Product Management Handbook + Tool Landscape

📒 Product Management Handbook

What is product management? | Atlassian Agile Coach

As a member of a product team myself, I work daily with product managers and have interviewed dozens more about their roles and responsibilities. Despite the advice here, I've learned that there is no one way to apply principles of product management.

https://www.atlassian.com/agile/product-management

What do Product Managers do?

• Product Discovery

• Product Development

• Product Roadmapping

• Project Management

• Product Analytics

• Stakeholder Management

• Revenue and Pricing Modelling

There is also a saying, Product Owners and Managers are like tiny CEOs of the business as they are responsible for the business's health and ultimately survival.

⛓ Components of Product Management

What is Agile? | Atlassian

Whereas the traditional "waterfall" approach has one discipline contribute to the project, then "throw it over the wall" to the next contributor, agile calls for collaborative cross-functional teams. Open communication, collaboration, adaptation, and trust amongst team members are at the heart of agile.

https://www.atlassian.com/agile

🪜 Stages involved in Product Management

#1. Product Management Fundamentals

#2. Getting to Product-Market Fit

#3. UX Design

#4. Business Fundamentals

#5. Communication + Stakeholder Management

🥷🏻 Key actions of a Product Manager

Mobile User Tracking | Mixpanel

Companies employ mobile user tracking to understand users' actions within their app. Understanding users helps teams adjust their product, marketing, and support to guide more users to sign up, purchase, and return. It also helps them disrupt behaviors that lead to churn, such as downgrades and deletions.

https://mixpanel.com/topics/mobile-user-tracking/

Validating Ideas

Many teams and organizations have begun adopting design thinking as an effective strategy to identify solutions faster and more efficiently. A major component of this methodology is testing ideas. The term "Failing Fast" has grown to represent this segment of the process, however, failing is not actually the objective.

https://userinsight.com/validating-ideas/

What is Usability Testing? (and What it Isn't) | Hotjar

Usability testing is all about getting real people to interact with a website, app, or other product you've built and observing their behavior and reactions to it. Whether you start small by watching session recordings or go all out and rent a lab with eye-tracking equipment, usability testing is a necessary step to make sure you build an effective, efficient, and enjoyable experience for your users.

https://www.hotjar.com/usability-testing/

User testing: everything you need to know to get started

User testing is critical to understand, is my product/business or service solving my customer's problems effectively and as expected. Is it making their life easier or in fact doing the opposite. You need to know who your users are, more importantly, you should be testing with your actual user base.

https://uxdesign.cc/user-testing-everything-you-need-to-know-4957fec25f83

What Is a Prototype: A Guide to Functional UX

Prototypes are one of the most important steps in the design process, yet prototyping is still confusing for some designers and project teams. No wonder it's unclear-a prototype can be almost anything, from a series of sketches representing different screens to a pixel-perfect prelaunch interface.

https://www.uxpin.com/studio/blog/what-is-a-prototype-a-guide-to-functional-ux/

Roadmap Basics: What is a Roadmap?

If you've worked as a product manager, or even researched job postings looking for your first product management position, you're probably familiar with most of the basic product management skills. These include the ability to learn about your market and develop an accurate profile of your target customer, research the competitive landscape, deliver a strong [...]

https://www.productplan.com/learn/roadmap-basics/

Roadmapping Explained: Take Your Initiative From Vision to Reality

Unless your product management stack includes a crystal ball, all those goals and resolutions we made way back in January likely didn't take global pandemics, fluctuating economies, and social unrest into account. Every year is unpredictable, but 2020 has been truly outdoing itself. That said, we're at the halfway point, so it's a good time [...]

https://www.productplan.com/learn/roadmapping/

What Is Feature Management?| A New Best Practice

Feature management is a new class of software development tools and techniques anchored in the use of feature flags. Feature flags act as control levers in your code, letting you decouple deployments from releases. Feature management enables teams to use feature flags in sophisticated ways on a massive scale.

https://launchdarkly.com/feature-management/

Task Management Software - Manage Tasks Online with Your Team

Task management software helps you manage tasks with features that can assign work, track progress, allocate resources and collaborate with team members. ProjectManager.com is a robust project management software that helps you manage your tasks every step of the way, as illustrated in this walk-through. Enter tasks quickly and easily.

