From code to product

Moving from software development to product management means shifting from how we build to what we build, and why. I made that move myself. The guide starts with how to make it, and how to do well once there.

Then the ground rules of the job: what separates a product manager from a UX designer, and how to build a product vision a team can share, with Tesla, Wise and Spotify as examples.

Product decisions come next. Removing features is part of the job. Phase 2 rarely comes. Google+ and the 280-plus products Google has shut down show how products fail. A talk on jazz shows how product managers improvise, and a note in French makes the case for designing products AI-first.

Then agile in practice, and how it slides back into waterfall, followed by the lessons of apps and games, where lean startup meets the App Store.

The engineering side comes last: how writing code shapes the way you think, and how eBay and Etsy learned to scale.