It gives me great pleasure to announce that the ProdBOK Guide is now available! It represents three years worth of hard work by a wide swath of the product management community. Contributors include: academics, authors, analysts, bloggers, consultants, industry thought leaders, practitioners, and leading professionals from outside the product management community.
An incredible amount of work has gone into this effort and its a cornerstone that we can continuously build upon. Today the vocabulary and practice of product management is highly variable from one organization to another. The goal of the ProdBOK Guide is to explain WHAT product management is as well as the terms, process steps, and tools that all product managers should know to be successful.
The Guide is not intended to be prescriptive. But it is a valuable resource that you can rely upon in your daily practice to learn new things – I know I did as I led this effort – and expand both your knowledge and skills. I am sure that not everything in the approximately 350 page body of knowledge will be applicable to your organization or your day-to-day. There is a tremendous amount of knowledge contained between the front and back covers.
The book’s contents were supplied using an approach that is different from most BOK’s. We asked contributing writers to develop content that aligned with their areas of expertise. For instance, Roman Pichler and Greg Cohen contributed material on Scrum and Agile respectively. This is in many ways a best-of-breed BOK, drawing on those with the most knowledge of a particular aspect of product management to provide material that all of us can learn from.
Product management is an expansive field ranging from the creation of an idea to managing a product’s end-of-life. Each stage of the product management lifecycle requires a different mix of skills. Every product manager tends to be strong in some areas and weaker in others. The ProdBOK Guide can help you fill in the blanks as you face new challenges.
In the ProdBOK Guide‘s first week of publication the book has been selling off the shelves rapidly. We hope you will check it out and help us to increase the level of understanding about the profession of product management. All of us care deeply about the profession and want to see it thrive going into the future.
Once again I want to take a moment and thank all the dedicated professionals that contributed to this effort!
Editors Note: Many folks have been asking when the book will be available on Kindle. The answer is – very shortly. We hope to have it in ebook format in the next 7 to 10 days.