moonshot
http://www.wired.com/2013/02/moonshots-matter-heres-how-to-
make-them-happen/
 • On having optimism for the future
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BltRufe5kkI
Exercise

• Write about a new technology or trend you are excited about. how do you
think it’ll evolve over time? What market conditions have to be met in
order to make that vision a reality?
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Hard skills
This section focuses on the fundamentals skills you need in order to become a
competent product manager. By the end of this section, you should have the requisite
knowledge to perform the major functions that a product manager do on a daily basis.

REQUIREMENT GATHERING

As a PM, requirement gathering is probably an activity you will spend the most time
doing day to day. There are a lot of resources out there on how best to write user stories
(some are linked in the readings below), so I wouldn’t get into the weeds here. But I do
want to share some rules of thumb I follow when I’m unsure what to do:

1. Be precise and clear

1. Say exactly what you mean. Don’t use ambiguous terms or
acronyms if you can help it. If there are acronyms, clearly
define them ahead of time.
2. Use everyday language, not big words that nobody
understands. Your requirement should read like the way you
explain how a product works to a smart friend.
2. Be concise
1. If there are sections of the requirement that feels repetitive,
look to break them out and consolidate them into one section.
Then, wherever that is relevant, simply call out that section.
This way, the engineers is not reading duplicative information
repeatedly. Moreover, whenever there is a change to the
requirement (there will be lots), it will also be easier for you to
change without forgetting a section. In the programming
world, this practice is called keeping your code DRY. It make it
more readable and maintainable. The same concept applies
here.
2. Use ample illustration, especially mockups and flowcharts to
communicate complex flows.
3. Be thorough
1. One of the worst thing that can happen is to have your
engineer read your requirement and think of an scenario that
you haven’t thought of. It slows down development and kills
your credibility in their eyes.
The readings below should help get you started on writing good requirements.
Questions to ponder:

• What are some methods you can use to gather requirements?

• What are the key components of a good requirements document?
• How best to share your requirements with the engineering team?
Readings:

•Chapter 11: Getting Real by 37signal

http://bit.ly/2mEGR6t
• Khosla Ventures, how to write a good PRD
http://www.khoslaventures.com/wp-content/uploads/How-To-Write-a-
Good-PRD-.pdf
• Effective workflow for writing PRD suggested on Quora
http://www.quora.com/Whats-an-effective-workflow-for-writing-a-spec-
or-Product-Requirements-Document-PRD
Exercise: Requirements writing

• Think of a product idea, write the necessary requirement documents to be

handed off to engineering
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WRITING
The first article in the reading below basically sums up how I feel about writing. I
actually never appreciated good writing until I started building my first startup Fleetbit
after college. At the time, we were building Uber like apps for the taxi companies so that
they can compete against Uber. Taxi companies, in case you don’t know, are incredibly
backwards. In order to educate our potential customers on this new technological trend
and why that’s going to fundamentally change their business, we started an industry
blog. One day, when we were in a meeting with one of the taxi company’s CEO, we
noticed that all of our blog posts were printed out and sitting on his desk. Apparently he
had been reading them and was planning to share them at the upcoming industry
conference he chaired. That was when I knew we had became a credible thought leader
in this industry, even though we were a tiny company of 5 and had only been in market
for 6 months. It opened my eye to the power of clear writing. Part of the reason I am
writing this guide is to help me distill my own thinking and reflect on what my strength
and weaknesses are as a PM. It’s been an incredibly rewarding experience to write it. I
hope you’ll have an equally rewarding experience reading it.

Questions to ponder:

• What are some of your favorite writing that you had read over the years?
Why did you like them?
Readings:

• Why writing is important

http://blog.idonethis.com/managers-write/
• Write better emails
http://bit.ly/2l6orz7
 • One of the best examples of good writing
http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/06/how-tesla-will-change-your-life.html
Exercise: blog

• Write about something you learned/find interesting once a week

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DESIGN

Design is one of those things that many people say is important, but not many people
truly invest the time in. It is much more than just making things look pretty. It is about
building a holistic solution to a problem that your users are having. It takes creativity to
come up with the initial solution, but it also takes rigorous research and testing to
validate those designs in the wild. It cannot be done in a vacuum.

