Like most things in life, a manual about how to be the best product manager you can be would be nice, wouldn’t it?
Fortunately, unlike most things in life, people actually write books to help you sharpen your skills and enhance your product management strategies.
Explore 75 best product management books to boost your expertise and fuel your innovation journey.
Best Product Management Books
Here are 75 of the best project management books recommended by the team at AnnouceKit.
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#1: Influence Without Authority by Allan R. Cohen and David L. Bradford
In this revised edition, leadership gurus Allan Cohen and David Bradford explain how to get cooperation from those over whom you have no official authority by offering them help in the form of the “currencies” they value. Now revised and updated, this classic work gives you powerful techniques for cutting through interpersonal and interdepartmental barriers and motivating people to lend you their support, time, and resources.Buy the book.
#2: The Art of Principled Entrepreneurship: Creating Enduring Value by Andreas Widmer
Are you an entrepreneur, manager, employee, or business student seeking to lead in a people-centered way? The Art of Principled Entrepreneurship is an insightful, practical guide to how businesses can and should be run to be both virtuous and profitable.
#3: Customer Centricity: Focus on the Right Customers for Strategic Advantage by Peter Fader
A powerful call to action, Customer Centricity upends some of our most fundamental beliefs about customer service, customer relationship management, and customer lifetime value.
Despite the old adage, the customer is not always right. Even companies that can seemingly do no wrong — like the coffeehouse giant Starbucks — have only recently started to realize this.
Starbucks is one of many companies that has successfully executed a pivot that puts it in a customer-centric mindset, an approach that Wharton professor Peter Fader describes in Customer Centricity. Fader advocates that in the world of customer-centricity, there are good customers — and then there is pretty much everybody else.
#4: The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt
Written in a fast-paced thriller style, The Goal contains a serious message for all industry managers and explains the ideas that underline the author’s Theory of Constraints.
#5: Start at the End: How to Build Products That Create Change by Matt Wallaert
Nudge meets Hooked in a practical approach to designing products and services that change behavior, from what we buy to how we work.
Start at the End offers a new design framework grounded in behavioral science. Technology executive and behavioral scientist Matt Wallaert argues that the purpose of everything is behavior change. By starting with outcomes instead of processes, the most effective companies understand what people want to do and why they aren’t already doing it, then build products and services to bridge the gap.
#6: Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value by Melissa Perri
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.
#7: Product Management’s Sacred Seven: The Skills Required to Crush Product Manager Interviews and Be a World-Class PM by Parth Detroja, Neel Mehta, and Aditya Agashe
Authored by 3 Product Managers at Facebook, Google, and Microsoft, Product Management’s Sacred Seven is a comprehensive resource that will teach you the must-know knowledge and applied skills necessary to become a world-class PM who can get hired anywhere.Buy the book.
#8: Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love by Marty Cagan
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 billions of people worldwide? Perhaps surprisingly, they do it very differently than most tech companies.
In INSPIRED, technology product management thought leader Marty Cagan provides readers with a master class on structuring and staffing a vibrant and successful product organization. Discover and deliver technology products that your customers will love and that will work for your business.
#9: Product-Led Growth: How to Build a Product That Sells Itself by Wes Bush
In Product-Led Growth, Bush shows you how to cut your acquisition costs and scale further than you ever thought possible — by making your product the tool that helps you acquire, convert, and retain customers.
#10: The Product Book: How to Become a Great Product Manager by Product School, Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia, and Josh Anon
“Nobody asked you to show up.” Every experienced product manager has heard some version of those words in their career. Think about a company.
Engineers build the product. Designers make sure it has a great user experience and looks good. Marketing makes sure customers know about the product. Sales get potential customers to open their wallets to buy the product. What more does a company need? What does a product manager do?
Based upon Product School’s curriculum, which has helped thousands of students become great product managers, The Product Book answers that question. Filled with practical advice, best practices, and expert tips, this book is here to help you succeed!
#11: The Lean Product Playbook: How to Innovate with Minimum Viable Products and Rapid Customer Feedback by Dan Olsen
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.
#12: Continuous Discovery Habits: Discover Products That Create Customer Value and Business Value by Teresa Torres
How do you know you are making a product or service your customers want? How do you ensure that you are improving it over time? How do you guarantee that your team creates value for your customers in a way that creates value for your business?
