Bookmark these Product Manager Resources (Updated — Feb 2021)!

Chaitan
3 min readJul 17, 2020

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High Output Founders Library

A curated list of all resources a founder would need!

PM’s tools (many other vendors available too, but most of the products listed below are either fully free or have some free offerings):

Human Universals

Great tool to keep in mind to know which category of needs your product falls into, as far as human needs are concerned.

Draw.io

A, PM will need to know the architecture of the product and how the data flows in the product. Great tool to quickly draw the architecture of the product

Trello

Great for having a product backlog, planning and project management

Google Analytics

Measuring Quantitative and Qualitative Data on user behavior and running digital experiments

Category: Competitor Research & Alternatives:

Competitive Insights

Competitive Insights. Example, what keywords do competitors use for SEO

Paid one. But great for finding the products big companies use

Category: Collaboration

  • Slack

For Instant communication with Customers/Teams alike

  • Zoom

Instant video communication with Customers/Teams alike

Category: Prototyping

To quickly create marketing flyers, campaigns or even visualize a design. Kind of, a lesser known cousin of Adobe Photoshop, but minus the complexity of Photoshop

Great tool to share UX designs, upload hand drawn mockups, create a clickable UX and get feedback on designs

Google Auto ML

Great skill to build. How to train models and use ML for products.

Survey Monkey

Great tool to find out more about your customers

Instapage

Great tool to create a landing page, quick!

Google Trends

Look out for trends. Study what users are looking for

Google Keyword Planner

Optimize your landing page for SEO

Periodic Table for Content Marketing

A one stop shop for the kinds of content a PM can produce specific to any context

Blogs/websites:

Alternatives not Competitors

Most products are competing with ‘alternatives’ not competitors!

Product Manager to Product Leader

The only article that very clearly states what it takes to go from an Individual Contributor (Product Manager) to leading a team of Product Manager.

All skills Product Manager

Talks about Customer acquisition but is an exhaustive list of what all a PM could acquire in terms of skills!

Product Hunt

Great platform to see new innovative products launched here. Hint: Zoom was launched in 2012 on this platform and look at it today!

Silicon Valley Product Group

Nice articles on what a product manager does

Product Habits

Nice articles around products and product management

PM HQ

Nice newsletter for PMs

Other Blogs: (Not directly related to Product Management):

Collaborative Fund

Deep and thoughtful content on Life and Business. Helps to hold stead during challenging times.

Stratechery

Great write up on Strategic thinking of businesses. Continues to teach me big picture thinking.

Heuristics to generate startup ideas

Kind of thinking prompts to generate innovative product ideas

No Mercy No Malice

Big picture thinking on businesses told in a hilarious way!

Visual Capitalist

Great free visual charts across a broad spectrum of topics, based on Data.

YouTube Channel:

Product School San Francisco

Some good talks on product managers and their experiences across various companies.

Podcasts:

Naval — Episode on ‘Learn to Build, Learn to Sell’

An Entrepreneur is a Builder and a Seller. Interesting!

Naval — All Episodes

A very deeply thoughtful podcast on business and life from a successful venture capital

Coaching for leaders — Episode with Steve Blank

A great talk on MVP

Books:

The Mom Test

Teaches ‘How’ to talk to customers and the pitfalls to avoid when talking to customers while validating the problem statement.

The Professional Product Owner

Vision, Value, Validation — 3 things a Product Manager needs to do as part of their job. This book is packed with practical tools to instantly jump start on what a Product Manager does.

Experimentation Works

Gives a great insight into how organizations like ‘booking.com’ run digital experiments. The tools, infrastructure, mindsets required to run thousands of experiments daily. Hard to replicate without any org support though.

What’s your Problem?

Practical tools on how to ‘Reframe’ the problem and avoid the perils of solving the wrong problem.

Unlocking the Customer Value Chain

Gave me a new perspective, ‘Technology doesn’t disrupt businesses, customers do!’. Taught me a framework to think of innovation

Zero to One

I have been fascinated by Peter Thiel’s ability to hold two opposing thoughts at the same time. His books, interviews, thought process is fascinating.

Elon Musk

What can I say? I admire this person for his sheer big vision thinking and execution.

Udemy Courses:

Monetization Strategy

Timeless PM skill

Growth Product Manager

Another timeless skills

Data Product Manager

A digital PM lives in the Data space.

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Chaitan

I love the profession of Product Management that helps me build meaningful relationships with teams and customers. I just can’t get enough of reading!