Every product manager builds things for customers, and knowing just who your customers are—what their needs, hopes, desires, frustrations and goals are—is the bedrock of all the work we do. But how do you go about learning that? And how do you know when you’ve learned enough and can keep building? Well, does has Erika Hall have the book for you! Li…

Because product management is so broad, we typically do episodes about a specific, narrow skill within the role—that allows us to go deep into what we think matters there. But we always knew we wanted to do one generalist book about PMing. Many years ago I (Anna Marie) read the first version of Marty Cagen’s book Inspired: How To Create Products Cu…

We wanted to tackle a marketing book, but one that wasn't just about tactics. We chose "Different" by HBS professor Youngme Moon, as her high-level, strategic view on marketing as both a philosophy and an art was very appealing to us. One of the core ideas in the book is that you can't just go along with the herd of companies and products that chan…

Show notes: Growth determines survival for most startups. If you aren’t increasing revenue, users, or time in-app, you’re probably being overrun by a competitor that is poised to take all your market share or future investors. But what helps product people drive growth in their companies? It’s not a series of hacks or tricks, though many successful…

After a bit of a summer break… we’re very happy to share the next episode of the Clearly Product Book Club Podcast. For Episode 8, we chat about David and Tom Kelley’s book Creative Confidence. In this book, the IDEO cofounders (and brothers!) share their hard-earned experiences, tactics, and general philosophy on ‘creativity’. While the tech and s…

As product managers, we have a bucket full of tools to finesse an idea from concept to customer. But slice and dice it how you will, we pass each of those hard-earned skills though some filter of how we communicate. Generally speaking, we do most of our communication by spoken word. How much do you think about how you speak? We wanted to give this …

Explanation of why I have decided to boycott the NFL and why you should too.Clear Lens Productions

Ashely Carmella Simon joins for a discussion about Philando CastileClear Lens Productions

Patri-ca, Edward and Beason The MC discuss Bill MaherClear Lens Productions

This month we decided to dig into the management side of product management, and dug into Andy Grove’s seminal book, High Output Management. I don’t want to spoil the podcast ending, but Sandi gave this a solid 5 out of 5 on the pony scale (🐴🐴🐴🐴🐴). We don’t hand out our ponies lightly, this is a great read for product managers at every stage. I’m n…

Part 2 is here! Listen to the second half of the conversation around "Winning with Data: Transform Your Culture, Empower Your People, and Shape the Future" by Tomasz Tunguz and Frank Bien. In Part 1 you heard our perspectives on how to run A/B tests, how this differs from a large org to a small one, what data to focus on when you're starting out, a…

As always, we're talking about a topic through the lens of a particular book we both read. This month we read "Winning with Data: Transform Your Culture, Empower Your People, and Shape the Future" by Tomasz Tunguz and Frank Bien. Data is something we care a great deal about! So much so, we talked enough for 2 whole episodes! In Part 1 you'll learn …

Anna Marie and I found that while we are basically constantly writing — emails, blog posts, proposals — we haven’t read anything beyond a few blog posts on how to become better writers… Whoops! We believe that the craft of writing and the process of becoming a better writer needs real time and attention, so we chose On Writing Well by William Zinss…

When choosing which book to read next for Episode 2 of the Clearly Product Book Club Podcast, Anna Marie and myself decided that something related to communications would be ideal. It’s basically the core of what the PM role entails. All of the overly focused ‘how to communicate with your team’ books seemed fine, but nothing really stood out as bei…

For the first episode of the Cleary Product Book Club Podcast, we chose an Alan Cooper (of Cooper Design) standard, published back in 1999. The book dives into why software needs to start with design, and explains some of the core problems associated with building software that make it easy to build overly complicated, non-user-friendly products. W…

Anna Marie and I geek out on product all the time. These conversations tend to be particularly eye-opening for us because of the fact that we work on very different types of products, at very different types of companies. Anna Marie is a Product Manager at Yammer, an enterprise collaboration tool owned by Microsoft. Meanwhile, I work on a consumer …