Cracking the PM Career: The Skills, Frameworks, and Practices To Become a Great Product Manager (Cracking the Interview & Career)

Before you create your own principles, you can first take a look at the design and product principles other companies have created. Design principles often involve universal design, consistency, tone of voice, and delight.5On the product side, common principles are created around user trust, innovation, and lean development.

The work can be written as straightforward tasks, or it can be represented in a format called User Stories. The typical template for a user story is: "As a , I want to , so that ." For example, "As an administrator, I want to require two-factor authentication, so that I can increase security." This format helps ensure that the P

In this book, we've grouped the skills it takes to be a great product leader into five categories: Product skills help you design a high-quality product that delights customers and solves their needs. Execution skills enable you to run and deliver your projects quickly, smoothly, and effectively. Strategic skills improve your ability to set directi

Show How People Are Using It: Sometimes teams lose track of how people are actually using the product, and what is most important to people. Include metrics that help illuminate how people are actually using the product, such as the relative usage of various features.

The tasks or stories usually have cost estimates—for example, in the format of story points. Story points are an abstract unit of cost; 1 point is the easiest possible work, 2 points is work that should take twice as long as a 1-point task, and it increases from there. Engineers (not PMs) set the cost estimates.

Don't think of the spec as something that's just for other people. Use the writing process to organize your thoughts, plan ahead, anticipate risks, and to clarify your thinking overall.

The design phase is not just about putting your ideas into pictures; it also includes expansive thinking and validating your ideas with real people. This includes both the user experience (e.g., mock-ups and visual prototypes) and the technical solution (design docs and technical prototypes).

In Scrum, teams work in sprints of one to four weeks. At the start of each sprint, the team does sprint planning where they pull work from the product backlog into the sprint backlog and estimate how much work can be done in the next sprint. During the sprint, team members pick work off the backlog and meet daily for a fifteen minute standup meetin

A product's key success metrics are manifestations of its strategy: