So many websites and so little time. And while that truism could be applied equally to recipes, sports analysis, or politics, we’re focusing here on product management websites. It turns out a lot of product folks like to share their tips and wisdom on the Internet.
Here at ProductPlan, we can’t get enough of product-related content, so we’re always on the lookout for who’s doling out easily-digestible-yet-professionally-fulfilling insights. That’s why we can save you the Googling and share our top five product management websites from 2022, along with why they topped our year-end list.
5. Product Talk
There’s no one more immersed in applying discovery and customer insights to prioritization and planning than Product Talk’s Teresa Torres. She literally wrote the book on it!
But this author didn’t stop there and continues pumping out quality content, all focused on gathering great customer and market intelligence along with best practices to put it best to use. Real-world stories from the trenches at companies like trivago and CarMax share a stage with meaty posts on how to stop salespeople from blocking your access to customers and using opportunity decision trees to visualize discovery work for easier consumption.
There’s even content on how to land your first product job, what to do when your buyers aren’t your users, and implementing continuous discovery at startups. And if you prefer to watch versus read, there are excellent videos on topics including collaborative decision-making and showing your work to attain stakeholder buy-in. With years of quality content in the archive, you won’t run out any time soon.
4. Silicon Valley Product Group
The Silicon Valley Product Group isn’t just a bunch of product peeps that happen to have a 415 area code. The SVPG remains at the forefront of thought leadership in product development.
Founded by Marty Cagan, who cut his product leadership teeth at places like eBay, Netscape, and Hewlett-Packard, the SVPG has been sharing best practices and practical insights into product development for more than two decades. That means there’s a massive back-catalog of meaty posts on agile, waterfall, and the age-old dilemma of where product management should live, and the hits keep on coming 20+ years later.
Recent entries include articles on coaching vs. mentoring, product/market fit, and what product managers need to take off their plates so they can focus on interacting directly with customers and engineers. But a quick search on nearly any topic should uncover a gem or two from their list of published posts.
3. Department of Product
This company’s bread and butter is training product managers, but their blog doles out a ton of useful content for anyone interested in the field. For PMs lacking technical backgrounds or who are decades past their days writing code, explainers on buzzy topics, including Web3, GitHub, and natural language processing are unintimidating primers on subjects you need to be conversant in to hold your own with developers.
Posts on process—such as writing release notes and managing UX debt—show they’re not afraid to spend time on the less-sexy parts of the job, while content regarding SaaS pricing and measuring product-market fit helps product managers optimize their go-to-market tactics. There’s also plenty of career advice, including pointers on how to build useful skills, including reading API documentation, SQL, and even how to draw on a whiteboard with confidence.
And, if your eyes are tired after all that close reading, pop in your earbuds and check out one of their podcasts, where they interview product leaders from companies including Wayfair, Venmo, and Uber.
2. Sachin Rekhi
Notejoy founder and CEO Sachin Rekhi’s website provides a flavorful variety of hundreds of essays and videos spanning a cornucopia of product-related topics.
Videos on career-propelling topics such as mastering influencing without authority and getting actionable product feedback stand alongside posts on midlife career exploration, finding product culture fit, implementing OKRs, and the importance of leaders reviewing which metrics you’re using
Sachin also frequently re-reads some once-hot business books and gives a fresh take on them with a bit of 20/20 hindsight, including Peter Thiel’s Zero to One and Hamilton Heller’s 7 Powers, as well as more recent reads such as the behind-the-scenes look into Amazon’s working backward approach to product development and where you begin with the press release and Andrew Chen’s The Cold Start Problem.
1. Bring the Donuts
Ken Norton’s Bring the Donuts is sadly not the latest subscription box or instant delivery service for baked goodies, but it is our top website of 2022. What—other than its unforgettable moniker—makes it stand out from the crowd?
Ken’s a former Google product leader and his posts are so thorough they even have footnotes. He challenges product managers to think beyond the immediate and consider nontraditional topics such as thirty-year product plans and why companies should offer dual career tracks for product management. But he also digs into some fundamentals, including creating strong product cultures and figuring out the ideal PM-to-engineer ratio.
There are also “deep dives” into how products get built at leading companies such as Stripe, Slack, and Airbnb, giving product leaders behind-the-scenes peeks into how those firms roll out innovative new offerings.
