Getting a Product Management (PM) job is tough. Whether you have experience or not. And in today’s market, it’s tougher than ever. With thousands of laid off big tech PMs on the market, the supply and demand dynamics are brutal. Experienced PMs are finding their recruiting funnels turned upside down. One Director of Product I […]
These are the references for The Ultimate Guide to Becoming a PM version 1. Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12
Can you name Reddit’s CEO? Did you guess Alexis Ohanian? You would be wrong. The famous husband of Serena Williams has cultivated a larger internet personality than the other co-founder of Reddit who is the actual CEO. That would be Steve Huffman. The same Steve who coded the entire site in Lisp in a few […]
If you add up the revenue of Twitter, Snapchat, Zoom, Lyft, Dropbox, Airbnb, and Spotify all together, it still wouldn’t be as big as Bytedance. The company is a behemoth. And Bytedance’s biggest product, by far, is TikTok. This year, TikTok crossed Twitter and Snapchat for US users. Yet, as recently as two years ago, […]
“Thinking deeply about payments.” In 2008, this sounded like the job of companies like Visa and Mastercard. But, in the end, the company that disrupted the merchant payment experience was a small upstart. After being fired from Twitter in 2008, Jack Dorsey came back with a new company that was thinking deeply about payments. From […]
In 2002, Amazon launched a side business with little fanfare: cloud Infrastructure as a service. 20 years later, it now makes over $70B in annual revenue. It’s a huge business. In fact, AWS’ hefty profit represents well over 50% of Amazon’s total. It is Amazon’s crown jewel. In a conglomerate full of great businesses, it […]
Product managers need to be multi-lingual. If you do not speak the language of the function you are interacting with, everything becomes more difficult. Conversations take longer. Alignment becomes tedious, if it ever happens. Stakeholders come back after a feature is launched with a list of complaints. The best PMs prevent these messes by speaking […]
How does a company navigate the clashing waves of the travel industry? Adeptly, like a master using a Kayak. The meta-search engine started in 2004 can be a forgotten site in the business coverage of travel. Certainly, at 30M visitors per month, it’s not forgotten in the actual travel side of travel. Kayak is ubiquitous. […]
India is exploding as a hub for innovation. These days, it seems more common to hear Unicorn announcements out of Bangalore than out of San Francisco. The numbers back up the feeling. Unicorn announcements in India have literally 10x’d. In 2021, India had 44 new unicorn announcements. Only 37 companies had hit that mark in […]
Principle 1: More is not better Start with the minimal, most important information: user story, success criteria, & design/ mock. Then, add in additional layers. Fewer people will read long specs. And even fewer will walk away with the right takeaways. Principle 2: Quality matters A bad user story is worse than none. Same for […]