The Product Book: How to Become a Great Product Manager Copyright ©2017 Product School All Rights Reserved

1 THE PRODUCT BOOK JOSH ANON and CARLOS GONZÁLEZ DE VILLAUMBROSIA PUBLISHED BY The Product Book: How to Become a Great Product Manager Copyright ©2017 Product School All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission. LEGAL NOTE All trademarks are property of their respective owners. Unless otherwise noted, all text and images are copyright Product School, and they may not be reproduced without permission. ISBNS 978-0-9989738-0-7 PRINT 978-0-9989738-3-8 MOBI BOOK DESIGN The Frontispiece PUBLISHED BY Product School TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 7 1 What Is Product Management 9 2 Strategically Understanding a Company 32 3 Creating an Opportunity Hypothesis 64 4 Validating Your Hypothesis 109 5 From Idea to Action 149 6 Working with Design 189 7 Working with Engineering 218 8 Bringing Your Product to Market 243 9 Finishing the Product-Development Life Cycle 279 Acknowledgments 300 About the Authors 302 INTRODUCTION Thank you for picking up this book! We know your time is valuable, and 7 we will do our best to make this book worth your while. One of the most important parts of being a product manager is knowing who your customers are and what they need. So, who do we believe you are, and what need will this book fill? Fundamentally, you are someone who’d like to know more about product management. Maybe you’re a recent graduate trying to figure out if product management is the right career for you. Maybe you’re an engineer actively transitioning into product management. Maybe you’re a start-up founder figuring out how to build your product division. Or maybe you’re already a product manager who naturally evolved into the role, seeking to fill gaps in your knowledge. Furthermore, there’s a lot of wisdom out there regarding best practices for product managers, but most of it focuses on parts of the product- development life cycle. This book will give you an end-to-end view of what goes into building a great product, as well as what product managers do each day. The upcoming chapters will cover a mix of theory and practical advice to teach you how to identify an opportunity, and build a product successfully to address that opportunity, whether the result is a new product or a refinement of an existing product. Whether you are new to product management, or an experienced veteran, this book is here to help you learn the needed skills to be a successful and effective product leader. A brief word of warning: Much like chess, poker, and Minecraft, product management is easy to learn, but can take a lifetime to master. If your goal is to be a product manager, consider this book the start of your journey. Becoming a truly effective product manager takes practice! If after reading this book you still want to become a product manager, consider enrolling in Product School, the world’s first tech business school. Product School offers product management classes taught by real-world product managers, working at renowned tech companies like Google, Facebook, Snapchat, Airbnb, LinkedIn, PayPal, and Netflix. 8 Product School’s classes are designed to fit into your work schedule, and the campuses are conveniently located in Silicon Valley, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Santa Monica, and New York. Now, read on to begin your journey through the wide and fascinating world of product management. CHAPTER ONE WHAT IS PRODUCT MANAGEMENT? “Nobody asked you to show up.” Every experienced product manager has 9 heard some version of those words at some point in their career. In this case, those painfully frustrating words are from Ken Norton, partner at Google Ventures, in a blog post titled “How to Hire a Product Manager.” Think about a company for a second. Engineers build the product. Designers make sure it has a great user experience and looks good. Marketing makes sure customers know about the product. Sales gets potential customers to open their wallets to buy the product. What more does a company need? Where does a product manager fit into that mix? Those simple questions are what cause not only the confusion, but also the opportunity that comes with product management. Heck, if you’re transitioning into product management, these questions might make you worry that product managers are irrelevant. And if you are currently a product manager, you might feel a sudden need to justify your existence. Truthfully, without a product manager a company will continue to operate pretty well—to a point. Yet with a strong product manager a company can become great. WHAT DO PRODUCT MANAGERS DO? Put simply, a product manager (PM) represents the customer. No one buys a product because they want to give the company money. Customers buy and use products because the products address their needs. Done properly, the products let the customers be awesome. The end result of representing the customer is that a PM helps the customer be awesome. There’s a lot behind this simple definition, though. Adam Nash, CEO of Wealthfront and former VP of product at LinkedIn, summed up product management by saying, PMs figure out what game a company is playing, and how it keeps score (hint: it’s not always about how much money the company makes). 10 Day to day, PMs must understand both business strategy and execution. They must first figure out who the customers are and what problems the customers have. They must know how to set a vision, finding the right opportunities in a sea of possibilities, by using both data and intuition. They must know how to define success, for the customer and the product, by prioritizing doing what is right over doing what is easy. They must know how to work with engineers and designers to THE PRODUCT BOOK THE PRODUCT get the right product built, keeping it as simple as possible. They must know how to work with marketing to explain to the customer how the product fills the customer’s need better than a competitor’s product. They must do whatever’s needed to help ship the product, finding solutions rather than excuses. Sometimes, this even means a PM getting coffee for a team that’s working long hours to show appreciation. By the way, PMs manage products, not people, so they must achieve everything using soft influence, effective communication, leadership, and trust—not orders. Even though it’s not always obvious what PMs do from the outside, they genuinely do a lot! PMs do so much that they’re sometimes even called “Mini CEOs.” Ironically, the thing a PM does the most is say “no.” Some people Management? Is Product 1. What believe that product managers just dictate what features to build. Given everyone has lots of ideas for features, why bother with a PM? It’s true that everyone has lots of ideas, some of them good, but most ideas people have are for things they want, not necessarily things customers want. For example, think of an engineer who spends her days using cryptic command-line tools—I’m sure you know someone like this! This engineer probably prefers keyboard shortcuts, dislikes GUIs, and favors using code to explicitly specify meaning. Now, imagine that engineer is part of a team working on an iPad word processor for senior citizens. Do you think the features the engineer would prioritize match what the customers need? A large part of a PM’s job is to figure out the small number of key features 11 to prioritize for the customer, and to lay the groundwork for long-term business viability by gracefully saying “no” to the numerous requests that don’t fit the customer’s needs. Similar but Different It’s also worth looking at roles that are related to, but different from, product management. These jobs get confused with product management because in some companies a product manager will also handle these roles’ responsibilities, even though they aren’t the product manager’s primary strengths. For example, remember how we said a good PM would do whatever it took to ship the product? Further confusing things, all of these related roles are abbreviated “PM.” Project managers are most often confused with product managers. While there are many subtle differences, they can be summed up by saying that a project manager owns the schedule and helps ensure the team is on track to meet any deadlines. The project manager will often work with the product manager, and a product manager will provide input on the schedule. Project managers are masters of schedules and Gantt charts, not of representing customers. Program managers are usually a bit more similar to product managers, but program managers generally focus more on the “getting it built” side, working closely with Engineering and Operations. If you’re building a wearable, for example, the program manager will likely be in touch with the manufacturing facility frequently, whereas a product manager will have limited direct interaction with them. Program managers tend to be masters of execution, sort of like a “super” project manager. To further confuse things, the title that describes what a product manager does varies slightly from company to company. Microsoft, for 12 example, calls its product managers “Program Managers.” Apple generally splits the product manager role into the “Engineering Program Manager” (EPM), and the “Product Marketing Manager” (PMM), with the PMM being closer to our definition a product manager, and the EPM being closer to a project manager.

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