Product Leadership: The Product Manager's Handbook

This practical book will guide you as you take the roller coaster ride of a product life cycle and the ups and downs of being a product manager. You will find it useful whether you are a product manager yourself or work with product management professionals. What you won't find here are didactic descriptions of methodologies like the 4 Ps, 5 Cs, or magic quadrants
you can read about these in any MBA book. Also absent are tedious instructions and standard operating procedures describing how to perform specific tasks
no one follows these anyway. Instead, the book consists of a series of short and largely independent chapters describing best practices and pointing out pitfalls to avoid. The sum total provides a clear sense of how to do product management right.Product managers are the unsung heroes of the technology industry. They carry a significant load and seldom get credit for their work. You hear about rockstar programmers but not about superstar product managers. You meet salespeople in their spiffy suits and perfectly polished shoes, while product managers stay in the back. I lost count of the number of times I've heard people insinuate that product management is less crucial than other functions. This opinion has been around for as long as product management itself and was dispelled time and time again. People seem to think (hope?) that a software business could consist of engineers building products and salespeople selling them, with pretty much nothing in between. This fantasy of free information flow from customers to engineering to sales to customers looks great on paper but does not work in practice. Product management is here to stay, and its ranks will keep getting filled by the best and the brightest.