Collections on Konstantin Zavarov

People Who Write Interestingly

Mon, 15 Sep 2025 15:17:01 +0300

I want to share a collection of people on the internet who write compelling content on product-adjacent topics and are worth reading regularly. I often come back to articles from these authors — especially when I’m looking for creative inspiration.

Marty Cagan — an iconic figure in the product world and author of the widely popular book series: Inspired, Empowered, and Transformed. Founder of SVPG and an active blogger on product management. His ideas about product discovery and empowered teams have become industry standards.
Paul Graham — co-founder of Y Combinator and author of remarkable essays that hold up remarkably well over time. He writes about startups, thinking, and decision-making — concisely, precisely, and without filler.
Andrew Chen — partner at Andreessen Horowitz and author of a popular blog on growth marketing.
Vitalik Buterin — founder of Ethereum and an active blogger. He writes deep technical and philosophical essays on decentralization and the future of technology.
Grigory Bakunov — founder of radio-t, former Director of Technology Spreading at Yandex. Writes about technology, management, and life in tech — sharp and free of corporate speak.
Oleg Yakubenkov — founder of GoPractice and author of the #1 most popular blog on product analytics. His simulators and articles are a must-read for anyone who wants to get serious about metrics and unit economics.
Artem Gorbunov & Co. — a curated collection of practical advice on product topics from cult-status specialists. Short and to the point — covering copywriting, interfaces, negotiations, and management.
Melissa Perri — author of Escaping the Build Trap. Writes about product as a value system, product culture, and why companies get stuck in feature-factory mode.
Teresa Torres — author of Continuous Discovery Habits. Her blog covers discovery practices: opportunity solution trees, customer interviews, and the habits of strong product teams.
Wes Kao — runs an excellent practical blog on management, product thinking, and career development. Publishes consistently.
Ben Thompson — tech analyst and author of the Stratechery blog. Offers deep dives into the business strategies of technology companies, platform models, and competitive market dynamics.
Valeria Rozova — product leader and curator of an article library on product topics, written by graduates of her courses. The articles are highly practical and detailed — a great resource for going deep on specific product skills.

Books and Resources for Product Managers

Mon, 02 Sep 2024 15:17:01 +0300

There’s no shortage of materials online for developing product skills and broadening your perspective. But I want to gather only the most useful, practical, and valuable ones. This list is continuously evolving — new materials get added, outdated ones removed. I hope you find something worthwhile here.

Introduction to Product Culture and the Profession

Essay «How to Do Great Work,» Paul Graham. An essay by the legendary Paul Graham on how to do your work well — full of advice and reflection. Recommended reading for anyone starting out in their career, not just product managers.
Article «Good Product Manager / Bad Product Manager,» Ben Horowitz. A short article written in 2012 that remains just as relevant today. It gives a solid general sense of what qualities a good product manager should have.
Article «Amazon Leadership Principles,» Amazon. Amazon’s 14 leadership principles — what Amazon expects from its managers, and what they’ll probe in interviews. If these don’t resonate with you on first read, set them aside and come back later.

Managing Yourself and Your Teams

Research

The Mom Test, Rob Fitzpatrick. An essential classic on preparing for user interviews. It has its fans and its critics, but both camps have read it — and nobody walks away indifferent.
Running Lean: Iterate from Plan A to a Plan That Works, Ash Maurya
Video «How to Talk to Users,» Eric Migicovsky (Y Combinator)
Video «ABCDX Segmentation,» Artem Azevich (IIDF Accelerator)
Video «Market Sizing,» Alexander Skurikhin (IIDF Accelerator, Yandex)
producthunt.com

Analytics

Playing the Numbers: How Analytics Helps Video Games Thrive, Vasily Sabirov. Likely the only book on product analytics written by a Russian author. It reads more like a conversation with a product analyst than a dry textbook on the subject.
Say It with Charts: The Executive’s Guide to Visual Communication, Gene Zelazny
GoPractice Blog. Simply put, an encyclopedia of product analytics and product management knowledge. The articles are exceptionally well-written. Best read slowly and carefully, evening by evening, with a cup of tea.
Free course «Fundamentals of Statistics and A/B Testing» from Yandex Practicum. An excellent intro to statistics and A/B testing, put together by the Practicum mathematics team.
Free course «Fundamentals of Statistics» by Anatoly Karpov. The most popular statistics course in the Russian-speaking internet, where Anatoly breaks down descriptive and inferential statistics with remarkable clarity. It has become a classic in the Runet.

