75 Best Product Management Books to Read in 2026
The 75 best product management books for 2026 covering PM fundamentals, customer discovery, UX, strategy, roadmaps, and leadership, with a summary of each.
The best product management books teach the core PM craft, customer discovery, UX, strategy, and leadership. This list of 75 titles, recommended by the AnnounceKit team, includes each book’s focus and a purchase link so you can pick the ones that match the skill you want to build next.
Core PM books like Inspired, Escaping the Build Trap, and The Product Book explain what a product manager does and how to structure a product organization. Discovery books like The Mom Test and Continuous Discovery Habits cover talking to customers. The rest span design, behavioral science, roadmaps, OKRs, strategy, and project management.
If your role leans toward positioning and launches, our list of product marketing books for managers is a good companion to this one.
The 75 Best Product Management Books to Read in 2026
Here are 75 product management books recommended by the team at AnnounceKit, in no particular order. Each entry has a short summary and a link to buy the book.
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1. Influence Without Authority by Allan R. Cohen and David L. Bradford
In this revised edition, leadership experts Allan Cohen and David Bradford explain how to win cooperation from people you have no official authority over. The method is to offer help in the form of the “currencies” they value.
The updated classic gives you techniques for cutting through interpersonal and interdepartmental barriers. It shows how to motivate people to lend you their support, time, and resources.
2. The Art of Principled Entrepreneurship: Creating Enduring Value by Andreas Widmer
Written for entrepreneurs, managers, employees, and business students who want to lead in a people-centered way. The Art of Principled Entrepreneurship is a practical guide to running a business that is both virtuous and profitable.
3. Customer Centricity: Focus on the Right Customers for Strategic Advantage by Peter Fader
Customer Centricity upends some of our most basic beliefs about customer service, customer relationship management, and customer lifetime value.
Despite the old adage, the customer is not always right. Even companies that seem to do no wrong, like Starbucks, have only recently started to realize this. Starbucks is one of many companies that pivoted to a customer-centric mindset, an approach Wharton professor Peter Fader describes in detail.
Fader argues that in a customer-centric world 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 carries a serious message for every industry manager. It explains the ideas behind 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 design framework grounded in behavioral science. Technology executive and behavioral scientist Matt Wallaert argues that the purpose of everything is behavior change. Effective companies start with outcomes instead of processes. They learn what people want to do, why they are not already doing it, and then build products that bridge the gap.
6. Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value by Melissa Perri
Melissa Perri explains how a solid foundation for product management helps companies solve real customer problems while hitting business goals.
By learning how to communicate and collaborate within a company structure, you can build a product culture that serves both the business and the customer. The principles apply 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
Written by three product managers at Facebook, Google, and Microsoft, Product Management’s Sacred Seven is a comprehensive resource. It teaches the must-know knowledge and applied skills you need to become a world-class PM who can get hired anywhere.
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 products that billions of people love? Perhaps surprisingly, they do it very differently than most tech companies.
In Inspired, product management thought leader Marty Cagan delivers a master class on structuring and staffing a successful product organization. You learn how to discover and deliver technology products that customers love and that work for your business.
9. Product-Led Growth: How to Build a Product That Sells Itself by Wes Bush
Bush shows you how to cut acquisition costs and scale further than you thought possible by making your product the tool that acquires, converts, and retains customers. If you are weighing this approach against a growth team, our post on product management versus growth hacking explains how the two roles differ.
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. Think about a company: engineers build the product, designers make it usable and attractive, marketing tells customers about it, and sales gets customers to buy it. So what does a product manager do?
Based on Product School’s curriculum, which has helped thousands of students become product managers, The Product Book answers that question with practical advice, best practices, and expert tips.
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 company, building great products is hard, and most new products fail. This book improves your odds with clear, step-by-step guidance.
12. Continuous Discovery Habits: Discover Products That Create Customer Value and Business Value by Teresa Torres
How do you know you are building something customers want? How do you make sure you improve it over time? How do you create value for customers in a way that also creates value for the business?
Torres lays out a structured, sustainable approach to continuous discovery that answers each of these questions. It gives you the confidence to act while preparing you to be wrong, so you can start without being blindsided by what you get wrong.
13. The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick
The Mom Test is a quick, practical guide that will save you time, money, and heartbreak.
People say you should not ask your mom whether your business is a good idea, because she loves you and will lie. That is true, but it misses the point.
You should not ask anyone if your business is a good idea. It is a bad question, and everyone will lie to you at least a little. Finding the truth is your responsibility, and it is worth doing right.
