Last updated: 3/6/22
Table of Contents (click a link to jump ahead to that specific section):
Product management can be a puzzling career to consider. In part because it’s dramatically different from one organization to the next. At some companies, product managers are glorified project managers whose primary responsibility is to set arbitrary deadlines and drag tickets across a Jira board. At others, you’re empowered to creatively solve problems, collaborate across disciplines, engage in discovery, and ultimately test, measure, and learn while driving business results.
So how do the best go about building product? Whether you’re looking to break into product and explore a new direction in your career, or you’re already in product and looking to level up your skills, it can be tough to know where to start or who to trust. There are so many resources out there, it’s overwhelming. It can take years to begin to connect and curate your own list of resources.
This article is my attempt to give you a head start and offer up the best product resources that I’ve found for product managers who are new to the space or want to level up their skills. I’ve only included resources that I’ve personally benefitted from. If I haven’t used or implemented ideas from a given resource, it didn’t make the cut. The goal is that this should serve as a highly curated, living guide to help you sort through the noise. Not a random list of everything I could turn up in search results.
I learn best through reading and writing, so most of the resources here will be oriented towards that learning style. I haven’t personally benefitted from product-specific podcasts (I’m sure there are great ones) but that’s why you don’t see that format listed below.
I hope this helps on your product journey and would love to hear if anything below resonates with you.
1. Books about product management and technology
These are books specific to product management and/or technology with direct applications to your work. You won’t have to work too hard to make the connection, thus I spend less time explaining these. If you’re curious to see additional details, you can click through to view my notes on each book.
Discovery:
Inspired by Marty Cagan
Sprint by Jake Knapp
Execution:
Escaping the Build Trap by Melissa Perri
Shape Up by Ryan Singer
The Messy Middle by Scott Belsky
Team and leadership:
High Growth Handbook by Elad Gil
How Innovation Works by Matt Ridley
Inspired by Marty Cagan
Product management is difficult enough as is, and it’s further complicated by the fact that the majority of companies have no clue what they’re doing when it comes to product. Engineering, product, and design are often structured as a service arm of the organization—viewed as overhead, only there to react to the needs of various stakeholders. Instead, this group should be on the front line searching for creative ways to solve real problems and lead the company to the next level. The first step to developing your product skills is understanding what product management is, what it’s not, and how the best companies think about building product.
Inspired is a foundational resource that provides answers to exactly this, serving as both an introduction and deep dive into the specific job description of a product manager. Cagan examines how to create a successful product culture by illustrating the principles of strong product teams and breaking down individual roles—product managers, designers, engineers, product marketing, and other supporting positions. He also digs into how to lead product discovery and the process of getting to the right product through ideation, prototyping, and testing. If you want to understand how product managers and product organizations should work, start here.
Check out my book notes for additional details on the content in Inspired.
“Product management is about insights and judgment, both of which require a sharp mind. Hard work is also necessary, but for this job, it is not sufficient”
Sprint by Jake Knapp
Discovery is a critical part of product. You have to get out and talk to customers to understand their pain points and how they think about the world. You also need to be able to run experiments and test prototypes to get feedback on the potential solutions that your team comes up with. This means understanding best practices in terms of how to conduct user research, empathy interviews, and prototype testing. Again, speed matters. The faster you’re able to get your learn, build, measure reps in, the better product you’ll be able to create.
Sprint is just one way to approach this, although it’s the best that I’ve found. The authors pioneered their own rapid design sprint process at Google Ventures. This book documents, step-by-step, the best way to examine, prototype, and test new ideas with customers, in a single week.
Check out my book notes for additional details on the content in Sprint.
“Get that surface right, and you can work backward to figure out the underlying systems or technology. Focusing on the surface allows you to move fast and answer big questions before you commit to execution, which is why any challenge, no matter how large, can benefit from a sprint.”
