Cracking the PM Career: The Skills, Frameworks, and Practices to Become a Great Product Manager
Product ID: 266814964
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Product management is a big role, and this a big book. From the authors of the best-selling Cracking the PM Interview comes the comprehensive guide to the skills, frameworks, and practices to become a great product manager. It will help you level-up your skills and career from your first product management role through product leadership, addressing questions like: What does it take to become a great product manager and great leader? How can you reliably ship products that make a difference in the world? How do you build your product intuition, hone your execution, strengthen your leadership, and develop your strategic skills? What does it take to lead and inspire teams? When is people management the right career move? How does excellence in those skills translate into career success? This book will teach you the reliable frameworks and best practices that improve your chances of shipping a successful product. The frameworks won't transform you into a great product manager overnight or guarantee that your products never fail, but they'll help you avoid the most common problems and give you the structure to start experimenting, reflecting, and improving. You'll learn how to: Design high-quality products that delight users and solve people's needs. Run and deliver your projects quickly, smoothly, and effectively. Create product visions and strategies to set direction and optimize for long-term impact. Lead people and influence without authority. Manage people, develop great PMs, build great teams, and create great product organizations. Manage your career so you can translate your efforts into the recognition you deserve. Topics include: Getting Started: the product life cycle; the first 90 days Product Skills: user research; A/B tests; problem solving frameworks; systems thinking; product discovery; design sprints; ethical product design; technical terms and concepts; product documentation (specs and PRDs) Execution Skills: agile project management; minimum viable products (MVPs); incremental development; product launches; time management; overcoming obstacles Strategic Skills: product vision; strategy; roadmaps; goals and OKRs Leadership Skills: growth mindset; ownership mentality; influencing without authority; stakeholder management; collaboration; communication; inspiring a team; mentoring; working with designers, engineers, and executives People Management Skills: becoming a people manager; being a member of the leadership team; reviewing work; holding people accountable; coaching and development; recruiting and interviewing; product processes; organizational structures Careers: career ladders; career goals; partnering with your manager; picking the right team; negotiations; networking; handling bad situations; career options beyond PM Product Leader Q&A: in-depth career interviews with eleven successful product leaders who have chosen career paths including CPO, head of product, CEO, social impact work, venture capital, angel investing, coaching, and starting their own companies. And much, much more. Featuring stories from over fifty PMs and product leaders who have worked at organizations including: Adobe, AirBnB, desertcart, Apple, Asana, Atlassian, Calendly, Chan-Zuckerberg Institute, Chegg, Cisco, City of San Jose, Coda, Coinbase, Dropbox, eBay, Facebook, FlipKart, Gojek, Google, HSBC, Instagram, LinkedIn, Medium, Microsoft, Netflix, OpenTable, Pinterest, Pocket Gems, Quora, Samsara, Slack, Sonos, Stripe, Swiggy, Twitter, Uber, Walmart Labs, Yahoo, and Yelp. Review: Great book that will help you as a PM and as a person - I started as software engineer out of college where I have great ambition but no direction in the software tech industry. Gayle McDowell's book serves as a torch guiding the unknown path for me. By reading her books i can start seeing more clearly what is around me (where i am standing) as well as a grand passage of what the journey looks like down the road and how to improve myself in order to progress forward. "Cracking the PM Career" is just an amazing resource work done by Jackie Bavaro and Gayle Laakmann McDowell I have been in industry for 15 years now (SWE converted Product Manager), while i have accumulate knowledge & scars along the way as a Product Manager Lead at Meta. I find it still incredibly helpful to read their books to fill my gaps and extend well-rounded knowledge. The latest publish shares a lot great knowledge that will help you to be a even greater product manager. I strongly recommend this book to others wether you are an aspiring PM or already a PM, or PM Leader to refine yourself throughout reading! Review: Would have paid 10x to have this when starting out - This book is the best Product Management book I've come across. I'm mid to late stage career. Have been co-founder or VP level at several companies. Have lead PM at several startups with successful exits. And with all those decades of experience, there was still good new stuff - to me - in here to learn, and great refreshers on other items. As I read the book, I couldn't help thinking of the cliche about "if I'd only known this starting out." I definitely could have used these insights. (Of course, some things are 'sign of the times' specific... there was no "Agile" as it exists today. But that's not so much the point as compared to just having a better starting framework for what does exist in the now; whatever those things may be.) It might be that some things don't really hit home until you have the experience, even if you got the book learning. But still, at least you have a better sense of things if you've been exposed to the concepts. This is not a full "Body of Knowledge" (BOK) type work. But it is just full of practical sensible, "this is what you may be facing" type scenarios. New or junior PMs... just get this.