Talking to customers is a foundational skill of both Customer Development and Lean Startup. Everyone knows they should do it, but few admit it is easy to get wrong. This book shows how customer conversations go wrong and how to do better. Pair it with a system for collecting customer feedback so the insights do not get lost.
14. Deploy Empathy: A Practical Guide to Interviewing Customers by Michele Hansen
Deploy Empathy rests on one key idea: how you ask a question matters as much as which questions you ask. To understand customer jobs to be done and uncover 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 Steve Krug’s guide to intuitive navigation and information design. Witty, commonsensical, and practical, it is one of the best-loved and most recommended books on usability.
16. Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely
In this revised and expanded edition of the New York Times bestseller, Dan Ariely refutes the assumption that we behave in fundamentally rational ways. From drinking coffee to losing weight, buying a car, and choosing a partner, we consistently overpay, underestimate, and procrastinate. These behaviors are neither random nor senseless. They are systematic and predictable, which makes 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 definitive book on personal organization. “GTD” is now shorthand for an entire way of handling professional and personal tasks, with its own culture of websites, tools, seminars, and offshoots.
18. Obviously Awesome by April Dunford
Dunford shows you how to find your product’s “secret sauce” and then sell that sauce to the people who crave it. She spent years as a startup executive with 16 product launches under her belt and as a consultant on dozens more, so she 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 part of everyday thinking for millions of people. Why? Because they work. With Sean Covey’s added takeaways on applying the habits in the modern age, the wisdom of the 7 habits is refreshed for a new generation of leaders.
20. Loved: How to Rethink Marketing for Tech Products by Martina Lauchengco
Martina Lauchengco is 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. In Loved, she distills decades of lessons from working with hundreds of companies into 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
Wolcott and Krippendorff provide a guide to the Proximity revolution and show how it is transforming every industry, and our lives. They reveal how pervasive this trend will be and what it means for leaders and innovators.
Proximity is a new way to serve customers, with implications for corporate strategy, investing, public policy, supply chain resilience, and sustainability. Incremental changes to existing business models will not be enough.
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 turned into knowledge that creates a competitive advantage and pushes a business toward market leadership.
Through examples and experience, you learn how to pick projects and build analytics teams that deliver results. You also cover ethical and privacy issues and apply the three-part litmus test of context, permission, and accuracy.
Data and analytics are the new source of competitive advantage, but how do executives move from hype to action? This book helps them make the right investments in the right place at the right time.
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 succeed when launching a startup or creating a new product.
The ideas in 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 achieved extraordinary success while ignoring “best practices.” Meanwhile, other promising startups often failed even when they seemed 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, including employees, managers, parents, and nurses, have united both minds and achieved dramatic results:
- The medical interns who defeated an entrenched, decades-old practice that endangered patients
- The home-organizing guru who developed a simple technique for overcoming the dread of housekeeping
- The manager who turned a lackadaisical customer-support team into service zealots by removing a standard customer service tool
25. The Culting of Brands: Turn Your Customers into True Believers by Douglas Atkin
Marketing expert Douglas Atkin 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 customers feel unique, important, and part of an exclusive group, and how that leads to long-term relationships between a company and its customers.
26. Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products by Marty Cagan and Chris Jones
Empowered gives leaders of product management, product design, and engineering everything they need to create an environment where teams can innovate.
As partners at The Silicon Valley Product Group, Marty Cagan and Chris Jones have long worked to reveal the practices of the world’s most consistently innovative companies. A natural companion to Inspired, Empowered tackles the reason most companies fail to tap their people’s potential: product leadership.
27. The Lean Start-Up: How Constant Innovation Creates Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries
The Lean Startup is a business approach adopted around the world. It is changing how companies are built and how new products are launched.
Essential reading for any ambitious entrepreneur, it teaches you to identify what your customers really want. You learn to test your vision continuously, adapting and adjusting before it is too late.
28. Game Thinking: Innovate Smarter & Drive Deep Engagement with Design Techniques from Hit Games by Amy Jo Kim
Amy Jo Kim lays out a step-by-step system for crafting products people love and keep loving. The secret? Build “impossible to put down” products using the techniques the games industry uses to 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 founding Pixar with Steve Jobs and John Lasseter in 1986.
