The Product Managers Book Club: 7 books that helped me on my PM journey
Whenever I meet a new product manager or person working in product-related fields, I ask them: “what are you reading these days?” This question was incredibly useful when I was first learning about product management as it gave me a very quick way to get up-to-speed on the core concepts of the discipline.
Now, whenever I meet someone who is interested in being a PM or making a career transition to the field, I always recommend some combo of these books. I hope you get as much out of them as I did.
Please let me know on Twitter (@dunmore_park) what I should be reading next!
FYI — None of these are affiliate links or anything like that. They’re just books that I’ve found helpful in my own career.
INSPIRED: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love
By Marty Cagan, Silicon Valley Product Group
Andrew’s Note - This is pretty much the starter PM Bible right now. It’s the right combo of rah rah inspiration and actual insight into the field. Pretty much the perfect place to start for many PMs.
How do today’s most successful tech companies — Amazon, Google, Facebook, Netflix, Tesla — design, develop, and deploy the products that have earned the love of literally billions of people around the world?
Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value
By Melissa Perri
Andrew’s Note - This book is written almost like a narrative where Perri helps a hypothetical company escape the build trap. So many situations will sound familiar if you’ve worked in tech for any amount of time. Very helpful for showing how product thinking can transform a company.
To stay competitive in today’s market, organizations need to adopt a culture of customer-centric practices that focus on outcomes rather than outputs. Companies that live and die by outputs often fall into the “build trap,” cranking out features to meet their schedule rather than the customer’s needs.
Product-Led Growth: How to Build a Product That Sells Itself
By Wes Bush
Andrew’s Note - The better your product solves the real problem your users are trying to solve, the easier growth will be. A great framework for start-ups to think about.
But what does it mean to be “product-led”? How do you know if a product-led growth strategy makes sense for your business? And most importantly, how do you execute it?
Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products
By Nir Eyal
Andrew’s Note - Great insight into how psychology plays a big role in how sticky your product is.
Why do some products capture widespread attention while others flop? What makes us engage with certain products out of sheer habit? Is there a pattern underlying how technologies hook us?
Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days
By Jake Knapp
Andrew’s Note - If you’re new to being a PM, a overview of the concepts of working in “Sprints” will be a useful one.
Entrepreneurs and leaders face big questions every day: What’s the most important place to focus your effort, and how do you start? What will your idea look like in real life? How many meetings and discussions does it take before you can be sure you have the right solution?
Now there’s a surefire way to answer these important questions: the sprint. Designer Jake Knapp created the five-day process at Google, where sprints were used on everything from Google Search to Google X. He joined Braden Kowitz and John Zeratsky at Google Ventures, and together they have completed more than a hundred sprints with companies in mobile, e-commerce, healthcare, finance, and more.
Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth
By Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares
Andrew’s note - Especially in smaller start-ups, this will give your a great framework on how to market your product or work with the marketers on your team.
Most startups don’t fail because they can’t build a product. Most startups fail because they can’t get traction.
Startup advice tends to be a lot of platitudes repackaged with new buzzwords, but Traction is something else entirely. As Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares learned from their own experiences, building a successful company is hard. For every startup that grows to the point where it can go public or be profitably acquired, hundreds of others sputter and die.
Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
By David Epstein
Andrew’s note - While it’s not really about product management, it is a great read to give you confidence in being a generalist. PMs tend to have to juggle many different skill sets and as you work with specialists, imposter syndrome can creep in. This book will help you see the value in bringing a generalist skill set to a team of specialists.
Plenty of experts argue that anyone who wants to develop a skill, play an instrument, or lead their field should start early, focus intensely, and rack up as many hours of deliberate practice as possible. If you dabble or delay, you’ll never catch up to the people who got a head start. But a closer look at research on the world’s top performers, from professional athletes to Nobel laureates, shows that early specialization is the exception, not the rule.