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> just decide your own roadmap and stick with it?

While this may sound like it's easier to manage it usually ends up with a product that does not solve the problem of the customer.

As a product manager solving problems of your user or customer must be the first priority. The only way to do this is getting closer to the customer.

I find teams shielded from customers via business teams use the best part of their product management and engineering skills (microservices included) to manage their business team and not the customers.

There is a constant grooming of the backlog with features and pressure to keep the engineers managed and busy.

Start measurning the value of each feature to your customers. Have short customer feedback cycles for planned features. Your backlog should reflect solutions that make sense to the customer.

The book "Escaping the build trap" talks about this. I highly recommend the book.

Good books on the subject talks against roadmaps and shifting to a value and goal based approach.

Here's a list of books I have compiled as a fairly fresh PM (just getting started with the reading). The intention with this list is to built up a good mental tool box to succeed in product management (coming from SW+chip design).

PM:

  - Inspired: How To Create Products Customers Love

  - The Lean Product Playbook: How to Innovate with Minimum Viable Products and Rapid Customer Feedback

  - Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value

  - What Customers Want: Using Outcome-Driven Innovation to Create Breakthrough Products and Service

  - Strategize: Product Strategy and Product Roadmap Practices for the Digital Age

Marketing:

  - Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers

  - Brand Identity Breakthrough: How to Craft Your Company's Unique Story to Make Your Products Irresistible

UX

  - Don't Make Me Think, Revisited: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability

  - The Design of Everyday Things: Revised and Expanded Edition

Organization / Business

  - Originals: How Non-conformists Change the World

  - Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit the Crisis Points That Challenge Every Company

  - Lovability: How to Build a Business That People Love and Be Happy Doing It

  - The Thank You Economy

Personal

  - Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery

  - TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking

  - Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World
  - How To Win Friends and Influence People

  - Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It

  - Thinking in Systems: A Primer

  - Thinking, Fast and Slow

Also, blogs:

  - Rich Mironov's Product Bytes
  - Aha! Blog
  - Inside Intercom
  - Mind the Product
  - PMHQ blog
  - Silicon Valley Product Group
  - The Accidental Product Manager
  - The Product Bistro
  - The Product Guy
  - The Secret Product Manager Handbook

Edit: Formatting

I would recommend Escaping the Build Trap - https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/escaping-the-build/9781...