Who is as comfortable with tech support reps as with executives? Who knows both customers and non-customers? Who is confident in dealing with Finance, Sales, Marketing? That’s right. Product Management. If you’ve been a product manager—or want to be one—you’ll enjoy The Art of Product Management by Rich Mironov.

The book explores myriad topics of interest to product managers including roadmaps, the value of technical support, growing product managers into executives, understanding customers, supporting sales systematically, pricing and packaging.

Logically organized into articles in related topic areas, each article explores a single issue from all sides and offers recommendations. You could just start from the front and read each article, or find the topic related to today’s thorny issue and jump straight there.

Rich Mironov clearly has experience in technology companies because he touches on areas no professor or theorists ever touch, such as customer support, software licensing, and field testing. For example, here’s Mironov on the under-appreciated, under-staffed support group:

In my experience, making Support a strategic asset takes a combination of organizational planning, good tools, and product management support. Tech Support sounds like something your company should outsource but you may instead drive off your customers. Get Support the organizational and strategic help it needs.

Elsewhere, Mironov makes clear a point I have been making for years:

Product managers who don’t love their products should change product lines or companies—or careers.

Indeed! If you don’t love your product, you won’t do a good job. Product management isn’t factory work. Product management is both art and science. It’s templates and processes and meetings and product knowledge but it’s also intuition, an inquisitive nature, insight beyond customer words to customer problems, and a love for technical solutions. Mironov looks at each issue procedurally and philosophically, often turning the issue on its head.

Most of all, he invites product managers to think like executives instead of like gofers. Rich knows the best product managers are future CEOs; he provides tips on how to look at your product—and your product management—from a business point of view:

Executives are paid to make decisions: a productive day must include at least one decision. Meetings, emails, discussions, forecast reviews and brainstorming are secondary to making decisions that drive action. It’s easy to be distracted by the minutiae of business, or by analysis paralysis.

There aren’t many decent product management books. Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore is a good business strategy book and marketing primer; Inspired: How To Create Products Customers Love by Marty Cagan does a good job as an introduction to product management; of course, Tuned In by my colleagues at Pragmatic Marketing illustrates the incredible results that come from listening to your market. I’ll add The Art of Product Management by Rich Mironov to the product manager’s required reading lists.

Steve Johnson is a recognized thought-leader on the strategic role of product management and marketing. Broadly published and a frequent keynote speaker, Steve has been a Pragmatic Marketing instructor for more than 10 years and has personally trained thousands of product managers and hundreds of company senior executive teams on strategies for creating products people want to buy. Steve is the author of the Product Marketing blog. Contact Steve at sjohnson@pragmaticmarketing.com