Escaping the Build Trap by Melissa Perri
Outcomes > outputs. Most product organizations measure themselves by the rate at which they are shipping features and hitting arbitrary dates, rather than the value they should be aspiring to create for their customers and the business. While many product organizations will say the right things, keep an eye out for is what happens after they ship. Are they done? Do they move on to the next thing? Or does the team continue to iterate (build, measure, learn) driving towards key metrics they set out to influence in their initial hypothesis? If you want to be successful as a product manager, it’s important to seek out companies and opportunities that align with the latter. Unless you’re in a leadership position, it’s not worth the time and energy to walk into an archaic product development organization and try to shift the way they think about building product.
The core message of The Build Trap is that organizations who become stuck measuring their success by outputs, rather than outcomes, will fail. The trap that Perri emphasizes is when you obsess over the rate at which you’re shipping and developing features, rather than focusing on the actual value they produce. Perri then digs into the role of product, career paths, strategy, how to organize product teams, and the key differences in product-led organizations. It’s a great book for learning what to seek out when assessing new opportunities and identifying product-driven, forward-thinking companies.
Check out my book notes for additional details on the content in Escaping the Build Trap.
“Product management is the domain of recognizing and investigating the known unknowns and of reducing the universe around the unknown unknowns…It takes a certain skill to be able to sift through the massive amounts of information and to identify the right questions to ask and when to ask them.”
Shape Up by Ryan Singer
Prioritizing discovery work and ensuring you’re focused on a meaningful problem that’s worth solving for the company is step one. But once you’ve settled on a problem to solve, explored different ways to solve it, prototyped the concept, and sought early feedback, the next challenge is shipping. How do you bring this thing to life so people are able to realize the value of it? And how do you move quickly? Remember, those who are able to accelerate the build, measure, learn loop are those that win. And they win because they’re learning at a faster pace and building that back into the product, not because they execute on a perfect product from day one.
In Shape Up the core problem Singer addresses is product development teams who are struggling to ship. Part one aims to provide a better language to deal with and describe risks, uncertainties, and the challenges we face in bringing ideas to life. Part two outlines the process which Basecamp (where Singer leads product) uses to make meaningful progress on their products. The book mainly focuses on the risk of getting stuck or bogged down in last quarter’s work, wasting time on unexpected problems, and not being free to do what you want tomorrow. A great case study on how to move quickly, assess risks, and ship.
Check out my book notes for additional details on the content in Shape Up.
“The best is relative to your constraints.”
The Messy Middle by Scott Belsky
Product management requires endurance. Most of your time will be spent in the trenches trying to bring an idea to life. As such, the ability to embrace the long game and lead through ambiguity is critical. As Belsky notes, it’s not always as pretty as the beginning or the end, but the middle is worthy of equal attention since it’s where most of the journey takes place. This means honing your focus, determining the right metrics, operating with conviction, optimizing for simplicity, and avoiding the trap that is trying to be everything to every potential customer. As it relates to leadership principles and best practices while executing in product, this is one of the best books I’ve read.
Check out my book notes for additional details on the content in The Messy Middle.
“For extraordinary outcomes, seek conviction in your work and build teams that value conviction over consensus.”
High Growth Handbook by Elad Gil
In product, empathy is one of your greatest tools. That means not only the ability to listen to your customers, stakeholders, and team. But also seeking to understand where they’re coming from and the unique challenges they face. You must be able to step back to understand which problems are worth solving for the business, which considerations are worth taking into account, and how to craft a message that resonates with your specific audience. High Growth Handbook is a resource for hypergrowth startups where Gil focuses on tactical advice for scaling a company from ten employees to thousands. The advice is meant to be painfully tactical in order to avoid the platitudes from investors who have never run or scaled their own company. Product is at the heart of this.
There’s a chapter dedicated to product management that’s worth the price of the book where Gil explains what product is, characteristics of great PM’s, the four types of PM’s, best practices in terms of processes, and why distribution is critical. But importantly, the book details other disciplines such as recruiting, marketing, and the CEO. Gil digs into challenges in building the executive team, organizational structure, financing, and valuation. It pays to be curious and understand the broader challenges your company is facing. This will help you develop a more comprehensive understanding of the current state of your company and the challenges you face. It will also help you better relate to key stakeholders and handle the challenges of being in a hypergrowth startup, if that situation applies to you.
Check out my book notes for additional details on the content in High Growth Handbook.