| Best Sellers Rank | #95,496 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books ) #40 in Job Interviewing (Books) #50 in Industrial & Product Design #78 in Job Hunting (Books) |
| Customer Reviews | 4.7 out of 5 stars 450 Reviews |
B**N
Great book that will help you as a PM and as a person
I started as software engineer out of college where I have great ambition but no direction in the software tech industry. Gayle McDowell's book serves as a torch guiding the unknown path for me. By reading her books i can start seeing more clearly what is around me (where i am standing) as well as a grand passage of what the journey looks like down the road and how to improve myself in order to progress forward. "Cracking the PM Career" is just an amazing resource work done by Jackie Bavaro and Gayle Laakmann McDowell I have been in industry for 15 years now (SWE converted Product Manager), while i have accumulate knowledge & scars along the way as a Product Manager Lead at Meta. I find it still incredibly helpful to read their books to fill my gaps and extend well-rounded knowledge. The latest publish shares a lot great knowledge that will help you to be a even greater product manager. I strongly recommend this book to others wether you are an aspiring PM or already a PM, or PM Leader to refine yourself throughout reading!
S**T
Would have paid 10x to have this when starting out
This book is the best Product Management book I've come across. I'm mid to late stage career. Have been co-founder or VP level at several companies. Have lead PM at several startups with successful exits. And with all those decades of experience, there was still good new stuff - to me - in here to learn, and great refreshers on other items. As I read the book, I couldn't help thinking of the cliche about "if I'd only known this starting out." I definitely could have used these insights. (Of course, some things are 'sign of the times' specific... there was no "Agile" as it exists today. But that's not so much the point as compared to just having a better starting framework for what does exist in the now; whatever those things may be.) It might be that some things don't really hit home until you have the experience, even if you got the book learning. But still, at least you have a better sense of things if you've been exposed to the concepts. This is not a full "Body of Knowledge" (BOK) type work. But it is just full of practical sensible, "this is what you may be facing" type scenarios. New or junior PMs... just get this.
J**C
Excellent PM book!
One of the best PM books on the market. Thorough and worth the entire read. If youโre pressed for time and canโt read the entire book they guide you on which sections to skip to. Jackie and Gayle does an excellent job of describing the day to day as a PM, the tools youโll need, methodologies to learn, and even how to understand the professionals youโll work with every day. By the end of it youโll feel sharpened and know exactly what to do to sharpen your game. 500+ pages later Iโm still highlighting. Excellent book! ๐๐ค
M**L
Great resource, but not a cover-to-cover read
My recommendation for how to engage with this book most effectively: do a mock interview with a trusted PM at a level higher than you, ask for specific feedback, and read the sections most pertinent to that feedback. Reading it cover-to-cover will expose you to information that is useful enough, but often intuitive. If you're a good PM, you'll be efficient with your time.
E**E
Textbook for PM (and tech) career
This is a very comprehensive book detailing the whole arc and every dimension of the PM career with relevance for other tech roles as well. It provides clarity and insights about the PM career trajectory as well as how to build better relationships with your manager, peers, networks. So much gem in this book! Note this is more of a foundational summary book. Try other books for more specifics on the execution of daily tasks.
A**R
The best definitive book to becoming a great Product Manager
As someone who has been a Product Manager for 15 years across Google, Foursquare, and Slack, my reaction when reading Cracking the PM Career was an audible, "Finally!" Someone finally wrote the best resource for not only navigating the PM career path, but building all the necessary skills to be a great product leader at every stage of one's career. I'm often asked for recommendations on what's the best single thing to read as a resource for developing into a world-class PM, and now I finally have the perfect answer.
M**L
Great
Great book
N**A
Junior production managers guide
Great book for junior product managers and for renewing your knowledge
E**A
Good start for new Product Managers
I have been considering transitioning to Product Management from my Finance field and had been researching materials I could read to help with this transition. I got some recommendations about this book and so got it. I have found the content helpful as a good start. If you are like me trying to transition, you will find this helpful. I believe it could be helpful as a refresher for those already in the field!
J**H
Good item
Best
N**N
Love it
Very interesting book
I**S
Otimo livro
Recomendado para Program manager
F**R
Perhaps the best books for product managers
I am so glad that Jackie and Gayle published this book after the great success of "cracking the pm interview". This new book is amazingly pragmatic, super hands on and translatable into every day life. What I really love is that they cover skills concerning 1) product, 2) execution, 3) strategy, 4) leadership, 5) people management. Followed by chapters around career and a product leader Q&A. They really work out how the skills of chapter 1-3 evolve with a PMs career path. The book has over 500 pages packed with insights, with aha moments and really the essence of product management. I am a pretty experienced product leader, however this centres me and takes me out of habits and back to growth trajectory. This book can be read and is valuable to PMs of all career stages.
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