1. Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value - Melissa Perri

To stay competitive in today’s market, organizations need to adopt a culture of customer-centric practices that focus on outcomes rather than outputs. Companies that live and die by outputs often fall into the "build trap," cranking out features to meet their schedule rather than the customer’s needs.

In this book, Melissa Perri explains how laying the foundation for great product management can help companies solve real customer problems while achieving business goals. By understanding how to communicate and collaborate within a company structure, you can create a product culture that benefits both the business and the customer. You’ll learn product management principles that can be applied to any organization, big or small.

In five parts, this book explores:

Why organizations ship features rather than cultivate the value those features represent
How to set up a product organization that scales
How product strategy connects a company’s vision and economic outcomes back to the product activities
How to identify and pursue the right opportunities for producing value through an iterative product framework
How to build a culture focused on successful outcomes over outputs

2. INSPIRED: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love - Marty Cagan

Link: https://amzn.to/36EN6A4

How do today’s most successful tech companies―Amazon, Google, Facebook, Netflix, Tesla―design, develop, and deploy the products that have earned the love of literally billions of people around the world? Perhaps surprisingly, they do it very differently than the vast majority of tech companies. In INSPIRED, technology product management thought leader Marty Cagan provides readers with a master class in how to structure and staff a vibrant and successful product organization, and how to discover and deliver technology products that your customers will love―and that will work for your business.

With sections on assembling the right people and skillsets, discovering the right product, embracing an effective yet lightweight process, and creating a strong product culture, readers can take the information they learn and immediately leverage it within their own organizations―dramatically improving their own product efforts.

Whether you’re an early stage startup working to get to product/market fit, or a growth-stage company working to scale your product organization, or a large, long-established company trying to regain your ability to consistently deliver new value for your customers, INSPIRED will take you and your product organization to a new level of customer engagement, consistent innovation, and business success.

Filled with the author’s own personal stories―and profiles of some of today’s most-successful product managers and technology-powered product companies, including Adobe, Apple, BBC, Google, Microsoft, and Netflix―INSPIRED will show you how to turn up the dial of your own product efforts, creating technology products your customers love.

The first edition of INSPIRED, published ten years ago, established itself as the primary reference for technology product managers, and can be found on the shelves of nearly every successful technology product company worldwide. This thoroughly updated second edition shares the same objective of being the most valuable resource for technology product managers, yet it is completely new―sharing the latest practices and techniques of today’s most-successful tech product companies, and the men and women behind every great product.

3. Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products - Nir Eyal

Link: https://amzn.to/3wHaBmR

Why do some products capture widespread attention while others flop? 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.

Hooked is based on Eyal’s years of research, consulting, and practical experience. He wrote the book he wished had been available to him as a start-up founder—not abstract theory, but a how-to guide for building better products. Hooked is written for product managers, designers, marketers, start-up founders, and anyone who seeks to understand how products influence our behavior.

Eyal provides readers with:

Practical insights to create user habits that stick.Actionable steps for building products people love.
Fascinating examples from the iPhone to Twitter, Pinterest to the Bible App, and many other habit-forming products.

4. The Lean Product Playbook: How to Innovate with Minimum Viable Products and Rapid Customer Feedback - Dan Olsen

Link: https://amzn.to/2UPCigc

The Lean Product Playbook is a practical guide to building products that customers love. Whether you work at a startup or a large, established company, we all know that building great products is hard. Most new products fail. This book helps improve your chances of building successful products through clear, step-by-step guidance and advice.

The Lean Startup movement has contributed new and valuable ideas about product development and has generated lots of excitement. However, many companies have yet to successfully adopt Lean thinking. Despite their enthusiasm and familiarity with the high-level concepts, many teams run into challenges trying to adopt Lean because they feel like they lack specific guidance on what exactly they should be doing.

If you are interested in Lean Startup principles and want to apply them to develop winning products, this book is for you. This book describes the Lean Product Process: a repeatable, easy-to-follow methodology for iterating your way to product-market fit. It walks you through how to:

Determine your target customers
Identify underserved customer needs
Create a winning product strategy
Decide on your Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
Design your MVP prototype
Test your MVP with customers
Iterate rapidly to achieve product-market fit

This book was written by entrepreneur and Lean product expert Dan Olsen whose experience spans product management, UX design, coding, analytics, and marketing across a variety of products. As a hands-on consultant, he refined and applied the advice in this book as he helped many companies improve their product process and build great products. His clients include Facebook, Box, Hightail, Epocrates, and Medallia.