“Since focusing on product is what caused initial success, founders of breakout companies often think product development is their primary competency and asset. In reality, the distribution channel and customer base derived from their first product is now one of the biggest go-forward advantages and differentiators the company has.”
How Innovation Works by Matt Ridley
Innovation is a critical concept for product managers to have a deep understanding of. You’re often charged with bringing the future vision of the company to life and solving problems in creative ways. But when you view innovation as something unique to the realm of prodigies who experience it in a single flash of brilliance, it can feel unattainable. However, if you study history, you’re able to lower the stakes as it becomes obvious that innovation is not an individual phenomenon. Instead, as Ridley suggests, it’s a collective, incremental and messy network phenomenon. As such, it’s important to understand what innovation actually is and how to create the right conditions for it to flourish on your team.
In this book, Ridley examines the role of innovation—an often misunderstood concept—in the modern age. He discusses the environmental conditions that promote innovation, how it differs from “invention,” and how our idea of a single moment of brilliance as the key to technological advances is flat out wrong. For those in technology who are on the ground floor doing the work, the message will be refreshing. Ridley emphasizes how iteration is the key to innovation—you have to get as many reps in as possible to turn an invention into something that’s both practical and affordable for widespread use. The story of innovation is one of incremental improvements and the freedom to exchange, experiment, imagine, invest, and fail. The key takeaways from product managers in this book are just how critical the elements of iteration, creative freedom, and autonomy are to a high performing team.
Check out my book notes for additional details on the content in How Innovation Works.
“The main ingredient in the secret sauce that leads to innovation is freedom. Freedom to exchange, experiment, imagine, invest and fail; freedom from the expropriation or restriction by chiefs, priests and thieves.”
2. Unexpected books that will improve your product skills
These are books that focus on other disciplines such as psychology, critical thinking, and overcoming obstacles from which you can draw parallels to product to better understand your customers, dial in your mental models, or learn to operate as a high-performing team. One of the most important things I’ve done in my career is to read across disciplines. Most PM’s focus exclusively on the same set of product-specific books. But there are incredibly valuable lessons to be gleaned from different genres that can give you an edge.
Psychology and human nature:
The Laws of Human Nature by Robert Greene
The Four Tendencies by Gretchen Rubin
Building a Story Brand by Donald Miller
Culture, teamwork, and ownership:
Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull
Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin
Endurance by Alfred Lansing
Mental models and better decision making:
The Great Mental Models, Volume One by Farnam Street
Thinking in Systems by Donella H. Meadows
Skin in the Game by Nassim Taleb
Mindset by Carol Dweck
The Laws of Human Nature by Robert Greene
If you want to be a great product manager, it benefits you to have a strong understanding of human nature. Not only because you’re building for human beings which requires empathy, an ability to listen, and an awareness to examine what’s beneath the things you hear. But also because you have to learn how to effectively manage up, collaborate with stakeholders, work around misguided people, build a high performing culture for your team, push yourself, and translate learnings based on the audience in front of you.
This book is the culmination of Greene’s lifetime of work focused on power, influence, and mastery, brought together in a single text focused on the truths of human nature. It’s an instructive guide to human nature and people’s behavior, based on evidence rather than a particular viewpoint or moral judgment. As Greene emphasizes throughout the book, understanding human nature in a deep way is advantageous for countless reasons. It helps you become a strategic observer, better judge of character, outthink malicious people, motivate and influence those around you, alter negative patterns, develop greater empathy, and recognize your true potential. Greene pulls stories from both sides throughout history—masters, as well as those who have failed spectacularly—to breathe life into each law.
Check out my book notes for additional details on the content in The Laws of Human Nature.
“The horse and the rider must work together. This means we consider our actions beforehand; we bring as much thinking as possible to a situation before we make a decision. But once we decide what to do we loosen the reins and enter action with boldness and a spirit of adventure. Instead of being slaves to this energy, we channel it. That is the essence of rationality.”
