Woman sitting and meditating on a pile of books. Credit: Book vector created by pch.vector (www.freepik.com)
Over the past 5 or 6 years, I’ve compiled a list of books, blogs, and articles that I’ve recommended to people interested in Product Management, or new to the role. It lived for a long time as an email that I would dig up, update, and copy-and-paste for each new recipient. I posted this list to Medium several years ago to share more broadly, and in the hope that I’d get suggestions from others on what books should be included or eliminated.
Book titles are italicized, online articles are not.
Articles for Getting Started
Intercom on Product Management. Fun and informative overview of product management (requires email to download).
Good Product Team, Bad Product Team by Marty Cagan (2014)
Fundamentals of PM and Building Valuable Products
Essentials
Inspired, How to Create Tech Products Customers Love by Marty Cagan (2017). The bible of modern product management, and a great starting place for anyone new to the subject. It’s now been updated with a second edition.
Lean Customer Development: Building Products Your Customers Will Buy by Cindy Alvarez (2014)
Radical Focus: Achieving Your Most Important Goals with Objectives and Key Results by Christina Wodtke (2016)
Deep Cuts
Product Talk website and An Introduction to Modern Product Discovery presentation by Teresa Torres.
Cracking the PM Interview: How to Land a Product Manager Job in Technology by Gayle Laakmann McDowell and Jackie Bavaro (2013)
Hooked: How to Build Habit Forming Products by Nir Eyal (2014)
Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs by John Doerr (2018)
Agile Planning and Software Development
Essentials
User Story Mapping: Discover the Whole Story, Build the Right Product by Jeff Patton (2014)
The Mythical Man Month: Essays on Software Engineering by Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. (1995)
User Stories Applied: For Agile Software Development by Mike Cohn (2004)
Deep Cuts
Planning Extreme Programming by Kent Beck & Martin Fowler (2000)
Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit by Mary and Tom Poppendieck (2003)
The Art of Agile Development by James Shore (2007)
Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams by Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory (2008)
Software Testing by Ron Patton (2005)
Agile Product Management with Scrum: Creating Products that Customers Love by Roman Pichler (2010)
User Experience, Design, and Research
Essentials
Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test Ideas in Just 5 Days by Jake Knapp (2016)
Google’s Design Sprint Resources: Re:Work: Guide to Design Thinking, Google Ventures: Design Sprints
Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability by Steve Krug (2013). Fundamentals of UX design.
Rocket Surgery Made Easy: The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Fixing Usability Problems by Steve Krug (2009). Fundamentals of usability testing.
Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights by Steve Portigal (2013)
Well Designed: How to Use Empathy to Create Products People Love by Jon Kolko (2014)
Deep Cuts
The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman (2013)
The Elements of User Experience: User-Centered Design for the Web and Beyond by Jesse James Garrett (2010)
The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity by Alan Cooper (2004)
Pretty much anything by Dan Ariely: Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions (2010).
Pretty much anything by Edward Tufte: The Visual Display of Quantitative Information(2001), Envisioning Information (1990).
The Market Research Toolbox: A Concise Guide for Beginners by Edward F. (Francis) McQuarrie (2015)
The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less by Barry Schwartz (2005)
Entrepreneurship, Strategy, and Business
Essentials
The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development: A Cheat Sheet to The Four Steps to the Epiphany by Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits (2010). A condensed version of The Four Steps to the Epiphany.
The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries (2011)
The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers by Ben Horowitz (2014)
Michael Porter’s Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors (1998) and Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance (1998)
7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy by Hamilton Helmer (2016)
Deep Cuts
The Four Steps to the Epiphany by Steve Blank (2013)
Anything in the Lean Series is worth reading: Lean Analytics: Use Data to Build a Better Startup Faster (2013), Lean UX: Applying Lean Principles to Improve User Experience (2013), UX for Lean Startups (2013), Running Lean: Iterate from Plan A to a Plan that Works (2012).
Pretty much anything by Clayton Christensen: The Innovator’s Dilemma (2011), The Innovator’s Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth (2013).