https://www.projectmanager.com/task-management

The Ultimate Guide To Product Onboarding For SaaS

Love it or hate it, one thing is clear: product onboarding is an important driver of activation and retention in SaaS businesses. If you see onboarding in the broader sense as customer education, there are few things more essential than educating your customer about how to derive value from your product.

https://userpilot.com/blog/product-onboarding-saas/

The ultimate guide to user onboarding

User onboarding is the process of guiding new users to find value with your software product. In this comprehensive guide, we break down the key onboarding terms, best practices, UX patterns, and real examples needed to design an exceptional onboarding experience.

https://www.appcues.com/user-onboarding

Workflow Automation Explained, and 5 of the Best Workflow Automation Software For 2021

Manual data entry might be one of the most tedious and inefficient tasks in the working world. Not only does it put you to sleep, but it also wastes precious time and resources, slashing your productivity to bits.

https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/workflow-automation

What is Workflow Automation | How Does Workflow Automation Help You?

Every process has a workflow to complete it. However, many workflows are filled with manual tasks that are time-consuming, error-prone, and expensive. It's like adding a bunch of rocks to your row of dominos. Workflow automation removes the rocks and provides a superior kinetic force that is swift, accurate, and relatively inexpensive.

https://kissflow.com/workflow/workflow-automation/

Visual Management

Visual Management is a business management technique that communicates important information in the physical workplace. It is a system of information displays, visual controls, labels and signs, color coding and other markings instead of written instructions. Lean organizations rely heavily on visual management to detect abnormalities and reinforce standards while ensuring stability and safety in the workplace.

https://citoolkit.com/articles/visual-management/

Visual Management: A Step-by-Step Guide

Visual project management makes knowledge work visible (just like the parts on the factory floor), so we can see it, react to changes better, and keep the project flowing quickly to completion. Its primary goal is to make the work in the product development system more visible so it can be better managed.

https://www.playbookhq.co/visual-project-management-software

The Ultimate Guide to Agile Product Management | ProductPlan

Agile product management might be the "new kid on the block" compared to linear, waterfall development, but the Agile Manifesto was actually published two decades ago. Since then, Agile has infiltrated not just software development, but many other industries. Its appeal is apparent-shortening timelines, maximizing productivity, empowering nimble decision making, and creating autonomy-yet it comes with tradeoffs.

https://www.productplan.com/learn/agile-product-management/

What is agile product management?

Agile product management is exactly what it sounds like. The idea is to set product strategy and create product roadmaps in an agile environment. It encourages an adaptive approach to product planning and implementation so organizations can quickly respond to feedback and build products that customers love.

https://www.aha.io/roadmapping/guide/product-development-methodologies/what-is-agile-product-management

What Is Product Data Management?

Product Data Management (PDM) is the process of collecting, organizing, storing, and sharing data within an organization. You might also have heard that it comes under the umbrella of Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) and is sometimes referred to in software engineering as version control.

https://productschool.com/blog/data-analytics/product-data-management/

What is document management?

Document management is the system used to capture and store e-documents. It aids document security, access control centralized storage, audit trails and more.

https://www.ibm.com/topics/document-management

🎢 Onboarding Flows

220+ User Onboarding Examples - Onboarding Study

Do you want to optimize user onboarding processes for your SaaS business? Come up with new ideas that will drive user activation? Or learn how others do it? Browse through the best product onboarding examples and gather inspiration for your project.

https://onboarding.study/flows/

Learn user onboarding - Onboarding Study

Learn how each of the UI elements fits into the whole picture and discover tactics used by the best performing SaaS products out there. Understand the basics and build solid foundations for creating your own onboarding strategies. See what analyses you can carry out (and how) to define the key actions you want new users to take.

https://onboarding.study/learn/

Product Management - Made Simple!

• PRD Templates

• CTA Library

• Email Library

• Product Buttons

• and many more

Product5x - Product Management made 5x faster

Product5x is the product management library to help PMs build successful products faster. Browse through PRDs, CTA ideas, feature discovery, email library and more.

https://www.product5x.com/

⚒ PM Tool Landscape

Our favorite digital tools for remote collaboration - Board of Innovation

We've spent 10+ years testing digital tools for remote collaboration and innovation workshops. Here are the best!

https://www.boardofinnovation.com/staff_picks/our-favorite-digital-tools-for-remote-collaboration/

• Budget: Select a tool that can provide maximum value and fits in your budget, size and meets your product needs

• Collaboration: Think about how you might grow in the near future. Would you have all team members based in the same location or globally spread (remote work)?

