Stop Reading Business Books, Start Reading Comic Books
How reading comic books made me a better Product Manager.
Walk by any Product Manager’s desk and I bet you’ll see a pile of business books. It’s the tell-tale sign of an intellectually curious person, hungry for sage wisdom and eager to hone their craft.
On my desk right now, I’ve got copies of Hooked, Understanding Michael Porter, and Turn the Ship Around. I’ve read them all — large portions of them, anyway. Okay, medium portions. Well, portions anyway…
I haven’t opened Hooked. Sigh.
To be honest, I just don’t really enjoy reading these kinds of books. It feels too much like, well, work.
Like most PMs, I work very hard every day trying to deliver value to customers and shareholders. And I love my job! But, at the end of a long day, the last thing I want to do is crack open a business book and bone up on ‘the value chain’. It’d be like running a marathon all day, and then coming home to unwind for a few hours by jogging on a treadmill.
Instead, I like to crack open a different kind of book — a comic book. My partner and I have been collecting and reading comics for over a decade, and we’ve got quite a diverse collection; everything from Maus, the harrowing story of a holocaust survivor during World War II, to Feynman, an illustrated biography of physicist Richard Feynman, to Red Son, an alternate history of Superman where he crash lands in Soviet Russia instead of Kansas.
Reading comics definitely doesn’t feel like work to me. Cliché though it may sound, a good comic is an escape — an opportunity to visit a different world, someplace new and unfamiliar. And, after 10–12 hours of debating business strategy, reviewing user experiences, and all the other things PMs do — sometimes you need an escape.
But after years of choosing comics over business books — and feeling guilty about it — I’ve come to a realization: Comic books have made me a better PM.
Granted, comics may not have taught me about Agile or growth-hacking, but they have helped me grow in ways that are very relevant to my day job as a PM.
By way of example, here are three lessons I’ve learned, from three different comic books, that have made me a better PM.
LESSON #1: ‘Understanding Comics’ taught me how to tell stories that engage users.
Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, by American cartoonist Scott McCloud, is widely considered a seminal work on comics. A comic book about comics, Understanding Comics explores the history and nature of this medium and examines the different narrative techniques it employs.
I believe that PMs, like comic authors and artists, are ultimately storytellers. Our job is to craft compelling narratives that engage our users using our chosen medium, the User Experience (UX).
In my career, I’ve found that many of the narrative techniques described in Understanding Comics are directly applicable when building UX.
Consider the following illustrative example (pun intended).
In Understanding Comics, McCloud explains that comics often use iconic, simplified character designs vs. more realistic illustrations because they are much more effective at engaging the reader.
A short excerpt that explains this technique:
Put simply, if the reader can see themselves in a character, they become more than just a passive observer — they become an active participant in the story.
Now, consider the user experience of Microsoft’s virtual assistant, Cortana. Given what we now know about comics, is it any surprise that Microsoft created an iconic, even abstract, visualization to represent their assistant rather than simply using Cortana’s more human face from the Halo games? If you can get your user to empathize with their virtual assistant they’ll be more forgiving when it makes a mistake — and it makes plenty.
Even if you’ve never read a comic book, Understanding Comics is an invaluable resource for understanding the universal principles of effective storytelling, no matter what your medium.
LESSON #2: ‘Burma Chronicles’ taught me how empathize with users.
Burma Chronicles is one of a series of illustrated travelogues by Guy Delisle, a Canadian animator and cartoonist. Guy’s books describe his experiences and observations living and working in Burma, North Korea, and Jerusalem among others places.
Guy’s genius lies in his capacity for keen observation that is free from judgement. He is genuinely curious and inquisitive, seeking to truly understand his subject as best he can — their motivations, their fears, their idiosyncrasies. His objectivity and sincerity, in turn, elicits a surprising level of openness and frankness from his subjects who confide in him — despite barely knowing him.
Guy’s books are a masterclass in empathy, a foundational skill for Product Managers. Product design must start with empathy for the customer — developing a deep understanding of their motivations, fears, and idiosyncrasies. I believe it is the genesis of all meaningful innovation and the basis on which every product decision should be made.
Guy’s books not only demonstrate the power of empathy as a tool for understanding, but they are a de facto guide for how to wield this tool. Reading them, I learned what to look for, how to document it, and finally how to rationalize my observations with my own personal biases.
LESSON #3: ‘Transmetropolitan’ taught me how to dream big.
Transmetropolitan is a comic book series by Warren Ellis and Darick Roberston set in a dystopian future. The story centers on the exploits of its anti-hero protagonist, Spider Jerusalem, a character loosely based on Hunter S. Thompson.
Transmetropolitan presents a dark and, at times, disturbing vision of the future. But the future it presents is also deeply original, especially its spectacular vision of technology in the 23rd century.
This is a place where the news is transmitted through ‘informational pollen,’ where cryonic suspension and re-animation is routine, and where food replicators have been known to develop drug addictions — and then synthesize their own fixes.
(While these may seem outlandish, consider this: Transmetropolitan accurately predicted the rise of feeds as a dominant news medium, and the emergence of anonymous whistle-blower sites like Wikileaks.)
In the world of Transmetropolitan, nothing is impossible because technological progress is inexorable and still accelerating. The existential threats to humanity’s survival (climate change, pollution) have been solved by technology. Now, technology has moved onto solving new problems we didn’t even know we had (the limitations of our corporeal husk, etc.).
As an engineer by trade, I have a tendency to think in terms of constraints; that is, what I know to be technically possible or feasible today. This way of thinking, while pragmatic, is at odds with innovation.
Reading Transmetropolitan, I saw a vision of the future unencumbered by constraints, limited only by human imagination (for better or worse).
While just a Sci Fi fantasy, Transmetropolitan inspired me to think about the possibilities of technology vs. the constraints. To reject what’s feasible today and think about what could be possible tomorrow — and then go build it.
Never a Straight Line
So, am I really suggesting that you burn all your business books and go buy some comics? No. What I am saying is that personal development and growth doesn’t always come from the places you might expect.
Comic books made me a better PM. They might make you a better PM, too. But then again, so might architecture. Or cooking. Or basketball. You may not see the connection right away but it’s there, and you’ll see it eventually.
As for me, I’m gonna finally go read Hooked. I hear it’s pretty good.
If you liked this article, hit recommend and check out some of my previous articles:
Or consider checking out some of the books I mentioned in this post:
