Product Management in Practice

Introduction

Why I Wrote This Book: My First Day as a Product Manager

I never felt more prepared for anything than I did for my first day as a product manager. Ever the eager student, I had made a point of reading up on the basic tenets of user experience, sharpening my programming skills, and learning about product development processes like Scrum and XP. I could recite the Agile Manifesto by heart, and knew about the industry-standard bounce rates for comparable web properties. After settling in at my new workstation, I approached my boss—who was not a product manager himself but had worked with enough of them to know the type—with the overconfident swagger of a young person who had read a lot of books very quickly.

“I’m so excited to really dig into this work,” I told him. “Where’s the latest version of the product roadmap? What are our quarterly goals and KPIs? And who should I be talking to if I want to better understand the needs of our users?”

He gave me a weary look and took a deep breath. “You’re smart,” he said, “Figure it out.”

Aside from a very generous assessment of my intelligence at the time, my boss gave me the greatest gift a new product manager can receive: a grim but resolute understanding that guidance would be very, very hard to come by. For all the books that I had read and all the methodologies that I had studied, the only thing I was left with when I sat back down at my desk was, “What the hell am I supposed to do every day?” If there was no roadmap, ...