Product Management Blogs To Follow – Part 1: The Influencers

A legacy post, kept as originally published. Dates, links and images may be out of date.

This entry is part 1 of 3 in the series Product Management Blogs To Follow

Regardless of whether you’re a newbie PM or a veteran in your field, staying up to date with current blogs is a great source of inspiration and learning. Having a good resource list in your tool set is a must. It’s like always having your own network of smart experts to consult with. You can almost always find a helpful tip or insight to help you with your daily dilemmas, when you have diverse and high-quality resources to follow.

Are you preparing for your first user research interview? There’s a blog for that. Are you getting ready for your first PM interview? There’s a blog for that. Just feeling kind of “stuck” today? There are many blogs for that too.

One of the really awesome things about the PM community is the degree to which knowledge-sharing has become second-nature. However, as a result there are a lot (and I mean A LOT) of product management blogs out there. The problem is that it’s a full-time job by itself to follow all of them. So, how do you know which ones are worth checking out?

The trick is to know the focus of each blog and ‘consult’ it’s content depending on your needs or what you want to learn. So, to help you out, we decided to compile our favorite product management blogs. To not overwhelm you with new sources, we will share our product management blogs compilation one category at a time with you, in this series

• Product Management Blogs To Follow – Part 1: The Influencers
• Part 2 - Product Management Blogs To Follow – Part 2: The Classics
• Part 3 - Product Management Blogs To Follow – Part 3: The Communities

NOTE: this is not a complete list. There are some great sites we ended up having to leave on the table—at least for now. And, obviously, there is overlap between these buckets. Most influencers are educators, and most of our favorite Medium writers are influencers, as well. These categories are intended as a loose guide, not pigeonholes. We’re planning to update this list frequently, so let us know if we forgot an essential entry!

To help parse the sheer volume of PM writing out there, we’ve organized this list into categories. And to make it more useful, I also added a short description of the focal point for each blog and added a blog post I think showcases their style, so you can easily choose the ones that will benefit you the most.

The Influencers

• Nir and Far Author Nir Eyal is essential reading for anyone interesting in user behavior and psychology. His popular book, Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, proposes a four-step process for building sticky products. His archives offer a trove of insightful content.Read this first: Hooked for good: How habit-forming products improve lives

• Ken Norton Ken is a Google Ventures partner and a Product Manager. He shares his experience in his blog, giving readers great tips from his vast experience.Read this first: Meetings that don’t suck

• Andrew Chen Uber’s Andrew Chen delivers essays via his weekly(ish) newsletter, but you can also read his writing directly from his personal site. According to his LinkedIn, Chen has written OVER 700 ESSAYS. So, a lot.Read this first:What 671 million push notifications say about how people spend their day

• Learning by Shipping On his Medium-hosted publication, Andreesen Horowitz partner Steven Sinofsky delves into technology, productivity and the business side of product management.Read this first: Getting (the Right) Stuff Done

• Jason Fried Basecamp Founder & CEO Jason Fried draws on his extensive experience as an entrepreneur and product leader to deliver inspiring—and cliché-busting—ideas via his Medium account. The ideal PM pick-me-up.Read this first: I’ve never had a goal

• Sophie-Charlotte Moatti Products That Count founder SC Moatti is an expert in developing mobile products and is the author of the bestselling book mobilized: An Insider’s Guide to the Business and Future of Connected Technology. Moatti is highly regarded in the tech industry, and has been called “a genius at making mobile products people love” by Andrew ChenRead this first: The three biggest mistakes companies do when going mobile

• Josh Elman Josh Elman’s resume almost reads like a parody of a dream PM resume: it’s got Twitter, Facebook AND LinkedIn. These days, Elman is a partner at Greylock Partners. He shares his insights on product management in his personal blog on Medium, which – naturally—is in Greylock’s portfolio.Read this first: Building to Independence on Top of Other Platforms

• Ben Horowitz If you haven’t read Ben Horowitz’ classic piece Good Product Manager/Bad Product Manager, then… well, you’re probably not even reading THIS piece, because any human interested in product management would have read that first. Horowitz is the author of The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers. And even though his product management blog isn’t updated very frequently these days, it’s got more than enough archive content to keep you busy.Read this first: Why Founders Fail: The Product CEO Paradox

• David Cancel Currently the CEO of Drift, David Cancel has a long and impressive history as an entrepreneur and product leader. In short: he knows how to build and scale worthwhile products. Another thing he’s good at: sharing knowledge with others. (Bonus: you also might want to check out the Drift blog and the Seeking Wisdom podcast—we’re fans.)Read this first: Creating a customer-driven product machine

• Product Hunt Product Hunt, which was founded by Ryan Hoover in November 2013, surfaces the best new products, every day. It’s a place for product-loving enthusiasts to share and geek out about the latest mobile apps, websites, hardware projects, and tech creations. Ryan also posts his own articles on Medium, you might want to check those out as well.Read this first: Apps for Product Managers