The Four Tendencies by Gretchen Rubin
Whether you’re advancing in your career and have direct reports or you’re an individual contributor collaborating with engineering, design, and other cross-functional stakeholders, it’s important to realize that people are motivated by different things and everyone navigates conflict in different ways. First, you need to build the self-awareness to be able to step back and observe your immediate reactions before you act so you’re able to make more rational decisions. But it’s also important to understand that the way you think about and respond to challenges is not the same as everyone else on your team. If you want to rally a team around a vision and build engagement, you must realize these differences.
In The Four Tendencies, Rubin details four main personality tendencies—upholder, questioner, obliger, rebel—that we all gravitate towards based on how we handle internal and external expectations. It's an interesting look into human nature and quite valuable when considering how we should motivate, persuade, or navigate conflict within ourselves and as we interact with others. She details each of the four tendencies in depth, while conceding that there are an enormous range of personalities, even among people with the same tendency. The goal of the book is to help us better understand ourselves and those around us by building greater self-awareness and acknowledging our differences. That way we can leverage our strengths, navigate our weaknesses, and build lives that work better for us.
Check out my notes for additional details on the content in The Four Tendencies.
“It’s all too easy to assume that what persuades us will persuade others—which isn’t true. One of my secrets of Adulthood is that we’re more like other people than we suppose and less like other people than we suppose.”
Building a Story Brand by Donald Miller
As a product manager, you’re engaging with different audiences at different points in time who each have different context and a unique perspective. The way you articulate a pain point, opportunity, learnings, or results to your individual team in the trenches doing the work will be totally different than what you would present to the broader product team, at an all-hands where people lack context, or at a leadership meeting with executives. You have to be able to step back and put yourselves in their shoes and articulate answers to the following questions from your audience’s perspective: 1) “What is this?” 2) “What’s in it for me/us?” 3) “What do I/we do next?” Whether you’re articulating the value of your product to customers or communicating results with the team, you must craft the message you’re delivering. You might claim these skills are only relevant to product marketing, I would strongly disagree. Product management will be a struggle if you don’t already have or aren’t committed to developing elite communication skills.
The heart of Building a Story Brand is about clarifying and simplifying your message. Miller presents his strategy in a seven-point framework which forms the foundation of all great stories. You’ll get the most value out of this book if you follow (and actually complete) the exercises, chapter by chapter. It will force you to consider how to message an opportunity, pain point, product, strategy, or learnings in a way that strikes a chord with the intended audience. As Miller emphasizes, “The best products don’t always win. The best communicators do.”
Check out my notes for additional details on the content in Building a Story Brand.
“The best products don’t always win. The best communicators do.”
Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull
At their core, product managers are creative problem-solvers collaborating on teams of other smart creatives who have honed skills in their own disciplines, specifically engineering and design. But the best product managers know that their team is far more valuable than any single idea. It’s your job to enable people to do their best work and provide creative freedom by emphasizing trust, experimentation, and depth. You have an opportunity to inspire people to do their best work by aligning the team around a compelling vision and guiding principle, rather than obsessing over a specific feature set.
There are so many parallels between product and the storytellers at Pixar you could almost consider this a product-specific book. Overall, it’s one of the best modern examples of the impact that comes from harnessing creativity and building a culture where the creative process can thrive. Catmull discusses the evolution of Pixar Animation, including the philosophies and strategies that established them as a creative force. Most notably, the team at Pixar embraces the years of ambiguity inherent to the creative process as a story evolves into its own. Instead of becoming attached to a single storyline or character, they seek out a deep truth at the core of the film—the guiding principle—and craft the story around that. Catmull also emphasizes the role of leadership in cultivating creativity. It starts with loosening your grip, accepting risk, trusting your people, and giving them space to do what they do best.
Check out my notes for additional details on the content in Creativity, Inc.
“Creativity has to start somewhere, and we are true believers in the power of bracing, candid feedback and the iterative process—reworking, reworking, and reworking again, until a flawed story finds its through line or a hallow character finds its soul.”
Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin
If there’s one thing that sets apart novice product managers from the best, it is ownership. That means accepting total responsibility. Unless it's a matter of ethics, great product managers absorb the blame and own what they're able to. They don’t shy away from challenging problems and they don’t pass the blame. Instead, they dig in. And when missteps are inevitably made, they learn and reflect on what they could have done better. This helps disarm people, it also helps create more productive discussion and allows you to grow as a leader by focusing on what you could have done differently to better anticipate, prepare, or empower your team.
