Product Sense: How to Solve Problems Like a PM, Ace Your Interviews, and Get Your Next Job in Product Management

by Peter Knudson, Braxton Bragg

THE ONLY COMPLETE GUIDE TO GETTING A JOB IN PRODUCT MANAGEMENT Attempting to land a new job in product management is daunting. For starters, there have been no comprehensive blueprints for success. The interview process is grueling. Few candidates receive offers. Product Sense is the only comprehensive, yet accessible, resource available to help navigate a complex process and succeed an a hyper-competitive market. What will you learn from this book? What’s also inside? This book will benefit those who are considering becoming PMs, those who are attempting to switch into product management from another role, or folks who are already PMs but want to be most prepared when applying for a new job.

344 pages, Paperback

Published July 12, 2021

Reviews

[Walter Ullon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good book, but more like 2.5 stars. Let me explain.

If you're new to Product Management or just "PM-curious", and this happens to be the first book you pick up on the subject, then you might be inclined to give it five stars. Trust me, it will be a fine first foray too.

It touches on all of the major PM talking points, offers great advice, provides solid frameworks (COMPASS), evaluation rubrics for assessing your answers (and possibly candidates), and has a good bit of extra sauce in the form of interviews with top PMs from FAANG companies. I really enjoyed the latter. Great launching pad.

However, if you have arrived at this book after having read "Decode and Conquer", "Product Management's Sacred Seven", or even "Acing the Data Science Interview", then you will begin to discern some areas in which this book could improve.

It's a bit too disorganized, overall. You can't discern this from the table of contents, but start reading and you'll see how some sections could have been reordered for a better idea flow. Minus one star.

I ding another star because some sections are just too light on substance. Case-and-point: Chapter 5 is called "Bringing a Product to Market", so you'd expect this to be the meatiest section because, well, you know, this book is about product management! But the authors chose to spend just eight sparse pages discussing the "Phases of Product Development", bringing the entire chapter to a grand total of 26 pages for the entire thing. That's it. It reads more like a fleshed-out powerpoint.

The biggest crime though, is reserved for Chapter 11: "Behavioral and Culture Questions". It is totally bankrupt in terms of ideas, substance, and execution. Better books have a bunch of mock interviews walking you through strong strategies for acing this part while showing you in no uncertain terms what pitfalls to avoid. How many sample questions do we have in this chapter you might ask? Zero. Nada. They just flat-out tell you to google questions and see what you can find. Ok...The entire section is just 3 pages long, but the last page is about how one of the authors used to be a Hiring Manager, so I guess it would have been nice to have more detail? It's just lazy. Can they really have the audacity to call this book "A Bootcamp in a book?". SMH...

It's a shame cause it could have been much better and become one of the most recommended texts on the subject given the authors' experience.

I'd say you can perhaps use it as a supplement to some of the other texts I mentioned previously, but I would not make it my primary choice.

I cannot wholeheartedly recommend it.

[Brendan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This clear, methodical, intelligent book clarifies the job of a product manager for interested outsiders. Its method is to to get the reader to understand the distinguishing skill of a product manager--what Knudson and Bragg call Product Sense -- the gut instinct to be able to answer the "What Should We Build" question, the primary question facing PMs. Understanding what goes into developing product sense, and how to articulate your own intuitions and analyses fall out of that fundamental understanding. It's a similar book to the popular cookbook Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat in that both are trying to clearly articulate the unspoken understanding practitioners get after years of working on the job. It's a dense book, one that really respects the readers, something that really resists skimming.

[Reid]

As an engineer I read this book to get a sense of a product person's perspective and thinking; the appendix which includes interviews of multiple product managers was most useful for this purpose. The majority of the book is focused specifically on how to interview effectively for product manager jobs with no prior experience.

[Mikhail Filatov · Rating 2 out of 5]

Very lazy writing-3 pages on “Behavioral interviews”, very few -just 6 -semi-cases for Product questions, but a whole chapter with useless interviews of “Product leaders” -with a lot of typos, nevertheless.

[Srivallabh B K · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nice book to strengthen your product thinking.

If you're someone with prior product management experience and looking to take the best step, this book has the maturity to help you in that.

Some topics are known and repetitive.

[Jonathan Bergh · Rating 4 out of 5]

I need to reread this book.