On My Shelf with Christian Becker — Founder of leanproductable (Berlin)
About
I support companies to fast forward from a very first idea to a validated product, doing product strategy, user research, conception and testing — as a coach, embedded or in interim positions. Before founding my own company 7 years ago, I was heading the product management, UX and content team at mobile.de, Germany’s leading online classified site for vehicles.
On my shelf
Founders at Work
Stories of Startups’ Early Days
by Jessica Livingston
My opinion
What we get to see and hear when it comes to startup stories is most often a white-washed and glitzy version to support reputation and further growth of the company. Jessica Livingston has spent a lot of time and effort to capture a more comprehensive version to get closer to reality. The book covers a wide range of industries and also less well-known names. A very good read and calibration for all product managers working on early discoveries and building up new business models.
456 pages, Apress 2009
Validating Product Ideas
Through Lean User Research
by Tomer Sharon
My opinion
When I started with product management it was usual that any research had to run through the marketing department. I had to write a lengthy briefing, then the marketing department would give advice how to answer the question (most likely after consulting one of their suppliers) and come back with a price and timeline. After freeing the budget, the supplier could get going and after another couple of weeks they presented some slides with data. Impact on product was close to zero — simply because the friction between the actual question at hand and the market research was way too high. I think that every product manager should be able to do research independently. Tomer’s book is a great start with some hands-on advice how to get going.
344 pages, Rosenfeld 2016
Running lean
Iterate from Plan A to a Plan That Works
by Ash Maurya
My opinion
A sad fact for product managers is that any release can only be a more or less educated guess. Whether you launch a small feature or a completely new business model, key is to iterate fast. Defining those iterations is a constant balance. You can either run too small experiments and end up with invalid data. Or you can create valid data by going big and complex, running the risk to waste time and energy. Unfortunately, there are way too few examples published in order to learn from other companies. Ash Maurya tries to document a great part of his own founding journey by describing in detail why and what experiments he designed. A nice practical example of what it takes to build something new.
240 pages, O’Reilly Media 2012
1984
by George Orwell
My opinion
Tricking customers online is easy. Put some trust items on the site, sort the list in a “most popular” order or flag something as “urgent” — just to name a few examples — and users will start to act differently with your product. And while DSVGO is a pain for every product manager to implement, it still lets doors wide, wide open to collect an ever-increasing amount of data and share it with more or less dubious players like Facebook and Co. to squeeze out more traffic or conversion. Add a bit of revenue pressure to these simple options and product managers are likely to follow the dark forces — after all, all competitors do just the same, don’t they? While every single step of each product manager seems only tiny, it will sum up over time and things become common and won’t be questioned anymore. The world described in Orwell’s “1984” is not too far anymore. What are you doing to prevent it?
336 pages, Penguin 1963
The PM Library series “On my shelf” features Product Leaders from all over the world who are passionate about reading and sharing with the community. If you want to join the movement and share your reading list with others send us a message or fill out the following form. Let’s get better together 📚.
