My “Product Management” Reading List — 2019

40+ summaries of books, articles, and talks about product management to help you learn and improve

For all of 2019, whenever I read a book or article valuable enough for me to take notes from it, I’ve added it to this post. It serves as my reference list and complements my actual note-taking system where I record the knowledge I’ve gained.

I’ve compiled similar lists in 2017 and 2018. More than 800 people have recommended them. Here you have the 2019 edition (note: you can find all previous lists combined here).

The list is organized around PM skills:

You can find the whole reading list below — within the broader categories, the resources are in no particular order.

Product Management

Topics around product management best practices, strategy, customer discovery, execution, user experience, marketing, data analysis, and product artefacts like roadmaps.

Best practices in product management

‘Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love’ by Marty Cagan (368 pages book). A masterclass in product management, especially product discovery. You can find my full summary of this classic product management book here.

Strategy & Product vision

‘Badass: Making Users Awesome’ by Kathy Sierra (294 pages book). Understand that users don’t want your product: they want to improve their lives. This book is awesome. You can find my full summary of the book here.

‘The PMARCA guide to startups - part 4: The only thing that matters’ by Marc Andreessen (9 min read). How you can tell if your product has reached product-market-fit or not.

‘How Superhuman Built an Engine to Find Product/Market Fit’ by Rahul Vohra (20 min read). How to measure product-market fit. Ask users “how would you feel if you could no longer use the product?” and measure the % who answer “very disappointed.” If you get more than 40% saying “very disappointed”, you have product-market fit. The article also gives an actionable survey template and tells you how to segment users to best action their feedback.

‘Articulating Your Product Design Principles’ by Sachin Rekhi (10 min read). You need to define your company’s core, all the way from your vision to your values. It’s not enough to have an ambitious vision because unless that vision translates into how you manage your company on a day-to-day basis, that vision will never be realized. One of the best ways for product teams to action this is by articulating your products design principles. The principles are a collection of fundamental beliefs that serve as guideposts for making product design decisions. They should be unique and actionable enough to help you weigh product trade-offs on a daily basis.

‘The red flags and magic numbers that investors look for in your startup’s metrics — 80 slide deck included!’ by Andrew Chen (80 slides with explanations). Andrew Chen’s approach to growth summarized with awesome explanations. When you talk about growth, you should focus about loops (repeatable) as opposed to campaigns or hacks (one-off). The two main loops we care about are acquisition (new people coming in) and engagement (reactivation, engaged users, and churners).

Customer discovery

‘How People Perceive Value’ by Itamar Gilad (12 min read). Value is subjective, relative to cost , relative to alternatives, and contextual. Value assignment is often fast and intuitive. Value changes over the lifetime of using the product . Value can be broken into on three main components: functional, social, and self / emotional / psychological.

‘Know the Two — Very — Different Interpretations of Jobs to be Done’ by Alan Klement (19 min read). Power’s hierarchy of goals: Your ideal self is a synthesis of various Principles or “Be” goals. For example, you think of yourself as a particular type of parent or friend and having a particular set of personal freedoms. These Be goals are what motivate you to choose and carry out one or more Programs or “Do” goals. These Do goals are then fulfilled by Sequences or Motor control goals. The article suggests that JTBD is about making progress, not about carrying out activities like many JTBD articles suggest. Very insightful (and opinionated) read.

‘A Three-Step Framework For Solving Problems’ by Lenny Rachitsky (11 min read). Useful examples of problem statements done well, and done poorly. A good one: Lyft drivers are cancelling rides too often because the passengers are too far away. A bad one: Users are bouncing from the signup flow. [Issue: Not focused enough, and missing a hypothesis of the why. Go one level deeper.]

Technology & Execution

‘SLOs, SLIs, SLAs, oh my — CRE life lessons’ by AJ Ross, Adrian Hilton and Dave Rensin (8 min read). If you want to know how reliable your service is, you must be able to measure the rates of successful and unsuccessful queries; these will form the basis of your SLIs. The more reliable the service, the more it costs to operate. Define the lowest level of reliability that you can get away with, and state that as your Service Level Objective (SLO). If you’re charging your customers money you’ll probably need an SLA, and it should be a little bit looser than your SLO.

‘Slaying the API beast — for Product Managers — ProductTank Singapore’ by Ridzwan Aminuddin (34 min talk). Solid primer on APIs and how they work.

User experience design

‘NPS is a waste of time. Use these metrics instead’ by Jeff Gothelf (4 min read). Instead of asking your customers some variation of, “Are you satisfied enough right now to do something in the future we find valuable?” ask them nothing. Instead, ask yourself: “What do satisfied customers do in our product?”, and measure that.

