Resources

Here you can find the most popular resources shared in the newsletter 📚

Working remotely

• How to be productive working from home (and anywhere else), based on Nir Eyal’s new book Indistractable.
• How to build (and sustain) culture in a remote environment, by InVision (InVision is ran by +700 remote people around the globe).
• 8 ways to manage your team while social distancing, by HBR.
• Running virtual offsites, by HBR.
• Working remotely? 5 ways to help your Product team thrive, by Teresa Torres.
• 10 suggestions on making the most from working from home, by Marty Cagan.
• How to keep your team motivated, remotely, by HBR.
• Remote work for Design teams, by Ben Goldman, Abby Sinnott, and Greg Storey for InVision. Learn the best practices for running a remote design team, and discover how designers can help teams collaborate while working apart. InVision is a fully remote company.
• The “field guide” to remote working for large teams. By Maggie Leung, NerdWallet VP of Content. “There are no silver bullets. Strong remote teams are built on building trust and communicating consistently and effectively. There are many ways to get there — even if you have a team that’s in the deep end struggling to work well now.”

Hiring / getting hired

• Your first 30 days as Product Manager in a new company. Practical advice for a smooth transition into a new company. For further reading on onboarding, check this great book: The First 90 days.
• 40 favorite interview questions by some of the smartest and most thoughtful collaborators of First Round.
• Product Management careers: levels, career growth, and promotions. Many of us arrived to Product by “accident”, and once in a Product job, career paths are generally little structured. Brent Tworetzky has attempted to give them some structure and shares with us with a simple overview.
• The Product Leadership career ladder. Rich Mironov has surveyed several product leaders in order to find out what questions and concerns they had while stepping up in responsibilities, and what is appreciated about leadership roles.
• The Role Canvas: 4 Questions to help you re-think how you hire. Creating a meaningful role is the foundation for building a strong product team. It ensures there’s clarity around purpose, accountabilities and skills — human and technical- that the team identifies collectively
• An exercise to improve at Product interviews. Simple, yet useful (and frequently used) case

Strategy

• ‘How-to’ guide for crafting your first Product vision. A brief and handy guide by Anthony Murphy, including resources by Roman Pichler
• 6 decision-making frameworks that help startup leaders tackle tough calls, by First Round Review.
• The GEM model: Prioritizing growth, engagement, and monetization to keep organizations aligned. Gibson Biddle explains how they applied this strategy prioritization model during his tenure as VP of Product at Netflix.
• Mastering the art of the Outcome. First Round talks to Guru’s co-founder and CEO Rick Nucci. “Are you paying attention to the metrics that matter to your clients’ success? If you spend more time talking about lagging indicators like ARR — rather than metrics like DAU or feature-specific engagement — stop saying you’re customer-oriented. You’re sales-oriented.”
• In search of a better way to measure Product/Market fit. We rarely use a hard metric to define PMF. Sean Ellis proposes one.
• The Hierarchy of Marketplaces (Level 1, Level 2, and Level 3) synthesizes the thinking on how to build enduring marketplaces. To deliver minimum viable happiness, you have to understand the humans on both sides of the marketplace, and what drives them. The marketplace that wins is the marketplace that figures out how to make their buyers and sellers meaningfully happier than any substitute. GMV is irrelevant — a vanity metric that can lead you down the wrong path if you chase it
• The Marketplace Library. A great work of curation on marketplace resources: Strategy, Metrics, Network Effects

Driving Teams

• Product vs. Feature Teams. A thoughtful piece by Marty Cagan, one of the most notable and influential voices in Product Management. Marty helps setting direction towards a truly empowered product team.
• UX as the driver for better team alignment and customer outcomes. Great interview with UXDX conference co-founder Rory Madden, highlighting the importance of cross-functional teams and deep customer focus.
• Sharing customer insights with development colleagues. An essential yet usually mishandled and ignored practice of successful teams.
• 6 must reads for onboarding tactics. An extensive selection on how to help newbies succeed (and stay), by First Round Review.

Managing people

• 6 Must Reads for Managers on 1:1s, by First Round Review.
• The indispensable document for the modern manager. A “manual” template for your team on how to operate with you, by Jay Desai for First Round Review
• A User Guide to working with me, By Julie Zhuo

Starting up a Product

• The 4 parts of an MVP. An MVP is more than a product, it’s a route to learning.

UX

• A beginners guide to Lean UX. A nice intro / refresher put together by Tony Ho Tran for InVision.
• Design thinking guide. InVision has recently put together a brief but useful intro/refresher on Design thinking
• UX Research & Design Meta Repo (aka the repository of UX repositories), the ultimate UX and Design toolkit by Matěj Káninský.
• Essential tools for User Research, by Nick Babich

Frameworks

• 7 Innovation frameworks to navigate disruption: Apple, Netflix, Amazon, & more. CB Insights analyzes 7 innovation frameworks from some of the most prominent thinkers in business, technology, and culture.

Tools / Templates

• PM templates. Extensive selection of useful templates on: 1-pagers, strategy, vision, GTM, and more. By Lenny Rachitsky
• 5 Product Roadmap templates (on Asana, Aha, and other tools), by Product School
• Startup Toolkit, Joanna Ngai, UX Designer at Microsoft, shares a beutifully curated list of resources for startups, ranging from design, to finance or strategy tools
• Productverse: an interactive visualization of the best product management tools by Product School

Books

• First Round Essentials – Management. Direct access to the pdf here.
• Outcomes over Output
• Start with why
• Radical focus
• Zero to One
• The hard thing about hard things
• The everything store
  The 15 most-read books by top Product Managers. Good book selection by ProductCon.