In Extreme Ownership, Willink and Babin, two Navy SEALs officers, recall their time leading the most highly decorated special operation unit of the Iraq War. Each chapter highlights one of their leadership principles in action before relating it back to the business world. I found the most relevant section to be on the laws of combat: cover and move, simple, prioritize and execute, and decentralized command. If you want to win, teams must not only know what to do, but they must also know why. As a leader, your job is to ask questions until you understand why. There are also great lessons in empowering yourself by accepting total responsibility, no matter your position, and the importance of being aggressive (not overbearing). As Willink and Babin suggest, there are no bad teams, just bad leaders.
Check out my notes for additional details on the content in Extreme Ownership.
“There are no bad teams, only bad leaders.”
Endurance by Alfred Lansing
No matter which way you cut it, product managers are leaders within the organization. People look to you for vision, strategy, conviction, and the why. But you don’t have absolute authority because those you’re working to influence often don’t report to you. As such, it would greatly benefit you to study some of the best leaders in history to learn which principles they called into action to be effective when the going gets tough.
Endurance not only highlights the leadership of Sir Ernest Shackleton in dire circumstances, but it’s also a great resource on how to motivate and engage different personalities, build morale, and adapt to ever-changing environmental conditions. It’s a brilliant tale of survival that documents Shackleton’s failed voyage to cross Antarctica from west to east. Along the way, Shackleton demonstrates the importance of operating with conviction and never allowing ambiguity or indecisiveness to linger for too long. His example also reveals why boredom is a fiercer foe than hardship, why speed often beats preparedness, and other key lessons in resourcefulness that directly translate to product.
Check out my notes for additional details on the content in Endurance.
“Whatever his mood—whether it was gay and breezy, or dark with rage—he had one pervading characteristic: he was purposeful.”
The Great Mental Models, Volume One by Farnam Street
One of the most important things you can do as product manager is hone your ability to evaluate decisions and opportunities from different perspectives. This helps you evaluate tradeoffs, anticipate pitfalls, consider second-order consequences, and assess strategic impact. If you’re able to see things through different lenses, you improve your rationality and the quality of your decisions. This helps you avoid the catastrophic decisions, learn quickly, evaluate what’s worth building, and determine what’s worth scrapping.
The Great Mental Models, Volume One, presents nine foundational mental models and general thinking concepts. The book champions a multidisciplinary approach to help broaden your perspective and make better decisions. It emphasizes that these mental models help us overcome three main barriers to effective decision making—not having the right vantage point, ego-induced denial, and distance from the consequences of our decisions. The concepts discussed range from first principles and inversion to Occam’s Razor and Hanlon’s Razor. The mental models listed in this book are critical tools for any product manager wanting to improve the quality of their decision making.
Check out my book notes for additional details on the content in The Great Mental Models, Volume One.
“Most geniuses—especially those who lead others—prosper not by deconstructing intricate complexities but by exploiting unrecognized simplicities.”
Thinking in Systems by Donella H. Meadows
As a product manager, you need the ability to appreciate and consider the interconnected whole. Not just the single product area that you’re responsible for in isolation. This starts by asking “what if” questions about future behavior to consider the range of potential scenarios that are likely to unfold. But resilience and lasting products are born not only from an appreciation for the interconnected whole and the complexity inherent in a given system, but also an ability to let go, evolve, and adapt knowing you can’t perfectly plan for every scenario you face—resourcefulness matters.
Meadows emphasizes systems thinking as the ability to step back and appreciate the complexity of the interconnected whole. She explains the dangers of generalizing about complex systems and digs into the key elements of resilient systems. This includes feedback loops, self-organization, experimentation, and alignment. She also digs into concepts like the tragedy of the commons, bounded rationality, modeling, and how to avoid the pitfalls of each. The benefit of systems thinking is that it helps you avoid isolated, shallow decision-making. With this comes a greater appreciation for the complexity of large systems, their connections, and a willingness to redesign them, when needed. This is a foundational book for product managers who want to improve their ability to better evaluate complex problems and develop into a more strategic thinker.
