Product Management

Product Management is one of Kyle’s product-craft concept pages, sitting alongside Product, Playbook — Product, and Best-in-Class Tech Stacks as a place to collect reading on the discipline. The sharpest grounded claim comes from Product Led Growth — The End User Era, whose thesis is that “the traditional product management method is broken and needs to be permanently retired” — every PM should operate from a growth mindset, not a separate “growth PM.” The book ties this to org structure: the Product Led Growth (PLG) motion let SendGrid run a 6:1 engineer-to-PM ratio (versus 20:1 at CA, where designers were a shared pool), and it champions the autonomous cross-functional “squad” — a PM, a designer, and the analysts/engineers needed to solve one specific problem, able to “build whatever they want without worrying about anyone (even the CEO) derailing their efforts.”

The page also collects Kyle’s saved product-management reading from his June 29th, 2021 Roam “Quick Capture” log — Ken Norton’s bringthedonuts.com essays (how to work with software engineers, leading cross-functional teams), Paul Graham’s “Maker’s Schedule,” Joel Spolsky on software inventory, and the Christensen / Horowitz canon (The Innovator’s Solution, The Hard Thing About Hard Things). Best-in-Class Tech Stacks notes that this same reading (Norton’s writing especially) accretes under the product-craft tag cluster. The saved links below are unsynthesized pointers, kept verbatim.

Quick Capture links — June 29th, 2021

• https://dunn.medium.com/get-one-thing-right-89390244c553
• https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2012/07/09/software-inventory/
• https://www.bringthedonuts.com/essays/how-to-work-with-software-engineers.html
• https://www.bringthedonuts.com/essays/productmanager.html
• https://www.bringthedonuts.com/essays/leading-cross-functional-teams.html
• https://www.bringthedonuts.com/ - Best-in-Class Tech Stacks
• http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html
• http://paulgraham.com/ds.html
• http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html
• https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2618.The_Innovator_s_Solution
• https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18176747-the-hard-thing-about-hard-things

Where this appears

• Product Led Growth — The End User Era — “the traditional product management method is broken”; the squad model; 6:1 vs 20:1 engineer-to-PM ratios.
• Best-in-Class Tech Stacks — sibling product-craft page collecting the same Ken Norton / product reading.
• Playbook — Product / Playbooks / Product — the product-craft concept cluster this sits in.