Announcing 2nd Edition!

In July of 2017, I published an e-book on the basics of product development. You did buy a copy, right? It was titled Principles of Project Planning, published to great fanfare. In all honesty, I was truly shocked at how well the book resonated with people. I was particularly humbled at knowing several companies bought the book and adopted its principles for their product development. The book was based on a lecture series I did at Lighthouse Labs, affectionately called The Sermon because I got a little preachy in it. The lecture was focused on approaching the building of a product, not just a pile of code. The lecture was intended to distill down my decades of experience of making my own mistakes, making mistakes with companies, and seeing others make mistakes, into some real world advice which would help the bootcamp students approach their mid-term and final projects.

As the world of technology has evolved, product management and development have evolved, and even as I have evolved, I look back on the content of the book and realize that it’s time for a refresh. Plus, I have collected a lot of feedback from happy readers of the book who have asked for, in a word, more. As another motivation, I like to hold myself accountable, and there’s no better way to commit to a project than to post publicly and have your audience start looking at their watch. So, I am officially announcing that my 2024 project is to do a 2nd edition of Principles of Project Planning. This will be a significant upgrade in the content. The core of The Sermon will still be there, but I will also refresh it for 2024 and expand out content that has been repeatedly requested:

• A more formalized Product Development Process
• Task Estimation methodology
• Dependency tracking (What tasks should be done first?)
• Task prioritization
• KYC considerations
• Better tips for evaluating third-party integrations (OAuth, Maps, Authentication providers, etc)

And because I want to put the pressure on myself, I am going to target releasing the 2nd edition on the 7th anniversary of the 1st Edition. Therefore, the new version will launch on July 1, 2024. I’veset up a newsletter so that you can get monthly updates on the book’s progress (subscribe below!), and even a sample chapter or two. I’ll also do a promo code for purchasing the book for anyone who subscribes to the newsletter.