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What Is the Point of Professional Development?
Whether you are new to the product management industry or a seasoned product management professional, continuing education can benefit you at any stage of your career. All aspects of product development are ever-evolving as technology and trends change over time. The same is true for people; we rely on thought leaders to keep us informed of the latest product design and development news so we can adjust our objectives and processes accordingly.
Product Management Blogs and News Sites to Bookmark
One of the best things you can do as a product manager is to educate yourself by consuming industry-relevant blogs, news sites, slack communities, and podcasts that highlight trending topics in the product management space. Reviewing case studies by product leaders in easily digestible formats, like blogs and articles, can offer insightful perspectives on all kinds of product management themes.
Here are ten useful online resources you should check out if you are interested in professional development, staying informed on news and trends, and learning helpful tips and tricks to master your product management skills.
ReadWrite
ReadWrite is an online publication that focuses on building community in the tech media space. Their productivity-centered content highlights popular tech-savvy topics like connected cars, smart homes, artificial reality, and virtual reality (AR/VR), fintech, and APIs.
Key Article: Revamping Product Strategy: A Necessity for Manufacturers puts a spotlight on the need for manufacturers to keep their product strategies as innovative as the products they create. This article makes a case for agile product management, product roadmap management software, and cross-functioning teams.
Tech Times
Tech Times is an online resource that brings business and technology together, reporting on the latest news, trends, and innovations making waves in the technology, science, and health industries. Their team publishes news, reviews, analyses, and opinion pieces surrounding technological innovation, scientific milestones, and medical breakthroughs.
Key Article: 4 Ways You Can Minimize Product Returns explains different ways you can refine your product development process to improve the target result and reduce the number of product returns for future iterations of your product.
Forbes - Manufacturing
As a business news heavyweight, Forbes is a natural destination for information and innovation. The Forbes Manufacturing tag online brings you pages and pages of articles on all things product management, development, and manufacturing.
Key Article: Data Strategies Start With Defining What Problem You Want to Solve dives into some helpful problem-solving essentials for data strategies that can also be applied to how you approach your product strategies.
The Product Manager
The Product Manager is a digital community for product leaders navigating the ever-changing challenges of product growth and maturity. Their content focuses on the product management life cycle, showcasing strategies, insights, and tools designed to help you scale your business.
Key Article: UX Research Planning: 6 Steps For Creating A Solid Plan (With Examples) is a great resource for product managers looking to hone their research skills and create a user experience (UX) research plan. The article also explains when you should (and shouldn’t) make time to execute a plan.
Product Talk
Product Talk is a product management blog written by Teresa Torres, a product discovery coach who helps product teams engage in customer interviews, run product experiments, and drive valuable product outcomes. Her content focuses on sharing tactics and techniques for product managers to learn new research methods.
Key Article: Understanding How Product Outcomes Connect to Revenue and Costs provides insight into how the work of product teams is impacting their organization as a whole, including the financial ramifications depending on product outcomes.
Ken Norton’s Bring the Donuts Blog
Bring the Donuts is a product management blog written by Ken Norton, an executive coach, speaker, and writer whose experience in the product management sector before his coaching venture landed him at Google. Ken led product initiatives for all kinds of Google products. His blog is based on what it means to be a product manager in a tech company.
Key Article: The Art of Product Management: Why and How to Develop the Essential Human Skills is Ken’s most popular blog post, and for a good reason, as it explains the importance of the six C’s in product management: Communication, collaboration, creativity, critical thinking, curiosity, and consciousness.
Mind the Product
Mind the Product is an internationally renowned community of product managers, owners, developers, and other product people who are dedicated to innovating the product industry. Mind the Product has the world’s largest Slack community, and they host conferences and workshops around the world.
Key Article: Jenny Herald: Using OKRs to define success features a discussion with Jenny Herald, Quantive’s VP of Product Evangelism, about why objectives and key results (OKRs) as a way to set company goals and measure product outcomes.
Product Coalition
Product Coalition is an editorial publication, podcast, and Slack community that offers a global learning community for people who are invested in product management, product design, and product delivery. This resource can be very helpful for product managers wanting to boost collaboration across their teams.
Key Article: 28 Collaborative Prioritization Activities for Your Next Workshop is a fantastic curation of collaborative group exercises to bolster creativity, brainstorming, teamwork, and inspiration to help prioritize new ideas.
SVPG Insights
SVPG Insights, a blog run by the Silicon Valley Product Group (SVPG), shares all kinds of insightful articles that focus on process, data science, product strategy, communication, and risk. The SVPG was founded by Marty Cagan, a product management expert whose portfolio includes work for Hewlett-Packard, Netscape Communications, and eBay.
Key Article: The Foundation of Product is a post written by Marty that speaks on the fundamentals of what makes a successful product team. According to Marty, an empowered product team must leverage three important constituencies. Click the post title to find out what they are.
Gocious Blog
Our Gocious blog is a value-add that features plenty of insight and advice on how to be a successful product manager, how to stay informed on trends in product management, and core principles to learn for developing great products. At Gocious, we pride ourselves in our product roadmap management tools for product teams.
Key Article: Top Lessons in Product Management is a valuable resource for new and seasoned product managers. The content in this article highlights a few key principles to keep in mind when managing product teams, as well as some tips and tricks to apply throughout the process to make sure your product strategy is a success from start to finish.
Product Roadmap Management Software for Product Teams
Here at Gocious, our mission is to provide product managers with software that helps them create great products. Book a live demo to see the benefits of our software.