Check out my notes for additional details on the content in Thinking in Systems.
“In the end, it seems that mastery has less to do with pushing leverage points than it does with strategically, profoundly, madly, letting go and dancing with the system.”
Skin in the Game by Nassim Taleb
This is what separates the pretenders. As a true product manager, you have to take risks. There will be plenty of moments when you will have to disagree and commit. If you want to keep things moving, you’ll have to put your ass on the line. At your core, you are a doer, a builder, a creator. The best product managers know that if you can’t put your soul into something, you should leave it for someone else. If you’re transferring the risk to others, deflecting blame, or refusing to stick around to face the consequences of your actions (e.g. consultants) you’re taking the easy way out. The best product managers find solace in the fact that even in their failures, the credit belongs to the man in the arena.
In this book, Taleb challenges standard conventions and long-held beliefs about a range of topics including uncertainty, symmetry, risk-sharing, and rationality in complex systems. Skin in the game means having exposure to the real world and paying a price for consequences, good or bad. He explains that it’s necessary for fairness, commercial efficiency, and risk management. But most importantly, it’s necessary to understand the world. Taleb digs into real-world applications of his ideas and explains important heuristics like the Lindy effect. This will give you an entirely new lens to view the world and plenty of frameworks that lend themselves well to product management. Love him or hate him, he’s one of the most original minds of our time.
Check out my notes for additional details on the content in Skin in the Game.
“The curse of modernity is that we are increasingly populated by a class of people who are better at explaining than understanding, or better at explaining than doing.”
Mindset by Carol Dweck
If you want to make a meaningful difference in the products you create, you have to be able to suffer. This means sticking it out when things aren’t going perfectly—conflict with stakeholders, an early version of your product fails, missteps during delivery, or any other number of obstacles. The ability to reframe each challenge as an opportunity for growth is the hallmark of a top performer. Even the best experience failure. To create something from nothing requires endurance. Some days your biggest accomplishment will be finding a way to show up and chip away at the problem in front of you. Sustaining this for the years it takes to create something great requires a growth mindset.
Mindset is a foundational book that I wish I would have read in college or at the start of my career. Dweck’s lessons in cultivating a growth mindset can be heard in passing on dozens of podcasts and seen referenced in countless other books. But this is the original source. As she discusses a fixed vs. growth mindset, the biggest difference is revealed not when things are going well but when coping with failure. In a fixed mindset, failure is any type of setback. In a growth mindset, failure is not growing. A growth mindset is about building resilience and belief in change. Your skills and abilities can be developed. This allows you to embrace and enjoy the process that is learning, rather than seeking immediate gratification or giving up. The earlier you’re able to read this, the better it will help shift your outlook.
Check out my notes for additional details on the content in Mindset.
“Becoming is better than being. The fixed mindset does not allow people the luxury of becoming. They have to already be.”
3. Articles
The best articles from other product leaders:
How to Become a Peak Product Manager by Ravi Mehta
Be a Director, Not a Manager by Fareed Mosavat
Product vs. Feature Teams by Marty Cagan
Product is Hard by Marty Cagan
Be a Great Product Leader by Adam Nash
Good Product Manager/Bad Product Manager by Ben Horowitz
Crossing the Canyon: Product Manager to Product Leader by Fareed Mosavat and Casey Winters
My product articles summarizing what I’ve learned:
How to Avoid Becoming a Bottleneck by Alex J. Hughes
Why the Worst Product Managers Expect the Best by Alex J. Hughes
Why Your First Bet is Always Wrong by Alex J. Hughes
4. Twitter
I’ve also found a lot of great frameworks from this crew that I follow on Twitter. This is not a replacement for the resources on this list but a good way to supplement some of these ideas. You can check out the list that I’ve put together here: https://twitter.com/i/lists/1353386429066272769
5. Career development programs
Reforge
I’ve done both the Growth Series and the Product Strategy track. Both are incredible. I learned more here than I did in my entire college career (and these are only six-week programs). Reforge gives you access to the world-class operators who have built and shipped meaningful products. Each lesson breaks down the fundamental models, frameworks, and strategies used to build successful companies so that you can apply them to your own circumstances.