In this book, you’ll learn a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery that will help you answer each of these questions. This approach will give you the confidence to act while also preparing you to be wrong. You’ll learn to balance action with doubt to get started without being blindsided by what you don’t get right.
#13: The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick
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 will show you how customer conversations go wrong and how you can do better.
#14: Deploy Empathy: A Practical Guide to Interviewing Customers by Michele Hansen
Deploy Empathy is underpinned by a key idea: how you ask a question matters just as much as the questions you ask. To thoroughly understand customer jobs to be done and pull out their hidden needs, desires, and processes, you need to ask questions empathetically.
#15: Don’t Make Me Think By Steve Krug
Since Don’t Make Me Think was first published in 2000, hundreds of thousands of Web designers and developers have relied on usability guru Steve Krug’s guide to help them understand the principles of intuitive navigation and information design. Witty, commonsensical, and eminently practical, it’s one of the best-loved and most recommended books on the subject.
#16: Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely
In this newly revised and expanded edition of the groundbreaking New York Times bestseller, Dan Ariely refutes the common assumption that we behave in fundamentally rational ways. From drinking coffee to losing weight, buying a car, and choosing a romantic partner, we consistently overpay, underestimate, and procrastinate. Yet these misguided behaviors are neither random nor senseless. They’re systematic and predictable — making us predictably irrational.
#17: Getting Things Done by David Allen
Since it was first published more than 15 years ago, David Allen’s Getting Things Done has become one of the most influential business books of its era and the ultimate book on personal organization. “GTD” is now shorthand for an entire way of approaching professional and personal tasks and has spawned an entire culture of websites, organizational tools, seminars, and offshoots.
#18: Obviously Awesome By April Dunford
In her new book, Obviously Awesome, Dunford shows you how to find your product’s “secret sauce” and then sell that sauce to those who crave it. Having spent years as a startup executive (with 16 product launches under her belt) and a consultant (who’s worked on dozens more), Dunford speaks with authority about breaking through the noise of a crowded market.
#19: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey
The 7 Habits have become famous and are integrated into everyday thinking by millions and millions of people. Why? Because they work! With Sean Covey’s added takeaways on how the habits can be used in our modern age, the wisdom of the 7 habits will be refreshed for a new generation of leaders.
#20: Loved: How to Rethink Marketing for Tech Products by Martina Lauchengco
Sharing her personal stories as a former product and marketing leader at Microsoft and Netscape, an advisor to Silicon Valley startups and venture capitalists, and a UC Berkeley engineering graduate school lecturer, Martina Lauchengco distills decades of lessons gleaned from working with hundreds of companies to make LOVED the definitive guide to modern product marketing.
#21: Proximity: How Coming Breakthroughs in Just-in-Time Transform Business, Society, and Daily Life by Robert C. Wolcott and Kaihan Krippendorff
Robert C. Wolcott and Kaihan Krippendorff provide an indispensable guide to the Proximity revolution, showing how it’s transforming every industry ― and our lives. Offering unparalleled foresight for leaders and innovators, they reveal how pervasive this trend will be. Proximity represents an entirely new way to serve customers, with critical implications for corporate strategy, investing, public policy, supply chain resilience, and sustainability. Incremental changes to existing business models won’t suffice.
#22: Analytics: How to Win with Intelligence by John Thompson and Shawn P. Rogers
Learn how big data and other sources of information can be transformed into valuable knowledge, creating an incredible competitive advantage that propels a business toward market leadership.
Learn through examples and experience exactly how to pick projects and build analytics teams that deliver results. Understand ethical and privacy issues and apply the three-part litmus test of context, permission, and accuracy.
Data and analytics are undoubtedly the new source of competitive advantage, but how do executives go from hype to action? That’s the objective of this book — to assist executives in making the right investments in the right place and at the right time to reap the full benefits of data analytics.
#23: Pattern Breakers: Why Some Start-Ups Change the Future by Mike Maples Jr and Peter Ziebelman
Based on extensive research and real-world examples, this book upends accepted wisdom about how to achieve success when launching a startup or creating a new product.
