Shhhh 🤫… the secrets of product are out!

I just finished reading a great little book by Nils Davis - “The Secret Product Management Handbook”.

First Impressions

It’s a nice short read and well put together. It’s thin at <1cm / 130 pages so you can read it quickly. It doesn’t repeat itself time and time again as many business books seem to.

I would have likes a few more visuals - but that is a personal preference to visual information. The structure and flow of the content is nice though and all links together nicely. There are lots of tips for actually putting the thoughts into practice which is nice and should help you hit the ground running.

The Scope

The table of contents is as follows:

1. What is product management and why is it important?

2. Finding and validating market problems

3. Creating solutions to market problems

4. Taking your solution to market

5. A final few words

6. Appendix

It doesn’t try to cover a ton of tools and techniques but instead focuses on the fundamentals of product management coupled with the mindset needed to go with it. The bonus in the appendix of how to break into Product Management is a nice addition even if it doesn’t directly relate to the main content of the book.

Work on Real Problems

The RWW framework is a nice structure to use when looking at problems. First are the Real? Are the Worth solving? And should We solve them? Even if you find a problem that is big for your customers and so is worth solving you might not be well positioned to deliver a solution to them. That can be as simple as they would not expect you to solve that problem as it doesn’t match your branding and positioning as a business or it could be as fundamental as you don’t have the technical competency to deliver it.

Create Valuable Solutions

“For every human activity, there is an appropriate level of abstraction to talk about it. Often there’s a big picture, and there are details, and somewhere in between is the meaningful stuff”

— Nils Davis

Another thing I picked out was the VALUABLE framework as an alternative to INVEST. It is a nice way to look at the “requirements” of your product. Are they Valuable, Aligned, Loved, Understood, Acceptance tested, Bounded, Leveraged and is the Expected usage clear? There is a lot more information here. The double use of solutions being valuable is a really nice reinforcement of how important it is to deliver value for your customers.

Critical Thoughts

I suspect much of the content can be found on the blog that goes with the book so you might be able to learn the majority without springing for a copy but it is a nicely compiled and curated version of the extensive content there. I don’t know about you but I still like a “dead tree format” copy of books, the tactile sense of turning the page helps me engage with the material better.

Having checked out the website I know that the book only really details part of the secrete PM framework, so for a full picture you need to head over here. If I’m critical I feel that the “post GTM” phase isn’t as well catered for as I would like. Once you take a product to market you have to live with it in-market, evolving it. Whilst that can be argued to be a repeat of the “find a problem, create a solution and take to market” mantra just on a smaller scale I would like to see it acknowledged more and also the element of end-of-life or withdrawal from the market given some time as well. I’m nitpicking though.

There are a few areas that feel like the could be a book in their own right, like the use of social proof in go-to-market. These areas do, however, act as a nice point of provoking thoughts on how you approach things and might want to dive deeper.

Final Thoughts

4.5 / 5 ⭐️s, I doubt I will ever review anything less than 4 though because I don’t finish the book!

Even just the first section is worth reading. It takes on the sticky subject of describing what Product Management do! If any of you have ever tried to describe that to someone you know it is hard to get across so that element that the framework helps you with is super valuable.

If I ever pull together a top 5 product mindset books there is a good change this one will make the list.

Check out the website for the book here and grab yourself a copy!