I’ve tried quite a few other certifications and workshops and they’ve all been relatively worthless with the exception of Reforge. It’s hard for me to overstate the value this program has had in my career. It’s built around curated case-studies, live discussions with experts and peers, and active learning as you translate the concepts back to your own company. If you’re interested, you can learn more about Reforge here.
6. Conferences
Conferences are a great way to familiarize yourself with how leaders in this space think and talk about building product. This allows you bring a fresh perspective back to your team or level up your communication and interviewing skills. There’s certainly a point of diminishing returns after you’ve attended a couple. My suggestion is to space them out. It’s worth going every few years. You don’t need to try to hit them all in a single season.
Mind the Product
Front
7. Interview resources
Practice interview questions:
https://www.productmanagementexercises.com/interview-questions
My interview framework:
If you’re going into a product interview, at the very least you need to be prepared to walk through your general framework for building product. A lot of companies will give you a prompt such as, “Build Lyft for kids…go.” It’s important to practice this over and over to get your thinking clean and so you’re able to clearly articulate how you would go about solving that problem. Below is my framework for how I assess these problems.
Discovery
Before you dig into development, you’re trying to answer two questions: Is this a problem worth solving? And is this a solution worth pursuing?
1. Develop an understanding of the problem and space we’re operating in
What’s the problem we’re trying to solve?
How does this fit with our vision and strategy?
What company objective does this map to?
What’s our goal?
Why does it matter?
Who are the key stakeholders?
How is this problem being solved today? Conduct market and industry research to understand the landscape.
Who are your users? Lead empathy interviews to build a deeper understanding of your users, the opportunity, if it’s a real pain point, and what it looks like in the context of their daily lives.
2. Map out the challenge and make it customer-centric
Key actors on the left.
Start with the ending on the right.
Map out the entire journey for each actor and match it to the ending.
Example of how this might look if you’re running a design sprint, as mentioned in Sprint by Jake Knapp.
3. Determine your initial target customer
Who is the most impactful customer to start with, why?
What’s your initial hypothesis?
How does this map back to the company vision and strategy?
4. Identify and prioritize user needs
List out needs that your target customer has based on the research above.
To reach your target customer, what has to be true? Asking yourself this will allow you to better identify problem areas or underserved needs.
Which user needs are critical to solving the primary pain point?
Which user needs are you uniquely positioned to solve for?
5. Brainstorm ways to solve the problem with your team
How would we measure success?
What are the primary metrics we’re trying to impact?
How might we creatively solve for this challenge?
What core features are required to meet the user needs we’ve prioritized? Remember to keep lift vs. impact in mind. Which 20% of the features will help us achieve 80% of the results?
6. Prototype
What’s a low-cost way we can test our initial approach? If you need help or inspiration on creative ways to test your ideas, check out Testing Business Ideas: A Field Guide for Rapid Experimentation.
Experiment, measure, learn (qualitative and quantitative data).
Document learnings, refine your hypothesis.
Repeat until you’ve established an appropriate degree of confidence in your approach.
bring it to life
Once you’ve identified that it’s a problem worth solving and you have a solution worth pursuing, it’s time to bring this thing to life.
7. Build / Measure / Learn
Define your MVP feature set based on discovery and prototypes.
Build! Spec it loose, be ruthless in cutting scope, focus on impact vs. lift, and get the core components out the door as fast as possible.
Shipping quickly will allow you to accelerate the build, measure, learn loop which isn’t about executing perfectly from day one, but rather building insights back into the product and accelerating the rate at which you’re learning. Those who learn the fastest win.
Continue to lead interviews to uncover pain points and get qualitative feedback from customers interacting with your product.
Continue to evaluate key metrics to understand how customers are using your product and the impact it’s having.
Is your hypothesis holding up? Are you making progress towards your primary OKR? Is it translating into a positive business impact?
If yes, qualitative and quantitative data should continue to inform direction and iterations until you achieve the OKR you set out to influence.
If not, is this worth the continued investment? Should you refine your approach based on what you’ve learned? Or should you scrap this effort, document your learnings, and move on to your next bet?