The breakthrough concepts of Pattern Breakers come from the observations of Mike Maples Jr., a seasoned venture capitalist who noticed something strange. Start-ups like Twitter, Twitch, and Lyft have achieved extraordinary success despite their disregard for “best practices.” In contrast, other startups deemed highly promising often fail, even when they seem to do everything right.
#24: Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard by Chip Heath and Dan Heath
In Switch, the Heaths show how everyday people — employees and managers, parents and nurses — have united both minds and, as a result, achieved dramatic results:
- The lowly medical interns who managed to defeat an entrenched, decades-old medical practice endangering patients
- The home-organizing guru who developed a simple technique for overcoming the dread of housekeeping
- The manager who transformed a lackadaisical customer-support team into service zealots by removing a standard tool of customer service
#25: The Culting of Brands: Turn Your Customers into True Believers by Douglas Atkin
Marketing expert Douglas Atkin has spent years researching both full-blown cults and companies that use cult-branding techniques. He interviewed countless cult members to find out what makes them tick. He explains exactly how brands like Harley-Davidson, Saturn, JetBlue, and Ben & Jerry’s make their customers feel unique, important, and part of an exclusive group — and how that leads to solid, long-term relationships between a company and its customers.
#26: Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products by Marty Cagan and Chris Jones
EMPOWERED aims to provide you, as a leader of product management, product design, or engineering, with everything you’ll need to create just such an environment.
As partners at The Silicon Valley Product Group, Marty Cagan and Chris Jones have long worked to reveal the best practices of the world’s most consistently innovative companies. A natural companion to the bestseller INSPIRED, EMPOWERED tackles head-on the reason why most companies fail to truly leverage their people’s potential to innovate: product leadership.
#27: The Lean Start-Up: How Constant Innovation Creates Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries
The Lean Startup is a new business approach being adopted around the world. It is changing the way companies are built and new products are launched.
Essential reading for any ambitious entrepreneur, The Lean Startup will teach you to identify what your customers really want. You’ll learn how to test your vision continuously, adapting and adjusting before it’s too late.
#28: Game Thinking: Innovate Smarter & Drive Deep Engagement with Design Techniques from Hit Games by Amy Jo Kim
In this groundbreaking book, Amy Jo Kim lays out a step-by-step system for crafting products people love — and will keep loving. The secret? Develop “impossible to put down” products using techniques that the fast-moving games industry employs when making games that glue millions of players to their screens.
#29: Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration by Amy Wallace and Edwin Catmull
As a young man, Ed Catmull dreamed of making the first computer-animated movie. He nurtured that dream as a Ph.D. student and then forged a partnership with George Lucas that indirectly led to his founding Pixar with Steve Jobs and John Lasseter in 1986.
Nine years later, Toy Story was released, changing animation forever. The essential ingredient in that movie’s success — and in the twenty-five movies that followed — was the unique environment that Catmull and his colleagues built at Pixar, based on philosophies that protect the creative process and defy convention.
#30: Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers by Geoffrey A. Moore
In Crossing the Chasm, Geoffrey A. Moore shows that in the Technology Adoption Life Cycle—which begins with innovators and moves to early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards—there is a vast chasm between the early adopters and the early majority. While early adopters are willing to sacrifice for the advantage of being first, the early majority waits until they know that the technology actually offers productivity improvements. The challenge for innovators and marketers is narrowing this chasm and accelerating adoption across every segment.
#31: Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days by Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky, and Braden Kowitz
From inside Google Ventures, a unique five-day process for solving tough problems has been proven at thousands of companies in mobile, e-commerce, healthcare, finance, and more.
In a Design Sprint, you gather a small team, clear your schedules for a week, and rapidly progress from problem to prototype to tested solution using the step-by-step five-day process in this book.
#32: Product Roadmaps Relaunched: How to Set Direction While Embracing Uncertainty by C. Todd Lombardo, Bruce McCarthy, Evan Ryan, and Michael Connors
A good product roadmap is one of the most important and influential documents an organization can develop, publish, and continuously update. In fact, this one document can steer an entire organization when it comes to delivering on company strategy.
