A Journey’s Path is Paved by Books
You have a lot of questions. And you damn-well should — life is a series of questions that are sometimes answered. We are all on a journey seeking answers of one kind or another.
What’s great for us is that there are a lot of people out there smarter than you and I. And wow are we fortunate that these people and teams have documented their journey to their own future, which we can use to uncover some hints for ourselves.
When I started as a wee product manager, I found myself with more questions than I thought I would ever find answers (which led to a lot of anxiety and debilitating unhappiness). Which I later learned is quite common.
Most importantly, I have learned there are countless channels through which we can climb our way out of ambiguous dark holes 🕳 with a ladder fashioned from answers. I started by asking more questions in conversations with friends, connections and myself. This helped the anxiety and enabled me to focus on questions that would help me build myself up. Reading books initiates conversations with ourselves. 🤔
How Reading Unlocks Support Channels
There are many feedback channels where answers can be found: through conversation with mentors, meditation, writing, drawing, music, movies, walking and many more. The most foundational approach for me has by far been reading.
Why reading? Because reading informs us to levels that we can engage in other feedback channels more productively. Each book that we read has the ability to support and drive our conversations, meditation, and so on to new heights.
It’s okay to start from nowhere, that’s how we all get started. I have found that setting a few goals for my journey’s direction can help guide book selection, but the major lift occurs during and after the reading process. Want to know what books I have read to develop this life-saving ladder with? Summarized takeaways to below… 📬📦
What books should PMs read?
All of them. Well, not all… but there are so many books out there to help with “all aspects of product” — even though product itself is by no means narrowly defined.
Remember, start with questions! Here are some I have asked:
- Why is my life a mess, and what can I do about it?
- What is this entrepreneurship thing and how do you start companies?
- Help! How do you design products? I need to “UX,” right?
- Is there a process for this blazing train? Why am I always off the rails?
- How will I ever focus on my work? There is way too much to do and not enough time…
- How do I build a team and how do I build a network?
Have you ever asked yourself these questions? Here are some books I have read in the past year or so in search for answers:
- The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up — Marie Kondo
- The Hard Thing About Hard Things — Ben Horowitz
- Hooked — Nir Eyal
- High Output Management — Andy Grove
- Deep Work — Cal Newport
- Give and Take — Adam Grant
Let’s jump in…
The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up — Marie Kondo
Seeking answers to: Why is my life a mess, and what can I do about it?
What is this book about?
Marie Kondo’s well-known and frequently translated book adds process and frameworks in order to peel apart the mystery and ambiguity behind the destructive thought process: my apartment is a mess == my life is a mess. The concept that ‘tidying is just a tool and not a final destination’ is powerful and empowers us to extrapolate “tidying” into different walks of our life. 👕👚
Marie emphasizes categorization over regional organization. Identifying groups of things that are important overall, rather than pressuring ourselves to decide what is important in a specific place in our home.
Why do these concepts matter to me?
Choosing what to keep, rather than choosing what to get rid of is a fundamental approach to prioritization. As Simon Sinek famously says, “start with why.” For example: staring down into my cabinet of pots and pans, I tell myself: ‘I definitely need this pan, it’s the only one I can cook fish or eggs in without turning my meal into a ‘skillet.’” Which contrasts the approach of starting by making myself decide which pots and pans I should toss out.
One of Marie’s takeaways that personally resonates with me, is to ask yourself when grooming through droves of objects: ‘does this bring me joy?’ If the answer isn’t ‘yes,’ the decision is already made to discard the object.
How do I get there?
Start with “why?” It seems silly to consider why you need a place to live, but this step is important in getting started. We all need to… eat, sleep, keep above a minimum threshold of hygiene, etc. Consider the rooms in your apartment or house. Each room serves a defined purpose, write them out. Keep going: identify the goal or desired outcome of each room. Now, define the strategy you will use to accomplish your goal.
