Making It Right

Product management is one of the most exhausting, exhilarating, stressful, and rewarding careers out there. It’s not for the faint of heart. It’s for people who want to move mountains. It swallows some whole, but others derive endless invigoration and passion from the pace and the impact and the glory and the huge potential for failure as well as success. There’s no other job like it, and this is a book to help you make it your job.


When I started out in product management I read a bunch of books about it, but none prepared me for the realities I would face once I got stuck in. A big problem is that the role goes by many different names — and if that’s not reason enough to be confused, some companies define product manager completely differently from how it’s understood elsewhere. I know we sometimes get stuck in our quest to define the damn thing, but in the case of product management, it’s effort well spent, because it’s quite the jungle out there.


So with that as background, I set out to write this book to accomplish three goals:


• Define the roles and responsibilities of product managers in the software development context.

• Explain why product management is an essential role in any organization, and what characteristics managers should look for when they hire product managers.

• Provide a framework and practical guidance for strategic product management; a framework that details the elements of product planning and product execution that make up a product manager’s day-to-day work.


This book is for anyone considering a career in product management, or those who have been in the field for a while and are looking for a more formal framework for the work they do. Most of us come to product management from different circumstances; design, business analysis, and development backgrounds are the most common. So this is also a book for those who want to keep working in their chosen specializations, but would like to gain a better understanding of how their work fits into the bigger picture of product strategy and delivery.


TABLE OF CONTENTS:


Part 1: Introduction

• Introduction

• Chapter 1: Roles And Responsibilities Of The Product Manager


Part 2: Planning

• Chapter 2: Uncovering Needs

• Chapter 3: Product Discovery

• Case Study: The User Experience Of kalahari.com

• Chapter 4: Product Roadmaps


Part 3: Execution

• Chapter 5: Defining A Product

• Chapter 6: User-Centered Design And Workflows

• What About Responsive Design?

• Chapter 7: Specifications

• Chapter 8: Build And Release

• Chapter 9: Assess And Iterate

• Chapter 10: Product Management In Agile Methodologies

• Chapter 11: Getting Started