• Usability: Determine what you want out of a tool before you sign up. Would you like the tool to integrate with your current workflows that can offer great functionality or do you think ahead in planning the next 6-12 months and start setting up today?

• Integration and Automation: Layout your end-to-end process and check tool integration in your product development cycles. Use simple automation services to take up manual administration that can assist your team to achieve delivery timelines.

• Analytics: IMPORTANT in all phases of your product. Research all the tools that can retrieve useful information that can later be measured for performance and impact. Setting up your data funnels and pipelines in the early phases saves you a lot of time and money in the later phases of your business.

📈 Frameworks and resources to expand your product intelligence

Product Management Frameworks:

1-Page Business Plan | LEANSTACK

Lean Canvas forces you to distill the essence of your product. You have 30 seconds to grab the attention of an investor over a metaphorical elevator ride, and 8 seconds to grab the attention of a customer on your landing page.

https://leanstack.com/leancanvas

The Design Sprint - GV

The sprint gives teams a shortcut to learning without building and launching. The sprint is a five-day process for answering critical business questions through design, prototyping, and testing ideas with customers. Developed at GV, it's a "greatest hits" of business strategy, innovation, behavior science, design thinking, and more-packaged into a battle-tested process that any team can use.

https://www.gv.com/sprint/

Outcome-Driven Innovation

Outcome-Driven Innovation® Put Jobs-to-be-Done Theory into practice and create solutions that customers want. Outcome-Driven Innovation® (ODI) is a strategy and innovation process that ties customer-defined metrics to the "job-to-be-done", making innovation measurable and predictable. The process employs qualitative, quantitative, and market segmentation methods that reveal hidden opportunities for growth.

https://strategyn.com/outcome-driven-innovation-process/

Product Management Framework | Pragmatic Institute

Sign up to stay up-to-date on the latest industry best practices. Get content such as: The Pragmatic - Industry insider magazine The ever-growing webinar series Our world-class podcast series

https://www.pragmaticinstitute.com/framework

The Hook Model - Simply Explained by Nir Eyal

Type the name of almost any successful consumer web company into your search bar and add the word "addict" after it. Go ahead, I'll wait. Try "Facebook addict" or "Twitter addict" or even "Pinterest addict" and you'll soon get a slew of results from hooked users and observers deriding the narcotic-like properties of these web sites.

https://www.nirandfar.com/how-to-manufacture-desire/

What is the Kano Model? | Definition and Overview of Kano

The Kano Model (pronounced "Kah-no") is an approach to prioritizing features on a product roadmap based on the degree to which they are likely to satisfy customers. Product teams can weigh a high-satisfaction feature against its costs to implement to determine whether or not adding it to the roadmap is a strategically sound decision.

https://www.productplan.com/glossary/kano-model/

Design Thinking

Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation-anchored in understanding customer's needs, rapid prototyping, and generating creative ideas-that will transform the way you develop products, services, processes, and organizations. By using design thinking, you make decisions based on what customers really want instead of relying only on historical data or making risky bets based on instinct instead of evidence.

https://www.ideou.com/pages/design-thinking

Dan Olsen shares advice on How to Achieve Product-Market Fit

One of the main reasons why products fail is because they don't meet customer needs in a way that is better than other alternatives. That is the essence of product-market fit. In this talk at ProductTank San Francisco, I share advice from my book The Lean Product Playbook on how to achieve product-market fit.

https://www.mindtheproduct.com/the-playbook-for-achieving-product-market-fit/

Toolkit

Define your product vision using our simple "fill-in-the-blanks" worksheet. You'll learn what makes a good vision, and lay the groundwork for your product strategy. Build out your cross-functional product strategy by defining your "RDCL": Real Pain Points, Design, Capabilities, and Logistics.

https://www.radicalproduct.com/toolkit/

A framework for product strategy

P roduct strategy is the set of choices a company makes to achieve business objectives. Choices such as which products to develop, which market segments to focus on, how to differentiate, how to price, how to position, how to message, and so on.

