Rules of Product Management – Notes from the Book

By Dorai ThodlaInformation and Intelligence

I am currently reading 42 Rules of Product Management. It is a great read and I highly recommend that you buy it.

Notes:

  • It is product management’s responsibility to identify customer problems worth solving. It is engineering’s role to identify technical solutions to those problems.
  • Research helps you understand:
    1. Your customers,
    2. Your competitive marketplace,
    3. Competitors,
    4. 4. Your own product
  • Be careful. Requirements are like chili powder. A little goes a long way, and too much spoils the pot. (This refers to the market research requirements but we know that it applies to project/product requirements as well).
  • To scope market research, you ask yourself – What are my questions? What am i going to do with the answers?
  • Two week rule (by Marty Cagan author of  Inspired- How to Create Products People Love ) – Never go more than two weeks without putting your product ideas in front of real users and customers
  • Steve Blank’s quote in the book  “In a startup, no facts exist inside the building, only opinions.”

Each chapter (a Rule) is filled with lots of golden nuggets. If you are doing a startup and building a product, you can learn a lot from this book.

 

5 thoughts on “Rules of Product Management – Notes from the Book”

  1. Awesome Dorai! Thanks for sharing this. Looking forward to more nuggets!

    Another book for anyone planning a start-up, would be “Rework” (http://37signals.com/rework/). It contains many hard-earned nuggets from 37Signals guys and some so contradicting with the norms that I’d have discarded without having gone through some of those experiences myself over time.

    1. Thanks Ashish for your comment as well as the recommendation. Rework is a great book. I am going to follow this up with Inspired (which was recommended by my son). I went to buy it and Amazon recommended this one 🙂 So I got both of them on my Kindle and started with the latter.

      Look through the link to the pdf and look at the product management manifesto. Interesting read.

      1. Already on to it Dorai, only delays my hitting the bed by a few notches! Thanks for the trigger 🙂

        Starting to think of the other books that I like, I may have a long list of reccos, will find sometime and put them down somewhere. And, also thanks for the “Inspired” – might catch up on it sometime.

    2. Ashish,
      Let me know when you make that list. I can point to it from my List of Lists. You can send it to me and I can create a page here too. But if you blog, that would be the best place to put it.

      1. I guess that’s what I will do. Add a blog post. I’ve not really done any books related posts yet, but may be a good idea… there’s a lot to talk about 🙂 Thanks.

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