I expected more [answers] to be about roadmaps, prioritization, product strategy and user interviews. you have to be really fluent in both approaches to communication. Frustrating to see 10 books all written by men. Rather, it was mostly a combination of learning mindsets — the ability to put aside your own ego and current knowledge and be open to learning, be coachable and also [have] relentless self-development. The 8 Best Advertising Books. Psychology and behavior often take a backseat to sexy technical solutions and slick user interfaces. That’s great for product managers. In fact, we’ve gone through and completely revitalized the list since it was originally published three years ago. Thanks Kevin! Thanks, Charles. He also explains that it’s okay to take a wandering path through life and your career. Lencioni’s The Advantage, which is about organizational health, was another huge one for me. That’s why any healthy mental diet should require some books as the main course. Author Al Pittampalli offers a fresh take on office meetings. Finding out how leaders made the transition from manager to leader — that was a very interesting conversation. Surely, there’s at least one good book about product management by a woman. I hoped to give some guidance as to the types of day-to-day challenges they might encounter — especially around communication — but also a sense that, if those are the challenges they’re facing, that doesn’t mean that they’re not doing the real work of product management. Product management is often framed as a visionary role, where you’re creating roadmaps and doing lots of strategic work — beginning-to-end customer-need discovery, testing the customer need and then launching something that meets the customer need and iterating from there. It also delves into why pre-work is so crucial before handing things over to the implementation team, from both a strategic perspective as well as to ensure the team understands what they’re trying to build and why. You’ll learn how to work with technical teams to get your products built the right way and the basics of how to be a great product manager. A product manager’s job is to “facilitate an exchange of value between a company and its customers,” writes Melissa Perri in Escaping the Build Trap. Resonate: Present Visual Stories that Transform Audiences by Nancy Duarte If you think about roadmapping for product, one trap we fall into is, Here are all the things we want to build; let’s put them in a timeline. Selling Your Own Books? I think it completes the picture. That’s part of product management, but a lot of day-to-day work is much less glamorous, less strategic — more facilitative than visionary. I’ll have to look for your quote in Analytics at Work. Top Best Portfolio Management Books. Delivering Happiness – Tony Hsieh For this year’s list of product management books, we dug a little deeper in our selections. Because it was originally published more than a quarter-century ago, you won’t have to worry about any of its examples or data not holding up because they are skewed in favor of some temporary trend. A lot of product managers struggle with roadmaps; this is a great book for that. Why are we building this feature and what business value and customer value does that actually produce? offers some fantastic strategies for these as well. Even after you’ve read all of these books (and a bunch of other must-reads), helped build products with a loyal following, and grow your company into a thriving enterprise, you’re still not out of the woods. Here is a more traditional product management book. It includes how to get design and development to work in tandem and how to spot and address problems before becoming blockers. It forces you to ask yourself if you are stuck in research mode, waiting for more data. German: Buecher Produktmanagement, Open Product Management Workflow ™ And then everything after that is allowed to be in a much more fuzzy state. Marty focusses the Product Management aspect of how to create successful and great products. 3. ProductPlan has its own virtual bookshelf of free books and an ultimate guide to other resources for product professionals that are ready for your perusal. He provides a slew of different types of experiments you could do to reduce risk, and make sure that you’re actually building something that’s valuable. The 12 Best Adult Coloring Books. Here is another classic product management title, written by one of the most successful product managers in modern times. The “build trap” is a scary place companies get into when they focus more on how many products and features they’re shipping, and they stop thinking about why. You may find the details and the latest examples, reading this book. The Lean Startup – Eric Ries Sprint – Jake Knapp. What he really explains in this book is that when information is poorly communicated to leaders, they’re going to search for information that’s usually too deep in the weeds. Meanwhile, those who follow a more meandering route tend to be happier and more successful in the end. It’s about unlearning past behaviors that led to success so that you can move forward. Books are an important source of knowledge, even for jobs as hands-on as product management. We have nine best-selling Product Management books written by our founder, Brian Lawley, and our team of consultants and trainers. It talks about this idea that a product-market’s fit isn’t even enough; you really have to think about product-market-sales