The Art of Building Great Products: Combine Your Intuition With the Best Proven Methodologies to Build Digital Products Everyone Will Love

Table of Contents
Helpful free resources
Introduction

PART 1: Rise of the digital world & the role of a Product Manager

Chapter 1: Brave New World
A new norm emerges
Norm = Normal = Lifeless

Chapter 2:Enter the Product Manager
What is a (good) product?
What Does a Product Manager Actually Do?
What is good product management?
How do you become a product manager?
Do certifications matter?
Do you even want to be a product manager?
What are the different roles on a product management path?
Product-market fit

Chapter 3: The Skills of an Effective Product Manager
(a.k.a Your Crash Course in Product Management)
Technology
Technology stack
System architecture
Database model
Business
Project management
Waterfall methodology
The famous agile methodology
Understanding the strategic flow of your product
Business flow
Funding
Requirements
Product value
Tech flow
Important metrics to track
UX/DESIGN:
Information architecture
Interaction design
Visual design guide (a.k.a. style guide)
How do you create a user experience strategy?
Before building the product (user intent)
After the product is built (user action)
Visually prototyping your idea
Building empathy into your products
Personal Conviction
Navigating the path to becoming a successful product manager
Summary

PART 2: Start the Fire

Chapter 4: Form Your Strategy, Discover What to Build
Attract the right kinds of people
Define your core values
Assess your own strengths and weaknesses
Reach a general agreement on the kind of drive and motivation needed.
Build a well-rounded team
State your vision—define the why
Why?
How?
What?
Find out the problem – If everyone is your market, then no one is your
market
Consolidate the problems you want to solve
Building something from scratch
Identifying problems for an existing product
Net promoter score (NPS)
Analyze the behavior of your users, not only what they are saying.
Act on your own personal convictions
Determine which problems have potential
Prioritizing your pain points
Choose a winning idea and make a hypothesis
Build experiments to test your idea: Write everything down
Build experiments to test your idea: Build features
Build experiments to test your idea: Build assumptions
Build experiments to test your idea: Form MVPs
Prioritize your hypotheses
Focus on things that don’t change over time
Conclusion

Chapter 5
Validate
How to launch your MVP and set it up for success
Step 1: Decide on an initial selling strategy
Step 2: Build a Product Roadmap
Step 3: Determine how you will build your product
Step 4: Keep measurements in mind
Helpful frameworks to think through the metrics
Acquisition
Activation
Retention
Referral
Revenue
Step 5: Build
Step 6: Launch
Step 7: Measure, track, report
Innovate ways to collect actual customer feedback
Smoke test
Plan for iterative launches
A/B tests
Rules when deciding metrics:
Step 8: Pivot or continue
Conclusion

PART 3: Rome Was Not Built in a Day

Chapter 6: An Agile Funding Foundation
Problems when determining product funding
Fund products, not projects
Associate products with a business value
Do what the VCs do
Measure the efficacy of funding requests
Summary

Chapter 7: The Right People for Your Team
Consideration for choosing a well rounded team member
But what about hiring more product managers?

Chapter 8: Helping Your Team Scale
How to structure teams
Information must flow
Building the right team culture: How to ensure a sense of openness and
collaboration
Enable a culture of trust and empathy across hierarchies
When something goes wrong, blame the entire team—never an individual
Create a customer-centric team
Summary

Chapter 9: The Repeatable Support Structure
Strategy
Infrastructure
Summary

PART 4: Innovate or Die

Chapter 10: Iterate and Innovate

Chapter 11: The Right Mix of Innovative Ideas
Being the patient
Learn to sail a ship and be a pirate
Inbound ideas
Hackathons
Design-thinking session
Roadshows
Outbound ideas

Chapter 12: “Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast”
Constantly innovate your culture
How to know whether your company culture needs work
Assess and advance your culture
1. Analyze the culture as it is now (and be honest!)
2. Imagine the culture as you want it to be
3. Map the differences between the two
4. Make an action plan
5. Measure differences over time
Stories
Rituals and routines
Symbols
Organizational structure
Control systems
Power structures
Guidelines for advancing your unique culture
Summary

Conclusion: Heart > Process

Bibliography

Book Summary

Final words