Example: I need my apartment so that I have a place to sleep…
Place: bedroom
Desired outcomes: a place to (a) sleep, (b) wake up and (c) get dressed
Strategy:
- Sleep: I will use a bed, which includes a sheet, a couple pillows, and a blanket.
- Wake up: I will use a side table, which keeps my charging phone in reach so that my alarm will wake me up (and so I can reach the snooze 🛌)
- Get Dressed: a dresser and a closet holding (minimum-)necessary clothes
PM Rating: 3.5 / 5
Shocking amount of concepts that tie to products and product teams. The book has tangible next steps, and always digging into the deeper meaning. A bit drawn out, but good concepts cover-to-cover.
The Hard Thing About Hard Things — Ben Horowitz
Seeking answer to: What is this entrepreneurship and how do you start companies?
What is this book about?
Seriously, this book is about building companies. 💪🏻 Ben’s personal stories and no-nonsense answers resonate with every entrepreneur facing challenges in grey areas — which is probably near 100% of entrepreneurs. The book is targeted at CEOs and how to be a good one.
Some of the most important concepts that resonated are around strategy and execution. In Ben’s own words:
- Strategy: the story and the strategy are the same thing — the output of all strategic work is the story
- Decision-making: the output of knowing what to do is the speed and quality of the CEO’s decisions
⚖️
Why do these concepts matter to me?
If you don’t have a strategy, you will have no possible way to achieve your desired outcomes. You might as well pack up and ship out if you don’t have a story leading you and your team. Famously, Steve Jobs hated slide decks saying that anyone who needs a deck doesn’t know what they are talking about. Tell your story 🎙
Another overarching theme is do your homework. No one is at as much risk as the CEO, and in one way or another, everything is the CEO’s fault. Have guiding principles about the kind of company you want to build. This book will help you identify the categories of sales, marketing, technology and the organization and management of the entire company.
As a PM, dig in and read this book to understand more so the perspectives and pain points of your executives and CEO. Hint: identify where you can alleviate those pain points. If you are an executive, Ben will help you create expectations of results, not just outputs.
How do I get there?
Ben will tell you himself, there is no single answer. PMs need to compartmentalize this book into its categories (it has many of them). Part of the value is in realizing the forest view of what it takes to run a software company, the other part is in the nitty-gritty trees view of those concepts.
Organize yourself, set a training plan — it’s a marathon.
PM Rating: 4/5
If you are in a startup and you haven’t read this book, it will deliver definition, perspective and scope like you couldn’t imagine.
Hooked — Nir Eyal
Seeking answers to: Help! How do you design products?
There I was, working with a team of engineers as “the product guy,” on a smaller team in a Chicago startup. No designer. The best product designer I had ever worked with at the time was indeed my CTO — the only person who ever did any design (to his defense, he’s darn good at design).
What is this book about?
Nir has done his homework! And by transitive, he has done ours as well. Hooked is a PMs best friend when it comes to thinking about how to approach designing habit forming products; those we feel the itch to use everyday. Nir has developed a concept called the Hook Model. Consisting of four phases, the Hook Model identified that all user interactions are initiated by a (1) Trigger, which then leads to users taking (2) Action and behaving in a certain wait in anticipation of a (3) Reward, and over countless interactions, our users build an (4) Investment in our products.
Why do these concepts matter to me?
If your product has users, or you want to have a product that has Users — than you are researching competitors, digging into user feedback, whiteboarding, or writing up some plans in Trello or JIRA and stand to benefit from viewing your app through Nir’s lens.
The entire book is highly actionable, with each chapter containing a “Do This Now” section — literally answering our question of “what should I do now?” The book guides us to peel apart different areas of usability and apply them to our products in a way that helps to organize the mind:
- “What habits does your business model require?”
- “What problem are users turning to your product to solve?”
- “What user behavior do you want to make into a user habit?”
Packed with real-world examples, Hooked makes the link between best-in-class habit forming apps like Instagram and Snapchat and strategies to drive the user behavior we want in our own apps. Put simply, if you want to learn how to get your users to use your app, and use more aspects of your app — read this book.
