Making It Right: Product Management For A Startup World

Product management is one of the most exhausting, exhilarating, stressful, and rewarding careers out there. It’s not for the faint of heart. It’s for people who want to move mountains. It swallows some whole, but others derive endless invigoration and passion from the pace and the impact and the glory and the huge potential for failure as well as success. There’s no other job like it, and this is a book to help you make it your job. 

The role of a product manager goes by many different names — and if that’s not reason enough to be confused, some companies define product manager completely differently from how it’s understood elsewhere. We sometimes get stuck in our quest to define the damn thing, but in the case of product management, it’s effort well spent, because it’s quite the jungle out there. 

So with that as background, this book wants to accomplish three goals: 

• Define the roles and responsibilities of product managers in the software development context. 
• Explain why product management is an essential role in any organization, and what characteristics managers should look for when they hire product managers. 
• Provide a framework and practical guidance for strategic product management; a framework that details the elements of product planning and product execution that make up a product manager’s day-to-day work.

TABLE OF CONTENTS 

Part 1: Introduction 

• Introduction 
• Chapter 1: Roles And Responsibilities Of The Product Manager 

Part 2: Planning 

• Chapter 2: Uncovering Needs 
• Chapter 3: Product Discovery 
• Case Study: The User Experience Of kalahari.com 
• Chapter 4: Product Roadmaps 

Part 3: Execution 

• Chapter 5: Defining A Product 
• Chapter 6: User-Centered Design And Workflows 
• What About Responsive Design? 
• Chapter 7: Specifications 
• Chapter 8: Build And Release 
• Chapter 9: Assess And Iterate 
• Chapter 10: Product Management In Agile Methodologies 
• Chapter 11: Getting Started