Product Sense is a comprehensive and accessible, guidebook for what it means to solve problems as product manager, and ace complicated PM interviews.
What will you learn from this book?
What’s inside?
Curious about the content? We’ll send you a chapter of Product Sense so you can see the quality of the text & resources before you buy. You’ll receive the “Everyone has Product Sense” chapter right after entering your email here.
Included, as a bonus, is the glossary of PM terms with use throughout the text, over 50 PM-specific terms that are commonly used throughout the book.
A good PM doesn’t have to know everything about every industry. This means that at any point in their career, they can help other teams because they don’t have much of a bias for what the team should be building. They will also help think of why the team should be building something and how the product will be used.
There are a handful of frameworks available online to help you answer product interview questions. While these can be useful for some, we feel that they are rarely as encompassing as they should be.
None seem to lead an interviewee to adequately cover all the concepts and touchpoints that an interview is looking for. You want to stand out among your fellow candidates, not blend in with them. If you don’t employ a framework that helps you to cover key elements in a thoughtful way, you might end up sounding rehearsed or rigid. This is not the time for a one-size-fits-all formula. You want to demonstrate that you possess the critical thinking skills and mindset of a well-rounded PM.
There are many different aspects to being a PM, and no PM is going to be excellent in all areas.
You will not be expected to be a magician. Hiring managers will want to hire you because you possess a unique blend of skills that cannot be found in other candidates—often, to balance out a team or because they think that your talents will deliver important value and missing out on you will be a loss for them. We call this blend of talents your PM Superpower, and you should learn to craft and rehearse it so that you can easily be recognized as a top-tier candidate.
We cover every step you need to take to get a new job in product. Even if you have never been a PM before, we outline key strategies to break into product management for the first time. Product Sense holds your hand from selecting your industry, to tackling take-home exercises, to dealing with rejection and successes. Your companion through complex interview loops.
Bootcamps and other intensive training courses are expensive and may not be available to everyone. PMs need a structured way to practice the skills needed to succeed in their role. They also need practical advice on how to navigate the nuances of each company’s processes, frameworks, and partners.
Product Sense is a bootcamp a a book that teaches PMs how to build products from idea through launch, with real world examples from companies like Google, Facebook, Uber, Twitter…and many others.
Product Sense helped me understand if PM is the right career path for me. Easy to read, clear, concise, and jam-packed full of insight and examples that illustrate all the concepts, this is the perfect starting point for anyone new to the field, and goes well beyond that for those looking to advance their career.
Jamie Gloyne
Aspiring PM
“This book is nothing less than a complete boot camp in the evolving profession of product management. As someone who has worked as and hired product managers in San Francisco, I know that getting and fulfilling the role of a product manager is hard. The authors of Product Sense have distilled both the key parts of the role and the critical strategies for interviewing down into one book that is both complete and fun to read.
Adam Braus
Author of "Leading Change at Work: The Secret Structure of Change and How Everyone Can Make It Happen"
Adrian Crook
Director of Product
Product Sense is a quick must read that outlines exactly how to prepare yourself as a new Product Manager and what to focus on in the interview process. This book was my North Star during my interviews.
Sam Rim
Product Manager @ Razorfish
Product Sense delivers a solid overview of what good product management looks like and sound advice for aspiring PMs on how to break into Product for the first time.
John Fontenot
Growth PM @ Lendio, Founder @ Path2Product.io
Loan
Aspiring PM
Think about a product that you use every day. Could you explain to someone what you like about it?
Imagine being trapped at a party and your neighbor, Bill, is talking your ear off about his new leaf blower. Now, Bill is not a PM, he’s an insurance agent, but between his personal leaf-blowing preferences and his actual knowledge of every facet and function of his blower, he actually has a pretty good product sense about the leaf-blowing product that he owns.
You, along with billions of other consumers, buy and use products every day. Choosing one product from your life and discussing it shouldn’t feel so daunting . . . you know what the product is and why and how you use it. Most people could easily name a product and state one or two things that they like about it, but only someone with a PM mindset (and carefully honed product sense) would be delighted to expound on the details of that product for a full forty-five-minute interview.
As you progress through preparing for interviews at most tech companies, you’ll encounter “product sense” interview questions, which typically require you to break down, deconstruct, or otherwise design a part of a product. This is usually the most common type of interview question used to evaluate a PM’s ability to succeed in a Product role. We agree that aptitude for “product thinking” is part of an individual’s product sense, but our goal through this book is to explore the entirety of what encapsulates a PM’s ability as it relates to the entire PM role. Our thesis is that a PM’s product sense encompasses not only the ability to design and create new features and products, but also to optimize, execute, and lead within a product development organization.
Our hope is that, by reading this book, you will strengthen your overall product ability—your product sense—and come to understand the full scope of strong product management and what life is like for product managers on a day-to-day basis. We aim to provide you with an overall understanding of product management and how that applies across different companies, industries, and products—while simultaneously helping you to adopt a PM mindset, so you can begin to see how you would approach the PM role you are seeking
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Co-authors Peter and Braxton have over 17 years of combined experience in the field, working on products ranging from gaming to B2B to consumer to fintech. Peter is based in San Francisco, while Braxton is located in New York City. They have served as individual contributors, hiring managers, PM career coaches. Having seen the processes of building product teams from all sides of the equation, they put their heads together to create a guidebook that leverages their experience, the wisdom from dozens of other product leaders, to create a complete guidebook to ensure that quality candidates make it through interviews.
The book is around 330 pages, so reading it start to finish might take around two weeks at a moderate pace. However, the last parts are interviews with PM leaders, as well as other appendix content which bring the total reading down to around 8-10 hours. You can read each part independently, although we recommend reading the book in order as the content is structured intentionally so that lessons build on each other.
At the moment, we are available for Amazon Kindle eBook and Paperback (fulfilled by Amazon). We are adding hardcover soon, as well as other eBook marketplaces.
Sure! Full table of contents
We’ve tried to approach our writing to be is as accessible as possible for product management. Any industry jargon or term is bolded in the text with a definition, and included in the glossary in the back for reference. The text has been professionally edited to ensure clarity. If you’d like to see a sample in advance, feel free to download our sample chapter and see for yourself.
This book will benefit those who are considering becoming PMs, those who are attempting to switch into product management from another role, or folks who are already PMs but want to be most prepared when applying for a new job. Students, business school candidates, and those unfamiliar or only a few years experience would benefit greatly from the lessons included in Product Sense.
Please contact us to discuss quantities of five or more books.
We’re in the Ingram network, so you can go to any bookstore and request it there, and it will be printed and shipped directly there. You can also find it from Barnes and Noble website.
You can contact us with any questions you might have. We’re here to help!
