How to learn product

The 6 step guide to learning product

Ivo Valchev
Product Coalition

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© 2011 Martin Eriksson. Re-use with appropriate attribution.

There is a lot of confusion out there about product, product management, product owners, product manager. Everyone’s talking about Agile, Scrum, Lean, etc. Learning is a step-by-step process, building one block of knowledge on top of the other. When getting started, many people (myself included) feel a little lost in this chaos.

Who is this article for?

  • Developers
  • Students / graduates
  • People looking to get into “product”
  • People looking to explain product to others (e.g. your auntie)

So, let’s get started.

1. Find out that the role exists

Too many people, including some in IT itself or studying a CS-related programme, are confused and unclear how products are built in this day and age. Higher education and training courses are much too often focused on code itself, but in fact there are many more aspects to developing digital products than that.

Many students particularly follow general Computer Science courses only to find out their real interest — in UX, Product, whatever — when it’s all but too late to do a more appropriate education for that. It then takes time to transition into their truly desired profession. So, do your research first.

Having an understanding of the roles and techniques means you’d be comfortable summarising in 1–2 sentences what each of the following mean:

  • Project vs product
  • Open-source
  • Product Manager vs Project Manager vs Product Owner
  • Agile vs Scrum vs Lean vs TDD vs BDD, etc.
  • SaaS vs PaaS vs FaaS, etc.

If you can’t explain it to a six year old, you don’t understand it yourself. — Albert Einstein

But fear not, here comes knowledge!

Books

  1. Software Project Survival Guide — Steve McConnell
  2. Agile Product Management with Scrum — Roman Pichler
  3. Executable Specifications with Scrum (the roles summary) — Mario Cardinal

Articles

2. Learn the theory

Deciding what career path to take is a huge, long-term decision that you shouldn’t take lightly. So, it makes sense to invest the time, energy and effort into really understanding and learning about it. The “great practitioners myth” is, well, a myth. Behind every expert there are thousands of hours spent learning, improving and iterating!

Books

  1. Building digital products — Alex Mitchell
  2. Agile project management for dummies — Mark C. Layton
  3. The Product Book — Product School (Carlos González de Villaumbrosia, Josh Anon & Russell Newton)

Articles

Also, learn about things related to product management:

3. Get in the right mindset, and join communities

As you develop more theoretical knowledge, it’s also important to really get in that mindset of product. Immerse yourself into product, think about the products that you love and use, and that others love and use. Try to figure out the product decisions behind them, apply critical thinking.

Podcasts are great to get you in the right mindset, so here’s a few:

  1. Rocketship.fm — Michael Sacca and Mike Belsito
  2. Business Casual — Kinsey Grant
  3. Product Coalition — Jay Stansell
  4. Product to Product — RoadMunk

Books

  1. Cracking the PM interview — Gayle Laakmann McDowell & Jackie Bavaro
  2. Decode and Conquer — Lewis C. Lin

Newsletters, subscriptions, etc.

  1. Product Hunt Daily
  2. The Download — MIT Technology Review
  3. TLDR tech news
  4. Food for Agile thought
  5. UX Collective Newsletter
  6. Medium’s Daily Digest — register a Medium account and let it learn what you love to read
  7. My Knowledgebase — best PM articles repository

Slack communities

  1. Product Coalition
  2. Mind The Product
  3. Product School

4. Learn about others, be empathic

Photo by Andy Kelly on Unsplash

Communication is key. You need to listen more, to be empathic and truly engage with others. The best way of doing it is by understanding what others do for the business. So, learn about:

  1. Developers
  2. Business analysts
  3. Marketing, Support
  4. HR, Accounting

Learn what is important for each of these roles, be able to show appreciation and understanding for what they do and the value they bring.

5. Develop domain-specific knowledge

I’ll admit, this is by far the most difficult one. If you followed the steps so far, you’d have the high-level, transferable knowledge that PMs need. But, often times PMs are hired for their domain-specific knowledge. (Don’t trust me — go check out those job vacancies. They are a great resource too, if you use it wisely to analyse and learn from.)

So, I’d say pick 2–3 industries you are passionate about, and know what’s happening there. Repeat the steps you did for learning PM and apply them for those domains that you care about. If you had two equal candidates, wouldn’t you hire the one who in addition to general PM skills has knowledge of your specific domain? Good.

6. Be passionate. Be patient. It takes time. Lots of it.

It takes a lot of time to follow the previous 5 steps, that’s OK. It is how it’s supposed to be. If you are really passionate about product, it should be a no-brainer that the time you invest in this will be time well spent.

Thank you for making it all the way down here. If you liked the article, please give it a clap or two… or 50!

Thanks, till next time. 😉

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