‘3 ways good design makes you happy’ by Don Norman (13 min talk). Pleasant things work better. When you design a product, you should consider the visceral, behavioral, and reflective aspects.

Data analysis

‘Measuring Product Health’ by Sequoia (19 min read). Great collection of KPI’s and different ways to measure the health of your product / features.

‘Product engagement: the most important metric you aren’t tracking for your SaaS business’ by Derek Skaletsky (8 min read). How to monitor engagement. Instead of trying to find one metric to rule them all, you list the activities that users perform in your product, assign weights based on their importance, and then calculate an overall engagement score per user.

Communication

Best practices for communication, negotiations, effective writing and how to craft good presentations.

Basics

‘The Pyramid Principle’ by Barbara Minto (177 pages book). How to better structure everything you write and say. It’s required reading at McKinsey for a reason. An incredible book that changed my approach to business writing. You can find my full summary of the book here.

‘How Leaders Can Get Honest, Productive Feedback’ by Jennifer Porter (6 min read). Don’t just ask “What feedback do you have?”. Be more specific and ask about specific events, worrisome patterns ( “How often do I interrupt people in meetings?”), personal impact (“How did it feel to you when I sent that email?”), or recommendations (“What can I do to help build my relationship with Priya?”).

Writing

‘Writing that works’ by Kenneth Roman and Joel Raphaelson (193 pages book). For knowing how to choose the right words. You can find my full summary of the book here.

‘Using 6 Page and 2 Page Documents To Make Organizational Decisions’ by Ian Nowland (7 min read). In your writing and in general, avoid subjective and weasel words. These are words and phrases such as “researchers believe” and “most people think” which make arguments appear specific or meaningful, even though these terms are at best ambiguous and vague.

‘How to Write Email with Military Precision’ by Kabir Sehgal (5 min read). Start your emails with a one-sentence summary of what they’re about. The author calls it the “bottom line”. After that, you can give the required background information, ideally in bullet points. Use keywords like INFO or ACTION in the subject line to make your email clear even before the recipient opens it.

Presenting

‘Resonate’ by Nancy Duarte (272 pages book). The must-read book for any presentation you’ll ever give. Amazing read. You can find my full summary of the book here.

‘TED Talks’ by Chris Anderson (288 pages book). The perfect companion to Resonate. It helped me improve the talks & presentations I give. You can find my full summary of the book here.

‘How I Create Talks’ by Michele Titolo (8 min read). Step-by-step and iterative process to approach the task of giving a talk. 1) Define the big idea in 1 sentence. 2) Write a teaser with background, problem statement, and audience gains in 4–6 sentences. 3) Write a full outline with all major ideas. 4) Break the outline into slides, without designing or adding detail. 5) Design your slides. 6) Practice and make sure your timing is right.

‘Speak like a leader’ by Simon Lancaster (19 min talk). Use rhetoric techniques to make a more compelling case. Three breathless / repeating sentences (tricolon) to be more convincing. Three sentences in which the opening clause is repeated to communicate passion and emotion. Metaphors to lead people towards things or make them recoil. Exaggeration to make a point.

Leadership & Collaboration

Topics around leadership, teamwork, stakeholder management, and developing others.

Leadership

‘Mastering Leadership: An Integrated Framework for Breakthrough Performance and Extraordinary Business Results’ by R. Anderson & W. Adams (384 pages book). The best framework I’ve come across so far to develop your leadership skills. You can find my full summary of the book here.

‘Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win’ by Jocko Willink (384 pages book). How to become a better and more resilient leader. Awesome book. You can find my full summary of the book here.

‘Here’s How Google Knows in Less Than 5 Minutes if Someone Is a Great Leader’ by Jeff Haden (3 min read). Google asks 13 evaluation questions to assess its leaders. They focus almost exclusively on ‘soft’ skills: communication, feedback, coaching, teamwork, respect, and consideration. The article contains all 13 questions.

Teamwork

‘Radical Candor’ by Kim Scott (272 pages book). An excellent book to learn how to give and receive feedback. You can find my full summary of the book here.

‘The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team’ by Patrick Lencioni (229 pages book). How to help improve your team and teams around you. You can find my full summary of the book here.

Emotional Intelligence

Topics around self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and persuasion & influence.

‘Great Leaders Can Think Like Each Member of Their Team’ by Brian Uzzi (5 min read). Product managers are multivocal leaders. When you think, “Am I technical enough?” it’s not about your coding skills. It’s about your ability to speak the language and empathize will all your team members: engineers, designers, data scientists, marketers, etc. Build out your vocabulary and be genuinely curious. Understand what you bring to the table, and what to defer to to the expertise of your team members.

