Product Management Resources for Leaders Who Want to Better Support Their PMs
Product management is practiced in so many ways and thus has never suffered from a shortage of opinions. What is hard is curating a reliable set of voices you can return to when you’re stuck, whether you’re a product manager yourself or a leader trying to support your PMs without becoming one.
Over the years, I’ve kept a personal list of the resources that have shaped my thinking the most. It started as something I shared with friends asking for advice, and lately with leaders who find themselves managing PMs despite never having worked in product. I recently organized everything into one place, and I’ll keep adding to it as I learn more.
You can find the full list here →
When I first became a PM, my manager Ana sent me Marty Cagan’s blog within weeks. His writing shaped how I understood the role. His advice is not directly applicable in every situation (far from it), but it gave me a lens. That’s how I think about the best product resources, they are less instruction manuals and more philosophical inputs.
Because (as I wrote about here) advice is still just an input. You can’t take any framework, book, podcast, or blog post and apply it wholesale to your company. Real product work is more contextual and human.
A thought leader won’t tell you that, of course. Cagan, especially, has been criticized for finding a way of attributing failure to product managers not convincing leadership hard enough. I’ve always taken that with a grain of salt. The value in people like him is in how they help you reflect. They surface paths you might not have considered, or give you more confidence in the direction you already sensed was right. Occasionally they hand you something delightfully practical, like the opportunity assessment, and it becomes a tool you use for years.
I’ll keep evolving the page as I learn more and as the field evolves. In the meantime, here it is, my working, well-worn set of product management resources I return to again and again.