This practical guide teaches you how to create an effective product roadmap and demonstrates how to use the roadmap to align stakeholders and prioritize ideas and requests. With it, you’ll learn to communicate how your products will make your customers and organization successful.
#33: The Geek Way: The Radical Mindset that Drives Extraordinary Results by Andrew McAfee
In this “handbook for disruptors” (Eric Schmidt), The Geek Way reveals a new way to get big things done. It will change the way you think about work, teams, projects, and culture and give you the insight and tools you need to harness our human superpowers of learning and cooperation.
#34: The Insights Driven Product Manager by Corinna Stukan
The ultimate guide to mastering product metrics, getting better data insights, and making more impactful product decisions this book is recognized as one of the top 22 books for Product Managers by analytics leader Amplitude.
#35: Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products by Nir Eyal and Ryan Hoover
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.
#36: Product Management for Dummies by Brian Lawley and Pamela Schure
From defining what product management is ― and isn’t ― to exploring the rising importance of product management in the corporate world, this friendly and accessible guide quickly gets you up to speed on everything it takes to thrive in this growing field. It offers plain English explanations of the product life cycle, market research, competitive analysis, market and pricing strategy, product roadmaps, the people skills it takes to influence and negotiate effectively, and so much more.
#37: Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap, and Others Don’t by Jim Collins
Good to Great is a management book by Jim C. Collins that describes how companies transition from being good to great companies and how most fail to make the transition. The book was a bestseller, selling four million copies and going far beyond the traditional audience of business books.
#38: Be the Unicorn: 12 Data-Driven Habits that Separate the Best Leaders from the Rest by William Vanderbloemen
How do I stand out? How do I become irreplaceable? With a crowded workforce, an unstable job landscape, and the rise of AI, these are the questions that everyone is either asking or should be asking.
William Vanderbloemen has asked these questions over the past 15 years while running one of the world’s top executive search firms. Through extensive research of over 30,000 top leaders and proprietary data, Vanderbloemen has identified the 12 habits that the best of the best have in common. Traits include authenticity, responsiveness, agility, and the ability to solve problems, among others.
#39: User Story Mapping by Jeff Patton.
Once you understand why and how to use it, user story mapping is a valuable tool for software development. This insightful book examines how this often misunderstood technique can help your team stay focused on users and their needs without getting lost in the enthusiasm for individual product features.
Author Jeff Patton shows you how changeable story maps enable your team to hold better conversations about the project throughout development. Your team will learn to come away with a shared understanding of what you’re attempting to build and why.
#40: Measure What Matters: OKRs: The Simple Idea that Drives 10x Growth by John Doerr
The revolutionary movement behind the explosive growth of Intel, Google, Amazon, and Uber. With a foreword by Larry Page and contributions from Bono and Bill Gates, Measure What Matters is about using Objectives and Key Results (OKRs), a revolutionary approach to goal-setting, to make tough choices in business.
#41: Why Simple Wins: Escape the Complexity Trap and Get to Work That Matters by Lisa Bodell
Imagine what you could do with the time you spend writing emails daily. Complexity is killing companies’ ability to innovate and adapt, and simplicity is fast becoming the competitive advantage of our time.
Why Simple Wins helps leaders and their teams move beyond the feelings of frustration and futility that come with so much unproductive work in today’s corporate world to create a corporate culture where valuable, essential, meaningful work is the norm.
#42: Be the Greatest Product Manager Ever: Master Six Proven Skills to Get the Career You Want by Lewis C. Lin
Be the Greatest Product Manager Ever is the playbook for moving up the PM career ladder. This book is suitable for PMs of all levels, from individual contributors to senior executives.
#43: Vivid Vision: A Remarkable Tool For Aligning Your Business Around a Shared Vision of the Future by Cameron Herold
In this easy-to-follow guide, Herold walks organization leaders through the simple steps to creating their own Vivid Vision, from brainstorming to sharing ideas to using the document to drive progress in the years to come. By mapping out how you see your company looking and feeling in every category of business without getting bogged down by data and numbers, Vivid Vision creates a holistic road map to success that will get all of your teammates passionate about the big picture.Buy the book.
#44: Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte
This eye-opening and accessible guide shows how you can easily create your system for knowledge management, otherwise known as a Second Brain.
