For a great product manager it is important to have a good resource list in your tool stack. Reading and learning from others’ experiences is valuable because it gives you an insight into how things work in practice and prepare you for the things you can expect.
It is important to stay up-to-date with business trends, to read the advice from experts. To help you stay ahead of all this here’s the list of blogs and authors I recommend you should follow in 2017:
Clever PM
Besides the obvious occasional humor and sarcasm, Cliff Gilley, is one of my favorite authors. He is a 10-year-experienced product manager, working on the variety of products, many of them generated over $10M in yearly revenue. In his writing, he is mainly focused on Agile and Scrum development, do’s and dont’s and best practices in product management. He also deals with leadership, psychology, strategies and organization in general.
Scott Sehlhorst
Scott Sehlhorst is a product management and strategy consultant, but also a visiting lecturer at the Dublin Institute of Technology’s Product Management degree program. He runs Tyner Blain blog and provides consulting services to large and small companies. The Tyner Blain blog is regularly updated with the latest trends and advice on creating user-friendly and market-wanted products, professional services and ways to improve your business.
Ken Norton
Ken Norton is a Google Ventures partner and a product manager. He provides product and engineering support to more than 300 portfolio companies including Uber, Nest, Slack, Foundation Medicine and Flatiron Health. Before joining Google Ventures, he was a group product manager at Google. In those years, Ken led product initiatives for Docs, Calendar, and Google Mobile Maps. At his blog, he shares his experience, great tips and good practice examples. His classic essay How To Hire a Product Manager became the playbook for a generation of product managers.
The Product Guy
Jeremy Horn, a founder of The Product Group and The Product Guy blog, is an award-winning, product management veteran that spent previous fifteen years leading and managing product teams, holding various executive and advisory roles. Besides discussions, advice, and reviews of products and the people behind them, he occasionally posts job opportunities for PMs.
Product Manager HQ
The main focus of Product Manager HQ is creating content that can help future/present product managers break into product management and excelling on the job. They run the world’s largest online Slack community for product managers with thousands of members from leading companies/startups from all over the world. They also host One Week PM, the popular course taken by hundreds of students, which teaches the fundamentals of product management, how to launch your own side project, and how to land a product job.
Brandon Chu
Brandon is a Senior Product Manager at Shopify, often sharing his thoughts at his Medium page. He is focused on e-commerce and scaling the product organization as the company grows. In 2016 he was announced as one of 40 influencers that helped move product management industry forward. Considering his contribution to the industry development, it should be obvious that his posts are full of the best practice examples as well as theory behind product management.
Eric Ries
Eric Ries is the author of The Lean Startup and he expresses his thoughts at the entrepreneurship blog Startup Lessons Learned. In 2017 he was named one of the Best Young Entrepreneurs of Tech and in 2009 was honored with a TechFellow award in the category of Engineering Leadership. He is a part of the advisory board for a number of technology startups and has worked as a consultant to a number of startups, companies and venture capital firms. Ries is an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Harvard Business School. His Lean Startup methodology has been written about in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Harvard Business Review, the Huffington Post, and many more blogs and publications.
Mind The Product
Mind the Product is an international product community consisting of over 50,000 members. It started in 2010 with the very first ProductTank meetup in London, followed by the Mind the Product Conference in 2012. They use their blog as a way to continue the discussions started at their events and a tool to grow the product management community around the world. It is the best place to reach out to the community for the opinion and to share your own on views on various PM topics.
ProductPlan’s Blog
The team at roadmap tool ProductPlan use their blog to share their own knowledge and experience on product management. They try to cover as many as possible topics related to product management, product strategy, entrepreneurship, agile and development, but also share tools, PM career opportunities and interviews with people from the business.
Jaco Blog
Jaco is a startup providing their customers with the ability to record and analyse users’ activity as they navigate through the product in real time. Their blog, written by their employees, is dedicated to Product Managers and Product Designers. They share best practices, how-to’s, expert tips and resources for further thinking and reading.
Andrew Chen
Andrew Chen works at Uber on their Growth team. He writes about mobile, metrics and growth, but he is also an advisor/investor to tech startups including AngelList, Barkbox, Dropbox, Grovo, Kiva, Product Hunt, Tinder, Wanelo, and Gusto. His blog on online marketing contains useful researches and insights into latest methods for building and retaining web audiences. He also covers broad array of tech and non-tech topics including internet advertising, viral marketing, web analytics, social networks, online games, and so on.
Ash Maurya
Ash Maurya is the author of Running Lean and the creator of business modeling tool Lean Canvas. Since bootstrapping his last company seven years ago, he has launched five products and one peer-to-web application framework. Throughout this time he has been in search of better and faster ways for building successful products. More recently Ash has been rigorously applying Customer Development and Lean Startup techniques to his products, about which he frequently writes on his blog.
Avinash Kaushik
Avinash Kaushik is the Digital Marketing Evangelist for Google, the Chief Education Officer at Market Motive Inc. and the author of the leading web analytics and research blog Occam’s Razor. Avinash wrote the best selling book Web Analytics: An Hour A Day and he is a frequent speaker at key industry conferences around the globe as well as a Board of Advisors of leading USA universities.
