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 This list is continuously evolving — new materials get added, outdated ones removed.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
- Getting Things Done, David Allen
- Jedi Techniques, Maxim Dorofeyev
- Herding Cats: A Primer for Programmers Who Lead Programmers, J. Hank Rainwater
- Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager, Michael Lopp
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.