A trusted and organized digital repository of your most valued ideas, notes, and creative work, a Second Brain gives you the confidence to tackle your most important projects and ambitious goals. From identifying good ideas to organizing your thoughts to retrieving everything swiftly and easily, it puts you back in control of your life and information.
#45: Statistics Done Wrong: The Woefully Complete Guide by Alex Reinhart
Statistics Done Wrong is a pithy, essential guide to statistical blunders in modern science that will show you how to keep your research blunder-free. You’ll examine embarrassing errors and omissions in recent research, learn about the misconceptions and scientific politics that allow these mistakes to happen, and begin your quest to reform the way you and your peers do statistics.
#46: Untrapping Product Teams: Simplify the Complexity of Creating Digital Products by David Pereira
Untrapping Product Teams guides you to simplify what gets unintentionally complicated and equips you to overcome dangerous traps while steadily driving customer and business value. This isn’t just another book about product management. It’s a thought-provoking guide filled with simplicity, encouraging you to act today for a better tomorrow.
#47: Free: The Future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson
In his revolutionary bestseller, The Long Tail, Chris Anderson demonstrated how the online marketplace creates niche markets, allowing products and consumers to connect in a way that has never been possible before.
Now, in Free, he makes the compelling case that, in many instances, businesses can profit more from giving things away than they can by charging for them. Far more than a promotional gimmick, Free is a business strategy that may well be essential to a company’s survival.
In Free, Chris Anderson explores this radical idea for the new global economy and demonstrates how this revolutionary price can be harnessed for the benefit of consumers and businesses alike.
#48: The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman
The Design of Everyday Things shows that good, usable design is possible. The rules are simple: make things visible, exploit natural relationships that couple function and control, and intelligently use constraints. The goal is to guide the user effortlessly to the right action on the right control at the right time.
The Design of Everyday Things is a powerful primer on how — and why — some products satisfy customers while others only frustrate them.
#49: Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things by Don Norman
Emotions are inseparable from how we humans think, choose, and act. In Emotional Design, cognitive scientist Don Norman shows how the principles of human psychology apply to the invention and design of new technologies and products.
#50: Product Management in Practice: A Practical, Tactical Guide for Your First Day and Every Day After by Matt LeMay
Matt LeMay provides real-world guidance for current and aspiring product managers in this thoroughly revised and expanded edition. Updated for the era of remote and hybrid work, this book provides actionable answers to product management’s most persistent and confounding questions, starting with: What exactly am I supposed to do all day?
#51: Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Jeff Sutherland
The definitive account of the Scrum methodology from its co-creator and the CEO of Scrum, Inc., Jeff Sutherland. Scrum is the revolutionary approach to project management and team building that has helped to transform everything from software companies to the US military to healthcare in major American hospitals. In this major new book, its originator, Jeff Sutherland, explains precisely and step by step how it operates — and how it can be made to work for anyone, anywhere.
#52: My Product Management Toolkit: Tools and Techniques to Become an Outstanding Product Manager by Marc Abraham
Why are some products a hit while others never see the light of day? While there’s no foolproof way to tell what will succeed and what won’t, every product has a chance as long as it’s supported by research, careful planning, and hard work.
Written by successful product manager Marc Abraham, My Product Management Toolkit is a comprehensive guide to developing a physical or digital product that consumers love.
#53: The Product Mindset: Succeed in the Digital Economy by Changing the Way Your Organization Thinks by David H. DeWolf and Jessica S. Hall
The Product Mindset approaches product development from a bold, new direction based on a shared internal outlook that drives focus, speed, experimentation, and innovation from a wide variety of stakeholders. David DeWolf and Jessica Hall provide you with all the tools you’ll need to revitalize your company’s methodologies, reframe its culture, and help it thrive in the digital marketplace.
#54: Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction by Philip E. Tetlock and Dan Gardner
In Superforecasting, Tetlock and coauthor Dan Gardner offer a masterwork on prediction, drawing on decades of research and the results of a massive, government-funded forecasting tournament.
This book offers the first demonstrably effective way to improve our ability to predict the future—whether in business, finance, politics, international affairs, or daily life—and is destined to become a modern classic.
#55: The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done by Peter F. Drucker
What makes an executive?
