I read Product Management in Practice, 2nd Edition.
A practical book by Matt LeMay focused on the day-to-day work of a product manager (PM). Its center of gravity is less "who is a PM" as a career or methodology question, and more "what actually happens in a PM's day, and how should you behave in it."
The book frames the skills a PM needs as four CORE skills — Communication, Organization, Research, and Execution — and each chapter is built around behaviors tied to that CORE, capped with a checklist.
What stood out:
- In the chapter on "the art of overcommunication," vague agreement like "sounds good" is treated as a danger signal, and tactics such as Disagree & Commit are introduced to avoid leaving decisions ambiguous.
- The "working with senior stakeholders (playing poker)" metaphor. Practical principles for staying user-centric inside internal politics, "never surprise without warning," and so on.
- Chapters like "the worst of best practices" and "the wonderful and disappointing truth about Agile" repeatedly push back against adopting methodologies blindly. Methods are a starting point, not a guarantee.
- Chapter 14, "the manager within the product manager," covers the pitfalls a PM hits when stepping up to lead PM or product leadership roles, and reads close to a book on engineering management.
Where Escaping the Build Trap draws "why the organization makes products at all" with frameworks, this book deals scrappily with "how PMs actually behave day to day." Read together, the strategy layer and the floor layer mesh more easily.