Entrepreneurs, executives, product managers, designers, developers, marketers, analysts and anyone who is passionate about building great products will find The Lean Product Playbook an indispensable, hands-on resource.

5. Cracking the PM Career- Jackie Bavardo & Gayle Laakmann

Link: https://amzn.to/3z0Nw07

Product management is a big role, and this a big book.

From the authors of the best-selling Cracking the PM Interview comes the comprehensive guide to the skills, frameworks, and practices to become a great product manager. It will help you level-up your skills and career from your first product management role through product leadership, addressing questions like:

What does it take to become a great product manager and a great leader?
How can you reliably ship products that make a difference in the world?
How do you build your product intuition, hone your execution, strengthen your leadership, and develop your strategic skills?
What does it take to lead and inspire teams?
When is people management the right career move?
How does excellence in those skills translate into career success?

This book will teach you the reliable frameworks and best practices that improve your chances of shipping a successful product. The frameworks won't transform you into a great product manager overnight or guarantee that your products never fail, but they'll help you avoid the most common problems and give you the structure to start experimenting, reflecting, and improving.

You'll learn how to:

Design high-quality products that delight users and solve people's needs.
Run and deliver your projects quickly, smoothly, and effectively.
Create product visions and strategies to set direction and optimize for long-term impact.
Lead people and influence without authority.
Manage people, develop great PMs, build great teams, and create great product organizations.
Manage your career so you can translate your efforts into the recognition you deserve.

Topics include:

Getting Started: the product life cycle; the first 90 days
Product Skills: user research; A/B tests; problem solving frameworks; systems thinking; product discovery; design sprints; ethical product design; technical terms and concepts; product documentation (specs and PRDs)
Execution Skills: agile project management; minimum viable products (MVPs); incremental development; product launches; time management; overcoming obstacles
Strategic Skills: product vision; strategy; roadmaps; goals and OKRs
Leadership Skills: growth mindset; ownership mentality; influencing without authority; stakeholder management; collaboration; communication; inspiring a team; mentoring; working with designers, engineers, and executives
People Management Skills: becoming a people manager; being a member of the leadership team; reviewing work; holding people accountable; coaching and development; recruiting and interviewing; product processes; organizational structures
Careers: career ladders; career goals; partnering with your manager; picking the right team; negotiations; networking; handling bad situations; career options beyond PM
Product Leader Q&A: in-depth career interviews with eleven successful product leaders who have chosen career paths including CPO, head of product, CEO, social impact work, venture capital, angel investing, coaching, and starting their own companies. And much, much more.

Featuring stories from over fifty PMs and product leaders who have worked at organizations including: Adobe, AirBnB, Amazon, Apple, Asana, Atlassian, Calendly, Chan-Zuckerberg Institute, Chegg, Cisco, City of San Jose, Coda, Coinbase, Dropbox, eBay, Facebook, FlipKart, Gojek, Google, HSBC, Instagram, LinkedIn, Medium, Microsoft, Netflix, OpenTable, Pinterest, Pocket Gems, Quora, Samsara, Slack, Sonos, Stripe, Swiggy, Twitter, Uber, Walmart Labs, Yahoo, and Yelp.

6. The Mom Test - Rob Fitzpatrick

Link: https://amzn.to/36xFXBB

The Mom Test is a quick, practical guide that will save you time, money, and heartbreak.

They say you shouldn't ask your mom whether your business is a good idea, because she loves you and will lie to you. This is technically true, but it misses the point. You shouldn't ask anyone if your business is a good idea. It's a bad question, and everyone will lie to you at least a little. As a matter of fact, it's not their responsibility to tell you the truth. It's your responsibility to find it, and it's worth doing right.

Talking to customers is one of the foundational skills of both customer development and lean startup. We all know we're supposed to do it, but nobody seems willing to admit that it's easy to screw up and hard to do right. This book is going to show you how customer conversations go wrong, and how you can do better.

6 books every product manager MUST read