When working with designers, I believe it’s important for PM to give feedback as much
as possible and push the designer to show/test her work consistently. The cost of
change during the design phase is 10x cheaper and faster than cost of change during
development. Given that technical resource is typically the limiting factor in startup,
prototyping and iterating on design quickly is key.

Questions to ponder:

• What does good design mean for you? How do you know it’s good?
• What are some ways you can test your design quickly?
• How do you balance the wants/needs of design vs the reality of
technology development and managing complexity?
• How do you incorporate design into the product development process?
Readings:

• On design thinking
https://medium.com/@jaf_designer/why-product-thinking-is-the-next-
big-thing-in-ux-design-ee7de959f3fe
• My Google Venture Design Sprint notes
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1uRWU74lYgoqm5LiBFig9YRk1_if
2A7IM2tsQv4VM1II/edit
• On building designs (this tool is awesome, especially if your designer is
resource constrained)
http://keynotopia.com/tutorials/
• On presenting design
https://medium.com/the-year-of-the-looking-glass/how-to-present-
designs-4a78c3ebca7b
Exercise: Design exercise

• How would you design the following (draw mockups):

• Alarm clock for heavy sleepers
• Car for the blind
• Others interesting scenarios you can think of
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BUSINESS STRATEGY

Strategy is a very sexy word, mostly because that’s what you see executives or
management consultants in fancy suits typically do. They are responsible for coming up
with the “strategy” that the rest of the company then executes on. How they came up
with it is often not talked about, but people seem to get paid a lot of money to do
it…therefore it must be extremely hard. I want to take some time here to demystify the
concept of strategy. Once you break it apart, it becomes incredibly clear what strategy is
and isn’t.

In the marketplace, a business always has to evolve. Imagine that there are 2 points on a
piece of paper. Point A is where the business is at currently. Point B is where the
business wants to go. Usually, point B has more customers, more revenue, and more
profit compared to point A. Now draw a line from point A to B. That line is the business
strategy. A strategy is a way for a business to go from point A to point B. Now when you
drew that line in your head, you probably instinctively drew a straight line. That’s the
shortest path to point B and is in theory the best strategy. However, there are literally
infinite ways to draw a line connecting point A and B, just like in the real world. There
are infinite ways to approach a problem. The challenge is to get to point B in as straight
of a line as possible.

To be clear, coming up with a strategy doesn’t mean you got to point B, simply that you
identified a potential route. Execution is what actually gets you there. With that said, it
is still important to understand strategy, because it’s a PM’s job to make sure your team
is working on the right things. You are the guide, and a guide who doesn’t know how to
get to the end destination is useless.

Questions to ponder:

• Why do big companies fail when they have so much resources at their
disposal?
• In a battle for mobile dominance, why did google choose to open source
android? How come Apple can’t do the same thing as Google?
• If you were to disrupt your own company or the company you work for,
what would you do?
Readings:

• Understand the nature of technology market

http://bit.ly/2my0duP
• Innovator’s dilemma – Chapter 1
http://jhqedu.com:1042/upload/books/Book1010/2014031111572987
1.pdf
• Focus on one thing
https://medium.com/@dunn/get-one-thing-right-89390244c553
• New York Time’s internal innovation report
http://www.scribd.com/doc/224332847/NYT-Innovation-Report-2014
 • On engineering growth
http://www.quicksprout.com/the-definitive-guide-to-growth-hacking-
chapter-1/
• What other say about growth hacking
https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-of-the-best-posts-on-growth-
hacking
Exercise:

• Pick a tech company that has recently been struggling (yelp, twitter,
stripe). If you were the CEO, how would you try to turn it around? Make
sure to write up your proposal.
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METRICS AND BASIC FINANCIAL ECONOMICS

It’s fairly obvious why understanding metrics is important. They provide valuable
evidence that either supports or refutes your hypothesis. It forces you to be methodical
about resource prioritization. It also allows you to communicate effectively with the rest
of the “business”. A debate based on metrics is going to be much more productive than a
debate based purely on opinions and assumptions. It allows people to check their egos
at the door and have a healthy, productive conversation.

