Recommended books for Product Managers [ongoing]

I love reading books, and since I’m a slow reader I appreciate good books and good reading recommendations.

You could find that I’m attracted to books about product management, user experience, psychology, self-improvement, and more.

Selecting the best book is almost impossible, and it mostly depends on what you are looking for.

I created a list of my top 5 books that I would recommend reading and 5 more books (6–10) that would be at the top of the list if it wasn’t full already.

It will be updated each time a top 5 book is replaced

In addition, I was inspired by Nils Janse and created a visual map of the book categories.

My Top 5 books

1. Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products by Marty Cagan and Chris Jones. It includes lessons on Product Coaching, Product Staffing, Product Team Topology, Product Vision, Product Strategy, Product Objectives, and more.
   One of my favorite paragraphs is: “In companies with the feature team model, those features are usually coming from stakeholders, so the stakeholders view themselves as ‘the client,’ and they view the product team as ‘the hired IT resource.’ It’s another way of saying that the purpose of the feature team is to ‘serve the business.’ Yet, in an empowered product team, the purpose of the product team is to serve the customers in ways customers love, yet work for the business.”
2. Strong Product People by Petra Wille.
   The book is an essential guidebook for Product Leaders, Product Mentors, and Managers of Product Managers. It maps actionable, practical advice for coaching and developing product managers. The book includes methods of team management, increasing motivation, recruiting product managers, time management, training product managers for excellence, building a great culture, and more.
   A few of my favorite quotes are: “Understand that what makes a Good PM good varies from organization to organization. That is, PMs are only good in their context, their company, their current job, and their time.”
   “When you tell your coachee what to do and solve the problem for him, he won’t develop as an employee. When you challenge your coachee’s thinking by asking the right questions, you build a long-term development”
3. Hooked by Nir Eyal. A highly recommended read for B2C product managers.
   The main thing I took from the book is that there are two types of triggers: the first one being external and quite simple, and if possible, we would use it until an internal trigger is created, which is when a habit is established.
   One of my favorite paragraphs is: “Emotions, particularly negative ones, are powerful internal triggers and greatly influence our daily routines. Feelings of boredom, loneliness, frustration, confusion, and indecisiveness often instigate a slight pain or irritation and prompt an almost instantaneous and often mindless action to quell the negative sensation”
4. Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne.
   The book challenges companies to break out of the “red ocean of bloody competition” by creating an uncontested market space that makes the competition irrelevant. The book provides a framework and tools to set the strategy, and gives tips for achieving the buy-in of management and employees. The book includes plenty of examples.
   A few of my favorite quotes are: “Does your industry compete on functionality or emotional appeal? If you compete on emotional appeal, what elements can you strip out to make it functional? If you compete on functionality, what elements can be added to make it emotional?”
   “Three principles are critical to assessing trends across time. To
   form the basis of a blue ocean strategy, these trends must be decisive to your business, they must be irreversible, and they must have a clear trajectory.”
   “the third principle of blue ocean strategy: Reach beyond existing demand….Instead of concentrating on customers, they need to look to noncustomers. And instead of focusing on customer differences, they need to build on powerful commonalities in what buyers value.”
5. Getting Things Done by David Allen
   In his book, Allen’s premise is simple: our productivity is directly proportional to our ability to relax. Only when our minds are clear and our thoughts are organized can we achieve effective productivity and unleash our creative potential.
   This book gave me a lot of practical tools for managing tasks, managing my time, and freeing my mind to focus on things that matter.
   A few of my favorite quotes are: “If you don’t pay appropriate attention to what has your attention, it will take more of your attention than it deserves.”
   “Things rarely get stuck because of lack of time. They get stuck because the doing of them has not been defined.”
   “There is one thing we can do, and the happiest of people are those who do it to the limit of their ability. We can be completely present.”

