‹ The Founder Bookshelf

The Product Manager's Survival Guide cover

The Product Manager's Survival Guide

Everything You Need to Know to Succeed as a Product Manager

A field manual for surviving and thriving in your product role.

by Steven Haines

Steven Haines offers a practical, no-nonsense guide to the realities of the product manager job, from understanding the role to working across functions. It covers establishing credibility, managing stakeholders, and building the skills needed to lead products through their lifecycle. The book aims to demystify what product managers actually do day to day.

Founders often play product manager in early-stage companies without any formal training, and this book lays out the core responsibilities clearly. It helps a founder understand how to coordinate engineering, sales, and marketing around a product roadmap. The survival framing maps well to the chaos of an early startup.

Where to get it