Making It Right: Product Management For A Startup World

About The Book

Written by Rian van der Merwe. Designed by Francisco Inchauste and Anna Shuvalova.

Product management is one of the most exhausting, exhilarating, stressful, and rewarding careers out there. It’s not for the faint of heart. It’s for people who want to move mountains. It swallows some whole, but others derive endless invigoration and passion from the pace and the impact and the glory and the huge potential for failure as well as success. There’s no other job like it, and this is a book to help you make it your job.

The main purpose of this book is to help product managers who work specifically with digital projects build better — less complex, more focused, less long-winded and more intelligent — products. By featuring lessons learned from real-life projects, the book provides a structured framework for strategic product management — to help build the right products, at the right time, for the right people with just the right amount of process involved.

The book isn’t concerned with abstract models and theoretical concepts. If your company has to address these issues or you’re looking for a hands-on guide through product management, that’s the book just for you. With this in mind, the book wants to accomplish three goals:

• Define the roles and responsibilities of product managers in the software development context.
• Explain why product management is an essential role in any organization, and what characteristics managers should look for when they hire product managers.
• Provide a framework and practical guidance for strategic product management; a framework that details the elements of product planning and product execution that make up a product manager’s day-to-day work.

About The Author

Rian van der Merwe designs and builds software that people love to use. After spending several years working in Silicon Valley and Cape Town, South Africa, he is now located in Portland, OR. He also writes regularly about design, technology, and software development for Smashing Magazine, A List Apart, and his own site, Elezea.