2020 Resources for Product Leaders: a Curated List
Congrats, you got the job! You're leading a team of product managers. Now what?
"How do I get into product?" is a super common question, with a corresponding number of articles. But there's far less good information out there about how to level up once you're already in product.
What skills do you need to develop as you move up into product leadership? Roles like group product manager (GPM), director of product, VP, or CPO need different skills.
The challenge is how to keep learning and getting better in a structured, step-by-step way.
This, my friends, is where most people plateau.
There's far less guidance available after you grok the core PM role and level up into leadership. My experience has been that there are a bunch of resources to help guide you into product management and learn the core role. But afterwards... you're kind of on your own.
When you were a line PM, you spent most of your time thinking about the product, users, and how it needed to evolve. Sure, you had to deal with the stresses of roadmapping, stakeholder expectations, and product reviews. But at least the product itself bounded the work.
You were responsible (hopefully) for helping your team ship features that would delight customers and serve the business.
Now, you have a whole new set of challenges to think about: People management. Org structure and team design. Feedback and communication architecture. Connecting strategy and vision with line-level execution. Protecting your PMs—not to mention the engineers and designers they work with—from the whiplash of the latest "just this once" sales special and the CEO's pet project of the week.
It's hard.
And, there aren't that many places you can turn to for help along the way. It's time consuming to find the best resources and filter out the bad ones. There's a dearth of quality, actionable resources for PMs that already have the job and want to level up.
Between my own product career and researching the podcast, I've invested MANY hours exploring these challenges. It's been a very aggressive learning curve, and I've found quite a few good resources that will save you time.
I wanted to share some of my favorite resources for product leaders looking to level up. These cover areas such as:
team leadership
resource planning and investment management
stakeholder management
org design
communication
outcomes thinking and negotiation
strategy
vision
The list below should accommodate a variety of budgets and levels of time investment. Either way, use them and they will help you make something that matters.
This list will expand over time, but I wanted to start off with some of my favorites. For each resource, I try to identify which product leadership topics it supports. As of this writing, there are 60 hand-selected resources on the list, with more to come!
If you have any favorite resources to recommend, I'd love to know on Twitter or in the comments below so I can update the list .
I hope this is a helpful start on your path to your next level as a product leader! Learn well and make something that matters.
And if you have a moment, I’d love it if you could give me a little feedback via this SurveyMonkey link. (It only takes one minute.)
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