Cindy Alvarez
Cindy Alvarez is the author of Lean Customer Development: Building Products Your Customers Will Buy and Director of User Experience for Yammer (a Microsoft company). She has over a dozen years’ of experience leading design, product management, user research, and customer development for startups, and is currently using that background to drive intrapreneurial change within Microsoft.
Daniel Elizalde
Daniel Elizalde’s area of expertise and passion is Product Management for the Internet of Things (IoT). He has experience in managing IoT product portfolios and complete lifecycle of the end-to-end IoT solutions, including hardware embedded software, cloud platforms, and user applications. He created TechProductManagment.com to share his IoT experience and to contribute to the growth of both IoT and the Product Management industries. One of his goals is demystifying IoT and providing a real-world guide to anybody wanting to build IoT products at scale
Derek Morrison
Derek Morrison spent 14 years managing digital products for various companies. He is currently freelancing for a start-up business unit that’s part of the Tesco digital entertainment group. At AllAboutProductManagement.blogspot.rs he shares insights, tips, tools and techniques with anyone involved in the product’s lifecycle. The posts are an expression of his own experience as a result of managing various products. His goal is to produce material that will help product managers do a better job and develop their careers.
Des Traynor
Des Traynor is the Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer at Intercom, a customer communication startup, also Author at Intercom Blog on Product Management and Customer Engagement topics. His role covers many areas including product strategy, content marketing, customer support, and customer education. Des represents Intercom when speaking at international conferences on topics such as product management, marketing, customer support, and the challenges of growing a product company.
Teresa Torres
Teresa is a product discovery coach who helps teams adopt user-centered, hypothesis-driven product development practices. She works with companies of all sizes on integrating user research, experimentation, and the right analytics into the product development process resulting in better product decisions. Recent clients include Capital One, CareerBuilder, Prezi, The Guardian, and the Wikimedia Foundation. Before becoming a coach, Teresa spent the majority of her career leading product and design teams at early-stage internet companies. She shares her thoughts at her blog – Product Talk.
Gopal Shenoy
Gopal Shenoy is a product management veteran with over 17 years of software industry experience leading teams that have launched successful products. His passion for product management made him launch his blog, Software Product Manager by Gopal Shenoy, back in 2007. He is currently Director of International Products at Care.com. Prior to Care.com, he worked in product management roles at Gazelle, OnForce, Salary.com and SolidWorks.
Jackie Bavaro
Jackie Bavaro, product manager at Asana, joined the company as first product manager and she led the team through their public launch, the launch of their premium product, and the launch of their product for larger teams. With over eight years of experience in product management, she has also worked as a product manager at Google and as a program manager at Microsoft. She writes frequently at The Art of Product Management at http://pmblog.quora.com where she covers topics like communication, building relationships with the team, and making data-driven decisions.
Jeff Lash
Jeff is a recognized thought leader in product management industry with over a decade of experience in the development of Web-based products and SaaS. He has significant expertise in customer understanding, new product innovation, Agile product management, user experience design, and product development processes. Currently he works as the Service Director for the Product Management advisory service at SiriusDecisions, helping business-to-business companies grow by improving the efficiency and effectiveness of their product management. He also blogs about product management at How To Be A Good Product Manager.
John Peltier
John Peltier is an accomplished product manager who discovers, develops and markets solutions to business problems. John has developed and released software solutions in the medical device and corporate compliance markets, for both traditional enterprise software companies as well as B2B SaaS companies. He shares his experience on his blog The PM Vision, writing about B2B product management, marketing, and growth.
Marty Cagan
Marty Cagan is a partner at the Silicon Valley Product Group, author of “Inspired: How To Create Products Customers Love“ and often referred to as the “the most influential person in the product space”. His work as an author is focused on listing unmeasurable traits, such as product passion, customer empathy, innate intelligence, ethics, integrity, and confidence for product managers.
Nir Eyal
Nir Eyal is the author of “Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products.” Nir has distilled years of research, consulting and practical experience to write a manual for creating products people love. He has taught at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and Hasso Plattner Institute of Design. His writings on technology, psychology, and business appeared in the Harvard Business Review, The Atlantic, TechCrunch, and Psychology Today. He shares his thoughts and experience at NirAndFar.com.
Steve Blank
Steve Blank is a Silicon Valley serial-entrepreneur and academician recognized for developing the Customer Development methodology, which launched the Lean Startup movement. He is also the co-founder of E.piphany. Blank spent over thirty years in the technology industry and has founded or worked within eight startup companies, four of which have gone public. He has published three books: The Four Steps to the Epiphany, Not All Those Who Wander Are Lost and The Startup Owner’s Manual. Right now Blank is a consulting associate professor of entrepreneurship at Stanford University and he currently lectures at the Haas School of Business, University of California-Berkeley, Columbia University and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Together with the Entrepreneurship Center at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF), he created a version of Lean for Life Sciences and Healthcare which he taught there in fall 2013.
Conclusion
I hope you will enjoy reading these authors. In case you have someone worth sharing hit me up in the comment section below. I’m always open to fresh new materials to read.