With that said, I want to stress that while metrics is important, lack of metrics should
not and cannot paralyze you into inaction. By definition, if you wait until you have all
the information, the opportunity is gone. If Elon Musk looked at the data at the time and
said: “Batteries are too expensive, heavy, and hold little power, using a battery to power
a car is a ridiculous idea.” then Tesla would have never came to be. There will be many
times you will have to make decisions in the absence of data, and that’s totally fine.

Questions to ponder:

• What are the key levers that drive your company’s business?
• How do you expect it to change overtime? Is that a reasonable
expectation?
• If you were the CEO, what would you focus on over the next 12 months
based on what you learned?
Readings:

• Key metrics to understanding a business

http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/saas-metrics/
• Understand basic financial statements
http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newCDV_45.htm
• How to build a projection
http://www.quora.com/How-do-I-build-future-financial-projections-for-
a-start-up-company
• On telling stories using data
http://a16z.com/2015/06/15/u-s-tech-funding-whats-going-on/
Exercise: investment analysis
 • Pick a stock and build a case for why you should/should not invest in the
company. Use data to back up analysis, including financial projections
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PROCESS

I’ll be the first to admit, I’m not really a process guy. I think they are important, but I
tend to be a minimalist in this area. I try to keep a pretty open mind about process. My
view is that different people like to work differently. Some people like to have more
touchpoint and feedback. Others prefer to be left alone to just do their work. Some
people like to think through the problem and solution alone and come back to the team
to discuss. Other like to come up with a answer together in a more collaborative
approach. They can all be equally productive, but need different process put in place to
maximize their potential. The point is that process should be used to make the team
more productive.

These days, most tech companies I know are either using agile or is transitioning to
agile. In technology, the cost of change is low compared to traditional industries like
manufacturing. As a result, it’s better to optimize for velocity. Agile processes are
specifically designed to minimize communication overhead, thereby increasing speed
and productivity. The readings below should get you a pretty good idea on how the
process works. However, as I stressed in the beginning, view them as a
template/starting point. Different teams will require you to finetune the process
differently to get the most out of them.

Questions to Ponder:

• Who are the typical stakeholders in a scrum? What do they do?

• What is typically the process to roll out a new feature?
• How do different product teams work together on larger projects?
• How do you measure effectiveness of your process?
Readings:

• 5 minute read on agile

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2012/07/09.html
• My notes on scrum
https://docs.google.com/document/d/11_9JC6X15P1xzb7Kd0EQ9mOaat
7gNGrcX3n3JfEPfD8/edit?usp=sharing
• How to prioritize features
http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-best-ways-to-prioritize-a-list-of-
product-features
• On managing complexity
• http://firstround.com/review/The-one-cost-engineers-and-
product-managers-dont-consider/
• http://ubiquity.acm.org/blog/the-facebook-method-of-
dealing-with-complexity/
Exercise:
 • Organize a small group of people and play the XP game, a old and famous
game that simulates the value of agile in real life
• http://www.agilebelgium.be/xpgame/description/
• http://www.agilebelgium.be/xpgame/download/
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TECHNOLOGY

One of the most common questions that gets asked about PM is “Do I have to know how
to code?” The answer is no, you don’t need to know how to code. But is it going to help
you become a better PM? Absolutely! The simplest way I can put it is that the top tech
companies (i.e. google, facebook, amazon, dropbox etc.), who has access to the cream of
the crop talent, wouldn’t hire product managers that can’t push code (at least that I
know of). The reason is communication cost. Anytime the engineer has to come up a
level and speak in “business” terms, the communication is less efficient. It’s much better
if the PM can communicate in the same language as the engineers. Granted, finding
people who are well versed in engineering as well as business is difficult. That’s why the
starting salary for a PM role at those companies is $150k+.

