Breaking into Product Management - Product Resources (part I)

Are you a college student or a recent grad with a deep desire to build your career in Product Management, Design, Marketing or Analytics, but once you start looking around for resources, you get overwhelmed pretty quickly?

Don't worry! You are not alone. Being a very recently evolved and a highly in-demand career field, there is an incredible amount of information from a tonne of different perspectives out there. And, navigating that can be a challenge!

And, this brings me to the topic for my first newsletter - to provide you with a well-crafted path to consuming knowledge and building your thinking in Product. The good thing is that the choice is yours on how much you want to engage, whom do you wish to follow and how much (if any) money you want to spend.

This is a master post/resource and you can keep coming back to it as your journey in Product evolves.

In this edition, I will share with you a list of people to follow on Twitter, a set of incredible Product books, and newsletters in Product to subscribe to!

People I follow (and, you should too!):

Before we go to the actual list - here is the biggest secret of them all. The best Product School in this world - TWITTER. Now, if you are on Twitter just for the sake of it or are not on it, make sure you get there first. Then, stop following friends and focus on following people whom you want to/can learn from. The moment you do this - BAMM! your entire Twitter feed is curated for you to learn. Now, don't just stop there, Twitter is the best place for you to engage with these individuals as well, and you should not shy away from it. So, make Twitter your school and knowledge churning machine for a great learning experience in Product.

And, here is the list of first 9 incredible Product experts and leaders you should follow. In case you don't wish to overwhelm yourself, you can start following the first 3 or 5 or 7 today, and slowly expand and follow others as well. In the bracket, I have also added their past and present roles/experiences.

• Marty Cagan (Silicon Valley Product Group, eBay, HP, Netscape, Author - Inspired, Empowered)
• Shreyas Doshi (Stripe, Google, Twitter, Yahoo)
• Lenny Rachitsky (Airbnb, Localmind)
• Melissa Perri (Prof - HBS, Author - Escaping the Build Trap)
• Teresa Torres (Author - Continuous Discovery Habits, ProductTalk)
• Ken Norton (Google, Bringthedonuts.com)
• Julie Zhou (Facebook, Sundial, Author - Making of a Manager)
• Janna Bastow (Inventor - Now, Next, Later framework; ProdPad, MindTheProduct)
• Julie Chabin (ProductHunt, AngelList, Co-Ven)

Book I have read (and, you should too!)

Now, books are whole different beasts when it comes to Product. You cannot finish reading them once and be done. As you navigate your journey in Product, you will see that certain sections of certain books are becoming more and more relavant for you. So, Product books have continuous value, and you will never realize them unless you relate it directly in your work.

So, I will share a list of 4 Books in today's post along with the context of why you should read it. I am also sharing the Amazon link so that it is easy to trace in case you wish to buy any of the books.

• Inspired (Marty Cagan, to get you started on your Product journey, you will keep coming back to it atleast once a month!)
• Continuous Discovery Habits (Teresa Torres, how to excel at Product discovery and knowing what to build)
• Escaping the Build Trap (Melissa Perri, what is effective Product management)
• The Mom Test (Rob Fitzpatrick, how to effectively talk to UX Collusers, customers)

Newsletter I read (and, you should too!)

Now, subscribing to newsletters is very easy, reading them is the hard part. Hence, subscribing to a few and reading them regularly is the way to extract most value from newsletters. Keeping this in mind, I am just sharing 3 newsletters that I read religiously, and if you started reading, they would give you immense value on your product career journey.

Here are the 3 newsletters:

• Lenny's Newsletter (simply the best out there, covers a lot of Lenny's knowledge but also crowdsourced and curated knowledge across all domains in Product)
• Bring the Donuts (Ken's take on product management, leadership and careers + future of work)
• The UX Collective Newsletter (Now, here's are thoughts on Product from designers perspectives and this will cover a lot of your blindspots)

In Closing

I know this might look like a lot to start with. So, I will reiterate that you can start with following 3 product experts on Twitter, not looking at any of the books and just starting with Lenny's newsletter.

What the post is supposed to do is give you a good GUI to navigate your own personalized product journey.

In case, the post has given you a bunch of thoughts and you would like further clarity, you can always email me on [email protected]

Let's get started :)