Product Management's Sacred Seven: The Skills Required to Crush Product Manager Interviews and be a World-Class PM (Fast Forward Your Product Career: The Two Books Required to Land Any PM Job)

Comprehensive and thoughtful, this is a worthwhile read, especially for folks new to Product Management.For experienced or well-read PMs, this book would more likely be a convenient way to refresh on key concepts. In other words, it may offer a few new insights but it likely won’t transform the way you think about Product Management. (Off the top of my head, some books that were gamechangers for me are Competing Against Luck, Don’t Make Me Think, Sprint, and Monetizing Innovation.)I’m rating the book 4 stars instead of 5 for two reasons.First, I wish a Kindle version of the book were available. According to one of the authors, Amazon’s incentive structure made it infeasible to offer a Kindle version at a fair price. So, while I don’t fault the authors for this gap, it still resulted in a slightly less convenient experience than getting a Kindle book on-demand.Second, it’s not clear to me how trustworthy the reviews are. In the conclusion of the book, the authors mention they’ve created a $79 interview-strategy ebook. They offer to give it for free, conditional upon writing an Amazon review.Specifically, they state: “If you share what you liked about Product Management’s Sacred Seven in an Amazon review, we’ll send you a free copy of this normally-$79 interview strategy ebook.”I spoke with one of the authors, and they plan to update the language of this offer in the next version of the book to minimize bias in reviews.I appreciate their responsiveness to my call out. At the same time, when I first purchased the book, I wish I had known that some of the reviews may have been biased.All in all, the book is useful and informative, and I would recommend it, especially for anyone considering a career in Product Management. For what it’s worth, I’ve been sufficiently impressed by the book that part of my motivation in writing this review is to receive a copy of the authors’ interview e-book.

I read these author's first book a while back based on a friend's recommendation that it was good for product management interview prep. That (Swipe to Unlock) was a good fun read and gave useful insight into how FAANG PMs think about technology and business strategy. However it wasn't written specifically for a PM audience but rather for anyone generally interested in technology.Sacred Seven, on the other hand, goes out of its way to essentially be the PM Bible, covering all the core subjects left out in Swipe to Unlock (e.g. data science, product design, growth hacking, UX, etc). This book combines actionable strategies and case studies with hints of theory to serve as an applied playbook for all PMs.As someone who is currently going through the PM recruiting process, I especially appreciated the gray boxes throughout the book with interview tips sprinkled in, such as how companies will often ask you to identify the most important metric for a company like Uber, and most candidates fail to realize that this is a test to see if you can call out that Uber is a two sided marketplace and weigh pros and cons of a driver side topline metric vs. rider side one. There are just so many useful nuggets like that in this book which have already helped me land PM offers from both Paypal and Oracle!

There are so many books you often hear you should read to hone your skills as a PM. Inspired, Lean Analytics, Predictably Irrational, Zero to One, Hacking Growth, Hooked and The Lean Product Playbook are just a few that comes to mind.This book felt as if someone took all the key product management insights and tactical strategies from all of those books and probably many more and combined them all into a single resource I expected this book to read similar to Cracking the PM interview or something like that, but the storytelling and applied examples make it fell much more similar to something like Sapiens or Freakonomics. Great read that I recommend to all PMs. I've worked at Microsoft/Amazon for three years and previously read all the books I listed above but still learned a ton of new things.

a lot of people who aspire to become a product manager, including myself, wonder exactly what breadth of knowledge it takes to be one. We hear a lot of common phrasing like knowing that PM's sit at the intersection of UX, business, and engineering, but that doesn't tell us at all to what degree and what principles within these topics help us on the job. This book covers that, and coming into interviews, not only am I knowledgeable about different topics related to product, but I now have several case studies that illustrate my understanding and fill in gaps that my experience doesn't specifically cover.

This book broke down the concepts in a way that was organized and manageable. It is a helpful resource to have all of this information compactly in one book, to evaluate which areas one would need to brush up on on their own after reading. It also contains lots of examples and brief case studies which helps reinforce the content discussed.