In this book, Peter F. Drucker reminds us that the measure of the executive is the ability to “get the right things done.” This usually involves doing what other people have overlooked and avoiding what is unproductive. Intelligence, imagination, and knowledge may all be wasted in an executive job without the acquired habits of mind that mold them into results.
#56: The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development by Donald G. Reinertsen
This book provides a well-organized set of 175 underlying principles in eight major areas. Reinersten shows you practical methods to:
- Improve economic decisions
- Manage queues
- Reduce batch size
- Apply WIP constraints
- Accelerate feedback
- Manage flows in the presence of variability
- Decentralize control
The Principles of Product Development Flow will forever change your thinking about product development.
#57: The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton M. Christensen
Offering successes and failures from leading companies as a guide, The Innovator’s Dilemma gives you a set of rules for capitalizing on disruptive innovation.
Sharp, cogent, and provocative—and consistently noted as one of the most valuable business ideas of all time—The Innovator’s Dilemma is the book no manager, leader, or entrepreneur should be without.
#58: Built for People: Transform Your Employee Experience Using Product Management Principles by Jessica Zwaan
This book shows how to transform the people function by applying the best elements of a product-management approach to HR activity.
Written for all HR professionals and business leaders, Built for People explains how to improve workforce and business performance by developing people-centered working methods, evidence-based decision-making, and a culture of continuous feedback and iteration.
#59: Hug Your Customers: The Proven Way to Personalize Sales and Achieve Astounding Results by Jack Mitchell
If you want to put your arms around your business and bottom line, you’ll want all the updated information and practices found in the landmark business bestseller Hug Your Customers. The only way to stay in business is to have customers; the only way to increase your profit is to attract more customer visits by providing exceptional customer service.
Filled with accessible advice, personal case studies, and tips any businessperson can use, Hug Your Customers is an energizing blueprint for customer and employee retention, increased per capita spending, and groundbreaking success.
#60: Seeing What Others Don’t: The Remarkable Ways We Gain Insights by Gary Klein
Insights like Darwin’s understanding of how evolution actually works and Watson and Crick’s breakthrough discoveries about the structure of DNA can change the world. We also need insights into the everyday things that frustrate and confuse us to solve problems and get things done more effectively.
Yet we know very little about when, why, or how insights are formed or what blocks them. In Seeing What Others Don’t, renowned cognitive psychologist Gary Klein unravels the mystery.
#61: The Influential Product Manager: How to Lead and Launch Successful Technology Products by Ken Sandy
The Influential Product Manager teaches product managers how to behave at each stage of the product life cycle to achieve the best outcome for the customer.
Product managers are under pressure to drive spectacular results, often without wielding much direct power or authority. If you don’t know how to influence people at all levels of the organization, how will you create the best possible product?
#62: Project to Product: How to Survive and Thrive in the Age of Digital Disruption with the Flow Framework by Mik Kersten
In Project to Product, Value Stream Network pioneer and technology business leader Dr. Mik Kersten introduces the Flow Framework―a new way of seeing, measuring, and managing software delivery.
The Flow Framework will enable your company’s evolution from a project-oriented dinosaur to a product-centric innovator that thrives in the Age of Software. If you’re driving your organization’s transformation at any level, this book is for you.
#63: The Product Manager’s Survival Guide, Second Edition: Everything You Need to Know to Succeed as a Product Manager by Steven Haines
Regardless of industry or sector, to compete in today’s business world, product managers must understand how their customer’s preferences change, how technology evolves, and how to anticipate what competitors might do.
You need a reliable resource that provides timely guidance and practical tools to help you compete. With new content and expert advice, this updated edition of The Product Manager’s Survival Guide brings you fully up to date on what you need to succeed as a product manager.
#64: The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master by Andrew Hunt and David Thoma
Written as a series of self-contained sections filled with classic and fresh anecdotes, thoughtful examples, and interesting analogies, The Pragmatic Programmer illustrates the best approaches and significant pitfalls of software development.
Whether you’re a new coder, an experienced programmer, or a manager responsible for software projects, use these lessons daily, and you’ll quickly see improvements in personal productivity, accuracy, and job satisfaction. You’ll learn skills and develop habits and attitudes that form the foundation for long-term success in your career.
