The tried guide of books every early stage PM must read!

There are a bunch of ways you can become a great PM, but the one key we often miss is reading. Join Niharika, Fi’s book-loving PM as she takes you through a thoughtfully curated list of books you must read as an early-stage PM.

My book reading habits started quite early, around first grade. My mom loved reading and she always worked a few ways to encourage me to read. It was a habit she wanted me to inculcate, and it fit well for both of us, I enjoyed reading a lot too!

I loved reading enough for my mom to incentivise good behaviour by buying me books. My earliest and fondest memories with my mom are tied up with reading and books. Each time I topped a class, I’d get a badge for it. I’d run home to show this badge to my mom. The next thing you know, we’d be on a Scooty, off to the bookstore for my rewards.

This habit of reading books stayed with even after we moved out of India. I didn’t have the same access to diverse books there but managed to read whatever I could find. I started reading regularly again after I graduated from college. My reading patterns have gone through all kinds of shifts. The latest has been my shift from fiction to non-fiction. I used to read fiction back in college but I have been picking up non-fiction for the past three years.

Why did I start reading non-fiction?

I’m currently working as a product manager, and the learning curve has been quite steep, and sometimes, overwhelming. A PM is supposed to act like the oil in an engine, ensuring that all their team members are delivering their work, getting unblocked, and filling in the missing gaps.

This is what a PM’s typical day at work looks like. The work they do also depends on the phase of the development cycle they are in.

1. PMs need to decide what needs to be built to deliver high business impact and create value for the company.
2. PMs need to understand users and build solutions that solve their problems and create value for them.
3. PMs analyze data to confirm/dismiss their hypothesis to make a strong case on what they should build.
4. PMs work with design to build delightful experiences for their users.
5. PMs work with engineering to build the product, plan for how the system should be designed for scaling it, and how a feature would look like in the long term.
6. PMs also work with marketing teams to launch and ensure that the feature is adopted by users.
7. PMs work with customer support to ensure that any queries or issues that users have are resolved well.
8. PMs work with legal teams to ensure that there are no regulatory pitfalls to whatever they are building on.

And the list of things that a PM needs to be good at is non-exhaustive. Since things move so quickly for PMs, the challenge isn’t just to keep up but also to upskill as you do. For me, one of the best ways to tackle this is by reading books, learning from them, and trying these skills at work. This is why non-fiction has caught and kept my attention all these years.

Before I take you on a ride through the books I recommend to become a better PM, let’s have a look at what is expected of someone new to the PM role.

The skills that an early-stage PM is supposed to be great at -

‍According to Ravi Mehta, the former CPO of Tinder, an early-stage PM or an Associate PM should be great at the following skills

Primary Skills

1. Feature Specification
2. Product Quality Assurance
3. Business outcome ownership
4. Voice of the customer

Important skills that you need to start working on as you transition into a PM

1. Product Delivery
2. Fluency with Data
3. User experience design

As someone who is transitioning to a higher PM level, I’ve used this list to show me where I need to improve. They have also helped me pick the next books to read.

With that, let’s talk about the books you’ve got to get your hands on as a PM

Books that PMs need to read to understand the role

Inspired by Marty Cagan

Product management as a role isn’t well defined. Everything from day-to-day work to larger goals varies from product, company, and teams. You would often question yourself if you’re honing the right skills for your job. ‘Inspired’ talks about lessons learnt from top tech companies while building products and principles of strong product teams. It takes you through how to build the right product, the right processes that need to be in place to build this product and establishing a strong product culture. I think this is one book that every PM should read.

Books that PMs need to read to get better at Execution

7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey

As a PM, you are expected to own everything related to a product while having zero influence on your team (since no one in your team will report to you). This book talks about the 7 habits that a person should have to be effective at what they do. It also talks about the lens through which one should look at a situation for them to make the most out of a situation.

Books that PMs need to read to get better at User Research

The MOM test by Rob Fitzpatrick

Customers are not very honest about what they want. They sometimes tell you things because they do not want to embarrass themselves or you, they don’t always know what they want, and sometimes they know what they want but it’s not very important to them. The MOM test guides you on how you should talk to your users to clearly understand what is important to them and what they would pay for. I believe this is very important for PMs to read this book as we need to clearly understand what problems we need to solve for users and create value for them

Books that PMs need to read to get better at Data Analysis

Cartoon Guide to Statistics by Larry Gonick & Woollcott Smith

I’m still reading this one. It is a great refresher on statistics and probability and would help you derive insights from data. It covers topics like data description, sampling, running data experiments, A/B Testing and more that you would use to design products for your users

Books that PMs need to read to understand Design

The design of everyday things by Don Norman

If there is one book that everyone in tech needs to read to understand design, then this is it. It talks about the elements that need to be a part of a product so that users understand how to use it and complete the intended action. It helped me figure out how to design products that are intuitive and delightful to use, examples of bad design, user’s mental models of how things work etc. Since PMs are constantly working on user-facing products, it’s important that they understand basic design principles.

