Five Articles To Make You A Better Product Manager

There has been so much written about Product Management recently that NomNom Insights and DataStories did a study of Product Management Content on Medium. We've been doing our best to keep up and have found a bunch of helpful ideas, experience and insights. Today, we share a few pieces that align with how we think and communicate important concepts better than we could have ourselves.

• The 280 Group recently conducted a survey of over 850 Product Managers and Product Management team leaders about the biggest challenges faced in their Product Management organizations. You may be surprised to find how much room for improvement product teams think they have and how much that improvement can add to the bottom line. To download the survey report, you'll need to give the 280 Group your email address, but it's well worth it.

• Julie Zhou, Product Design VP at Facebook has some great thoughts on the battle of "Metrics vs. Experience." Like Spiderman, Julie knows that the power of data comes with great responsibility. Read it to find out why "framing things as 'metrics versus experience' is entirely the wrong way to start the conversation."

• Do you use Slack? Satya van Heummen of Fileboard has our favorite analysis of Slack so far and it shows the power of serving the emotional job: The Real Reason Slack Became a Billion Dollar Company.

• Becky Yelland wrote a great job advice piece for Mind the Product on how to be an Industry-agnostic product manager. We're especially keen on this advice because Jobs-to-be-Done, like Becky, has also seen success across multiple industries from software to consumer products to medical devices.

• NewCo (founded by our friend John Battelle) has a terrific and wide ranging interview with media theorist and cultural critic Douglas Rushkoff on their blog, Shift. R.U. Sirius' piece explores Rushkoff's thoughts on business and technology. Within is a nugget that elucidates the problem we're solving at thrv: "The bigger issue is that most digital businesses won't make money. Not until they learn to help their users create value."

If these links put you in the product management reading groove, you might enjoy our 4 day course on Jobs-to-be-Done, which you can find on the bottom right of this page.