Product Leadership ─ How Top Product Managers Launch Awesome Products and Build Successful Teams

In today’s fast moving world good product management is quickly becoming critical to maintaining a sustainable competitive advantage. Product Managers are thus becoming more central to company success and Product Management teams are growing fast yet the role is still ill-defined and product leadership is a challenge as product tends to have all the responsibility for success but no authority over the assets and resources needed to deliver it.

Why do some product managers succeed while other don't? Product design and development are made successful by strong product leadership. Organizations are using combinations of internal teams and agency partners to design and develop world-class products. Managing these assets and successfully navigating complex product roadmaps is no easy task. In fact it’s downright rare to find a product leader that can steward a product from concept to launch without some major hiccups. Through our work in the product design and development space we have come across several of these rare beasts. This book is an attempt to capture their approaches, styles, insights and techniques in a way that will provide a guidebook for other product managers trying to emulate their success.

The CEO and Co-Founder of Boston-Based User Experience Agency Fresh Tilled Soil, Richard Banfield wears the strategic hat around the office. He's worked his way up the web marketing food chain, starting with online ad sales at MultiChoice, Africa’s largest TV and Internet media business. Richard was in the thick of it during the heady dot-com years, founding Acceleration, an international e-marketing business headquartered in London. He has never met a whiteboard he didn't like.

Martin Eriksson is a product management professional with 20 years experience building leading online products, from small startups to global brands, such as Monster and The Financial Times. He is the founder of ProductTank, a global meetup for product people with over 10,000 members across fifty cities worldwide. He is also the co-founder of Mind The Product, which is both a top ten blog for product management and the world's largest product management and design conference, with annual events in San Francisco and London.