Product Management Curriculum for Entrepreneurs
You have no idea about product management? Perfect!
I have compiled the most relevant learning resources (books, blogs, etc) that will help you — as an entrepreneur — to achieve your goals when it comes to building your first prototype with the ultimate goal to find product-market fit.
Why I have created this?
There is no educational starting place for people who want to understand the basic concepts of product management. The subject is fairly new, and only now some institutional players are starting to formalize it. I have found that it does not really need a formalization of education but more of an aggregation and curation of it — because there are already a lot of great resources out there.
Step 1: Back to a classic — The Lean Startup 👴🏻
Let us start with a classic — The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. The Lean Startup is one of the first books that captured the ideas of the iterative Idea-Build-Measure-Learn process. Marc Andreesen says about the book: “Eric has created a science where previously there was only art. A must-read for every serious entrepreneur — and every manager interested in innovation.” We think the same. It is essential, especially for entrepreneurs who are focused on product building.
About the author: Eric Ries is an American entrepreneur, blogger, and author of The Lean Startup, a book on the lean startup movement. He is probably one of the most prominent figures in the global startup ecosystem. His Lean Startup is a classic and essential if you want to understand how to build a company that is relevant.
Link: The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses
If you are too lazy to read the book, have a look at this medium post. However, I would highly encourage you to read it and grasp the core concepts.
Step 2 | Let’s do some groundwork 👷♀️
This piece has helped me to understand the essential steps of iterative product building. Especially in the early days of your startup, the classic by Dan Olsen will guide you with a clear process on how to go forward. Contrary to the quite negative Amazon reviews, we find the piece very essential and believe it can help you as well.
About the Author: Dan Olsen worked at Intuit, where he led the Quicken product team to record sales and profit. He also led product management at social networking pioneer Friendster.
Link: The Lean Product Playbook: How to Innovate with Minimum Viable Products and Rapid Customer Feedback
You can find an overview of the most important ideas of the book on Slide share.
Also, this medium post gives an overview of what could have learned. 😜
Step 3: Entrepreneurial Advice for PM roles 👨💻
Since you are building or you are thinking about building your own company, we wanted to include some essential articles that support you on that journey. They might help you to focus and to focus on the essential parts during the early days of your business.
Do things that don’t scale
Since you are building or you are thinking about building your own company, we think to include some essential articles that support you on that journey.
Paul Graham has some counterintuitive advice for founders: Do things that don’t scale.
Start-ups don’t often experience hockey stick growth by themselves. They need a nudge from founders, who need to aggressively market their products and be overly attentive to users in the beginning.
Link: Do things that don’t scale
Good and bad procrastination
We all know the problem. We lose focus. Here is some great advice by Paul Graham to what extend procrastination might be not as bad as we all thought.
About the author: Paul Graham is the co-founder of the start-up accelerator program Y Combinator.
Link: Good and bad procrastination
Get one thing right
Here is some great advice to focus on one product and one product only at the beginning. The tenor is: don’t lose focus! We believe this is one of the most important factors for you to succeed.
About the author: Andy Dunn is the co-founder of Bonobos Inc
Link: Get One Thing Right
Step 4 | The Quest for product-market fit 🕵️
Understanding product-market fit is essential for your current stage of development. You will iterate your idea constantly into the direction of a potential fit between your product idea and the market you want to target. We will include here some of the most comprehensive ideas about the idea of product-market fit.
From a product perspective, there is really nothing else you should currently focus on. Finding Product Market Fit should be your number one objective.
What is the product-market fit and why do you need it
We have gathered here a list of blog posts of a few of the most important thinkers of the startup ecosystem that present their opinions on the topic. Please go through them and gain an understanding of the topic.
➡️Marc Andreesen, founder of a16z
Link: The only thing that matters
➡️Michael Seibel, CEO of Y Combinator
Link: The real product-market fit
➡️Gigi Levy-Weiss, Managing Partner at NFX
Link: 10 Places to Find Product-Market Fit
➡️Tren Griffin, Executive at Microsoft
Link: 12 Things about Product-Market Fit
➡️David Rusenko, Founder of Weebly
Link: How To Find Product Market Fit
Step 5 | Build your prototype fast 🏃♀️
Product-Market Fit — Part 1: The first major component that you should have in mind in order to achieve the product-market fit is the product. Here, it is especially important to launch something fast but good enough to test if your value proposition is actually creating value for the user and if they — at the end of the day — want to pay for the service or product of yours.
“The first thing we always tell founders is to launch their product right away; for the simple reason that this is the only way to fully understand customers’ problems and whether the product meets their needs. Surprisingly, launching a mediocre product as soon as possible, and then talking to customers and iterating, is much better than waiting to build the “perfect” product. This is true as long as the product contains a “quantum of utility” for customers whose value overwhelms problems any warts might present (Y Combinator)”.
Link: How to plan an MVP
Link: Building Product
In those two videos, Michael Seibel is talking about how to plan and build an MVP.
About the author: Michael Seibel is CEO and a partner at Y Combinator and co-founder of two startups — Justin.tv/Twitch and Socialcam
We can only recommend reading again the post by Paul Graham that we have mentioned already as a part of an earlier lecture.
Step 6 | The Quest for product-market fit / Talk to your users 🗣
Product-Market Fit — Part 2: The second component to have in mind is your user. In the end, you want to create something that is used by someone. So the best way to find out if they like what you have created is to talk to them. The book helps you to understand “how to talk to customers & learn if your business is a good idea when everyone is lying to you.” We find it to be the best resource on the subject. But of course, we gathered some more.
About the author: Rob Fitzpatrick an entrepreneur for 10 years, running both bootstrapped and VC-backed companies.
Link: The Mom Test
About the speaker: Eric Migicovsky is a partner at Y-Combinator
Link: How to talk to users
In addition to the two resources, here you can find a template to get your interviews started.
Link: Customer Interview Template
Step 7 | The Quest for product-market fit / Get user feedback 📊
Product-Market Fit — Part 2.1: Obviously, the best way to understand your users and the problems they have, or to validate your idea is to talk to them directly. The personal and individual interaction is extremely valuable and you should try to pursue it at any given stage of your company.
However, there is one problem to individual interviews: it is really time-consuming and the outreach is limited. Therefore, we find surveys to be a really good tool to complement user interviews. Once, you have already validated a hypothesis in initial interviews you can further validate it with an easier and further outreach through the survey.
We find typeform to be a great tool when it comes to conducting surveys. But SurveyMonkey has excellent resources when it comes to the topic.
Link: Surveys 101
In this piece, the SurveyMonkey team has gathered some best practices of survey building.
Link: Product feedback surveys
Additionally, they have their own template for user feedback and give advice on how to to the set-up of user feedback survey most effectively.
