The Product Club Book (part 1)
“A capacity, and taste, for reading gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others”
— Abraham Lincoln
The first part of a curated list of 31 must-read books for product managers & product leaders with passion for creating real value for users at scale:
1. The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work
Summary: A behind-the-scenes look at the firm behind WordPress.com and the unique work culture that contributes to its phenomenal success50 million websites, or twenty percent of the entire web, use WordPress software.
2. Validating Product Ideas
Summary: Want to know what your users are thinking? If you’re a product manager or developer, this book will help you learn the techniques for finding the answers to your most burning questions about your customers. With step-by-step guidance, Validating Product Ideas shows you how to tackle the research to build the best possible product.
3. Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth
Summary: Why do so many startups fail? According to entrepreneurs Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares, most failed startups make the fatal mistake of putting all their effort into perfecting their product at the cost of reaching out to potential users.
4. The Third Wave: An Entrepreneur’s Vision of the Future
Summary: One of America’s most accomplished entrepreneurs — a pioneer who made the Internet part of everyday life and orchestrated the largest merger in the history of business — shares a roadmap for how anyone can succeed in a world of rapidly changing technology.
5. Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days
Summary: From three design partners at Google Ventures, a unique five-day process for solving tough problems using design, prototyping, and testing ideas with customers.
6. Shipping Greatness
Summary: Shipping Greatness Need a shortcut to a degree in shipping great software?Successful team leaders must have an extremely broad skill set to find the right product, work through a complex and ever-changing development process, and do it all incredibly quickly. In this guide, Chris Vander Mey provides a simplified, no-BS approach to the entire software life cycle, distilled from lessons he learned as a manager at Amazon and Google.
7. The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business
Summary: In The Power of Habit, award-winning New York Times business reporter Charles Duhigg takes us to the thrilling edge of scientific discoveries that explain why habits exist and how they can be changed. With penetrating intelligence and an ability to distill vast amounts of information into engrossing narratives, Duhigg brings to life a whole new understanding of human nature and its potential for transformation.
8. The Perfectly Executed Startup: Building Successful Startups
Summary: With this book you’ll learn how to validate, execute and start a profitable business without wasting a lot of time and money. Whether you have too many ideas, or no ideas yet, this book is designed to teach you how to validate your business ideas (see if people pay for your product) and how to generate sustainable revenues as fast as possible.
9. Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
Summary: Unabashedly inspired by Malcolm Gladwell’s bestselling The Tipping Point, the brothers Heath-Chip a professor at Stanford’s business school, Dan a teacher and textbook publisher-offer an entertaining, practical guide to effective communication. Drawing extensively on psychosocial studies on memory, emotion and motivation, their study is couched in terms of “stickiness”-that is, the art of making ideas unforgettable.
10. Lean Customer Development: Build Products Your Customers Need
Summary: How do you develop products that people will actually use and buy? This book will serve as an intensely practical guide to customer development that will get you talking and discovering valuable insights within days.
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