1

THE
PRODUCT
BOOK
JO S H A NO N
and

CAR LOS G ONZ ÁL EZ DE V I LL AUM BR OSI A

PUBLISHED BY
 e Product Book: How to Become a Great Product Manager
Copyright ©2017 Product School
All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form or by

any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise,
without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a
website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.

LEGAL NOTE
All trademarks are property of their respective owners. Unless otherwise noted, all text
and images are copyright Product School, and they may not be reproduced without
permission.

ISBNS 978-0-9989738-0-7 PRINT

978-0-9989738-3-8 MOBI

BOOK DESIGN e Frontispiece

PUBLISHED BY Product School

 TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION
1 What Is Product Management
2 Strategically Understanding a Company
3 Creating an Opportunity Hypothesis
4 Validating Your Hypothesis
5 From Idea to Action
6 Working with Design
7 Working with Engineering
8 Bringing Your Product to Market
9 Finishing the Product-Development Life Cycle
Acknowledgments
About the Authors
INTRODUCTION

ank you for picking up this book! We know your time is valuable, and 7
we will do our best to make this book worth your while.
One of the most important parts of being a product manager is knowing
who your customers are and what they need. So, who do we believe you are,
and what need will this book ll? Fundamentally, you are someone who’d
like to know more about product management. Maybe you’re a recent
graduate trying to gure out if product management is the right career
for you. Maybe you’re an engineer actively transitioning into product
management. Maybe you’re a start-up founder guring out how to build
your product division. Or maybe you’re already a product manager who
naturally evolved into the role, seeking to ll gaps in your knowledge.
Furthermore, there’s a lot of wisdom out there regarding best practices
for product managers, but most of it focuses on parts of the product-
development life cycle. is book will give you an end-to-end view of
what goes into building a great product, as well as what product managers
do each day.
 e upcoming chapters will cover a mix of theory and practical
advice to teach you how to identify an opportunity, and build a product
successfully to address that opportunity, whether the result is a new
product or a re nement of an existing product. Whether you are new to
product management, or an experienced veteran, this book is here to help
you learn the needed skills to be a successful and e ective product leader.
A brief word of warning: Much like chess, poker, and Minecra ,
product management is easy to learn, but can take a lifetime to master. If
your goal is to be a product manager, consider this book the start of your
journey. Becoming a truly e ective product manager takes practice!
If a er reading this book you still want to become a product manager,
consider enrolling in Product School, the world’s rst tech business
school. Product School o ers product management classes taught by
real-world product managers, working at renowned tech companies
like Google, Facebook, Snapchat, Airbnb, LinkedIn, PayPal, and Net ix.
8 Product School’s classes are designed to t into your work schedule, and
the campuses are conveniently located in Silicon Valley, San Francisco,
Los Angeles, Santa Monica, and New York.
Now, read on to begin your journey through the wide and fascinating
world of product management.
CHAPTER ONE
WHAT IS PRODUCT MANAGEMENT?

“Nobody asked you to show up.” Every experienced product manager has 9
heard some version of those words at some point in their career. In this case,
those painfully frustrating words are from Ken Norton, partner at Google
Ventures, in a blog post titled “How to Hire a Product Manager.” ink
about a company for a second. Engineers build the product. Designers
make sure it has a great user experience and looks good. Marketing makes
sure customers know about the product. Sales gets potential customers to
open their wallets to buy the product. What more does a company need?
Where does a product manager t into that mix?
ose simple questions are what cause not only the confusion, but
also the opportunity that comes with product management. Heck, if
you’re transitioning into product management, these questions might
make you worry that product managers are irrelevant. And if you are
currently a product manager, you might feel a sudden need to justify
your existence. Truthfully, without a product manager a company will
 continue to operate pretty well—to a point. Yet with a strong product
manager a company can become great.

WHAT DO PRODUCT MANAGERS DO?