fit. What is product management? It also tells you about a lot of things you may observe in your company and understand why they’re broken. The Lean Product Playbook by Dan Olsen For instance, product leadership is not the same as management. Still, this book uses Basecamp’s own internal experiences to help others fix broken processes, bust down silos, and get valuable products out the door and into the hands of users. Build Better Products: A Modern Approach to Building Successful User-Centered Products by Laura Klein, #ProMa: Product Management Tools, Methods and Some Off-the-wall Ideas by @ddiinnxx. As a product manager. I haven’t read that one, I’ll have to check it out. Like Crossing the Chasm, we feel comfortable including this one, because it has stood the test of time. This new take on the adage that you shouldn’t build a solution that doesn’t address a problem posits that, by focusing on outcomes, the best products create behavior change versus supplementing existing bad or inefficient habits. Books. [These authors] are pushing for a different approach, one that truly challenges companies to question some of their own assumptions and orthodoxies. And that’s really the goal in product, right? And no matter how brilliant your product’s strategic vision, how well you’ve thought through the details of the execution, you will have a difficult time earning the buy-in and enthusiasm of these audiences if you present it in a flat, boring or convoluted way. What’s great about Chris Anderson’s Free is that the former WIRED editor-in-chief forces us to take a long, objective look at how we’re pricing our products. When I began the transition to becoming a Product Manager, I was very blessed to have a great mentor at our company, who gave me a reading list to start (and several others along the way). Product managers have no shortage of reading material. Books provide a unique opportunity to spend some quality time with a subject and escape the daily rat race. Waterfall describes the traditional, linear product development method: idea, prototype, testing, launch. After reading most of these books, you will be a Product Management master. Evidence shows that specializing too soon is usually a recipe for failure and burnouts, as it limits options and closes off those individuals from new possibilities when they peak. Thanks Shaun! Thanks. The Customer-Driven Culture explores that same thing. How does it fit into a company? Sometimes authors put the hardest of concepts in the simplest of words. 5. You make a good point; I’ll definitely take that into consideration in future recommendations. Several were ranked in the top 50 business books on Amazon.com the first day they were available. It’s an uphill battle against the familiar, the routine, complacency, and inertia. Or, just as frustrating, other successful companies employ a culture of remaining nimble and adapting to new technologies to stay competitive — but often make the mistake of adopting the wrong new technologies and losing because of that misstep. -Checklist Manifesto, Further afield from product management specifically: Product Design and Development — Karl Ulrich and Steven Eppinger. The stories are great, and so are the key-points summaries. There were a lot of books on product management from a day-to-day perspective, but I kept getting questions about how product works holistically. Unlike our peers in sales, development, finance, operations, and design, we need to know a little about a lot of things. John Cutler, a product manager at Amplitude and popular management writer, talks about doing things in smaller batches. We like the idea of building momentum, and flywheels tend to fit very nicely into that. Again, not only understanding team dynamics and having concrete examples of those dynamics, but also understanding how telling the stories of those team dynamics is the first step toward understanding and addressing them. They’re part of a product; it just might be a feature set that’s part of a much bigger thing, but you can use the same concepts. While our shortlist is designed to serve product managers, the books themselves aren’t necessarily advertised for such an audience. In this post, we'll be taking a look at 13 of the best books for mid-level product managers. But his way of seeing and writing is so compelling and so generous. Thanks for the list! Enjoy! This is especially true in the context of trying new things in innovation and technology. But perhaps the most crucial aspect of the book for our purposes is its section discussing research. You can’t get lost in them, and they don’t build up evidence, engaging anecdotes, and supporting facts to hammer home an overall thesis or philosophy—they’re simply too scant and fleeting by their very nature. Theoretically, product management is about building products that people love. Product Management Resources What do leaders do? Books simply reach us in a way no other media format can, due to the length of time we spend with them, and their ability to explore and explain things in greater detail. But in reality, we were all dealing with them and we didn’t have good answers. These different experiences and settings usually make us better in future roles, even though they may seem irrelevant. recommendation that getting stuck in research and data-analysis mode can be a genuine pitfall for product managers. However, products that stick identify the ideal and work on what behaviors must change to