On My Shelf with Henrik Hedegaard — Head of Product Experience at Parabolic.io (Aarhus, Denmark)
About
Head of Product Experience with Parabolic.io and +15 years of experience in a strategic design consultancy. My core passion is helping client/partners implement outcome centric and needs-first approaches to product delivery. I love help building — and be part of — product teams, shift leadership mindset from agile to agility and adopt a learning mindset in the organisation.
On my shelf
Escaping the Build Trap
How effective product management creates value
by Melissa Perri.
My opinion
After experiencing Melissa’s keynote at Productized I immediately bought this book. It’s somewhere between theory and practice and follows a semi-fictional company that’s caught in “the build trap” (use agile to push features), and tells a story of how to escape it.
The book is both close to theory and super tangible with key tools and various tips. A great takeaway is the Product-Kata that helps prod. team drive the product forward.
200 pages, O’Reilly Media 2018
Inspired (2nd edition)
How to create tech products customers love
by Marty Cagan
My opinion
Nothing less than THE BIBLE of product management. Basically, if you’re into PM this is an absolute goldmine! It provides a deep dive into “the why” and “the how” of how the successful product companies work today, how the org is structured and staffed as well as how to develop and ship products customers will love. Personally I use it as a reference book when I need to refresh certain perspectives of PM.
368 pages, John Wiley & Sons 2018
Outcomes Over Output
Why customer behavior is the key metric for business success
by Joshua Seiden
My opinion
If your leadership team (or the prod.team) don’t fully understand what outcome are and why they are important, this is THE BOOK! The basic statement is that outcomes are changes in human behaviour that drives business results. It has a great discussion of how outcomes relates to OKRs/impact, and why a released feature is not an outcome. The ~76 pages are a fantastic read for your commute.
76 pages, Sense & Respond Press 2019
The Product Book
How to Become a Great Product Manager
by Product School (Josh Anon & Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia)
My opinion
Some rant this book for being too high-level. I completely disagree. It provides a great high-level picture of PM and delivers a large set of methods and tools to actually deliver on PM. It’s easy to talk about why PM is important but it’s very difficult to execute on. This book helps you get started on that journey.
314 pages, Product School 2017
The Lean Product Playbook
How to Innovate with Minimum Viable Products and Rapid Customer Feedback
by Dan Olsen
My opinion
The book provides step-by-step guidance on how to apply lean principles to product development. Typically, this can be quite tedious and has many pitfalls. The book helps you improve the chances of building successful products. It discusses concepts such as the product-market fit pyramid, and a repeatable methodology to achieve that fit. If you’re into product metrics part 3 of the book is for you. It provides tools on what/how to measure. Finally, it’s a book that discusses the bastardised MVP — when utilised in a lean context, it’s quite a productive tool.
336 pages, Wiley 2015
Jobs to be done
Theory to Practice
by Anthony W. Ulwick & Alexander Osterwalder
My opinion
To me, JTBD is absolute key, when building a successful product. Basically, if you’re not building something that actually addresses a customer need, you’re setting yourself up for failure (eventually). JTBD is quite easy to understand but difficult to practice — it’s more than doing an interview and derive needs. This book introduces the Outcome-Drive-Innovation framework which helps make innovation more predictable by linking a company’s value creation activities to customer-defined performance metrics related to the job they are trying to get done. There you go!
202 pages, IDEA BITE Press 2016
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 📚.
