There’s no shortage of materials online for developing product skills and broadening your horizons. But I want to gather the most useful, practical, and valuable ones in one place. This list is constantly evolving — new materials are added, outdated ones are removed.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 the company expects from its managers, and what they’ll probe in interviews. If these don’t resonate with you at first, it’s worth coming back to them later.
Managing Yourself and Your Teams
- «Getting Things Done,» David Allen
- «The Jedi Techniques,» Maxim Dorofeev
- «Herding Cats,» J. Hank Rainwater
- «Managing Humans,» Michael Lopp
Research
- «The Mom Test,» Rob Fitzpatrick. A must-read classic on preparing for user interviews. The book has its fans and its critics, but both camps have read it and haven’t been left 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. Probably the only book on product analytics written by a Russian author. It reads less like a textbook and more like a conversation with a product analyst.
- «Say It with Charts,» Gene Zelazny
- GoPractice Blog. An absolute encyclopedia of knowledge on product analytics and product management. The articles are exceptionally well-written. Best read slowly and carefully, over a cup of tea in the evening.
- Free course «Fundamentals of Statistics and A/B Testing» by Yandex Practicum. A very solid course on statistics fundamentals and A/B testing, put together by the Practicum math 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 in a clear, structured way. It has become a classic.
Strategy
- «Good Strategy Bad Strategy,» Richard Rumelt. A foundational conceptual book on strategy — what good strategy looks like, and what bad strategy looks like (of which there is no shortage). 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 overview of 20 techniques for prioritizing a backlog or a list of hypotheses.
- Article «RICE: Simple prioritization for product managers,» Intercom. The original article from Intercom, where this prioritization method was born. Among other things, it includes an XLS template you can use right out of the box.
Interviews and Hiring
- «The Art of Recruitment: How to Evaluate a Person in an 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,» Laakmann McDowell
- «Decode and Conquer,» Lewis C. Lin. One of Lewis Lin’s books — though if you can, it’s worth reading his others as well.
- Podcast «Sobes» (Interview)
- Podcast «Dva Stula» (Two Chairs)
Computer Science Basics
- Free Python courses «Python Generation». A series of free Python courses for complete beginners by Timur Guev, a professional developer and instructor. Timur belongs to a generation of mathematicians who scored perfect marks on the national exam 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 practice platform sql-ex.ru. One of the best — if not the best — SQL practice platforms out there, and it’s free. It includes a huge number of exercises; I recommend working through them to solidify your SQL skills. Don’t let the dated interface put you off.
- «System Design Interview,» Alex Xu
Data Science Basics
- Article «Machine Learning for People,» vas3k. A comprehensive introduction for anyone who has finally decided to understand machine learning — written in plain language, without formulas or theorems, with real-world examples and 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 rise as a businessman — the challenges he overcame, the risks he took. Including the story of his trip to Russia in 2002 to try to buy an intercontinental ballistic rocket.
- «Pour Your Heart Into It: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time,» Dori Jones Yang, Howard Schultz
- «The Yandex Book,» Dmitry Sokolov-Mitrich. The story of Yandex’s rise from its founding to its IPO — including the personalities of its founders, and the time Sergey Brin and Larry Page came to Moscow in 2003 to acquire 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.