11 Books To Read As A Product Manager

Product managers are forever students; they are constantly seeking to learn and grow their skillset and knowledge. As the technology industry continues to grow, so must product managers so they don’t fall behind. What better way to do so than by reading!

Here are our top 11 best books to read as a product manager:

1. The Making of a Manager: What to Do When Everyone Looks to You by Julie Zhuo

This handbook is the perfect book for those new to the job and who want to learn how to become the manager you’ve always wanted. This book is a modern field guide packed with everyday examples and transformative insights, including:

• How to tell a great manager from an average manager (illustrations included)
• When you should look past an awkward interview and hire someone anyway
• How to build trust with your reports through not being a boss
• Where to look when you lose faith and lack the answers

2. Continuous Discovery Habits by Teresa Torres

This book is all about your continuous discovery. How do you know that you are making a product or service that your customers want? How do you ensure that you are improving it over time? How do you guarantee that your team is creating value for your customers in a way that creates value for your business? In this book, you’ll learn a structured and sustainable approach that will help you answer each of these questions.

This book will give you the confidence to act while also preparing you to be wrong. You’ll learn to balance action with doubt so that you can get started without being blindsided by what you don’t get right. If you want to discover products that customers love that also deliver business results-this book is for you!

3. The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni

This book is all about the fascinating and complex world of teams. It explores the fundamental causes of organizational politics and team failure. It describes the many pitfalls that teams face as they seek to “grow together”.

Throughout the story, Lencioni reveals the five dysfunctions which go to the very heart of why teams, even the best ones, often struggle. He outlines a powerful model and actionable steps that can be used to overcome these common hurdles and build a cohesive, effective team.

4. Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t by Jim Collins

This management book describes how companies transition from being good companies to great companies, and how most companies fail to make the transition.

5. The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail (Management of Innovation and Change) by Clayton M. Christensen

This book explains why most companies miss out on new waves of innovation. No matter the industry, a successful company with established products will get pushed aside unless managers know how and when to abandon traditional business practices.

Offering both successes and failures from leading companies as a guide, this book gives you a set of rules for capitalizing on the phenomenon of disruptive innovation.

6. The Innovator’s Solution: Creating and Sustainability Successful Growth by Clayton M. Christensen

This definitive work will help anyone trying to transform their business right now. The authors expand on the idea of disruption, explaining how companies can and should become disruptors themselves. This classic work shows just how timely and relevant these ideas continue to be in today’s hyper-accelerated business environment.

This book provides advice for the business decisions crucial to achieving truly disruptive growth and proposes guidelines for developing your own disruptive growth engine. The authors identify the forces that cause managers to make bad decisions as they package and shape new ideas — and offer new frameworks to help create the right conditions, at the right time, for a disruption to succeed.

This is a must-read for all senior managers and business leaders responsible for innovation and growth, as well as members of their teams.

7. Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive by Noah J. Goldstein, Steve J. Martin & Robert Cialdini

Every day we face the challenge of persuading others to do what we want. But what makes people say yes to our requests? Persuasion is not only an art, but is also a science, and researchers who study it have uncovered a series of hidden rules for moving people in your direction. Based on more than sixty years of research into the psychology of persuasion, this book reveals fifty simple but remarkably effective strategies that will make you much more persuasive at work and in your personal life, too.

8. Writing Is Designing: Words and the User Experience by Michael J. Metts & Andy Welfle

Without words, apps would be an unusable jumble of shapes and icons, while voice interfaces and chatbots wouldn’t even exist. Words make software human-centred and require just as much thought as branding and code. This book will show you how to give your users clarity, test your words, and collaborate with your team. You’ll see that writing is designing.

9. Big Potential: How Transforming the Pursuit of Success Raises Our Achievement, Happiness, and Well-Being by Shawn Achor

In his follow-up to The Happiness Advantage, Achor draws on his work in 50 countries and shows that success and happiness are not competitive sports. Rather, they depend almost entirely on how well we connect with, relate to, and learn from each other. Just as happiness is contagious, every dimension of human potential — performance, intelligence, creativity, leadership ability and health — is influenced by those around us. So when we help others become better, we reach new levels of potential, as well. Rather than fighting over scraps of the pie, we can expand the pie instead.

Small Potential is the limited success we can attain alone. BIG Potential is what we can achieve together. Here, Achor offers five strategies — the SEEDS of Big Potential — for lifting the ceiling on what we can achieve while returning happiness and meaning to our lives.

The dramatic shifts in how we approach work today demand an equally dramatic shift in our approach to success. Big Potential offers a new path to thriving in the modern world.

10. The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries

Most startups fail. But many of those failures are preventable. The Lean Startup is a new approach being adopted across the globe, changing the way companies are built and new products are launched.

The Lean Startup approach fosters companies that are both more capital efficient and that leverage human creativity more effectively. Inspired by lessons from lean manufacturing, it relies on “validated learning,” rapid scientific experimentation, as well as a number of counter-intuitive practices that shorten product development cycles, measure actual progress without resorting to vanity metrics, and learn what customers really want. It enables a company to shift directions with agility, altering plans inch by inch, minute by minute.

11. Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind by Al Ries & Jack Trout

This book deals with the problems of communicating to a skeptical, media-blitzed public. Positioning describes a revolutionary approach to creating a “position” in a prospective customer’s mind-one that reflects a company’s own strengths and weaknesses as well as those of its competitors.

Have fun reading away!