turn that into reality. For the most part, we’re not as focused as we should be on understanding why problems exist, getting down to first principles. Product Management Books. Steve- I agree; for me, Lean Startup is more readable than Four Steps. That’s horribly flawed. We see a lot of companies taking subject matter experts or people from different parts of the business and throwing them into the product manager role. But the point of product management is identifying and solving pain points while delivering additional value to current and new users. I notice you posted ten books by men. Hi Shaun, Thanks for sharing. If you have tips for the following collection you are welcome to contact us and tell us your personal recommendations of your books for product managers. You can’t say, “We’re customer-centric, and it turns out our customers want exactly the things that drive profits for our business!” That’s not how it works in the real world. at But for all the moving parts and the role’s unique hybrid of the facilitative, technical and creative, the job boils down to value. It works really well for personal prioritization of time, energy and effort, but it works exceptionally well in the bigger context as well. We include Crossing the Chasm here partly because its principles have stood the test of time. It might (statistically speaking), but as you’ll read throughout the great little book, many massively successful corporations have failed, and they bounced right back. The impetus behind the book was to collect the various mental models so that his kids could have access to them. He introduces some very high-threshold criteria that a manager should have to meet before being able to call a meeting. Hi! We spoke with LeMay, Perri and Richard Banfield — all authors of books about product management — to get their insights and recommendations for other books to check out. There are several good books about customer-centricity, but Customers Included is probably my favorite. But almost all were about executive communication and stakeholder management — how to communicate openly and transparently with people who have direct organizational authority. I really liked Crossing the Chasm. To overcome the increasing complexity of global competitive markets for new products it suggests solutions. You have to figure out, what’s the most important thing to do? So I wanted to write something that both provided tactical guidance for doing those less glamorous parts of the job and also reinforce to working product managers that, if you find yourself doing a lot of those less glamorous things, that doesn’t mean you’re a bad product manager. It shows how a lot of different companies can do roadmaps, and how to make a great roadmap. They have so many people and so much money that they can afford to spread people thin across multiple initiatives, and it takes so long to develop and ship work that they don’t realize they’re not producing value until it’s too late. Although this is one of the best books for product managers in the technology industry, specifically, we believe its principles are broad enough to offer value to a PM in any field. With hundreds—or maybe even one or two thousand employees—organizations… Read →, Marketplaces like Amazon and eBay have built such outstanding online shopping experiences that consumers now take these experiences for granted…. Lessons from 47 years of experience, including Hewlett-Packard, Apple, 75 products, and 11 startups later. I’ll definitely have to check that one out. And it also explains some bad practices that you do see in companies that frustrate a lot of product managers. And guess what? It focuses on how businesses can develop products that make that rare and challenging leap from cool novelties for a small group of early adopters to full-blown mass-market successes. Below you will find tips, recommendations and for free product management books. Mark Hurst was a little ahead of the curve with this kind of thinking, but a lot of people are now realizing that it’s not enough to just hand off a report and say, “Hey, this is what our customers want.” You have to get stakeholders in the room, experiencing the customer research as directly as possible. We stated in our Do the Work! 2. I’m looking for a product management process book to help build the product management processes within a physical B2B Industrial products market space where they currently don’t have one. Baby steps and simplicity is the key to bring them into a program that develops more rigor in the product introduction and product management side where they haven’t been exposed to previously. And what we’ve recognized is, Play Bigger has some really interesting insights into owning categorization. Here’s a fun and, at times, hilarious exploration of the many public failures of individuals, institutions, and businesses. And that doesn’t even count all the amazing podcasts, webinars, and video series out there. It’s a little less practical, or specifically about product management, but it tells you how strategy should be created and deployed. Marty Cagan, a longtime product executive for companies like eBay and HP, walks the reader through his hard-won insights about how to identify when you’ve got the right product and when you don’t. That idea fits nicely with the “one thing” concept — doing one thing, then connecting that. Blue Ocean Strategy is a great one; I’m a big fan of W. 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