As a product manager, you look after various stages of product lifecycle. From discovery, defining, designing, delivery, to measure and scaling, each of these stages require different expertise and knowledge to ensure everything within the stage is done well. At the same time, you also need to ensure, all these stages are well connected and flow into each other seamlessly.
As a beginner you know about these stages and may not even be working on initial stages of Discovery, since these are given to you by someone senior, however, as you grow, you would need to be expert in these stages.
While there are many sites,courses and videos around this, many of them just give you broad undersatnding but does not give you details of it. This page will help you find those links which will give you some better insights into what all is involved in product lifecycle management.
Following links direct you to building this expertise. It is a mix of courses, videos, blogs, articles etc. Click on the title to go to respective pages.
Please comment, if you know any other course, videos, material which would help others.
ALL in ONE:
- Discovery, define and deliver with productboard: Download the pdf to go through the steps from discovery to delivery.
- User pilot’s all steps: very detailed and includes many areas to focus and take care before building and post building scenarios.
- Product Management with Cowan: This is one of the most valuable and best product management lesson from anybody. It provides hypothesis based product management, which is needed in every phase and to deliver the best
- Design thinking playbook: one of the best book to enhance your ability to find right problems and right solutions.
PRODUCT DISCOVERY:
- Inspired by Marty Cagan: Most famous of books to read to understand which products to start working on which will create customer value and make them love the product.
- Product Discovery with Tim Herbig: Great explanation with diagrams and a long section.
- Product discovery with Aha: Explanation with frameworks to practically apply your learnings.
- Discovery with Atlassian: Good if you work on Jira, Confluence for your planning and define discovery steps. Good for organizing things better.
- Continuous discovery: you definitely need to discover continuously to ensure your product grows well.
- Holistic product discovery: Frameworks keep you constrained, you should keep an open mind in discovery to capture the most valuable ideas.
- Hear from Teresa Torres: Hear out what Teresa has to say about product discovery.
- Prepare for product discovery: Understand how do you navigate through various scenarios and business needs to reach at the stage of product discovery.
- Jobs To Be Done: This is a must know skill today as you build whole product around people’s goals and jobs. This is ofcourse recommendation to do it this way, however, this directly puts your focus on how you can help users always with right problem to solve.
- Jobs to be done book by Jim Kalbach: a must read book to understand various scenarios of Jobs to be done and its definition.
- Market research: Understand the research process to know how to best get the problems discovered of your intended audience.
- Idea generation: develop ideas which will help you finding the right problem to solve and how to approach them to get ideas.
PRODUCT DEFINE PHASE:
Once you have discovered what are the key problems, you can now define what and why you will build. Involves defining which problem to solve, vision, value to be delivered. This needs to be communictaed to everybody in the company to keep them aligned on your future valuable work.
- Definition and steps: Good to understand what it means and what all is involved.
- Problem definition by labspractices: Step by step guide and details around how exactly to approach this.
- Build what matters: Defines how you should focus on the value of the product with right vision.
- Advanced product management vision, strategies and metrics: Defines product vision, and mainly talks about frameworks. Good for getting idea on how to approach vision and strategies in beginning.
- Problem Prioiritization article: Understand what problem prioirtization means and how you define which problems to solve first.
- Problem defining template: Explore templates to understand how to approch problem definition with Mural boards. This is just for reference and you can use any templates you like.
PRODUCT DESIGN PHASE:
Product design is not just about UX design, the product design goes beyond UX/UI to design a solution which connects with the user and makes sense to solve the problem. If it were only UX/UI then it would be just putting some buttons, boxes and links. But product design goes beyond to build multiple solutions along with design be it rough design or practical design. This is where your wireframe, paper prototypes etc. skills comes in handy to test your designs to select the final one.
- Product design with Interaction Design Foundation: Good to cover basics of product design.
- Product Design with Figma: learn it straight from one of the best design tools out there.
- Path to senior product designer: good to understand what is needed to grow in this role.
- What exactly is product design: Very well designed you tube video to tell you what is product design.
- UX/UI vs product design: good to understand the difference between them.
- Role of product designer: Understand who becomes a good product designer.
- Product design portfolio final final: yes thats not a mistake, the final final word is used twice in the book. Read this for job roles.
PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT AND DELIVERY:
This is the phase where you pass on the requirements to development and QA team to build, test and deliver. Your role here is to ensure you validate that the solution solves the key problem of user in real world and with agility. While Product design phase helps you understand which solution is preferable with very small number of users and if design is simple, easy to understand and help achieve the user’s goal, the product development and delivery phase helps you understand if the solution implemented makes the real impact which was intended with solution. For instance you would test with A/B testing if your new solution works better for retention than current solution. It is also time to put out MVPs out there to validate your ideas quickly. If everything works fine then you roll out fully and promote the product. You manage the whole development with Agile, Kanban or waterfall method.
- Product development methodologies: Start with knowing differences between the various methods. Choose and implement what is best for your team and customer.
- Guide to choose the methodology: Gives you a great understanding of how to choose the development method. Generally you can combine various methods to suit your needs and make it efficient.
- Different techniques of development: Watch the video to understand it visually what each technique mean.
- Technical terms to know: A product manager should know these terms to interact better with tech team.
- Sprint: great read to understand building cycle in sprints.
- Agile coach: If you want to deep dive and be expert in agile methodology.
- A/B Testing: Become an expert AB tester with this FREE course.
- A/B testing from Harvard: Theory from Harvard.
- VWO: AB testing details and parameters to take care. Very detailed steps.
- What are PRDs: understand what PRDs mean and how they are used.
- Writing Great PRDs: Know how to write Product requirement documents for all.
- User stories: Write user stories to help development team know for which person and which of their goals are they developing for.
- Testing plan: If you are focused on delivery then you would need to be thorough with testing plan to ensure everything is taken care of.
- Product Release management: Know about managing release of the product.