Cracking the PM Career: The Skills, Frameworks, and Practices to Become a Great Product Manager Gayle Laakmann

From the authors of the best-selling Cracking the PM Interview comes the comprehensive guide to the skills, frameworks, and practices to become a great product manager. It will help you level-up your skills and career from your first product management role through product leadership, addressing questions like:

• What does it take to become a great product manager and great leader?
• How can you reliably ship products that make a difference in the world?
• How do you build your product intuition, hone your execution, strengthen your leadership, and develop your strategic skills?
• What does it take to lead and inspire teams?
• When is people management the right career move?
• How does excellence in those skills translate into career success?

This book will teach you the reliable frameworks and best practices that improve your chances of shipping a successful product. The frameworks won't transform you into a great product manager overnight or guarantee that your products never fail, but they'll help you avoid the most common problems and give you the structure to start experimenting, reflecting, and improving.

You'll learn how to:

• Design high-quality products that delight users and solve people's needs.
• Run and deliver your projects quickly, smoothly, and effectively.
• Create product visions and strategies to set direction and optimize for long-term impact.
• Lead people and influence without authority.
• Manage people, develop great PMs, build great teams, and create great product organizations.
• Manage your career so you can translate your efforts into the recognition you deserve.

Topics include:

• Getting Started: the product life cycle; the first 90 days
• Product Skills: user research; A/B tests; problem solving frameworks; systems thinking; product discovery; design sprints; ethical product design; technical terms and concepts; product documentation (specs and PRDs)
• Execution Skills: agile project management; minimum viable products (MVPs); incremental development; product launches; time management; overcoming obstacles
• Strategic Skills: product vision; strategy; roadmaps; goals and OKRs
• Leadership Skills: growth mindset; ownership mentality; influencing without authority; stakeholder management; collaboration; communication; inspiring a team; mentoring; working with designers, engineers, and executives
• People Management Skills: becoming a people manager; being a member of the leadership team; reviewing work; holding people accountable; coaching and development; recruiting and interviewing; product processes; organizational structures
• Careers: career ladders; career goals; partnering with your manager; picking the right team; negotiations; networking; handling bad situations; career options beyond PM
• Product Leader Q&A: in-depth career interviews with eleven successful product leaders who have chosen career paths including CPO, head of product, CEO, social impact work, venture capital, angel investing, coaching, and starting their own companies.

And much, much more.

Featuring stories from over fifty PMs and product leaders who have worked at organizations including: Adobe, AirBnB, Amazon, Apple, Asana, Atlassian, Calendly, Chan-Zuckerberg Institute, Chegg, Cisco, City of San Jose, Coda, Coinbase, Dropbox, eBay, Facebook, FlipKart, Gojek, Google, HSBC, Instagram, LinkedIn, Medium, Microsoft, Netflix, OpenTable, Pinterest, Pocket Gems, Quora, Samsara, Slack, Sonos, Stripe, Swiggy, Twitter, Uber, Walmart Labs, Yahoo, and Yelp.

About the Author

Jackie Bavaro was most recently Head of Product Management for eight years at Asana, the well-loved work management software, where she joined pre-launch as the first PM. During her tenure, she grew the PM team to over twenty amazing people, helped Asana's go from $0 to more than $100 million in annual recurring revenue, and launched Asana's associate product manager program. With over 15 years of product management experience, she has also worked as a PM for Google and Microsoft as well, and in a diverse set of roles--a consumer PM, a B2B PM, a platform PM, a mobile PM, and a growth PM. Jackie has coached, mentored, managed, and advised hundreds of people in product and people who aspire to move to product roles. Jackie and Gayle's first co-authored book, the best-selling Cracking the PM Interview, has been credited with helping to level the playing field for product management talent. Jackie graduated from Cornell University with a double major in Computer Science and Economics. She currently writes, coaches, and advises from her home in San Francisco, California. More of Jackie's writing about product management can be found at https: //twitter.com/jackiebo and https: //medium.com/@jackiebo.

Gayle Laakmann McDowell is an author, consultant, and founder focusing on improving tech hiring for both the interviewer and the candidate. Gayle has worked as an engineer for Google, Microsoft, and Apple. Most recently, at Google, she served on the hiring committee where she interviewed hundreds of candidates and evaluated thousands more. It was here that she discovered the disconnect between candidates, their skill set, and their interview performance. Though her company, CareerCup, Gayle has worked with many of the top tech companies to reform their hiring practices and implement interviewer training programs. She is the author and creator the best-selling Cracking the Interview & Career series: Cracking the Coding Interview, Cracking the PM Interview (co-authored with Jackie Bavaro), Cracking the PM Career (co-authored with Jackie Bavaro), and Cracking the Tech Career Gayle holds a bachelor's and master's in Computer Science from the University of Pennsylvania and an MBA from the Wharton School of Business. She currently consults, writes, and codes from her home in Palo Alto, California. She can be found online at gayle.com, twitter (@gayle), and facebook (@gayle).