#65: Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters by Richard Rumelt
In Good Strategy/Bad Strategy, Rumelt debunks these “bad strategy” elements and awakens an understanding of the power of a “good strategy.” He introduces nine sources of power—ranging from using leverage to effectively focusing on growth—that are eye-opening yet pragmatic tools that can easily be put to work on Monday morning. He also uses fascinating examples from business, nonprofit, and military affairs to bring his original and pragmatic ideas to life.
#66: Leading from the Middle: A Playbook for Managers to Influence Up, Down, and Across the Organization by Scott Mautz
Leading from the Middle delivers an insightful and practical guide for the backbone of an organization: those who have a boss and are a boss and must lead from the messy middle. Accomplished author and former P&G executive Scott Mautz walks readers through the unique challenges facing these managers and the mindset and skill set necessary for managing up and down and influencing what happens across the organization.
#67: How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors That Determine the Fate of Every Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration and Everything In Between by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner
Understanding what distinguishes triumphs from failures has been the life’s work of Oxford professor Bent Flyvbjerg, dubbed “the world’s leading megaproject expert.” In How Big Things Get Done, he identifies the errors in judgment and decision-making that lead projects, both big and small, to fail and the research-based principles that will make yours succeed.
#68: Data-Driven Organization Design: Delivering Perpetual Performance Gains Through the Organizational by Rupert Morrison
Data-Driven Organization Design provides a practical framework for HR and organizational design practitioners to build a baseline of data, set objectives, carry out fixed and dynamic process design, map competencies, and right-size the organization. It shows how to collect the right data, present it meaningfully, and ask the most relevant questions to help complex, fluid organizations constantly evolve and meet moving objectives.
#69: The Innovation Mindset: Eight Essential Steps to Transform Any Industry by Lorraine Marchand
Innovation requires more than a eureka moment. The vast majority of new product ideas never make it to market. Typically, this is because they fail to address a real problem that a customer has experienced and is willing to pay to have solved. What do people and businesses need to know about the realities of innovating to develop products successfully?
Marchand’s innovative how-to program is straightforward to follow. It features a toolkit of strategic templates and planning frameworks illustrated by helpful case studies. Written in authoritative but conversational language, The Innovation Mindset offers a practical plan for both the veteran with another great idea and the first-timer with a big dream.
#70: Critical Chain Project Management by Eliyahu Goldratt
This business novel focusing on project management aims to provoke readers to examine and reassess their business practices and transform the thinking and actions of managers.
#71: Pragmatic Project Management: Five Scalable Steps to Success by David Pratt
Pragmatic Project Management: Five Scalable Steps to Success will help you select the methodologies and tools that will enable you to expend minimum effort to achieve maximum gain on your project. This clearly written guide lays the groundwork with a chapter on project sizing and management scaling followed by chapters on the five essential elements of pragmatic project management.
#72: The Art of Product Management: Lessons from a Silicon Valley Innovator by Rich Mironov
The Art of Product Management takes us inside the head of a product management thought leader. With color and humor, Rich Mironov gives us a taste of Silicon Valley’s tireless pursuit of great technology and its creation of new products. He provides strategic advice to product managers and tech professionals about start-ups and big organizations, how to think like a customer, and what things should cost. He also reminds us to love our products and our teams.
73: Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts by Annie Duke
In this Wall Street Journal bestseller, now in paperback, poker champion turned decision strategist Annie Duke teaches you how to get comfortable with uncertainty and make better decisions.
#74: The Plugged-In Manager by Terri L. Griffith
The Plugged-In Manager makes the case that being plugged-in—the ability to see choices across each of an organization’s dimensions of people, technology, and organizational processes and then to mix them into new and powerful organizational strategies, structures, and practices—may be the most important capability a manager can develop to succeed in the 21st century. Step by step, Griffith shows you how to acquire this ability.
#75: Project Management in the Hybrid Workplace (The Future of Work) by Phil Simon
In his inimitable style, Simon adeptly fuses critical research and concepts from a slew of diverse and seemingly unrelated fields, including Agile software development, human resources, supply chain management, cognitive psychology, organizational behavior, and labor economics.
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