Thread by @beckybowers

This year, I made the leap from two decades in newsrooms to working in product on the business side of a company. Lots of books helped along the way. These are the ones I found myself returning to again & again 🧵

First, “Cracking the PM Interview” helped me organize my news experience into product-relevant anecdotes that showed leadership, teamwork, successes, challenges & failures crackingthepminterview.com

I scribbled a literal grid in my Rocketbook with those categories as rows & three columns so I had plenty of examples. (And since I interviewed in the remote era, I didn’t even have to memorize it!)

Next, “Cracking the PM Career,“ which promises skills, frameworks & practices for product management. For a news nerd, that meant the vocabulary & structure to translate work as a reporter, editor & content strategist into formal product thinking crackingthepmcareer.com

I could both see where I’d been engaging in product work earlier in my career—often—and also how to speak across levels & departments

Once I got started, I reached for “The First 90 Days,” handed to me in 2018 as part of Dow Jones’s Ignite exec leadership program. Do I follow every step? Absolutely not. But the reminder to give yourself space to step back & listen at the start is crucial
amazon.com/First-90-Days-…

(@MattBoggie, excellent manager that he is, welcomed me to the @phillyinquirer with a letter outlining 30, 60 & 90 day goals that lined up beautifully with this approach)

Joining the @phillyinquirer product team meant tapping into a mission-driven community of practice. Early on, product manager @joshuaskaroff asked me if I’d read “Outcomes Over Output” senseandrespondpress.com/managing-outco…

It’s a tiny volume that packs a punch, and we soon invited author @jseiden to lead us through workshops on how we might use our org goals to inspire creative & measurable hypotheses to test in our daily work

The best thing about a focus on outcomes—changes in human behavior that drive results—is that it’s as useful for internal transformation as it is for driving products for our audiences. News orgs need big doses of both

One theme that emerged in our conversations with @jseiden was the need for strategy that helped us say “No.” That led me to “Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters” amazon.com/Good-Strategy-…

Key highlights: “Strategy is at least as much about what an organization does not do as it is about what it does” and “Good strategy and good organization lie in specializing on the right activities and imposing only the essential amount of coordination” ONLY THE ESSENTIAL AMOUNT

Another joy of plugging in at @phillyinquirer was asking other leaders what they lean on for inspiration. @pmdoucette pointed to “The Content Trap,” packed w/ media case studies and gems like, “Create to connect. Expand to preserve. Dare to not mimic.” thecontenttrap.com

But if you’re going to dare at all, you need a culture that supports risk. @jseiden shared another thin & mighty tome that’s been my go-to lately—“A Culture of Safety”
senseandrespondpress.com/culture-of-saf…

Building inclusive spaces & building innovative spaces requires many of the same blocks. @iamallaw focuses on the type of safety that allows all of us to think, collaborate and innovate

That’s heavy on my mind heading into 2022, when I’ll broaden my role as director of product to become vice president of product at @phillyinquirer, managing our teams of product managers, designers & agile practitioners

We’re focused on community, connection & engagement—what it means to serve Philadelphians. I’ll no doubt pick up a few more books on the way. (Who am I kidding—there's already a fresh pile on my desk.) What else should be on my list?