By Josh Duncan
I wanted to start 2013 off by sharing a site that will help you with your product management work in 2013.
If you haven’t heard of it, Quora is a Q&A site with the goal is to be the place for answers. Note the tag line, “Quora connects you to everything you want to know about“.
I remember when Quora first came out, there was a tremendous amount of hype. For a breif period of time in 2010, everyone seemed to be talking about it and then it quickly faded away as the tech press moved on the next big thing.
I was orginally impressed with the number of high profile technology and startup leaders on the site that were answering questions but quickly lost interest. It wasn’t solving a need for me and their product updates (boards, points, etc) didn’t seem like anything I needed.
I am not sure how it happened, mostly likely a shared post on Twitter, but I am now hooked. At least once a week I scan the site looking to see the latest discussions and topics. More often than not, I find a great piece of advice that applies to what I am working on or a really good random story.
How can you use it?
First, there are some great answers on the site that will show up in your feed if you follow the Product Management and Product Marketing topics. Here are few recent questions as examples:
- What makes a great product manager at a tech startup?
- How is the (B2B or consumer) Product Management role different in these two situations: one, the product is relatively new or does not yet exist; two, the product has been on the market for a while and is under-performing?
- What are some must-read books for product managers?
- What is the point of having non-technical product managers in technology companies?
- How is being a Product Manager at a larger company (Google, Facebook) different from being a Product Manager at a start-up?
Second, you can follow areas to increase your domain knowledge and help you find new ideas. I follow Startups, Software-as-a-Service-SaaS, Business Models, Internet Advertising, and Enterprise Software just to name a few.
Finally, there are some really great stories that show up on Quora (often answered by the main participants). Here are a few examples so you can see what I mean:
- What are the best stories about people randomly meeting Steve Jobs?
- What was the true genesis of Craigslist?
- What are some things that airline pilots won’t tell you?
- How much did it cost AOL to distribute all those CDs back in the 1990s?
- How and why did Amazon get into the cloud computing business?
Hope you find this resource as useful as I have. All the best in 2013!
Josh
Tweet this: Want to be a better Product Manager in 2013? Start here: http://wp.me/pXBON-3HU #prodmgmt #innovation
Image Credit: Eleaf