Strategy

Good Strategy Bad Strategy, Richard Rumelt. A foundational conceptual book on strategy — what good strategy looks like, and what the many bad ones look like. I have a short summary of it on this blog.
The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement, Eliyahu Goldratt

Delivery Management / Backlog Management

Getting Real: The Smarter, Faster, Easier Way to Build a Successful Web Application, Jason Fried + David Heinemeier Hansson + Matthew Linderman
Article «20 Product Prioritization Techniques: A Map and Guided Tour». A detailed breakdown of 20 backlog (or hypothesis) prioritization techniques.
Article «RICE: Simple prioritization for product managers,» Intercom. The original article from Intercom, where this prioritization method was born. Includes an XLS template you can put to use right away.

Interviews and Hiring

The Art of Recruitment: How to Evaluate a Person in One Hour, Svetlana Ivanova
Who: The A Method for Hiring, Geoff Smart and Randy Street
Cracking the PM Interview: How to Land a Product Manager Job in Technology, Gayle Laakmann McDowell
Decode and Conquer, Lewis C. Lin. One of Lewis Lin’s books — though if you can, read his others too.
Podcast «Sobes» (Interview)
Podcast «Dva Stula» (Two Chairs)

Computer Science Fundamentals

Free Python courses «Python Generation». A series of free Python courses starting from zero, taught by professional developer and instructor Timur Guev. Timur belongs to a generation of mathematicians who scored 100 on their national math exams and a generation of engineers who went on to work at FAANG companies. You won’t find better beginner courses than this series.
Free SQL trainer at sql-ex.ru. One of the best — if not the best — SQL practice platforms out there, and it’s free. It contains an enormous number of exercises; I recommend grinding through them to really solidify your SQL query-writing skills. Don’t let the dated interface scare you off.
System Design Interview, Alex Xu

Data Science Fundamentals

Article «Machine Learning for People,» vas3k. A thorough introduction for anyone who has always wanted to finally understand machine learning — written in plain language, without formulas or theorems, with real-world problem examples and their solutions.
Machine Learning for Humans, Vishal Maini, Samir Sabri

Inspiring Stories

Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, Ashlee Vance. A book about Musk’s journey as an entrepreneur — the challenges he overcame, the risks he took. Includes the story of his trip to Russia in 2001 and his attempt to purchase an intercontinental ballistic missile.
Pour Your Heart Into It: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time, Howard Schultz and Dori Jones Yang
The Yandex Book, Dmitry Sokolov-Mitrich. The story of Yandex from its earliest days to its IPO. A portrait of its founders — and the story of how Sergey Brin and Larry Page came to Moscow in 2003 to buy the company, only to be turned down by Arkady Volozh and Ilya Segalovich, who went on to build Russia’s most technologically advanced IT company.

Tools and Services for Product Managers

Tue, 02 Jul 2024 15:17:01 +0300

I want to share the services and apps I use on a regular basis to get things done at work. Maybe you’ll discover something new and make your work a little more enjoyable.

Product Awareness and UX

ProductHunt — the go-to resource for staying on top of product trends, keeping up with new product launches and the evolution of existing ones.
UserOnboard — a library of detailed UX teardowns of popular products like Gmail, Instagram, Apple Music, Netflix, and more.

Research and A/B Testing

Statista — a knowledge base with up-to-date market analytics and research. A corporate account unlocks detailed reports, but the free version still gives you access to the basics.
Yandex Wordstat — helps you analyze user search queries in the Russian-language internet segment.
ResearchGate — a massive library of academic papers on virtually any topic.
Evan’s Awesome A/B Tools — one of the oldest and most popular online tools for planning and analyzing A/B tests: sample size estimation and experiment result evaluation.
GoodUI — a pattern library featuring A/B tests and breakdowns of their results.

Diagrams, Flowcharts, and Graphics

Miro — the de facto standard for visual collaboration.
Mermaid — a tool for generating diagrams from text descriptions (code). Integrates with a wide range of modern wiki systems: Notion, Google Docs, Confluence.
Draw.io — a simple and convenient tool for creating more complex diagrams than Mermaid supports. Saves files directly to Google Drive and requires no registration or login.
Canva — the best tool for creating visual assets; the free version is more than enough for most everyday tasks.
Emojipedia — an emoji reference for adding a touch of personality to requirements docs and task descriptions.

Personal and Team Productivity

Things — a clean, beautifully designed to-do app for Mac and iOS with minimalist aesthetics and great typography, perfect for design perfectionists.
Ilya Birman’s Typography Layout — a keyboard layout that makes it easy to type proper typographic characters quickly (✓≈≠₽×↓−""). If you write a lot and care about how your text looks, give it a try — it’s a joy to use.
Obsidian — an app for organizing notes in Markdown (.md) format.
ChatGPT — my replacement for Google Search.
Google Sheets, Slides, Colab — the baseline toolkit for any manager.

Rapid MVP Development and Vibe Coding

Cursor IDE — a supercharged code editor that lets you build apps and services with minimal programming knowledge, incredibly fast.
GitHub / GitHub Pages — deploy static sites to production quickly and for free.
Vercel — deploy more complex services to production quickly and for free.