There are a lot of links and readings in this section. It can be a bit overwhelming if you
don’t come from an engineering background and never dealt with computers before.
Just stick with it. There are tons of great resources out there to help you along. If you
have a question, a quick google search will typically yield the answer you are looking
for.

Questions to ponder:

• How does data flow from your computer to the internet and then back to
your computer? What systems does the data hit? What does each system
do with the data?
• How do one web application know how to talk to another web
application?
• How do you think machines and humans will interact with each other
once general AI is achieved?
Readings:

• How the internet works

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oj7A2YDgIWE
• How the cloud works
http://gizmodo.com/what-is-the-cloud-and-where-is-it-1682276210
• How web application works
https://teamtreehouse.com/library/build-a-simple-ruby-on-rails-
application/getting-started-with-rails/how-web-applications-work-2
• Learning SQL
https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/computer-programming/sql
• How API works
http://www.theodinproject.com/ruby-on-rails/working-with-external-
apis
 • What is big data?
• http://dataconomy.com/understanding-big-data/ (read first 2
articles)
• http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/big-data-explained-
brilliantly-in-one-short-video
• What is AI?
• http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~russell/intro.html
• http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-
revolution-1.html
• http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-
revolution-2.html
• Building analytics systems
https://medium.com/@samson_hu/building-analytics-at-500px-
92e9a7005c83?hn
Exercise:

• Finish chapter 2 of Odin Project (Web Development 101)

http://www.theodinproject.com/web-development-101
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Soft skills
This section covers the soft skills that are needed to thrive as a product manager. It
focus more on effective communication, relationship building, time management, and a
number of other areas. If mastered, those skills will take you from being a competent
product manager to a great one.

ASKING QUESTIONS

This to me is an entire subject upon itself. Asking good questions is probably one of the
most underrated and undervalued skill that a PM can have. Eric Schmidt, executive
chairman of Google, once said, “We run this company on questions, not answers.”
Asking good questions gets you new insights from your customers, which often uncover
new opportunities for the business. However, throughout my entire career, people seem
to just expects me to know how to ask questions, like it’s something that should come
naturally. Make no mistake, asking good questions is a skill. It needs to be practiced and
honed like any other skills.

As a PM, you are going to be spending a lot of time doing user interviews. The readings
below should give you some good stock questions to start with. Luckily, this is a skill
you will get to practice this a lot on the job. If you put your mind to it, you’ll get better
really fast. If you are not currently a PM, then find every opportunity to learn and ask
people questions. An interesting way to practice that someone suggested to me is to
post questions on Quora and measure how good the questions are by the number and
quality of the responses you get.

Questions to ponder:
 • What are some of the characteristics of a good question? a bad question?
• Besides the way you phrase the question, what are other factors that
could potentially impact the response you get from your subject?
• The question “How are you?” is probably the most common question that
get asked in any social interaction. Often the response is not very
interesting (99% of the time, it’s “good and you?”). What are some other
ways you can ask that question to elicit a more insightful response?
Readings:

• most common questions asked by PM

http://www.productplan.com/questions-product-managers-ask-
customers/
• examples of good questions
http://leanb2bbook.com/blog/b2b-customer-discovery-interview-
questions-the-master-list/
• examples of bad questions
http://kevindewalt.com/2013/01/21/bad-customer-development-
questions-and-how-to-avoid-my-mistakes/
Exercise

• Listen to podcasts that you like and focus on the questions that the
interviewer asks. If you don’t know what to listen to, I highly
recommend the Tim Ferris show on iTunes. He ask some of the best
questions to some really interesting people.
• Post 1 question a day on Quora and evaluate the responses you get.
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WORKING WITH OTHERS

An analogy i use quite often is that PM is similar to an amplifier in a sound system. By

itself, it’s useless. Paired with the right speakers, power supply, and control unit, it’s the
difference between a home theatre system and a sound system at a 20,000 people
concert hall. Your ability to amplify your team’s output and impact will ultimately be
what you are measured on. As a result, it’s important to understand how to best work
with the people that are in the trenches with you everyday.

