80 Articles and Books that will Make you a Great Product Manager

From Horowitz to Christensen to Zhuo to Spolsky and more, a collection of the best articles and books from the best product leaders.

Must reads

• Good Product Manager/Bad Product Manager by bhorowitz of a16z
• The Innovator’s Dilemma and The Innovator’s Solution by Clayton Christensen (books, but worth it)
• How to get startup (and feature) ideas, Do things that don’t scale, and Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule by Paul Graham of YC
• Leading Cross Functional Teams, How to hire a product manager, and How to work with software engineers by Ken Norton Google PM
• Software Inventory by Joel Spolsky, StackOverflow/FogCreek CEO
• Get one thing right by Andy Dunn, Bonobos CEO

Books

Product-leaning business books:

• The Hard Thing about Hard Things by bhorowitz
• High Growth Handbook on everything from product to strategy to hiring for getting from 500 to 15,000+ people by Elad Gil
• Monetizing Innovation, a great read on packaging, pricing, and positioning products.
• The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon is the best business book on operating efficiency Brad Stone

Product design and strategy:

• Creative Selection, an inside look at Apple’s product design process.
• Creativity Inc., an inside look at how Pixar brings out creativity.
• The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman
• The Visual Display of Quantitative Information and Beautiful Evidence by Tufte

Management and practical PM skills:

• Managing Humans, by a former eng manager at Apple on the soft skills you need to manage and lead a software development team by rands
• Cracking the PM interview and Cracking the PM Career are great practical guides by Jackie Bavaro
• High Output Management by Andy Grove, the creator of OKRs and former Intel CEO
• Naked Statistics, an accessible primer to stats so you can understand and analyze experiment results
• On Writing, by Stephen King (of horror book fame)

What, exactly, is a product manager?

• Good Product Manager / Bad Product Manager by Ben Horowitz
• We Are Product Managers by Satya Patel, ex VP Product at Twitter
• Top 10 Product Leadership Lessons and Be a great product leader by Adam Nash, COO @ WealthFront / Ex-VP of PM at LinkedIn
• A product manager’s job (slides) by Josh Elman, Twitter/FB PM
• The DNA of product management by Hunter Walk, ex YouTube PM
• 10 Traits of Great PMs, Five Dangerous Myths, and Chief Question Officer (me)
• Good vs. Dead Group Product Manager by Khosla Ventures
• What Makes a Good PM, by Ed Ho, Ex staff engineer At Google
• What distinguishes the top 1% of PMs by Ian McAllister, GM at Amazon
• Traits great Internet product leaders share
• Why companies should have Product Editors
• Intercom on Product Management
• First Round Review’s overview of practical PM advice

Working with and leading teams

• How to work with designers and engineers by Julie Zhuo, Product design director at FB
• Amazon annual shareholder letter on decision making velocity and process, by Jeff Bezos
• The job of leadership by Ev Williams, Twitter/Medium CEO
• How to present designs by Julie Zhuo
• 5 hard questions to ask yourself during a conflict by Julie Zhuo
• Unlocking the power of stable teams by Chris Fry, Twitter
• “Be a Shit Umbrella” by Todd Jackson, Google/FB/Twitter/Dropbox
• The Art of Decision Making as a Product Manager by Sachin Rekhi
• Product/Eng Org design and Hiring PMs and Executive team dynamics by me

Planning, prioritizing, and roadmaps

• Babe Ruth and Feature Lists by Ken Norton
• Finding ideas and Tending the Spark by Julie Zhuo
• The best ways to prioritize a product and feature list by Ian McAllister
• Guide to product planning: three feature buckets by Adam Nash
• “Shipping beats perfection” and “It’s OK to be embarrassed about what your product doesn’t have” by Ben Kamens (Khan Academy VPE)
• The Tax of New by Julie Zhuo
• Product strategy means saying no from Intercom
• The one cost engineers and product managers don’t consider by Kris Gale, VP of Eng at Yammer
• Understanding how The Innovator’s Dilemma affects you by Mark Suster
• How to Avoid Delusional Thinking in Start-up Growth Strategy and why you have to believe in magic (aka building a product people love)
• Pandora’s Product Prioritization Process by Tom Conrad, Pandora CTO
• The next feature fallacy by Andrew Chen
• Manage your time like Google invests its resources, The lego block exercise, #now, #next, #later: Roadmaps without the Drudgery (me)

Product strategy and vision

• We don’t sell saddles here by Stewart Butterfield, Slack CEO. Sell the innovation, not the product.
• If your product is great, it doesn’t need to be good Paul Buccheit, Gmail creator / YC
• Mobile is eating the world, Messaging and mobile platforms, and app unbundling, search, and discovery by Benedict Evans
• E-commerce tipping points per sector, by Jeff Jordan
• All marketplaces are not created equal by and The Dangerous Seduction of the Lifetime Value (LTV) Formula Bill Gurley, Benchmark
• Complexity and Strategy by Terry Crowley, former MS Office lead
• Making Big, New Feature Bets in Mature Products (me)

Writing great (specs)

• Working Backwards by Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon
• Writing, briefly by Paul Graham
• Writing is Thinking by Steven Sinofsky
• The Specification is Dead; Long Live the Specification
• Bad managers talk, good managers write on how talking doesn’t scale.

Dealing with data

• The Agony and Ecstasy of Building with Data by Julie Zhuo
• How to Avoid Delusional Thinking in Start-up Growth Strategy by the HowAboutWe Founder
• “Growth Accounting” 5-part series from Social + Capital, looking at user/revenue growth, LTV, and depth.
• Design for continuous experimentation by Dan McKinley, Principal Engineer at Etsy (another related Etsy data science slidedeck)
• The only metric that matters by Josh Elman
• The ‘Oh, Shit!’ Moment When Growth Stops by Jeff Jordan
• How do users really hold mobile devices

Tactics

• The Right Way to Ask Users for Mobile Permissions
• TripAdvisor’s Unfair Email Marketing Advantage

Differences between companies

• Google by Larry Page and Sergey Brin
• Microsoft by Steven Sinofsky, former head of Windows
• Amazon by Ian McAllister
• Facebook

Want to work at Slack — in NYC? We are hiring talented engineers, product managers, and designers. Visit slack.com/jobs to find out more, or email me directly at nweiss @ slack-corp . com.