Top 10 Product Management books that you must read in 2020
Validating the market-fit, understanding the users and discovering the right product with very short and low budget experiments is not any more a problem for just startups. Enterprises and any company need to embrace innovation as part of their culture and they cannot afford to spend months working on a solution to find out that nobody wants to use it. The problem is not the cost, but the time and lost opportunities. Companies need to iterate and create the right and meaningful product for people’s real problem just from the beginning.
This carefully selected list of 10 books will lead your journey to modern Product Management to distinguish from the rest and create products that users will not be willing to live without them.
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10) The Lean Product Playbook
How to Innovate with Minimum Viable Products and Rapid Customer Feedback By Dan Olsen
Understand why most products fail to achieve product-market fit. In this book you will learn how to achieve product-market fit, including the Product-Market Fit Pyramid. Dan explains his Lean Product Process, an iterative methodology for achieving product-market fit.
Most valuable: Lean process for product-market fit.
9) Lean UX
Designing Great Products with Agile Teams by Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden
Lean UX became the preferred approach to interaction design, tailor-made for today’s agile teams.
8) Testing Business Ideas
A Field Guide for Rapid Experimentation by David J. Bland and Alexander Osterwalder
It will help in the think phase to make short and cost less discovery and validation experiments for market fit even before running a design sprint. Explains how to create and test hypothesis.
Most Valuable: Discovery experiments and Validation experiments, Test cards, Learning cards.
7) Value Proposition Design
How to Create Products and Services Customers Want by Alexander Osterwalder
It will help in the idea to think phase to talk to people, identify their real problems and transform them into value proposition canvas and possible solutions before experiments or a design sprint. Also provides techniques to validate the proposition in the think phase.
Don’t fall in love with the solution, give a step back, talk to people and fall in love with the problem. More and appropriate solutions will emerge.
Most valuable: Value proposition canvas
6) The Lean Startup
In this book, Eric Ries tells us a lot of stories of startups that wanted to create new products for unknown types of users. They usually started with a basic idea and iterate with very short and cheap experiments in order to find people’s problems, learn from them and adapt the vision (pivot) until they find a group of potential customers that would pay for a given solution.
Most valuable: Framework to create something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty.
5) Lean Analytics
Use Data to Build a Better Startup Faster By Alistair Croll, Benjamin Yoskovitz
Lean Analytics steers you in the right direction of creating a product that people actually want. This approach is used by startup founder trying to disrupt an industry as well as enterprises working on new ideas or improving existing product.
This book has more than 30 case studies showing you how to validate an initial idea, find the right customers, decide what to build, how to monetize a business, and how to spread the word.
While the book Sprint focus a lot on talking and validating with real users, this is a great complement to understand Lean Startup with analytics fundamentals and a data-driven mindset.
Most valuable: Metrics that change your behavior. Right metric per product type and maturity stage.
4) Hooked
How to Build Habit-Forming Products by Nir Eyal & Ryan Hoover
Why do some products capture our attention while others not? What makes us love a product without noticing? Why we would not afford to lose certain product? What is the common pattern to how technologies hook us?
Nir Eyal answers these questions with his four-step process called Hook Model. In this book you will learn how to make your users depend on your product and need it rather than just use it as one solution.
3) Crossing the Chasm
Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers
By Geoffrey A. Moore
While the other books in this list focus a lot in making the right product for a specific type of users and problem in the beginning, this book will help you to make your product adopted massively.
2) Sprint
In this book Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky & Braden Kowitz tell us about the framework and activities that they were using and proving to be successful at google and many startups for years to test ideas and validate with real users. Sprints are being ran by many small and huge companies to embrace innovation and save time of working on non-valid ideas and focus on the right solutions for a problem and adjust them over and over to make them successful.
Most valuable: Strong framework and many techniques and activities to validate user experience.
1) Inspired (2nd edition)
How to create tech products customers love by Marty Cagan
And this is the #1 book for Product Managers. A must read for every Product Manager and Product Owner. In this book Marty Cagan describes Product teams, their structure, motivation and stories. He describes the difference between a IT team that builds what business say and a Product team that are empowered to make a meaningful product that users love.
Most valuable: The right and successful Product Manager mindset.
Conclusion
These are books I enjoyed and I hope these books bring more fun at work and better results! :)
Do you think any great book is missing here? Let me know!