There are lots of generalizations in the readings below. However, I found that most of
them do hold true based on my own experiences. Similar to the process section, use
these as a guide and reference, not hard and fast rules.

Questions to ponder:

• How are engineers and designers similar? How are they different?
• How would you change the way you interact with your team?
• Was there anything that stood out to you, or was unexpected?
Readings:
 • Leading a team
https://www.kennethnorton.com/essays/leading-cross-functional-
teams.html
• Working with designers
https://medium.com/the-year-of-the-looking-glass/how-to-work-with-
designers-6c975dede146
• Working with engineers
https://www.kennethnorton.com/essays/how-to-work-with-software-
engineers.html
• On how to connect with others beyond surface level
https://medium.com/@dustinfarivar/on-connecting-6b748ade09a3
Exercise:

• Experiment with at least one of the best practices suggested by the

readings above and measure the impact over time.
Back to Top
ON PRODUCTIVITY

PM is probably one of the most highly leveraged position at a company. You are
constantly being pulled in different directions. One minute, you may be on customer
support, the next you are gathering new requirements, until your engineers come to you
with a blocking issue you must resolve. If you don’t have a systematic way to triage
these requests, they can become overwhelming.

For me, I try to follow 3 simple rules:

• Everyday, have 1 thing I must get done. I don’t go home until either it’s
done or until I’m blocked.
• Get in at least 1 hour ahead of my stand up to prep for my day. Those
tasks may include answering emails, making sure requirements are in the
system and all the tasks are up to date.
• Take a 15 minute break every 2 hours. Go for a walk, play some ping pong,
stare into space. Whatever I do, just don’t think about work. I find that
this really helps refresh my mind.
In terms of day to day prioritization, there’s not really any hard or fast rules, but I use
these heuristics as prioritization guides:

1. Putting out fire: This include blocking issues from engineering or

production bugs that significantly disrupt business operations.
2. Tasks that must be done within the next 2 weeks: These are generally
requirements gathering tasks to ensure that design and requirements
stay between 1 to 2 sprints ahead of development.
3. Other tasks with more flexible timelines: These generally are my
research tasks. I usually have a list of key questions I want to answer and I
take time to knock those out 1 by 1.
Questions to ponder:
 • What is your typical work day looks like?
• What are some of your biggest time sinks in a typical work day?
• How can you eliminate them?
Readings:

• Maker’s schedule
http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html
• 7 things you need to stop doing to be more productive
https://medium.com/@cammipham/7-things-you-need-to-stop-doing-
to-be-more-productive-backed-by-science-a988c17383a6
• 5 ways to instantly become more productive
http://www.nerdfitness.com/blog/2012/08/13/productivity/
Exercise:

• Experiment at least 1 recommendation from the readings above and

measure the result over time.
Back to Top
OTHERS

Below are some other resources that I found interesting, but didn’t really fit into any
single categories. So I thought I would share it here.

• On learning how to learn – Coursera course on learning from UC San

Diego
https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn/home/info
• How to read faster
http://fourhourworkweek.com/2009/07/30/speed-reading-and-
accelerated-learning/
• Other Great References
• http://www.kennorton.com/
• https://medium.com/@noah_weiss/50-articles-and-books-
that-will-make-you-a-great-product-manager-
aad5babee2f7?goback=.gde_2144_member_58333413044608
28672
• https://sites.google.com/site/hbspm101/home/2014-15-
sessions/01-course-intro
• PM Humor
https://www.pinterest.com/crankypm/cranky-product-manager-
humor/