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Mind the Product

Product Management

An Anthropic report on Claude misuse, Intel restructuring and layoffs: This week’s news round-up

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Building Product Teams

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Minimum Viable Product

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Why great product managers think like therapists

When your product is not THE product by Emily Tate at #mtpcon London 2025

Spotify invests in non-English audiobooks, new product chief at Trainline: This week’s news round-up

What AI can’t—and shouldn’t—do for product managers

How and when to sunset features – Roni Ben Aharon (CPO, Craft.io, Booking.com, Wix)

Christian Bonilla is the founder of UserMuse, which connects product and UX teams with hard-to-find subjects for user testing and product feedback. He writes regularly for UserMuse and Fast Company.

Christian Bonilla

The product management job has no shortage of challenges, tactical or strategic. There are the ones you sign up for: validating problems in the market, identifying a differentiated value proposition, defining the roadmap, shepherding feature development. For most of us, those things are synonymous with the job itself.
Then there are the challenges we don’t necessarily sign up for but often end up being the hardest parts of the job. In Ben Horowitz’s book <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18176747-the-hard-thing-about-hard-things">The Hard thing about Hard Things</a>, he expanded at length on how the hardest parts of being a CEO for him had never been on his radar before: demoting loyal friends, hiring people who fit the company today but likely won’t tomorrow, and more.
I’ve found his point about running a company to be true of product management as well. The toughest parts of the job, the things that really make it challenging, often aren’t in the job description. Whether it’s not having enough time to do what you need, managing upward, or motivating people, I’ve found that most product managers cite something that doesn’t immediately come to mind as their number one obstacle. And now, we’ve got some survey data to prove it.
We’d love to hear about what your number one challenge is in our product manager survey. It takes about two minutes, and we’ll share the results with Mind the Product Readers in a separate post as soon as the results are in.
<a href="http://www.surveygizmo.com/s3/3052011/Product-Manager-Challenges-MtP">Take the Product Manager Survey</a>
Please note that this is not a Mind the Product survey. It&#8217;s part of the research for a new service, currently in development, which is aimed at helping product managers do their jobs better. We look forward to sharing those details in the near future.
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Product Management Characteristics

Taming your product gremlins: an antidote guide for product people by Keji Adedeji

The next 10 years in product management

Bring the JOY back to work by Ben Newell

From engineering to product management at Google

What makes for effective product management by Nikolaus Horn and Sebastian Ratcliffe

Walk a Mile in Their Shoes by Egan Cheung

In My Humble Opinion by Thor Mitchell

Mindset – Is Being a Product Manager the Worst Job? With Laurel Gray and Rosemary King

We can Build Better Things Together by Martin Eriksson

Be a Director, not a Manager by Fareed Mosavat

What’s the toughest part of your job?

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What’s the toughest part of your job?

Christian Bonilla

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