Continuous Learning for Product Managers
The best Product Managers are those who have a #GrowthMindset. If you can stay hungry, curious, continuously learn, you will continue on your journey to product excellence. I have read books in several categories that help me become a better PM and a better product leader. They fall in the categories of Product Management, Design, Human centered design, Leadership, Behavioral science, growth hacking, inclusive design, etc., I could probably recommend a few hundred and it was hard to come up with the top few. Hence, I have tried to curate a small list of books that are more directly helpful for PMs.
Inspired: How to Create Product Customers Love by Marty Cagan - A complete guide to all aspects of product management. A great read for new and early PMs to dunk in every area of the function that you can dig deeper into. The book will make even more sense if you can read it and take any workshop run by Silicon Valley Product Group (SVPG). SVPG partners teaching you the concepts are so much more fun!
Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products by Marty Cagan and Chris Jones- Empowered is and should be a must read for any product leader. There are a lot of books to help Product Managers and a lot more on leadership but almost nothing has been written about how to help develop product leadership. Product Leadership is extremely important in this world where product management principles are being applied to any industry. Product leadership needs a balance between strong functional skills of a PM, strategic thinking of a strategist and leadership skills of great leaders. The book helps you think about all the ways you can help your teams build extraordinary products. The best thing I loved about the book is the philosophies, frameworks and techniques to help PMs thrive and grow. The practices will help PMs build great products.
Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon - An excellence reference for anybody interested in learning about Amazon’s core best practices.
The Lean Product Playbook: How to Innovate with Minimum Viable Products and Rapid Customer Feedback by Dan Olsen - A playbook for PMs to translate the principles of Lean Startup to product management.
Creative Confidence - Tom Kelley, David Kelley A simple, joyful read. Nobody can say they are not creative after reading this book. The book enables you to unleash their inner creativity to solve for problems you encounter. A great gift for your high school, college graduate or anybody who is beginning their journey in entrepreneurship
Continuous Discovery Habits: Discover Products that Create Customer Value and Business Value by Teresa Torres: It is written very well written book providing simple techniques that product teams can use to be customer centric and to unleash innovation that truly solves for opportunities. It throws light on a lot of bad habits PMs pick up in their work. It was great to see a lot of the Discovery practices I have learnt, followed and taught over the years in a book.
Escaping the build trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value by Melissa Perri Another must read for any PM at any level. Melissa throws light on how many PMs, teams and companies end up focusing on outputs vs outcomes. The book can help you keep an eye out on how to avoid falling into a build trap and stay on course to build great products that deliver real value for your customers and your business.
Lean Impact How to Innovate for Radically Greater Social Good by Ann Mei Chang Love the fact that Ann Mei Chang brought lean best practices to the world of social impact.
Building for Everyone: Expand Your Market with Design Practices From Google’s Product Inclusion Team by Annie Jean-Baptiste If you are looking to learn how to build products that are more inclusive, equitable and just, then this is a great resource for you. Annie brings some of the best practices she and her team have developed at Google to all of you. She also have specific recommendations on how you might be able to bring about this change within your company.
Mismatch How Inclusion Shapes Design by Kat Holmes Inclusion is not only the right thing to do but it is also a smart thing to do. When PMs and companies can build products that are inclusive, they unlock innovation. Kat Holmes is one of the first authors who wrote about this topic and a solid read for PMs and product teams to widen their aperture to build inclusive products.
The Design of Everyday Things - Don Norman A lot of the concepts in this book might not be new to those who are familiar with human centered design or work in the tech innovation space. This book elaborates why product design and user needs matter. The book is also filled with examples of good designs and the not so good ones.
Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days - Jake Knapp A step up step and practical guide for how to test ideas and validate quickly - all within a week. I have followed the book and ran several design sprints with some really eye opening learnings and stellar customer centric solutions. I have been able to best leverage the sprints by applying this framework to the solutioning part of design thinking.
Hooked: How to Build Habit Forming Products - Nir Eyal In this book, Nir Eyal introduced the “hooked” model that helps you create products that are habit forming. While this is great for product managers and companies, we also have to be cautious in using it so that we don’t cause harm. Using the model to create habit forming products even for improving your health could be detrimental. To counteract this book, Nir also wrote another book called Indistractable.
Radical Focus: Achieving Your Most Important Goals with Objectives and Key Results by Christina Wodtke A fun quick read that helps you understand OKRs and implement them in a way that actually works for your teams because simply setting OKRs is not enough. Operationalizing them is really important and a lot of teams miss that.
Measure What Matters: OKRs - The Simple Idea That Drives 10x Growth by John Doerr A thorough write up on the theory of OKRs - Outcomes and Key Results. However it leaves a lot of open questions around how to implement them but Radical Focus helps with that.
The Amazon Way: 14 Leadership Principles Behind the World’s Most Disruptive Company by John Rossman Another simple but captivating read about the 14 leadership principles of Amazon and how they translate into actions. Some really great examples.
Groundwork: Get better at Making Better Products by Vidya Dinamani and Heather Samarin There are way too many concepts and frameworks out there for PMs. This is a quick read that simplifies a lot of those concepts specially for early to mid career PMs. Vidya and Heather also run a company called Product Rebels that can help your teams learn these concepts and implement best practices.
I am sure there are other wonderful books out there that I might have missed or might not know about. Please do share your favorites and I would love to add them to my learning list in 2022.