Must Read Books for Product Management
Especially when I talk about product management at university events, at the end of the event, always question “Which books should I read?” is asked.
Or when someone in my around becomes interested in product management, “Which books should I read?” she/he asks.
These are the books that should be read by students, a recent graduates, those who want to be product owner / product manager, and those who want to switch to product management.
At Modanisa we have a curriculum for product owners:
1- The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement
First published in 1984, this book by Eliyahu M. Goldratt has been used as a textbook in more than 200 universities and business faculties.
Written in a fast-paced thriller style, ‘The Goal’ contains a serious message for all managers in industry and explains the ideas which underline the Theory of Constraints developed by the author.
2- Thinking in Systems
“Purposes are deduced from behavior, not from rhetoric or stated goals.”
“Keeping sub-purposes and overall system purposes in harmony is an essential function of successful systems.”
“An important function of almost every system is to ensure its own perpetuation.”
Meadows’ Thinking in Systems, is a concise and crucial book offering insight for problem solving on scales ranging from the personal to the global.
Donella Meadows readers to pay attention to what is important, not just what is quantifiable, to stay humble, and to stay a learner.
3- The Phoenix Project
“Obviously, he continues, “every work center is made up of four things: the machine, the man, the method, and the measures.”
In a fast-paced and entertaining style, three luminaries of the DevOps movement deliver a story that anyone who works in IT will recognize. Readers will not only learn how to improve their own IT organizations, they’ll never view IT the same way again.
4- The Lean Startup
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.
Do one important thing: make better, faster business decisions. Vastly better, faster business decisions. Bringing principles from lean manufacturing and agile development to the process of innovation, the Lean Startup helps companies succeed in a business landscape riddled with risk.
This book shows you how.
5- Running Lean
I want to put a star next to this book. This is perhaps the most important book on this list.
At Modanisa, we want the candidate to read this book during the job interview process.
In this book you can find the following topics:
- Find a problem worth solving, then define a solution
- Engage your customers throughout the development cycle
- Continually test your product with smaller, faster iterations
- Build a feature, measure customer response, and verify/refute the idea
- Know when to “pivot” by changing your plan’s course
- Maximize your efforts for speed, learning, and focus
- Learn the ideal time to raise your “big round” of funding
6- UX For Lean Startups
In this book you can find the following topics:
- Determine whether people will buy your product before you build it
- Listen to your customers throughout the product’s lifecycle
- Understand why you should design a test before you design a product
- Get nine tools that are critical to designing your product
- Discern the difference between necessary features and nice-to-haves
- Learn how a Minimum Viable Product affects your UX decisions
- Use A/B testing in conjunction with good UX practices
- Speed up your product development process without sacrificing quality
Author’s video about this book:
7- Business Model Generation
“Business Model Generation is a handbook for visionaries, game changers, and challengers striving to defy outmoded business models and design tomorrow’s enterprises.”
Here is a video illustrating this book:
8- The Agile Samurai
Enter the dojo of the agile samurai, where agile expert Jonathan Rasmusson shows you how to kick-start, execute, and deliver your agile projects.
By the end of this book you will know everything you need to set up, execute, and successfully deliver agile projects, and have fun along the way.
9- User Stories Applied
One star should also be added for this book.
Agile requirements: discovering what your users really want.
This book will help you:
Save time and eliminate rework, make great user stories, and how to organize them, prioritize them, and use them for planning, management, and testing.
If you would like to learn about user stories, you can find the article written by my colleague Atakan Ülgen here:
https://medium.com/modanisa-engineering/a-solution-of-communication-problem-between-business-and-technic-user-stories-1eb821c0b961
10- Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation
When you start reading this book, “Why haven’t I read it before?” you will say.
Continuous Delivery is the ability to get changes of all types — including new features, configuration changes, bug fixes and experiments — into production, or into the hands of users, safely and quickly in a sustainable way.
The practices at the heart of continuous delivery help us achieve several important benefits:
- Low risk releases
- Faster time to market
- Higher quality
- Lower costs
- Better products
- Happier teams
11- Extreme Programming Explained
Extreme Programming (XP) was conceived and developed to address the specific needs of software development conducted by small teams in the face of vague and changing requirements.
This methodology challenges many conventional tenets, including the long-held assumption that the cost of changing a piece of software necessarily rises dramatically over the course of time. XP recognizes that projects have to work to achieve this reduction in cost and exploit the savings once they have been earned.
I hope you liked it. If you want to ask a question, please get in touch!
