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):
Great tool to keep in mind to know which category of needs your product falls into, as far as human needs are concerned.
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
Great for having a product backlog, planning and project management
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
Great skill to build. How to train models and use ML for products.
Great tool to find out more about your customers
Great tool to create a landing page, quick!
Look out for trends. Study what users are looking for
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:
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.
Talks about Customer acquisition but is an exhaustive list of what all a PM could acquire in terms of skills!
Great platform to see new innovative products launched here. Hint: Zoom was launched in 2012 on this platform and look at it today!
Nice articles on what a product manager does
Nice articles around products and product management
Nice newsletter for PMs
Other Blogs: (Not directly related to Product Management):
Deep and thoughtful content on Life and Business. Helps to hold stead during challenging times.
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
Big picture thinking on businesses told in a hilarious way!
Great free visual charts across a broad spectrum of topics, based on Data.
YouTube Channel:
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!
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:
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.
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.
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
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.
What can I say? I admire this person for his sheer big vision thinking and execution.
Udemy Courses:
Timeless PM skill
Another timeless skills
A digital PM lives in the Data space.
