Don’t Sell Off Your Furniture: Be Successful! Or 7 must-read books for Product Managers
A newbie to Product Management or a superstar of strategic thinking, this reading list is for you.
To become a successful manager you should be constantly curious about what is happening in the field and expand your skills. But how to find the right guidelines among thousands of tweets, blogposts and video talks?
Productized team has hand-picked and crafted for you the list of the best 7 books in Product Management and Design Thinking. Browse through it carefully and add the ‘perfect’ one to your ‘must-read’ agenda. Better yet, study all of them!
- The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman
The Design of Everyday Things is a tremendous read for both who designs anything to be used by humans — from a teapot to a self-driving car — and those who uses anything created by another human. Drawing the line between good and bad design — it explains to you how things should be designed. Read it, and you will never see the surroundings the same way
Quote from the book: “Good design is actually a lot harder to notice than poor design, in part because good designs fit our needs so well that the design is invisible, serving us without drawing attention to itself. Bad design, on the other hand, screams out its inadequacies, making itself very noticeable.”
2. Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull
A co-founder (together with Steve Jobs and John Lasseter) of Pixar, Ed Catmull shows how to build a culture of creativity and create space for people to excel — both through general principles, and his experiences. Creativity is a Bible for those who want to bring their team to the next level, a manual for managers who strive for originality, and a personal guided tour to Pixar’s brainstorm meetings.
Quote from the book: “If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up. If you give a mediocre idea to a brilliant team, they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something better.”
3. Making It Right: Product Management For A Startup World by Rian Van Der Merwe
Product management is one of the most exhausting, exhilarating, stressful, and rewarding careers out there. It’s not for the faint of heart. It’s for people who want to move mountains. It swallows some whole, but others derive endless invigoration and passion from the pace and the impact and the glory and the huge potential for failure as well as success. There’s no other job like it, and this is a book to help you make it your job.
Quote from the book: ‘‘It is vastly easier to identify market problems and solve them with technology than it is to find buyers for your existing technology.”
4. Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
A 2011 bestseller which describes the cognitive biases that impact our thinking, judgment, and decision making processes — the problem which Product Managers especially face in their daily work. Engaging the reader in a lively conversation about how we think, Kahneman reveals where we can and cannot trust our intuitions and how we can tap into the benefits of slow thinking. Thinking, Fast and Slow is a journey to the field of psychology, reasoning, and decision making.
Quote from the book: ‘‘If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do not use complex language where simpler language will do.”
5. Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath
Made to Stick offers 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. What makes the story great and sticks it better to your memory than to the Gum Wall in Seattle? Brothers Heath have the answer: simplicity, unexpectedness, concreteness, credibility, emotions and stories.
Quote from the book: “To make our communications more effective, we need to shift our thinking from “What information do I need to convey?” to “What questions do I want my audience to ask?”
6. Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products by Nil Eyal
What makes us engage with certain products out of sheer habit? Is there a pattern underlying how technologies hook us?
Nir Eyal answers these questions (and many more) by explaining the Hook Model — a four-step process embedded into the products of many successful companies to subtly encourage customer behavior. Through consecutive “hook cycles,” these products reach their ultimate goal of bringing users back again and again without depending on costly advertising or aggressive messaging.
Quote from the book: “Users who continually find value in a product are more likely to tell their friends about it.”
7. The Four Steps to the Epiphany by Steve Blank
‘‘Great ideas, no strategic planning.’’ That is how many startups fall without even starting to climb. The Four Steps to the Epiphany is the essential book for anyone bringing a product to market, writing a business plan, marketing plan or sales plan. The book offers insight into what makes some startups successful and others fail. Packed with concrete examples, it will leave you with new skills to organize sales, marketing and your business for success.
Quote from the book:“In the early stages of a startup, focusing on “execution” will put you out of business. Instead, you need a “learning and discovery” process so you can get the company to the point where you know what to execute.”
Lots of successes!
Productized
About Productized Masterclasses
The Productized Masterclasses are 2 days of hands-on masterclasses and insightful keynote speakers. On 27 & 28 May you’ll enjoy 4 masterclasses of your choice, get practical tips, and network with your peers. Come and meet Dan Olsen, Kandis O’Brien, Radhika Dutt, Ken Sandy, or Daniel Zacarias, among many others and get ready to be inspired to learn more about Enterprise Product and Consumer Product! SAVE THE DATE — MAY 27–28 2021
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