Any other great books for product managers we forgot? The book continues by explaining how Basecamp makes bets on these projects and then empowers the teams to deliver them autonomously. at Sprint – Jake Knapp. These three together are my collective favorite in terms of thinking through customer-centricity. German: Buecher Produktmanagement, Open Product Management Workflow ™ Here are a couple to start: 1. I see this a lot with teams I coach, where people get frustrated because they feel that other people, executives in particular, aren’t grasping their ideas. Frustrating to see 10 books all written by men. Product Management Books. Product managers build products. 3. Velocity is prized, new features mean more press releases, landing pages, and outbound campaigns hunting for additional users and the revenue they bring (or may represent to investors). -Team of Rivals (The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln). Technologies change, whereas mental modeling and understanding how people think is much more interesting. He introduces some very high-threshold criteria that a manager should have to meet before being able to call a meeting. Are there any Cliff Notes / Executive Summary of these books? There are several good books about customer-centricity, but Customers Included is probably my favorite. I notice you posted ten books by men. We don’t take a big step back and ask ourselves “why” we’re making them too often. For this reason, we recommend Analytics at Work: Smarter Decisions, Better Results, by Thomas Davenport and Jeanne Harris. Small startups have to be focused. Then it becomes a race to achieve that business value faster, usually to pay investors. What would your recommendation be for a book focusing on *industrial* product management? Then let it go from there. 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. I don’t know of any books specifically focused on industrial product management, but many of the principles in the books above apply to a wide range of product people. 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. Lessons from 47 years of experience, including Hewlett-Packard, Apple, 75 products, and 11 startups later. Our wide range sets us apart and makes us tricky to hire. 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. It is simply a great explanation of how a successful product will make its way through a standard bell curve — from early adopters to the early majority, to the late majority, and finally to the laggards — and how to structure your products to follow this successful path. It’s nice to see some unusual books in your list! Product lifecycle management or PLM books have influenced people belonging to various stages of the organization including managers. I’m regularly asked for product manager book recommendations. 2. By going through such books in detail, it is possible to learn various techniques in handling numerous features of the products in an extensive manner. I really like books that take me to the place where I can universally apply the mental model approach. Product management is a key organizational process for high tech B2B companies involving more or less all parts of the company. Tech exec and behavioral scientist Matt Wallaert’s book tries to get companies to kick the habit of coming up with ideas, falling in love with them, and then forcing them on the market via expensive marketing campaigns and aggressive sales tactics. Meanwhile, those who follow a more meandering route tend to be happier and more successful in the end. There are some great ideas here for product managers, in terms of finding other ways to communicate updates or other important information without having to assemble a large group of people in a room (or a Google Hangout session) for an extended period. So if you create the category, name it and participate in it, you’ve got a much better chance of winning than if you play in somebody else’s category, or you’re a pretender to that throne. It talks about how we have to be reflective and understand that the way that we did things in the past and the way that we got here are not necessarily what we need to take with us going forward. Resonate: Present Visual Stories that Transform Audiences by Nancy Duarte Some of these books explain how technology has changed the strategy and tactics of marketing, while others are timeless observations about human nature and group behavior. There’s sometimes a reluctance to expose one’s own inadequacies, so people don’t ask those questions. Playbook is great for looking at tactical approaches and exercises that teams can do together to put that kind of customer-centricity in the practice. There are lots of excellent books about product management, but these are the ones I'd consider essential to any PM’s bookshelf. It’s one of our best product management books because it forces you to acknowledge that your product is never finished. Basecamp’s Ryan Singer has made a career out of increasing productivity. Psychology and behavior often take a backseat to sexy technical solutions and slick user interfaces. You can be a competent, good manager, but that doesn’t mean you’re a good leader, and vice versa. 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. Make sure you don’t miss any future titles by signing up for our free newsletter. It’s about leadership and team dynamics, but I think there’s a sneaky, powerful lesson in this book about storytelling. Why are we shipping this feature? Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss And then the companies themselves are trying to adopt new technologies and rapid iterations and agile and all that wonderful stuff. That’s a good point; do you have any suggestions of great books by female authors for PMs that we could add to our list? Your business (no matter how successful) can never slow down and rest on its laurels. I haven’t read that one, I’ll have to check it out. Do the Work! The idea — and it’s a powerful one — is that you bring stakeholders directly into customer research. For this year’s list of product management books, we dug a little deeper in our selections. 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. – The Effective Engineer, Value Proposition Design: How to Create Products and Services Customers Want by Alexander Osterwalder, “Well Designed: How to use empathy to create products people love” by Jon Kolko, I’m a big Jon Kolko fan; this one definitely belongs on the list. I started interviews by asking, “What’s one story from your work that you wish somebody could have told you when you started out?”. And with good reason. 4. It has so many specific examples of what it means to be customer-centric. Do you have any recommendations of good PM resources written by women? It dissects it into manageable pieces. We like the idea of building momentum, and flywheels tend to fit very nicely into that. Let us know if you have any suggestions for additions to this list! 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. Free also offers one of the earliest explorations of the freemium model. While quite valuable and scratching that itch for bite-sized information and opinions, they all lack the space to dive deep into a particular subject. There are many blog posts, articles, and social media threads to get lost in, covering every topic imaginable. 5. 2. Selling Your Own Books? You make a good point; I’ll definitely take that into consideration in future recommendations. I expected more [answers] to be about roadmaps, prioritization, product strategy and user interviews. 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