https://uxdesign.cc/building-the-product-strategy-bf0cb660480b

What is MoSCoW Prioritization? | Overview of the MoSCoW Method

MoSCoW prioritization, also known as the MoSCoW method or MoSCoW analysis, is a popular prioritization technique for managing requirements. The method is commonly used to help key stakeholders understand the significance of initiatives in a specific release. MoSCoW stands for four different categories of initiatives: must-haves, should-haves, could-haves, and will not have.

https://www.productplan.com/glossary/moscow-prioritization/

The Opportunity Solution Tree - Cogent

Facilitators of gatherings like this need techniques in their kit bag; trusted tools they can pull out with the timing of a seasoned tradie. One of the tools I've found useful to use when countering the 'dominant contributor' scenario outlined above, is the Opportunity Solution Tree, or OST

https://cogent.co/blog/the-opportunity-solution-tree/

Jobs-to-be-Done: A Framework for Customer Needs

Imagine if all the developers, marketers, strategists and R&D managers in your company shared a common understanding of what a need is and which customer needs are unmet. Such alignment and focus changes everything. So how can this be achieved? Harvard Business School marketing professor Theodore Levitt said, "People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill.

https://jobs-to-be-done.com/jobs-to-be-done-a-framework-for-customer-needs-c883cbf61c90

How to choose the right UX metrics for your product

When designing for the web, you can analyze usage data for your product and compare different interfaces in A/B tests. This is sometimes called "data-driven design", but I prefer to think of it as data- informed design - the designer is still driving, not the data.

https://library.gv.com/how-to-choose-the-right-ux-metrics-for-your-product-5f46359ab5be

Resources to develop Product Thinking and Intuition:

What Product Sense Is and Isn't - Austin Yang✌️

We often hear how important Product Sense is to a product manager. It's like the sharp vision of an eagle, helping it locate prey from miles away. That's why many companies use product sense as a key criterion to evaluate their PM candidates. But what is product sense exactly?

https://austinyang.co/what-product-sense-is-and-isnt/

How to Product - Get the book

How to Product aims to simulate the experience of sitting across Product Managers to learn about the variety of challenges they faced and the crucial steps they took that led to their current roles. It draws out important themes from the interviews and presents similar ideas to those looking to transition into a product role.

https://www.howtoproduct.io/

Product Coalition

The world's largest independent Product Management community. 1m+ readers. 3,500+ articles. 7,000+ Slack members. Join us at members.productcoalition.com.

https://productcoalition.com/

Is that Product Management? - Medium

Deciphering everything that implies being a product manager.

https://medium.com/is-that-product-management

ProductFix

Insights for Product Leaders

https://productstride.substack.com/

Training your product intuition

Your customer is the foundation of the product hierarchy because this is where gravity needs to take you when you're tired or lost. If something isn't working, go back to the assumptions you've made about who your customer is first. For startups grinding out 0-1, this person is your early core customer.

https://merci.medium.com/training-your-product-intuition-276a7f8965b6

How to Develop Your Product Intuition

When you ask any hiring manager what they're looking for in Product Managers, they'll always include these three qualities: Technical comprehension User Empathy Product Intuition Lulu Cheng has already written the best piece on Getting to "technical enough ", so I won't belabor that. And just about every PM author has written about the Empathy piece.

https://medium.com/@TweetAnnaMarie/how-to-develop-your-product-intuition-9ba7dd2f07a3

Intercom on Product: Understanding your customer is key to good product judgment

It might sound like a sixth sense but product judgment is a tangible skill that can be learned by listening and observing. You may have noticed we've taken a break from Intercom on Product over the past few months - we didn't feel it was an appropriate conversation to continue in the midst of the tragic events unfolding around the world.

https://www.intercom.com/blog/podcasts/intercom-on-product-ep10/

10 Ways to Build More Value Into Your Product

Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value. - Albert Einstein Value for user (as opposed to value of a user) is a critically important product concept. It's at the bottom of product/market fit, growth, revenue and basically much more.

https://productcoalition.com/how-your-customers-think-of-product-value-51d80f78305f

How to Improve your Product Sense-Shreyas Doshi, Stripe Product Lead

Shreyas Doshi is a product lead at Stripe. We discuss how to improve the elusive "product sense," a relevant skill to all product managers. Previously Shreyas has served as a director of product management at Twitter, and a group product manager at Google and Yahoo!.

https://blog.tryexponent.com/improve-your-product-sense/