This is a great read for those hoping to dive deep into product management. As a young professional looking to transition into product management, this was a fascinating and easy to understand overview of what techniques and strategies good product managers use to launch and scale their product.I found this book to be heavy on frameworks, strategies, and high-level examples, but lighter on in-depth case studies. It doesn't get into esoteric details with step by step how to's of taking a product to market.I'd highly recommend this book to anyone who works or is looking to transition into product management. It's a great complimentary read to any Lean, Agile, or other framework you or your org might be using for product development / management. T

Overall, this book was a great read. The authors offered a lot of insight for a product manager's role for both the tech industry and for companies that offer physical products

The book is definitely lengthy but is written in a manner that makes it actually a pleasant and fast read.The authors clearly put in a lot of time and effort into explaining core concepts across a variety of different domains. I particularly liked the vast amount of case studies included. There are literally hundreds of case studies/examples.I understand why many are saying this is a review of topics. I for one learnt a large part of the content in college, but that being said I feel the case studies included really helped consolidate and further my understanding of these concepts.I read Swipe to Unlock as well but this is far better! Highly recommend.

Summary: Great book. Must be an addition to any ProdMgr's library (next to Swipe to Unlock). Well written and keeps a reader's interest throughout. It should be read in its entirety first and then as a reference guide for interviews and keeping fresh.Through interviews with PMs and their own experience, the three authors break down product management into 7 Disciplines.Product Design Highlights* Fundamentally breaks down design into building a new product (0 --> 1) and scaling an existing one (1 --> n)* Mentions the Kronos effect - Companies protect their cash cows through a variety of tactics (acquisition, etc). One of the more dangerous implementations of protection is companies ignoring research or building out disruptive technologies to their own cash cow. The authors cite a great example in Eastman Kodak which actually invented the digital camera in 1975. Investment in the idea was squashed by leadership.* Assumptions in Chapter 3 - The books rightfully points out that "If you’re going to be going successful, your assumptions have to be valid - so your first step has to be finding and validating your assumption.” They go on to mention "Assumptions are hard to dig from the back of your mind, so it helps to have a systematic way to catalog them”. While the authors rightfully acknowledge this as critical they provide a quick write-up of a potential way of systemically eliciting the assumptions and organizing them. I would have liked to see some more depth here. The link doesn’t seem to work well for the footnote (PD.CH.FN1). Many people including myself don’t even realize they are making assumptions. I would like to have seen more depth in the book or via footnote on this important topic.* MVP vs RAT vs MLP - The authors correctly mention that MVP is a flawed term and oft-debated terms. They propose the Riskiest Assumption Test (RAT). Great concept! Which Assumption is Riskiest and how can it be most simply tested? They go on to expound on another very useful concept, Minimum Likable Product (MLP). An MLP "is the simplest thing that will impress your users and make them stick around." The key with an MLP is to identify the "surface area" for the feature set.* User Personas - The authors provide some strong arguments against the overuse of user personas which I found both interesting and compelling.* User research - ask open-ended questions to ascertain a fuller picture. They give a great example and funny at the same time example from a Pink Panther movie. While Y/N or multiple choice questions are standard, advancement is possible when an investigator breaks away from dominant methods with the courage to opt for labor intensive ones.* Experience over products - consumers are not just purchasing a set of features or a product. They value a complete experience.* Randon Note - the authors provide some interesting examples of how American Airlines and Ford complimented their products. AA with Sabre and Ford with their financing arm. Provides food for thought.

The book was interesting to read and had a lot of product management information.

I liked the topics covered in this book, as it’s not the typical content on product management where everyone always starts (and stays). The topics are very well organized and described, the key messages are on point and they illustrate the concepts with lots of examples. The QR codes at the end of the chapter are the cherry on top. I recommend this book and I’m planning to buy their first one too.