Put simply, a product manager (PM) represents the customer. No one
buys a product because they want to give the company money. Customers
buy and use products because the products address their needs. Done
properly, the products let the customers be awesome. e end result of
representing the customer is that a PM helps the customer be awesome.
ere’s a lot behind this simple de nition, though. Adam Nash, CEO
of Wealthfront and former VP of product at LinkedIn, summed up
product management by saying, PMs gure out what game a company
is playing, and how it keeps score (hint: it’s not always about how much
money the company makes).

10 Day to day, PMs must understand both business strategy and

execution. ey must rst gure out who the customers are and what
THE PROD UCT BOOK

problems the customers have. ey must know how to set a vision,

nding the right opportunities in a sea of possibilities, by using both data
and intuition. ey must know how to de ne success, for the customer
and the product, by prioritizing doing what is right over doing what
is easy. ey must know how to work with engineers and designers to
get the right product built, keeping it as simple as possible. ey must
know how to work with marketing to explain to the customer how the
product lls the customer’s need better than a competitor’s product. ey
must do whatever’s needed to help ship the product, nding solutions
rather than excuses. Sometimes, this even means a PM getting co ee for
a team that’s working long hours to show appreciation. By the way, PMs
manage products, not people, so they must achieve everything using so
in uence, e ective communication, leadership, and trust—not orders.
Even though it’s not always obvious what PMs do from the outside, they
genuinely do a lot! PMs do so much that they’re sometimes even called
“Mini CEOs.”
Ironically, the thing a PM does the most is say “no.” Some people

1. Wh at I s Product Mana gement ?

believe that product managers just dictate what features to build. Given
everyone has lots of ideas for features, why bother with a PM? It’s true
that everyone has lots of ideas, some of them good, but most ideas people
have are for things they want, not necessarily things customers want.
For example, think of an engineer who spends her days using cryptic
command-line tools—I’m sure you know someone like this! is engineer
probably prefers keyboard shortcuts, dislikes GUIs, and favors using code
to explicitly specify meaning. Now, imagine that engineer is part of a team
working on an iPad word processor for senior citizens. Do you think the
features the engineer would prioritize match what the customers need? A
large part of a PM’s job is to gure out the small number of key features
11
to prioritize for the customer, and to lay the groundwork for long-term
business viability by gracefully saying “no” to the numerous requests that
don’t t the customer’s needs.

Similar but Di erent

It’s also worth looking at roles that are related to, but di erent from,
product management. ese jobs get confused with product management
because in some companies a product manager will also handle these
roles’ responsibilities, even though they aren’t the product manager’s
primary strengths. For example, remember how we said a good PM
would do whatever it took to ship the product? Further confusing things,
all of these related roles are abbreviated “PM.”

Project managers are most o en confused with product managers.

While there are many subtle di erences, they can be summed up by
 saying that a project manager owns the schedule and helps ensure the
team is on track to meet any deadlines. e project manager will o en
work with the product manager, and a product manager will provide
input on the schedule. Project managers are masters of schedules and
Gantt charts, not of representing customers.

Program managers are usually a bit more similar to product managers,

but program managers generally focus more on the “getting it built” side,
working closely with Engineering and Operations. If you’re building a
wearable, for example, the program manager will likely be in touch with
the manufacturing facility frequently, whereas a product manager will
have limited direct interaction with them. Program managers tend to be
masters of execution, sort of like a “super” project manager.
To further confuse things, the title that describes what a product
manager does varies slightly from company to company. Microso , for
12 example, calls its product managers “Program Managers.” Apple generally
splits the product manager role into the “Engineering Program Manager”
THE PROD UCT BOOK

(EPM), and the “Product Marketing Manager” (PMM), with the PMM
being closer to our de nition a product manager, and the EPM being
closer to a project manager.
Product managers are like the conductor in an orchestra. e
conductor never makes a sound but is responsible for making the
orchestra as a whole sound awesome to deliver a great performance to the
audience. Great conductors understand and engage with everyone in the
orchestra, using the right vocabulary with each section, diplomatically
moving everyone together toward the shared goal of a great performance.
Project managers help keep all the rehearsals organized so that the
orchestra will be prepared for the concerts. Program managers are involved
in planning the entire season’s schedule for the concert hall, setting things
up so that the project managers can make each performance successful.
BECOMING A PM
ere’s no obvious path to becoming a product manager. And if you’re
reviewing résumés for potential PM hires, especially if you’re a start-up
founder, it’s not obvious what to look for. Most careers have a very clear-

