My top product management books to learn and improve your PM skills
I want to share with you the key books that I have read about (just because everyone do it or because it really helped me in the beginning) related to Product management and what I get from them:
• “Product Leadership: How Top Product Managers Launch Awesome Products and Build Successful Teams” by Richard Banfield (Author), Martin Eriksson (Author), Nate Walkingshaw (Author) It is written, among others, by Martin Eriksson one of the founders of MindtheProduct (If you do not know that web / community, better to jump right now instead keep on reading this) This was the first book that shape and describe what PM really is on my mind. A good book both for beginners and for those who have been in the PM world for some time and want to see if anything has slipped off.
• “INSPIRED: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love” Marty Cagan. If you have to read only ONE book, THIS is the book! no matter B2C, B2B, startup or corporate. If you are on this page, there are 2 options: a) you are interested on the topic or b)you are a google bot. In both cases, READ IT!!!
• 37 signals: books such as Remote — How to get the best out of working remotely for boss, slave or boss and slave at the same time, Rework — while focusing on how to do things differently in order to get to launch products, in the same line is Getting real (you can get this one free) where it focuses on how to launch a website in an agile way. They are my gurus on how to manage the work, the team, and the objectives. These books are read very fast and are worth it when you’re tired of wasting your time at work with non-efficient processes
• “Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products” by Nir Eyal. Explore human behavior to design products and services that create positive patterns of behavior for our product / service. If you wonder why you refresh the mail or the home of linkedin manually even though you know that the app does it alone, or you feel a miracle of happiness when you receive a whatsapp, this is the book that explains why and more important, how to get it in your services
• “Hard things about hard things” by Ben Horowitz This book I only recommend to entrepreneurs or PMs with aspirations of entrepreneurs. It is comforting, especially for those of us who have tried, to understand the sacrifices (even miseries) of one of the most successful and influential guy in tech, first as a entrepreneur (book focus) and then through his venture capital firm
• Dan Olsen’s “The Lean Product Playbook: How to Innovate with Minimum Viable Products and Rapid Customer Feedback” focuses on the key to create a successful product: product market fit (The process of testing and testing dozens of versions of a product based on the problem you have detected in a segment of the population).
And which ones have impacted you the most?