How do I get there?
Nir tells us exactly how. Consider where your users get started. What’s your funnel? What are your triggers? (Hint: there are internal and external triggers). What behavior to you want users to have? How are you rewarding users for their behaviors and are they accumulating into an investment that provides them a return? If you were a user, how would you like to see your time and energy reflected in an app? My personal favorite example: Stackoverflow.
Beware: You won’t be able to simply “do” the four phases Nir provides. Your product needs to provide actual value to users. My advice? Don’t convince yourself that your app has triggers that drives action…convince your users and provide yourself the data to see if they are in agreement.
PM Rating: 4.5/5
So many examples. So tangible. Takes the secrets out of building a habit forming product.
High Output Management — Andy Grove
Seeking answers to: Is there a process for this blazing train? Why am I always off the rails? train
As my team started interacting more and more we picked up a little steam, a benefit afforded by enduring agony together and building shared experiences. We started feeling rough and tough and went after more and more robust product plans (more to come on the issues encountered during this phase). We tripped and fell each and every time. Why? Let’s take a field trip to Andy’s breakfast factory to find out..
What is this book about?
Nothing to date has resonated with me in Product more than two of Andy’s core concepts (1) The Breakfast Factory and (2) The Black Box.
Why the hell is it called a breakfast factory? Because, like any other production process, every step of development can spoil the end result.
And something about a Black Box? Yes! Applying a black box approach helps us apply organization to any wicked process or complex product. Your product is (most likely) a black box, and framing this perspective will help you segment both processes and how you tell the story behind your product.
Why do these concepts matter to me?
Because, if you are like me, being organized is a priority yourself and your team; it’s something that can always be improved.
How do I get there?
Build your breakfast factory (process)
What steps need to be completed in order for a concept or plan to reach your users? My first take looked something like this:
(a) “realization” > (b) plan > © design > (d) development > (e) QA > (f) user contact.
Okay, very oversimplified, and terrifying out of context. Communication is king throughout the entire process. Have conversations and let everyone share their ideas at different phases.
From there, think through recent projects and consider what the limiting factor was in each project and why. From my perspective, a lot of the issues seemed to be in the plan. Eek that’s a harsh realization, I’m the guy helping the team to organize our plans.
I will get into this in another post, but identifying how you will measure product success is highly important here. Don’t just consider what problems your product has, think up a solution and then make a plan. This makes the team’s target an objective: create whatever was planned. When in reality, the team’s target needs to be the outcome: making whatever problem you were aiming for improve for your users. I’m interested to know, how does your team’s breakfast factory work?
Organize your black box (process +storytelling (sales))
Your breakfast factory above? It’s a black box. Every step in the process has leading indicators and trend indicators:
- Lead Indicators: give you a look inside your black box, showing you in advance what the future might look like. Is this project going where we need it to in order to accomplish the desired outcome?
- Trend Indicators: measure outcomes against time and expectations. Is our overall aim taking us in the right direction?
I also love the black box for storytelling, or selling, product. We sell to our teammates, we sell to our enterprise customers, and we sell to our users. We are all selling something.
Do your customers have problems? Great! Tell them to throw them right at you and that you will output a result that is, at minimum, satisfactory to them. How? Hey…that’s your secret sauce and why customers will send money your way.
But we aren’t full of crap, and we do know a great deal about the customers problem. So let’s cut some holes into the black box to show some key indicators identifying how we deliver results, without catching our customers up in our(magic) details. Focus on key customer problems, cut some holes there to illustrate your solution and be sure to include data!
PM Rating: 5/5
Every single product manager needs to read this book. Andy Grove is renowned as the greatest manager there ever was, with praise from many Silicon Valley executives — and has lived up to every bit of that in this book! Which by the way is timeless, written long before management books were even a thing…
Deep Work — Cal Newport
Seeking answers to: How will I ever focus on my work? There is way too much to do and not enough time…
What is this book about?
