(Part 2) Top products from r/ProductManagement

Great to hear that you're looking to get into product ownership, it's a great career with a bunch of learning opportunities and career options. Understanding agile and the various frameworks is a great start. It sounds like you have some technical understanding (although not a must, it can help tremendously) and also domain expertise...again more ticks. At its heart a PO is responsible for ensuring that what your team build is the correct thing. This can be summarised as the following

1. value risk (whether customers will buy it or users will choose to use it)
   
2. usability risk (whether users can figure out how to use it)
   
3. feasibility risk (whether our engineers can build what we need with the time, skills and technology we have)
   
4. business viability risk (whether this solution also works for the various aspects of our business)
   
   This work is often called 'Discovery' and learning how to ensure that these 4 critera are meet and then suitably broken down to stopries which can be consumed for your dev/qa team is keys. As with everything there is a host of methods/frameworks out there, but here is some articles i've found good.
   
   https://www.gov.uk/guidance/content-design/user-needs - a comon method for creating initial stories, and most improtantly makes you consider why you're creating the story as you need to talk to the benifit. (the british government's digital transformation is actually a great case study for PO's)
   
   https://www.devbridge.com/articles/how-to-set-up-dual-track-scrum-in-jira/ -Dual track scrum is a framework for creating a design framework which preceeds the dev/test sprint.
   
   I'd suggest trying to find out which agile methodology your company uses (Scrum, kanban etc) and then spending time gathering more info on the specific methodology. If Scrum then the key ceremonies a PO is needed for is Sprint Planning and Demos & Retrospectives. Learn what is expected of you during these ceremonies.
   
   A couple of books that i found useful:
   
   https://www.amazon.co.uk/Lean-Startup-Innovation-Successful-Businesses/dp/0670921602/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1541540223&sr=8-1&keywords=lean+startup - Lean Startup....kinda product mangement/owner essential reading
   
   https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sprint-Solve-Problems-Test-Ideas/dp/0593076117/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1541540263&sr=8-1&keywords=sprint - Sprint. A practical guide toi how to solve big problems. As you only have a week heres a 90 second video on it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2vSQPh6MCE
   
   https://www.amazon.co.uk/Inspired-Create-Tech-Products-Customers/dp/1119387507/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1541540364&sr=8-1&keywords=inspired - Inspired - A great book specifically on Product manangement but is also usefuil for PO's
   
   Once you become a PO, the trick is applying the host of diffrent frameworks and understanding what works best for your team is the tricky part. If you can find yourself a mentor it's a great help to do so as they can help you navigate potential hurdles.
   
   Hope this helps and good luck with the interview
   
   PS i didn't continue with education post GCSE, don't let that worry you.
   
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1. In my SaaS startup world, your product should do one of two things: save customers' money or save them time. If you save them money, that's straightforward, you charge a % of the amount you save the customer. On the other hand, if your product saves a developer 1hr of time a month (based on your estimate), you can say 1hr of a developer's time is $100, so I'm going to price product at 10% of that, i.e. $10 a month. Also, look at established competitors who offer similar value to your product, that gives you a good benchmark for pricing your product. So, in summary: price product at % of value to customer or based on market price of competitor product offering similar value.
   
2. In an early stage startup, the founder does the pricing. For medium stage startups, a product manager would have the responsibility to price product. For large companies, there's often a pricing team that does sophisticated modeling to come up with pricing.
   
   ​
   
   I found the following book very useful to come up with a framework for pricing decisions: Monetizing Innovation. https://www.amazon.com/Monetizing-Innovation-Companies-Design-Product/dp/1119240867/.

This is a great resource: https://www.oneweekpm.com. This course is a great place to start.

