There are many books for Product Managers📚
And many book lists too.
Here’s my list. What I hope makes it different:
• Books with very high signal-to-noise ratio
• Books that'll 𝘥𝘪𝘳𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘭𝘺 enhance PM skills
• Books that are unlikely to be in typical 📚lists for PMs
👇🏾
July 2020 Product Management book recommendations:
1. Super Thinking
2. The War of Art
3. 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People
4. Alchemy
5. The Cartoon Guide to Statistics
6. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
Why?
1. Mental models for better decisions
2. PM is a creative job, need to break creative blocks
3. For improving design intuition
4. Role of psychology in building & mktg products
5. Refresher of stats concepts PMs need
6. IMO the most important book for PMs (read 2 or 3 times)
Will update this thread 1-2 times every month with more book recommendations.
More July 2020 book recommendations for product people:
1. Understanding Michael Porter
2. Practical Empathy
3. The Charisma Myth
4. 7 Powers
5. Getting Things Done
6. The Art of Thinking Clearly
Why?
1. The definitive, accessible guide to strategy
2. Empathy is essential for strong Product Sense
3. For effective & authentic communication
4. To understand & leverage 7 strategic powers
5. Useful for improving self-execution
6. To understand our own biases & think clearly
As a reminder, these recos are for Product Managers AND other folks who spend most of their time thinking about what products to build, how to build them & how to get adoption.
Here's what (I hope) makes these recos different:
Regarding "𝘥𝘪𝘳𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘭𝘺 enhancing PM skills", here's a reference product management skills map.
The book recos I'll post in this thread should help directly enhance the skills listed in the leaf nodes here, one-by-one.
If you're curious where the👆🏾skills map came from, you can check out this short thread on Product Management skills, from entry level PM to CPO.
That's all for today.
Next set of 📚 recos will be posted in August 🗓️
Happy reading!
Aug 2020 book recommendations for product people:
1. Are Your Lights On?
2. Peopleware
3. The Systems Bible
4. Games People Play
This month’s books are a nod to the Lindy Effect: these books are fairly old & we might reasonably expect them to stay relevant for a while longer
A couple of reference links.
The Lindy effect:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_eff…
How to choose your next book by @farnamstreet:
fs.blog/2013/08/choose…
Why?
1. Excellent principles for problem solving. Covers creative execution, a key part of High Agency
2. Insightful look at the human aspects of software dev. Part I is gold
3. Grok systems, errors & problem solving
4. Analyze interpersonal transactions, incl those at work
October 2020 book recommendations for product people:
1. smile.amazon.com/Adrenaline-Jun…
2. smile.amazon.com/Art-Game-Desig…
3. smile.amazon.com/Score-Takes-Ca…
4. smile.amazon.com/Good-Strategy-…
Why?
1. Collaboration patterns & anti-patterns, useful & relevant for every function & every level
2. An analysis of games, which are often the best-designed products one can find
3. Lots of useful lessons on empowerment & leadership
4. Practical guide for developing strategy
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