The Influential Product Manager: How to Lead and Launch Successful Technology Products

by Ken Sandy

This book is a comprehensive and practical guide to the core skills, activities, and behaviors that are required of product managers in modern technology companies. Product management is one of the fastest growing and most sought-after roles by job seekers and companies alike. The availability of trained and experienced talent can barely keep up with the accelerating demand for new and improved technology products. People from nontechnical and technical backgrounds alike are eager to master this exciting new role. The Influential Product Manager teaches product managers how to behave at each stage of the product life cycle to achieve the best outcome for the customer. Product managers are under pressure to drive spectacular results, often without wielding much direct power or authority. If you don't know how to influence people at all levels of the organization, how will you create the best possible product? This comprehensive entry-level textbook distills over twenty years of hard-won field experience and industry knowledge into lessons that will empower new product managers to act like pros right out of the gate. With teaching experience both from UC Berkeley and Lynda.com, the author boils down the most complex topics into principles that are easy to memorize and apply. This book methodically documents the tools product managers everywhere use to align their teams with market needs and organizational goals. From setting priorities to capturing requirements to navigating trade-offs, this book makes it easy. Not only will your product succeed, you'll succeed, too, when you read the final chapter on advancing your career. Let your product's success become your success!

Genres: Business, Nonfiction, Leadership, Technology

384 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 14, 2020

Reviews

[Brad Boehmke · Rating 2 out of 5]

Big idea: Good product management is the key to successfully connecting stakeholders and developers in order to produce an exceptional product. This book attempts to address this by providing a comprehensive manual, offering a very pragmatic how-to guide for successful product management. Covers a wide range of topics while sprinkling in examples from the authors experience and providing many templates for the reader to immediately apply.

Favorite concept: Although not original to this book, the author builds onto Adam Nash's concept of feature buckets. Simply, good feature releases should regularly include features from many, if not all, of the following buckets:
       - Metric movers: improves business/product metrics
       - Customer requests: bugs and/or enhancements
       - Delighters: internally generated innovations not based on customer requests
       - Strategies: features related to learning or long-term future goals
       - Enhancers: a constant set of improvements to the health of underlying technology or to eliminate minor usability irritants.

Drawbacks: More of an owners manual than a good flowing read. Many sections were long embedded lists that may be ok for lookup references but don't make for an easy reading flow. This also caused some topics to feel a little disjointed.

Favorite quote: On the importance of collaboration -- "Product managers own the problems (the 'why' and 'what'), and engineers own the solutions (the 'how' and 'when') - but it is only by collaboration that you can develop and build the best ideas."

[Mikhail Filatov · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book does not deliver.
The author mixed a lot of things, but I don't see his book as a consistent product.
E.g., he introduced 3 case studies in this book, but played with all of them for a couple of chapters before dropping.
There are some stories about author' experience as a product manager, some interesting, some banal. And a lot of different models (like Kano, etc.) mentioned, but never applied consistenlty.

[Kate Gridina · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book from the perspective of an engineering manager, lots of ideas were quite interesting and gave me insights about the internal kitchen of PM. For me it was useful, but it looks like this book is mostly for beginners or junior PMs. Also many topics were either not covered or covered very briefly, such as managing of a managers, stakeholder managment, collaboration with an engineering team. The concept of collaboration or existence of the engineering manager was completely left aside. It seems like an author always worked with engineers directly, without consideration that it can be a separate unit.
The tips on how to progress in the PM career were again, mostly for juniors. Especially I found amusing the suggestions on how to progress in tech skills - coding bootcamp for PM?
So overall the book is good for beginners and curious people, but if youve advanced already in this field, it can be a bit superficial.

[Rob Sanchez · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great book for those who want to become software product managers and a healthy primer for those who already are. Packed with insight and actionable wisdom for the job. Product management is never easy but there are tools, frameworks and mindsets to help used in successful teams and organizations worldwide. As a product Manager this was excellent. I'd recommend to anyone in the industry.

[Candice Dookran · Rating 5 out of 5]

A truly amazing book for sound practical advice.
Ken offers sage adverse for growth and development for the aspiring and seasoned Product manager.

He offers so many free resources along with the book.

I highly recommend this book

[Mert Topcu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great product management book. More like a reference book to open up and read the relevant section as a PM.

[Krystal · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lots of good information. Good to come back to and reference.