I love asking my colleagues and friends in product management what they read to keep working on their craft, and I get asked this question fairly often too. I’ve regurgitated the same answer on various forums so I figured I would document it for everyone.
My general advice on this is that less is more. I’ve succumbed to FOMO in the past and subscribed to every newsletter under the sun and found myself with hundreds of unread emails. So do yourself a favor and don’t overload your inbox with more than you can read. Pick a reasonable number that works for you and stick to it.
Anyway here’s the list, I hope you discover something new.
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Stratechery: This is a newsletter I hope I can write some day, if and when I get my shit together. Ben Thompson is somewhat of a legend now in Silicon Valley and the reason for that is his consistent, far-sighted, and opinionated view of the tech industry. The depth of his strategical analyses and the wealth of information I get every time this email hits my inbox is unparalleled. It’s not product management specific, but it’s hard to be a product manager in tech without understanding the industry dynamics at play.
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First Round Review: This one isn’t particularly focused on product management but they regularly interview subject matter experts from every functional area across product, design, marketing, leadership, and management. This isn’t a frou-frou interview filled with generic platitudes from the C-suite——the format of First Round’s articles is hinged on providing real frameworks and actionable advice.
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Ken Norton: An oldie but a goodie, focused on product management! Ken was an early product manager at Google and his advice feels hard-won and therefore, more reliable. Unfortunately, he doesn’t seem to write regularly any more but there’s a wealth of material on his blog, and his writing is a pleasure to read. Some of his classics include “How to Hire a Product Manager” and “What to Do in Your First 30 Days as PM”.
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Inside Intercom: Intercom is one of those companies that rose to the forefront because of the quality content they produced under the guise of content marketing. I read this more religiously when I was a consumer PM and less so now but I absolutely love their deep dives into building great product teams and sustaining a good product culture. From what I can tell, they’re leaning heavily into podcasts now, which might work better for some people!
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TechRepublic: This is the least glamorous of the bunch but there’s so much happening in the enterprise tech space, right from new product launches, changes in leadership and strategy to acquisitions that it’s hard to keep up. TechRepublic helps me stay in the loop. The best part of TechRepublic is that you can subscribe to subject areas that are relevant to you, so I only get news and articles relevant to “Data Center Trends” and “Cloud and Everything as a Service”. Scintillating, I know.
That’s about it. My list has remained fairly static over the last few years, so if there’s other gems out there I’m missing out on, please comment and let me know!