The next 5 books (6–10)

1. Continuous Discovery Habits: Discover Products That Create Customer Value and Business Value by Teresa Torres
   This book serves as a comprehensive guide, outlining the systematic steps and recommended practices for product managers to actively explore and identify viable business opportunities through ongoing user research.
   A few of my favorite quotes are: “Don’t capture the feeling itself as the opportunity. Instead, look for the cause of the feeling.”
   “You are never one feature away from success…”
   “Study after study found that the individuals generating ideas alone outperformed the brainstorming groups. Individuals generated more ideas, more diverse ideas, and more original ideas. As researchers dug into why individuals outperformed groups, they identified four mitigation factors. First, research has found that people tend to work harder when working individually than when working in groups. This is called Social Loafing.”
2. Microcopy: The Complete Guide by Kinneret Yifrah. This isn’t a book that’s meant to be on a shelf; it’s a practical tool that should be within a hand’s reach on your desktop.
   The book provides instructions on how we should communicate with users before, during, and after the action we want them to complete. In addition, it’s a fun read that includes plenty of examples. I would highly recommend this book for Product Managers, Marketing Product Managers, and Designers.
3. Atomic Habits: Tiny Changes, Remarkable Results by James Clear. It’s a book for people who are trying to acquire a new habit or to get rid of a bad habit.
   One of the quotes I liked most in this book was: “One day an elite coach visited our gym. He had worked with thousands of athletes during his long career, including a few Olympians. I introduced myself and we began talking about the process of improvement. “What is the difference between the best athletes and everyone else?” I asked. “What do the really successful people do that most don’t?” He mentioned the factors you might expect: genetics, luck, talent. But then he said something I wasn’t expecting: “At some point, it comes down to who can handle the boredom of training every day, doing the same lifts over and over and over… The only way to become excellent is to be endlessly fascinated by doing the same thing over and over. You have to fall in love with boredom.”
4. The Mom Test: How to talk to customers and learn if your business is a good idea when everyone is lying to you by Rob Fitzpatrick. Interviewing customers is hard and it is much harder not to screw it up. This book is an indispensable resource for anyone who interviews customers and users and tries to learn what they want. It is a quick, practical guide that will save you time, money, and heartbreak.
   A few of my favorite quotes are:
   “It’s not anyone else’s responsibility to show us the truth. It’s our responsibility to find it.”; “If you just avoid mentioning your idea, you automatically start asking better questions”; “The value comes from understanding why they want these features. You don’t want to just collect feature requests.”;
   “If they haven’t looked for ways of solving it already, they’re not going to look for (or buy) yours.”; “People stop lying when you ask them for money”.
5. The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries.
   The book teaches the Lean approach that is common in the last few decades where startups need to continuously build, test, and learn fast before they ran out of money.
   A few of my favorite quotes are: ”The big question of our time is not Can it be built? but Should it be built? This places us in an unusual historical moment: our future prosperity depends on the quality of our collective imaginations.”
   “The only way to win is to learn faster than anyone else.”
   “Reading is good, action is better.”

Other books I read

• User Story Mapping: Discover the whole story, build the right product by Jeff Patton
• The Lean Product Playbook: How to innovate with minimum viable products and rapid customer feedback by Dan Olsen
• The 4-Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferriss.
• Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value by Melissa Perri
• The Hard Thing About The Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers by Ben Horowitz.
• Decode and Conquer: Answers to Product Management Interviews by Lewis C. Lin
• Agile Product Management With Scrum: Creating Products That Customers Love by Roman Pichler
• Radical Candor: Be a Kickass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity by Kim Malone Scott
• INSPIRED: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love by Marty Cagan.
• Cracking the PM Interview: How to Land a Product Manager Job in Technology by Gayle Laakmann McDowell
• Indistractable: How to control your attention and chose your life by Nir Eyal, Julie Li.
• Influence Without Authority by Allan R. Cohen and David L.Bradford
• Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel, Blake Masters.
• Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari
• Ship It: Silicon Valley Product Managers Reveal All by Product School, Nathan Thomas, Gabriela Araujo, Roy Cobby
• Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely
• The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home by Dan Ariely
• The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone — Especially Ourselves by Dan Ariely
• Payoff: The Hidden Logic That Shapes Our Motivations by Dan Ariely

My next two reads:

1. The Lean Product Playbook: How to Innovate with Minimum Viable Products and Rapid Customer Feedback by Dan Olsen
2. Strong Product People: A Complete Guide to Developing Great Product Managers

Once in a while, I will update the list with my latest readings.

I would appreciate good reading recommendations in the comments section.