Hitchhiker's Guide to Product Management ( great blog ):

Books to read after the course: https://yilunzh.com/pm/

INSPIRED: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love: https://www.amazon.com/INSPIRED-Create-Tech-Products-Customers-ebook/dp/B077NRB36N

The Lean Product Playbook: How to Innovate with Minimum Viable Products and Rapid Customer Feedback: https://www.amazon.com/Lean-Product-Playbook-Innovate-Products/dp/1118960874

Shipping Greatness: Practical lessons on building and launching outstanding software, learned on the job at Google and Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Shipping-Greatness-Practical-launching-outstanding/dp/1449336574

Hope this guides help.

Not sure if the intent is for your client to drop your product slides into a larger presentation, or if you’re intending to build the complete presentation for your client...either way, you may find it useful to incorporate storytelling techniques to amp up viewer engagement. I’ve found the following books very good:

Resonate, by Nancy Duarte

Storynomics, by Robert McKee and Tom Gerace

Good luck!

Read this: First 90 Days, Updated and Expanded: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1422188612/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_XqeFDbVRQHA8B

Then read this: The Lean Startup: How Constant Innovation Creates Radically Successful Businesses https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0670921602/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_nreFDbZQPJHRM

Biggest failure is lack of humility. Remember you are a Servant Leader (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servant_leadership) and are responsible for everything while owning nothing.

The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change

This could be a good read !!

Mostly because I wanted to analyze baseball stats, and at the time (4-5 years ago) that was mostly done in R. If the last industry conference I went to is any indication, it still is, many of the presentations features plots that were clearly ggplot2. There are also books like this one floating around: https://www.amazon.com/Analyzing-Baseball-Data-Chapman-Hall/dp/1466570229/ref=nodl_.

Software Requirements (3rd Edition) (Developer Best Practices) https://www.amazon.com/dp/0735679665/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_91JMDbRFCPG5X

Applied Artificial Intelligence: A Handbook For Business Leaders is a must-read imo. It should point you in the right direction.

Good primer on all of the agile methodologies:
https://www.amazon.com/Learning-Agile-Understanding-Scrum-Kanban/dp/1449331920/ref=nodl_

The Product Manager's Desk Reference by Steven Haines (I heard rumors he is creating a 3rd edition)

Your title indicates knowledge of quality/reliability standards are going to be a critical need, right?

Find the Q&R standards that are used by aerospace firms & bookmark them.

It also helps to become familiar with the math underlying many statistical reliability concepts. I ran across this one (The New Weibull Handbook) a few days ago::

https://www.amazon.com/Handbook-Reliability-Statistical-Predicting-Supportability/dp/0965306232

Amazon wants WAY too much for this, but I found an earlier edition elsewhere.

https://www.amazon.ca/Industrial-Organization-Strategies-Paul-Belleflamme/dp/0521681596 the last few chapters of this go into it in some detail. There are many papers on the subject though. Industrial Organization + Two sided markets should turn up a lot of results.

Platform Revolution – How Networked Markets are Transforming the Economy?and How to Make Them Work for You

I've not been asked in those terms, but it sounds like an Agile/Waterfall question.

A lot of the verbiage sucks but this is my base process answer-book: https://www.amazon.com/Agile-Project-Management-Creating-Innovative/dp/0321658396

I would recommend that you:

• Find some benchmarks for your industry. For example, if you pick B&Q here in the UK (they sell DIY stuff), I would assume they have a low conversion rate because the biggest use case for their website is to look up an item before heading to the physical store to buy it... vs Someone like ASOS who exclusively sell clothes online.
  
• Once you know the delta between where you're performing vs your industry average, I would start to focus on the areas that you're losing the most amount of traffic that has an intent to convert.
  
• If possible, do some user research, observe people going through your funnel to see where the biggest pain points and stumbling points are (as Analytics tools aren't going to tell you that).
  
• Then make changes one at a time to measure the impact, or alternatively run some A/B or Multi-variant tests to find out the changes that will move your metrics.
  
• One watch out to think about other metrics that are important, such as av. spend or % of users who opt for a premium subscription... As you can boost conversion, but you could lower these and you could end up net negative.
  
  I'd recommend you give Lean Analytics a read if you haven't had the opportunity to do so.