Deep Work is about building your value in the knowledge economy. We live in a competitive space at a highly competitive time. How long would it take for a smart, focused college grad to do what you do? How can you gain knowledge and skills that are not easily replicated?
Work deeply. Cal calls us out clear as day and (correctly) tells us that we are working in a distracted time. Facebook push notifications, outlook emails, meetings, Slack messages…let’s face it, we are distracted at great cost to our teams and to ourselves.
The book identifies a plethora of focus strategies to implement based on cognitive science and other leading research — with examples to back them up.
Why do the concepts matter to me?
We all face competition in a growing global economy and distractions are rampant. If you want to build your own skill set and stand out from others, start practicing deep work.
How do I get started?
What are your professional goals? What are key activities that are focused on enabling you to get there?
Make grand gestures. Clean of your entire desk, clean the window to let more light in. Buy a pricy candle and find a focus playlist on Spotify. Make effort and take pride in preparing your work space. This is your monastery where you will create your very best. Go out of your way to make it representative of the work you aim to do.
Work with ferocity. Cal cites Teddy Roosevelt’s work ethic during the time Teddy was a student at Harvard. He would spend time relaxing and writing, socializing, participating on the wrestling team and still managed to have rock-solid grades. How? He would work with such intense focus that he was able to accomplish a great deal in a very short amount of time.
How do you get started working ferociously? Take a block of work you might expect to take 6 hours and tell yourself it must be done in 1 hour. Impossible? Maybe. But give it a try. Layout what you need to do and start a timer. Push yourself to work uncomfortably. Afterward, identify what areas were particularly challenging and define “why.”
PM Rating: 5/5
Deep Work can be defined as a career changing book for many. Focusing on building a personal culture of getting things done with practical examples and instructions on how to get there.
Give and Take — Adam Grant
Seeking answers to: How do I build a team and how do I build a network?
What is this book about?
There are three different styles of reciprocity: givers, takers and matchers. Adam does fantastic work in Give and Take in helping us to recognize the power of doing something helpful for others. Research and real-world context help us see that givers are the people who make it to the top of their personal and professional circles, not takers.
Considering the intentions and goals of others certainly goes a long way. Identifying the middle area between being selfish and being wastefully selfless (he calls it “otherish”) is a great way to find opportunities to do things for others in ways that advance you to where you want to go, without looking for ‘trades.’ Adam organizes examples of how helping others is the best way to help ourselves reach the levels of success we hope to attain.
Why do these concepts matter to me?
Every team needs to see and understand this concept. Learning what your teammates would like to achieve is an important step towards achieving success for the whole team. You may have spent a great deal of time identifying how your product solves a customers problem, and even how that customer will measure your product’s success — but why are those concepts compelling to the engineers, designers, marketers and analysts on your team? (Hint: it’s not because they get paid)
Giving (time, attention, energy) to people on your team and in your network can push individuals to new heights, and they will, in turn, be able to give to others around them.
How do I get started?
Know what is important to you and where you would like to get to yourself. You’re likely to already have some tangible knowledge or skills in that areas — if not, start by building some up or giving from other backgrounds — give to teammates or connections who are in your circle and help them in accomplishing their own goals.
Attend networking events and spend time with others outside of work, listening to what matters to them. Find ways to give your time and attention where you can support them on their own journey.
PM Rating: 4/5
For me, Adam provides a new way of thinking. One that gives examples of preventing giver-burnout from wastefully giving in unproductive ways and aligning goals with others. Building this perspective is an investment with infinite return. Just keep giving productively.
We are all on a journey. Every journey has more questions than it does turns. Pave the path of your journey with books and initiate conversations with yourself and those around you. Reflect. And keep reading. 📚📖
That’s a wrap. No time to read? Try to prioritize reading. Think of what you would do to have answers to your questions. Or..listen to your books (thank you Audible). 🔈
Is this post helpful? If it not? Provide me some feedback and we will improve our journey together! And yes..there will be books. Kindly, Patrick.
