The Product Club Book (part 2)
This is the second part in a three-part series. You might want to read the first part here.
“If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.”
― Oscar Wilde
Let’s continue with the curated list of 31 must-read books for product managers & product leaders with passion for creating real value for users at scale:
11. Lean Analytics: Use Data to Build a Better Startup Faster
Summary: This book shows you how to validate your initial idea, find the right customers, decide what to build, how to monetise your business, and how to spread the word. Packed with more than thirty case studies and insights from over a hundred business experts, Lean Analytics provides you with hard-won, real-world information no entrepreneur can afford to go without.
12. The Innovator’s Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book that Will Change the Way You Do Business
Summary: In this revolutionary bestseller, Harvard professor Clayton M. Christensen says outstanding companies can do everything right and still lose their market leadership — or worse, disappear completely.
13. Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products
Summary: Hooked is based on Eyal’s years of research, consulting, and practical experience. He wrote the book he wished had been available to him as a start-up founder — not abstract theory, but a how-to guide for building better products. Hooked is written for product managers, designers, marketers, start-up founders, and anyone who seeks to understand how products influence our behavior.
14. Grit
Summary: Winningly personal, insightful, and even life-changing, Grit is a book about what goes through your head when you fall down, and how that-not talent or luck-makes all the difference.
15. The Elements of Scrum
Summary: The Elements of Scrum opens with a blow-by-blow description of a week in the life of a scrum team, then briefly details the history and origins of scrum, comparing it to traditional methodologies and providing context for how scrum applies to the cultural history of the software industry. Next, the principles and practices set forth in the Agile Manifesto are broken down and illustrated with real-world examples, putting the reader inside the heads of the founders of scrum and agile for a thorough grounding in theory.
16. Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
Summary: Forget everything you thought you knew about how to motivate people — at work, at school, at home. It’s wrong. As Daniel H. Pink (author of To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Motivating Others) explains in his paradigm-shattering book Drive, the secret to high performance and satisfaction in today’s world is the deeply human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world.
17. Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration
Summary: Creativity, Inc. is a book for managers who want to lead their employees to new heights, a manual for anyone who strives for originality, and the first-ever, all-access trip into the nerve center of Pixar Animation — into the meetings, postmortems, and “Braintrust” sessions where some of the most successful films in history are made.
18. The Art of Product Management: Lessons from a Silicon Valley Innovator
Summary: The Art of Product Management takes us inside the head of a product management thought leader. With color and humor, Rich Mironov gives us a taste of Silicon Valley’s tireless pursuit of great technology and its creation of new products. He provides strategic advice to product managers and tech professionals about start-ups, big organisations, how to think like a customer, and what things should cost.
19. Reinventing Organisations: A Guide to Creating Organisations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness
Summary: In this groundbreaking book, the author shows that every time, in the past, when humanity has shifted to a new stage of consciousness, it has achieved extraordinary breakthroughs in collaboration. A new shift in consciousness is currently underway. Could it help us invent a more soulful and purposeful way to run our businesses and nonprofits, schools and hospitals?
20. The Mom Test: How to talk to customers & learn if your business is a good idea when everyone is lying to you
Summary: The Mom Test is a quick, practical guide that will save you time, money, and heartbreak. This book is going to show you how customer conversations go wrong and how you can do better.
21. Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
Summary: Zero to One presents at once an optimistic view of the future of progress in America and a new way of thinking about innovation: it starts by learning to ask the questions that lead you to find value in unexpected places.
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