On My Shelf with Ekaterina Garbaruk Monnot — Senior Product Manager at Spotify (Sweden)
About me
I’m Ekaterina, Senior Product Manager at Spotify. I work with platforms behind Spotify partner integrations. For example, when you listen to Spotify on a speaker or a TV, your device would use our platforms as the backend to be able to play the right thing and also to make correct reporting back to Spotify. Before Spotify I worked as PM in FinTech, and before that in telecom.
On my shelf
The first 90 days
by Michael D. Watkins
My opinion
I love this book because it brings structure to the process of onboarding to a new position. When I first read it, it helped me to not get overwhelmed with the amount of information that one needs to digest in the first weeks at a new job.
I also found it insightful when I was transitioning between the teams as a Product manager. In this situation there is often no additional onboarding since the change of jobs is internal. In such a situation I used a light-weight structure inspired by this book.
I also like that the book provides highlights for each chapter and therefore it is easy to get back to it without re-reading the whole book every time.
304 pages, Harvard Business Review Press 2013
The lean startup
How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses
by Eric Ries
My opinion
This is one of the classic books that have been reviewed many times and has many follow-up discussions, articles and books. It is still in my top list since it helps me to keep critical thinking about my product and all the time challenge myself on how to release and test the product with customers as early as possible.
I first read this book when I was working with consumer-facing products where we had long lead time. This book has challenged every single assumption that my team had about validation of ideas with customers.
336 pages, Currency 2011
Good Strategy, Bad Strategy
The Difference and Why It Matters
by Richard Rumelt
My opinion
This is one of the classic books about strategy. I like the format that the author suggests as well as the examples that he provides.
I would recommend every product manager to read it in order to compare it with your approach to the strategy. I personally find this book useful when working on the strategy.
322 pages, Profile Books 2017
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team
A Leadership Fable
by Patrick Lencionion
My opinion
Our success as product managers is heavily relying on the collaboration and teamwork. This book describes the challenges that a team faces before the members can work productively together.
I really liked the book because it is written in a style that makes it easy to read. When reading it, I always reflect on the team that I’m part of. This reflection can help to test some of the approaches or alternatively celebrate that we don’t have a specific dysfunction
229 pages, Jossey-Bass 2002
How to Measure Anything
Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business
by Patrick Lencionion
My opinion
I often see two different extremes of how people feel about data: they are either very good at it and they can dig into lots of details or they are not too confident and then it takes lots of effort to make an estimation of a cost or impact. As a Product managers we don’t need to be experts in data, but we need to have a good idea how something can be measured or estimated — and this is what I find interesting about this book.
It explains many data concepts in a rather simple way and helps people to relate better to those concepts. It helps both not to be intimidated by data and also to keep the business question in mind.
432 pages, Wiley 2014
Our series “On my shelf” features product people from all over the world who are passionate about reading and sharing their best book recommendations with the community. If you want to join the movement and share your reading list with others send us a message. Let’s get better together 📚.