Productivity

Topics around decision making & cognitive biases, habits & willpower, productivity techniques, and PM career advice.

Decision making & cognitive biases

‘Principles’ by Ray Dalio (592 pages book). A masterclass in decision making. One of the best non-fiction books ever written. You can find my full summary here.

‘Speed as a Habit’ by Dave Girouard (13 min read). Begin every decision-making process by considering how much time and effort that decision is worth, who needs to have input, and when you’ll have an answer. There are decisions that deserve days of debate and analysis, but the vast majority aren’t worth more than 10 minutes.

‘The 6 Decision-Making Frameworks That Help Startup Leaders Tackle Tough Calls’ by First Round (23 min read). Good roundup of 6 First Round articles on decision-making. The main point: decision-making isn’t always about capturing some elusive “best” decision — it’s about making the most of information available, garnering trust across stakeholders and executing with conviction.

‘Square Defangs Difficult Decisions with this System — Here’s How’ by Gokul Rajaram (14 min read). The SPADE framework for making important decisions. Make sure you cover the setting (what, when, and why) of the decision, people involved (responsible, approver, and consultants), alternatives with their pro’s and con’s, the actual decision-making (in person and in writing), and the explanation (to the approver, to everyone in writing, and in a commitment meeting for everyone involved).

’10 Habits for Making Wicked Hard Decisions’ by Gibson Biddle (8 min read). When you don’t know the answer, ask questions. Netflix’s CEO would ask the heads of marketing and finance to debate the merit of a price decrease. Halfway through the argument, he’d stop them and ask them to flip positions. This drill forced each leader to listen to the other’s argument.

‘Predicting the Future with Bayes’ Theorem’ by Farnam Street (Shane Parrish) (5 min read). Limitations of inductive reasoning: A high probability of something being true is not the same as saying it is true. “The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken.”

‘The 10/10/10 Method: Make Decisions Like Warren Buffett and Ray Dalio’ by Zat Rana (5 min read). Before you decide what to do, take a moment to ask yourself the following three questions: How will I feel about it in 10 minutes? How will I feel about it in 10 months? How will I feel about it in 10 years?

‘The Self-Serving Bias: Definition, Research, and Antidotes’ by Alice Boyes (2 min read). Self-serving bias: When we do something awesome, it’s because we are awesome. If something bad happens to us, it’s because the world sucks but not us.

Habits & willpower

‘The Motivation Wave’ by BJ Fogg (23 min talk). When you have high willpower/motivation, do (1) hard things that structure future behavior; (2) hard things that make future behaviors easier; (3) hard things that increase your capability/skills. Avoid simple, on-time behaviors; tiny habits; easy steps in a process — save them for later instead.

Productivity techniques

‘Mattermark Founder On Being Self-Taught In Silicon Valley’ by Caleb Kaiser (5 min read). How to learn quickly: Push every shiny button, be curious. Learn just enough to build what you need. Take big risks and don’t hide your losses, be transparent.

‘Mindfulness Meditation and the Brain’ by Shauna Shapiro (6 min talk). We are born with a ‘happiness set point’ which determines our happiness levels. Whenever big life events happen, we might be more or less happy for a while, but we gravitate back to that set point within a few months. One way to improve our set point is mindfulness meditation: like muscles with physical exercise, our brain will change for the better if we train it regularly (neuroplasticity).

‘The Art of Deconstruction — How to Reverse Engineer Success’ by Matthew Encina (8 min read). If you want to do something you haven’t done before, try the approach of deconstruction. (1) Identify your goal before you do anything. (2) Research the subject and platform. (3) Deconstruct, analyze, and understand. (4) Emulate and apply. (5) Improve upon: add your POV; remix it; go more in-depth; or find what they are not doing yet.

‘Cut Through The Small Talk and Connect — Lessons from 130+ Dinners, Summits and Salons’ by Anita Hossain (20 min read). Great tips for organizing events: how to set a good goal, who to invite, interesting ice breakers, and more. Gave me lots of inspiration to improve the meetups we organize for product people in Barcelona.

‘The Definitive Guide To Issue Trees’ by Crafting Cases (1 hour read). Issue trees are useful in problem solving to identify the root causes of a problem as well as to identify its potential solutions. They also provide a reference point to see how each piece fits into the whole picture of a problem. This awesome guide explains how to create issue trees, different caveats to consider, and provides useful examples. In case you know Opportunity Solution Trees, issue trees follow the same approach.

PM career advice

‘The long view’ by Brian Fetherstonhaugh (246 pages book). The best career advice I’ve ever received. A short and incredibly insightful read. You can find my full summary of the book here.

Remember that you can find this list + all the lists from previous years combined here on my website.