People ask me which of my posts to read if they want to get better at product management. I never had a good answer, because I did not write them as a curriculum. I wrote them because something was on fire.
This is the inventory.
The job, as I have been saying since 2015:
Builders create the product. The PM’s job is to generate clarity and commitment so builders can create magic, and to protect one coherent customer experience across the rest of the company.
Everything below is a tool for doing that job. If a post does not help you create clarity, make a choice, or install a mechanism, it is not in the toolbox.
1. What the job is
Start here if you think PM means owning the backlog, insulating engineers from customers, or being the smartest person in the room.
- What it Means to Be Great Product Manager is the shortest version: PMs do not create the product, they create the conditions.
- Customer, Business, Technology, Organization (CBTO) is my four-lens check. Customer is synonymous with Product. Great product orgs are excellent at all four, not just one.
- Lead Without Authority is the operating skill for PMs. Influence is the job.
- Program: You Keep Using That Word is the lexicon: Program vs Product vs Project vs PM/PgM/PjM. If you cannot say which one you are doing, you are already misaligned.
- How We Scaled Alexa: One Problem, One Leader is what ownership looks like at scale: one person, one durable customer problem, end to end.
2. Work backwards from the customer
Never start with the technology; start with the customer experience…then invent what has to be true.
- Work Backwards From The Customer is the principle.
- How To: Write a Working Backwards Doc is the mechanism: artifact, FAQs, a series of reviews, not a template you fill in once.
- A FAQ About Frequently Asked Questions is how FAQs force thinking (one question each, hostile questions first).
- Focusing on users is not Customer Obsession is the distinction between the person who pays and the person who is stuck using it.
- Experience = Stuff / Time is the definition of an end-to-end experience: devices, people, brands, channels, services, and content, improving over time.
- Brand is a Critical Part of the End-to-End Experience and Wanna Compete with Apple? Focus on Experiences. apply that model.
- Why Nobody Can Copy Apple is the strategy constraint: pick a customer. Businesses Buy Differently is what happens when you pretend consumer and enterprise are the same motion.
- “Write Once…” is Anti-Customer and Don’t Build APIs are tech-first traps. Be Either an App or a Platform, Not Both and Paying Developers is A Bad Idea are the platform version of the same point.
3. Write it down…then debate it.
If it is not written in complete sentences, it is not thought through. If it is not debated early, execution will suck later because folks will be fundamentally misaligned.
- Details Matter in Presenting Narratives and Clear Narratives Show Instead of Tell are the craft bar for the memo.
- Don’t Sell Ideas. Debate Them is why slides are how sloppy thinking hides. Narrative review is the mechanism.
- Find the Crux by Debating Excellence is how you stop arguing over symptoms.
- Tenets and Debate Tenets are how you decide the hard tradeoffs before you are in the meeting where everyone is tired.
- Taxonomy and Lexicon, Have Specific Conversations, Not General Conversations, and Load-Bearing Terms are how you stop agreeing on words that mean different things.
- Do Your Job: Don’t Use Placeholder Text is the same idea at the pixel: fake copy defers a product decision.
4. Choose. Starve the rest. Ship.
A roadmap is not strategy. A long list of “priorities” is peanut butter. Dates must be treated with sanctity.
- The 5Ps: Achieving Focus in Any Endeavor is the completeness test: Purpose, Principles, Priorities, People, Plan.
- Have a Plan and Have a Plan (With Dates) are the short version. A plan without dates is a hope and you can’t engineer based on hope.
- No Starving Children? The Shocking Truth About Prioritization. is the rule: prioritization is starvation. More than three or four priorities is a red flag.
- Don’t Make Your Team Say No To You is for idea-people (including PMs) who randomize their own teams.
- One-Way and Two-Way Doors and 90% of the Decisions You Make Don’t Matter are how you spend attention. Shipping with a weak Minimum Lovable Product is a one-way door.
- Path To Green is the status language: red/yellow/green, named owner, date.
- Have Backbone, Disagree and Commit is how a PM escalates with an alternate, then lets the team execute.
- Attention is the Currency of Leadership is why all of the above is scarce.
5. Install mechanisms, or it is just a slide
Good intentions never survive contact with a calendar. If the behavior has to happen when you are not in the room, it needs an owner, a tool, adoption, and inspection.
- Good Intentions are Never Enough and Mechanisms are the definition. Working Backwards reviews are an Ass-u-me mechanism.
- Mechanisms In Action is the same idea with names you already know (WB, DRI/STL, Andon, OKRs).
- The Secret to Delivering Outsized Results is written principles plus the mechanisms that make them live.
- Leading by Fitness Functions is how you know the system is getting better at delight without inspecting every outcome.
- Broken Windows is the papercut mechanism: small experience defects compound if you do not have a way to kill them.
- Your Org Is Sinking in Silo Gravity is why customer-journey reviews and Paper Cuts exist. Silos are gravity. You engineer around them.
- Exorcise the Ghost of Mediocrity is what happens when the bar quietly drops.
- How to Be a Secret Agent of Change is D x V x F > R: treat resistors as customers when you are changing the system.
- Ownership is the behavior the mechanisms are trying to produce.
- Just Right Porridge and Leadership Principles is the over/under on Customer Obsession, including working backwards vs over-engineering.
If you want the index of the mental models themselves, that is Mental Models and Tools to Achieve Clarity of Thought. This post is the product-management cut.
How to use this
Do not read it top to bottom.
If you cannot explain the PM job without saying “backlog,” start at 1. If you are about to build something, start at 2 and write a PRFAQ. If the room is using the same words and meaning different things, start at 3. If everything is urgent, start at 4. If it only works when you personally hero it, start at 5.
I am putting these under a Product Management category on tig.log so the set is findable as a set. If I missed a tool, tell me.