Skip to main content

The Phenomenal Product Manager book review



Six months ago, I felt like I needed to step back from my current activity. It was time for me to ask others what they felt were the basic and reference books about product management.

The result of the thread I initiated showed two books. One for a newbie and one as reference which receptively are:
After opening the delivery carton, I pulled out the books and held one in each hand. Their respected weight confirmed to me the one, I would read first.
After reading the third chapter of the Phenomenal Product Manager, I told myself: "My god this is another book about leadership". By reading this book, I was looking for product management knowledge but here I found something that described how to collaborate with people. But I continued up to the end, because it is well written and also because its end was not so far. Despite my disappointment, I was astonished by the quality of each tip and I was finding myself and my current situation in every chapter.

Finally, when I closed the book, I watched on last time its cover and read the title: The Phenomenal Product Manager : the product manager's guide to success, job satisfaction and career acceleration.
I read the entire book for a purpose for which it wasn't written and this book was given as the one for a newbie to read!

I went through the book a second time and my final review is:
This is a real pragmatic book to read when you start the activity of product manager, when you are feeling your have to step back.

The book is small, easy to read.
  • The first chapter lists the typical duties of product management and product marketing. Guess what: I went through this list with my marketing colleague and even thought the barrier is not so clear between our respective experience, we confirmed who is in charge of each part.
  • Chapters 3,4 and 5 are about your understanding of the relationships with the very different characters that are engineers, sales and executives.
  • The final ones proposed some good tips to improve yourself and your career. The final one is: "Have fun". I don't imagine performing the job can be done without fun.
Finally, this book shows me where I need to push myself a little more regarding my collaborators and on the other hand, reminds me how much I love this job.

I have been told smart people will move straight forward to become executive and do not remain in a product management role. Fair enough.
I realised while writing this post, how difficult this situation is, and now I need to understand if the product management can be combined responsibly with team management.
Thanks to Brian Lawley for this book.

I started to read the Product Managers's Desk Reference. I thought, it was only a reference book, but It seems to be more that that.

Sources :
The Phenomenal Product Manager: The Product Manager's Guide to Success by Brian Lawley,
The Product Manager's Desk Reference by Steven Haines.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Learning about Data Science?

This is the end of a beautiful summer, and also one of the warmer recorded in France. I’m continuing my journey in the product management world and today I’m living in the product marketing one too. I will blog about this later. During this first half of this year, I read several articles on big data and started to understand how important the data science discipline is. Being able to define a direction/goal to search, collecting the proper data, then using a collection of techniques to extract something others can’t see - it sounds like magic. Also, when I listened to the Udacity Linear Disgression podcast episode “Hunting the Higgs”, I understood people with these skills can be better at solving a problem than the domain experts themselves. Katie Malone explained that in a competition to solve a particle physics problem, the best results came from machine learning people. Then I read the article about Zenefit on the vision mobile website : “Zenefits is an insurance compan...
5 comments
Read more

What I’m learning about AI agents

My learning journey in the world of AI, updated for 2026 Originally published in March 2025. Updated in August 2026. I started this list because I kept seeing the same terms used in different ways. I needed a simple map to understand what each technology actually does, and where it may be useful when bringing AI into a product. AI changes so quickly that a learning journey can become dated in a few months. My first version of this article was an attempt to map the technologies around AI agents and to make sense of the growing number of tools. Since then, the topic has moved from interesting experiments to real business systems. This updated version keeps the original intention: learn in public, organise the landscape, and focus on what is useful in practice. What changed since 2025 In early 2025, most conversations were still about chatbots, prompt engineering and early agent frameworks. In 2026, the more useful question is no longer "which model is the best?" but ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Embracing Bluesky: A search for authentic dialogue beyond professional networks

LinkedIn is great for professional networking, but where can you have conversations with different people on a wider range of topics? I joined Twitter in 2008, later than many of my peers. Initially, it served as a platform for personal intellectual growth, offering pleasant exchanges focused primarily on computer science, human organisation, design and product management. But the growing awareness of climate issues changed everything. Anger became the dominant tone, and I found myself missing a more constructive environment. I don't want to spend my days in a world full of anger. In search of a new wave of self-improvement and more balanced discussions, I've made the move to: https://bsky.app/profile/lookingforanswers.me  I look forward to connecting with you there for more diverse and enriching conversations.
Post a Comment
Read more