Cracking the PM Career: The Skills, Frameworks, and Practices To Become a Great Product Manager (Cracking the Interview & Career)

Engineering doesn't start until the Discovery and Design phases have gotten a large enough head start.

Your company should have a dashboard that can show you the metrics over time. If it doesn't, please work with your team to create one! It's awfully hard to optimize metrics if you can't easily understand what they are.

In this book, we've grouped the skills it takes to be a great product leader into five categories: Product skills help you design a high-quality product that delights customers and solves their needs. Execution skills enable you to run and deliver your projects quickly, smoothly, and effectively. Strategic skills improve your ability to set directi

Our goal is for this book to help more people become great product managers.

Normalize Metrics: Consider normalizing metrics by dividing by the number of active users to get charts where the lines are horizontal unless there's a real behavior change.

Common tasks during the product discovery phase include: Reading through feature requests Analyzing funnel metrics Interviewing customers Testing concept mocks Discussing long-term strategy Researching competitors Doing market analysis Holding brainstorming sessions Running design sprints3 Discovery is the magic tool for reliably creating successfu

The define phase is when you narrow down the problem space to a specific, feasible slice, and frame it so it's ready for the team. You might have a hypothesis for a solution at this point, but it's just an illustration, not something you're committed to. During this phase, you'll be shaping the outcomes you're going after, and outlining the big pic

During discovery, you take that initial idea and expand your understanding of the customer's needs, problems, and goals. You're looking for a problem that's large enough to be worth solving, while feasible enough for your team to be successful.

This is a process called product discovery—when you figure out what problem you should go after.