1. Wh at I s Product Mana gement ?

cut path—you go to school, study computer science, and then you’re set
to become an engineer. Product management isn’t one of those careers.
Because product management is a relatively new discipline, it has a much
less formalized training process than other careers. Given that the role
o en comes down to “doing whatever it takes to ship a product that
customers will love and that achieves business goals,” product managers
should be smart, talented people who can gure things out on their own.
Beyond that, product managers commonly have an intersection of a
technical background—not just engineering—such as industry expertise,
and communication skills. e most common type of product manager is
someone with an engineering/computer science background who became 13
interested in business. PMs o en start out as individually contributing
engineers who then nd themselves taking on more responsibilities:
conducting customer interviews, working with Design to validate ideas,
and possibly even collaborating with marketing to make sure what they’re
working on aligns with customer needs. ey’re not necessarily the best
coders or the most de nitive domain experts, but their mix of skills
makes them unique. Sometimes PMs come from Design, Marketing, or
even business school!
At Product School, we o en talk about the Product Triangle (Figure
1-1). is is a simple way to visualize and understand where product
management (ideally) sits in relation to other core departments:

Engineering (product development), Design, and Marketing. is

diagram is helpful for two reasons. First, it visually emphasizes that
product management is a generalist role and PMs need to be able to
 work with signi cantly di erent domains. Second, as you go through
the process of building a product, you will shi your balance to di erent
parts of the triangle—more on this shortly. inking about which
leg of the triangle you’re focusing on will let you think about the right
way to communicate—you’ll talk with Design di erently than you do
Engineering—and the right goals to set during each phase.

Product
Design

Product
Management
14
Product Product
Development Marketing
THE PROD UCT BOOK

Figure 1-1. The Product Triangle, showing product management at the intersection of three
core domains.

A common question about becoming a PM is, how technical do PMs have

to be? ey need to know enough that they can work e ectively with
engineers, participating in things like bug prioritization and scoping
meetings, but they don’t need a computer science or electrical engineer-
ing degree. Especially for so ware PMs, knowing how to code even a
little will be bene cial, and if you want to become a PM but don’t know
how to code, we’d highly recommend learning the basics. Fortunately,
there are plenty of resources to help you learn—you can enroll in a boot
camp like Code School or Hack Reactor or take an online course from
lynda.com or Udemy.
 A big bene t to learning to code is that PMs frequently rely on a
way of thinking common to coding—top-down design and bottom-up
implementation. is means that you think about the big picture, break
it down into small pieces, and then build those small pieces rst. A er

1. Wh at I s Product Mana gement ?

building the small pieces, you combine them to get the big picture.
Learning to code will give you consistent practice thinking this way.
Another common question is, how business-oriented do PMs have
to be? PMs don’t need an MBA—in fact, some tech companies prefer
not to hire MBAs—nor do they need a sales background. ey should
understand the industry of the company they’re interested in and be
able to answer the following questions: Who are the customers? Who
are the major players? What di erentiates one company from another?
How do the businesses make money? PMs should also understand basic
nancial concepts such as revenue vs. pro t—revenue is how much
money a company takes in, and pro t is how much is le a er expenses.
15
In general, when we’re working with people who want to make the
transition to being a product manager, we recommend they start with
an industry/company they’re already very familiar with. at makes for
an easier transition because they likely know the answers to many of the
questions above, even if they don’t explicitly realize it! A er you have a
few years of product management experience, it’s fairly easy to switch to
a new domain, as you know the right questions to ask to be successful.
If you’re a founder looking to build your start-up’s product team, we’d
recommend focusing on nding the best product person possible, even if
that person isn’t familiar with your domain.

Types of Product Managers

While you will o en hear people talk about product managers in the general
sense, you will also hear about specialized product managers. Depending
on your background, you might nd one of these specializations a more
appropriate career choice than the general role.