Pretty much anything by Jim Collins: Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t (2001), Great by Choice: Uncertainty, Chaos, and Luck — Why Some Thrive Despite Them All (2011), Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies (1994), How the Mighty Fall: And Why Some Companies Never Give In (2009).
Pretty much anything by Chip and Dan Heath: Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die (2007), Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard (2010), Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work (2013), Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen by Dan Heath (2020).
Outside In: The Power of Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business by Harley Manning and Kerry Bodine (2012)
Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers by Geoffrey Moore (2014)
Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation by Steven Johnson (2011)
High Output Management by Andrew S. Grove (1995)
The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone (2014). What makes Amazon great.
How Google Works by Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg (2014). What makes Google great.
Smart Business: What Alibaba’s Success Reveals About the Future of Strategy by Ming Zeng (2018). What makes Alibaba great.
Intentional Integrity: How Smart Companies Can Lead an Ethical Revolution by Robert Chestnut (2020)
Leadership, Work Relationships, and Culture
Essentials
The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever by Michael Stanier (2016)
The Feedback Fallacy by Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall / Harvard Business Review (2019)
Dare to Lead: Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts. by Brené Brown (2018)
Deep Cuts
Pretty much anything by Simon Sinek: Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action (2011), Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’t (2014)
Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead by Brené Brown (2015)
Google’s Manager Resources: Re:Work: Managers
Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity by Kim Scott (2019)
The Culture Map: Decoding How People Think, Lead, and Get Things Done Across Cultures by Erin Meyer (2016)
Platforms and Marketplaces
Essentials
The Marketplace Glossary by Li Jin / Andreeson Horowitz
Why Some Platforms Thrive and Others Don’t by Feng Zhu and Marco Iansiti / Harvard Business Review (2019)
Aggregation Theory by Ben Thompson / Stratechery (2015)
Deep Cuts
Money Out of Nowhere: How Internet Marketplaces Unlock Economic Wealth by Bill Gurley (2019)
8 Things to Consider When Building Managed Marketplace Companies by Li Jin / Andreeson Horowitz
How to Kickstart and Scale a Marketplace Business by Lenny Rachitsky (2019)
Underutilized Fixed Assets by Kevin Kwok (2020)
APIs Explained for Product Managers by Richard Holmes
The Evolution of Trust: Interactive Guide to Game Theory by Nicky Case (2017). A really well-designed and fun animated simulation for game theory.
Self-Published Articles and Newsletters
When I first created this list, this section on blogs and newsletters was very short, but recently (and thanks to substack) there has been an explosion in self-published, subscription newsletters. Here are some that I think are must-reads:
Ben Thompson (Stratechery). Aggregation theory, strategy, technology.
Benedict Evans. Strategy, technology.
Lenny Rachitsky. Product, growth, marketplaces.
Shreyas Doshi. My new favorite person to follow on Twitter. Incredibly smart, analytical, thoughtful. Part insights and frameworks for product, part insights and frameworks for life.
Josh Breinlinger (A Crowded Space). Marketplaces.
Teresa Torres (Product Talk). Product management, product discovery.
Marty Cagan (SVPG). Everything product.
Bill Gurley (Above the Crowd). Tech, startups, marketplaces, VC.
Kevin Kwok. Loops, marketplaces.
Quora and Medium
Both Quora and Medium are good places to learn more about different aspects of product management. Here are some that are worth looking at:
Quora
Ian McAllister. Ex-Amazon GM and Director of Product at Airbnb and it looks like he’s back at Amazon. His posts are great: 16 Tips for Writing Upwards, Top 10 Reasons Good Product Ideas Don’t Get Implemented, The Book of Ian.
Michael Wolfe. Serial Entrepreneur. Great answers to engineering, entrepreneurship, VCs, product, life. His response to Why Is Dropbox More Popular Than Other Programs With Similar Functionality is classic.
Marty Cagan. Most of his writing is on svpg.com/articles.
Medium
I’m planning on updating this list from time-to-time. What are your recommended newsletters, books, articles, videos, or blogs?