Top 5 books …for more advanced Product development

5 min readDec 13, 2021

A shoebox. Just a regular looking brown cardboard shoebox. It was 2013 and I was standing in one of the board rooms at Amazon’s London headquarters. I don’t mind admitting that back then, when I visited one of the tech giants it made me feel pretty important, special even. You know, puff your chest out special. I started to question just how special I was, however, when one of the Amazon tech team pulled out this shoebox. It had a spaghetti of wires coming out the back and looked like a child’s ill-advised experiment — fire hazard was written all over it. They told me how “this is going to be the future of television”, and that while it might not look like much yet, they planned on shrinking it down to the size of a USB thumb drive that would enable anyone’s regular TV to become “Smart”.

I was there representing the UK’s largest commercial broadcaster at the time, ITV, to provide industry feedback and, of course, to be primed (pun intended) for some early negotiations to include ITV’s connected TV app on the device for its launch. I didn’t know it at the time but what I was actually looking at was one of the early prototypes for what went on to become Amazon’s FireTV stick. Amazon sold over 100 million devices globally as part of the wider revolution for the television industry as mainstream viewing moved online. Not bad, for a shoebox.

I learned a lot about product development that day and witnessed what rapid prototyping has the potential to result in when you ask a variety of different stakeholders for feedback. Taking this sentiment, and building on my previous article ‘Top 5 books…for those getting started in Product’, I wanted to follow up with a few more suggestions that can help take your product development to the next level.

1) Sprint: How To Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days — Jake Knapp
Sprint is all about providing a framework to accelerate your discovery process. The faster you can learn what works and what users really think, the better. The hardest thing I see is making the mental leap or convincing your stakeholders to invest in a Discovery Sprint. Look at it backwards though, if you could increase your certainty on the success of a product before it launched in just five days, wouldn’t you? Turns out you don’t need a crystal ball, just a rapid prototype.
Authors site | Amazon

2) Lean Analytics — Alistair Croll and Benjamin Yoskovitz
I’ve always advocated for the nuance of being “Data-informed” rather than directly “Data-driven”. We can learn a lot from data; connecting big data in ever innovative ways continually breaks new ground in understanding human behaviours and patterns. Sometimes, though, people are very predictable and I recall implementing programme recommendations for ITV’s streaming service, where rather than over analyse we just recommended a half-hour comedy as the follow-on content to play in all scenarios. The data told us that whether you’ve just watched a half-hour comedy, or a full hour documentary, more often than not people want a low cognitive load, low investment choice. Hopefully it goes without saying but good product development and a deep understanding of capturing and analysing your experience and performance data is key. Lean Analytics emphasises these points, personally helping me to expand how I thought about analytics data in relation to my product development.
Authors site | Amazon

3) A/B Testing — Dan Siroker and Pete Koomen
This isn’t a deep data analysis book but it does put additional emphasis on the importance of good testing and the results that can be achieved when properly incorporated. It’s a lot easier to get started in this space than it was ten years ago, but it’s still not easy to do well or with sufficient frequency to have a meaningful impact. In the first instance, the focus needs to be on the workflow that enables the creation and productionisation of the tests. I routinely see teams struggling to get off the ground by trying to jump straight to the end, so excited to prove or disprove their hypothesis, it prevents them from ever building the frequency required to turn the dial on their success metrics. This book helped me better understand the role, frequency and scale of A/B tests in product development. It also provides some of the language to communicate with specialists in this space and understand how their roles can fit into a Product & Technology organisational design.
Authors site | Amazon

4) Nudge — Richard H Thaler
Behavioural psychology and choice architecture. Simple. Or perhaps not. Ok, so this one gets a tiny bit scary in places and you’ll never look at a supermarket the same way again, but it contains useful lessons that can be incorporated into everyday user experiences. There are good nudges. There are bad nudges. Try to focus on taking away concepts that support the former and avoid those dark UX patterns. No really, avoid dark UX patterns. Care for your users, treat them as loved ones, all the good things will flow from there and you’ll be just fine.
Amazon

5) Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products — Nir Eyal
Hooked is a nice follow on from the deeper human behaviour concepts explored in Nudge. It helps you explore what goes into creating sticky experiences using the “Hook Model”, a four-step process that, when embedded into products, subtly encourages customer behaviour. Key design patterns will change over time but our underlying need states as human beings are unlikely to. Tie this back to Simon Sinek’s “Start with Why” and maybe you’ll end up with the next Instagram or Facebook.
Authors site | Amazon

So, that’s my take. What’s your favourite book for taking product development to the next level?

Top 5 books …for more advanced Product development

Written by Rico Surridge