100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People by Susan Weinschenk

This was a super fun read. I learnt a lot about how people perceive objects around them, what motivates them to take action, and how our brain deceives us to perceive things differently from what they actually are. This helped me understand the design language that needs to be followed to help users pay attention, how people feel and decide etc.

Hooked by Nir Eyal

Have you ever wondered why you tend to open social media apps like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram subconsciously and spend so much time on them? Hooked decodes how big tech companies build engaging products and change behaviour of their users to spend more time on their platforms. Great read for anyone working on B2C product management as it helps you design engaging products

Books that PMs need to read to understand Tech

As a PM, the majority of the day would go into working with engineers to build the product. You will be expected to have a basic understanding of how great apps work, and you will be expected to understand the lingo that your engineers use to talk to each other about work. Eventually, you will also be expected to help your engineers make trade-offs on how something needs to be built.

Swipe to Unlock by Aditya Agashe

This book has insights on how big tech companies’ business models work and the ideas behind the tech of the same. I learnt about what goes behind the screens on how google search works, how google and facebook target users to show ads. It jumped into how companies like Airbnb and Robinhood monetise.

Tech Simplified by Deepak Singh

This book is a must read for every product manager that does not have experience with software development. It teaches you fundamentals of tech such as what is an OS, what are applications, databases, APIs, high level system design, the constraints that you need to keep in mind during software development, the trade offs that need to be made while designing an application etc. Post reading this book, you will be able to understand what your developers are talking about much better and you will also be helping them take decisions related to tech design.

Books that people need to read to understand Business & Metrics

As a PM, you are expected to build products that will create massive value for your company in the long run.

Working backwards by Bill Carr & Colin Bryar

This book is about the culture, principles and processes that Amazon followed to become what it is today. Amazon started as an online book store and then grew to establish multiple business lines such as e-commerce, cloud services, hardware, entertainment etc, and scaled them to profitability. No company has been able to do this before at such a large scale. I’d highly recommend this book to all PMs and anyone interested in becoming entrepreneurs in the future. I particularly loved the notes on defining your input metrics and output metrics, setting OKRs, running effective meetings and the importance of documentation.

How I manage to read consistently

I know that this can sound intimidating. With packed schedules and days that go on forever, all you look for is some downtime where you don’t have to do anything stressful. Reading a book is fun but when it starts feeling like work you have to do, it isn’t fun anymore.

Additionally, our attention spans are getting shorter by the day and to start reading and finishing a book is an underrated achievement we don’t talk about enough. Here are some ways I’ve been trying to read constantly in my everyday life.

I usually read books for 30–60 mins before going to sleep. It helps me

1. Reduce any stress/anxiety that I have
2. Helps me focus and think because I’m done with every other activity for the day
3. Reduces exposure to UV light because of digital devices
4. Just puts me in the right place to sleep

If you don’t really have time for an hour, I’d suggest that you start with reading just 10 pages of any book, you’ll soon find yourself making time for an hour just to read books. If you find reading books a little draining or requiring too much focus, I’d recommend listening to audiobooks while doing your daily chores like traveling, cooking or working out.

What I plan on reading next

Most of the product leaders that I follow recommended that early PMs must read the following books, so I plan on picking these up next.

1. ‘Getting Things Done’ by David Allen — As the title itself suggests, this is a book on being productive and getting your projects delivered on time without wearing yourself down.
2. ‘Dear Data’ by Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec — This is a great book on how one can use data visualization to tell stories

To conclude this series, I want to insist that I don’t think that books are the only way to learn, but I do believe that PMs should actively invest at least one hour every day into learning something that would help them add value to their work.

When you are in school and college, there is a curriculum and learning plan that you follow, so there is constant learning. But once you start to work, especially as a PM, you realize that you might not be learning as much as you should. A lot of your day goes into project management and meetings. So, to ensure that you are learning, you need to constantly put in effort because tech evolves at a very rapid pace.