Back in December, a reader named Adam sent me an email about a book that I had just reviewed, What Customers Want by Anthony W. Ulwick. Adam asked me about my recommendation, which was
“…it’s not a good fit for Product Managers at early stage companies or where there is not a lot of product or market data for you to evaluate under-served outcomes.”
Adam’s question to me was essentially, “Well, if this book isn’t good for Product Managers at start ups, which ones are?” It’s a good question and one that until recently, I would not have had a good answer for. The problem with Product Management books is that for the most part, they are all about process and what can only be loosely defined as “traditional” Product Management.
Traditional Product Management is what we all learned about in Product Management training (Pragmatic Marketing, Sequent, ZigZag Marketing, etc) and read about in books like The Product Manager’s Handbook and Product Strategy for High Technology Companies. Traditional Product Management tends to be waterfall development with teams that have significant resources (Program/Project Manager, anyone?) and an extensive organizational and process hierarchy.
That’s not what most Product Managers at start ups experience. They’re more likely to be just one person, who probably inherited an Engineering team that was accustomed to NOT having any Product Management process. There’s no supporting team members and they also find themselves wearing many additional hats, such as Sales Engineer, QA Engineer, and Technical Writer. For those Product Managers, books that discuss traditional Product Management process are not very useful.
To be honest, the best place to find the kind of information a start up Product Manager needs is on blogs like this one (toots own horn!) and many of the others out there who post regularly about their EXPERIENCES at start ups. I won’t list them here, but check out the list of folks under BlogNation in the menu. There’s lots of great information out there.
However, I recently read (and reviewed) Rich Miranov’s The Art of Product Management and while it’s not they same type of book as the one’s I mentioned earlier, it provides a lot of insights on how Product Management works at smaller companies, especially start ups. I would recommend it for folks who know enough about Product Management to be dangerous, but want some guidance on what happens when you step outside of the traditional Product Management framework.
There are also other books and resources out there that don’t specifically address Product Management as a discipline, but are nonetheless useful for Product Managers looking for information that they can use to build and deliver better products. Examples include Tuned In, Rules for Revolutionaries, Freakonomics, Manager Tools, and The Welch Way.
One big rule for ALL of these resources, including this blog: there is no gospel on Product Management. YOU have to decide what is right for you, your product, and your organization. If something you read or hear or see strikes you as interesting, give it a try. If it works, great; if not, you still learned something.
So, Adam, there’s the long answer to your question. We know you have a choice when you read Product Management blogs and we appreciate you choosing The Productologist. We look forward to serving you again in the future. The local time is….