Nine years later, Toy Story was released and changed animation forever. The essential ingredient in that success, and in the twenty-five movies that followed, was the environment Catmull and his colleagues built at Pixar: 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
Geoffrey A. Moore shows that the Technology Adoption Life Cycle, which runs from innovators to early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards, contains a vast chasm between the early adopters and the early majority. Early adopters will sacrifice to be first. The early majority waits until the technology clearly delivers productivity gains. The challenge for innovators and marketers is to narrow this chasm and speed 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 comes a five-day process for solving tough problems, 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 move from problem to prototype to tested solution using the step-by-step 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 influential documents an organization can develop, publish, and keep updating. This one document can steer an entire organization toward company strategy.
This practical guide shows how to create an effective product roadmap and use it to align stakeholders and prioritize ideas and requests. You learn to communicate how your products will make customers and the 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 changes how you think about work, teams, projects, and culture, and gives you tools to harness the human superpowers of learning and cooperation.
34. The Insights Driven Product Manager by Corinna Stukan
A guide to mastering product metrics, getting better data insights, and making more impactful product decisions. Analytics leader Amplitude recognized it as one of the top 22 books for product managers.
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 behind how technologies hook us?
Nir Eyal answers these questions by explaining the Hook Model, a four-step process built into the products of many successful companies to subtly encourage customer behavior. Through repeated “hook cycles,” these products bring users back again and again without costly advertising or aggressive messaging.
36. Product Management for Dummies by Brian Lawley and Pamela Schure
From defining what product management is (and is not) to the rising importance of product management in the corporate world, this friendly guide quickly gets you up to speed. It offers plain-English explanations of the product life cycle, market research, competitive analysis, market and pricing strategy, product roadmaps, and the people skills it takes to influence and negotiate effectively.
37. Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap, and Others Don’t by Jim Collins
Good to Great describes how companies transition from good to great, and why most fail to make the transition. The book was a bestseller, selling four million copies and reaching far beyond the traditional audience for 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, everyone is asking these questions, or should be.
William Vanderbloemen has asked them for 15 years while running one of the world’s top executive search firms. Through research on more than 30,000 top leaders and proprietary data, he identified the 12 habits the best of the best share. They include authenticity, responsiveness, agility, and problem-solving.
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 book examines how this often misunderstood technique keeps your team focused on users and their needs, without getting lost in enthusiasm for individual features.
Jeff Patton shows how changeable story maps help your team hold better conversations throughout development and come away with a shared understanding of what you are building and why.
40. Measure What Matters: OKRs: The Simple Idea that Drives 10x Growth by John Doerr
The 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 goal-setting approach, 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 every day. Complexity is killing companies’ ability to innovate and adapt, and simplicity is becoming the competitive advantage of our time.
Why Simple Wins helps leaders and teams move past the frustration of unproductive work and build a 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. It suits PMs at every level, 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
Herold walks leaders through the steps to creating their own Vivid Vision, from brainstorming to sharing ideas to using the document to drive progress in the years ahead. By mapping out how you see your company looking and feeling in every category of business, without getting bogged down in data, Vivid Vision creates a holistic road map that gets your teammates excited about the big picture.
44. Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte
This accessible guide shows how to create your own system for knowledge management, otherwise known as a Second Brain.
A trusted, 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 capturing good ideas to organizing your thoughts to retrieving everything quickly, it puts you back in control of your 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 and how to keep your own research blunder-free. You examine embarrassing errors in recent research, learn about the misconceptions and scientific politics that let them happen, and start reforming how 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 avoid dangerous traps while steadily driving customer and business value. This is not just another product management book. It is a thought-provoking guide built on simplicity that encourages you to act today for a better tomorrow.
47. Free: The Future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson
In his bestseller The Long Tail, Chris Anderson showed how the online marketplace creates niche markets and connects products and consumers in ways that were never possible before.
In Free, he makes the case that businesses can often profit more from giving things away than from charging for them. Far more than a promotional gimmick, Free is a business strategy that may be essential to a company’s survival. Anderson explores this radical idea for the global economy and shows how it can benefit 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 between function and control, and use constraints intelligently. The goal is to guide the user effortlessly to the right action on the right control at the right time.
It 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 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 revised and expanded edition. Updated for the era of remote and hybrid work, the book gives actionable answers to product management’s most persistent 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 Scrum from its co-creator and the CEO of Scrum, Inc. Scrum is the approach to project management and team building that has helped transform everything from software companies to the US military to major American hospitals. Sutherland explains step by step how it operates and how it can 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? There is no foolproof way to tell what will succeed, but every product has a chance if it is backed by research, careful planning, and hard work.
Written by 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: a shared internal outlook that drives focus, speed, experimentation, and innovation across a wide range of stakeholders. DeWolf and Hall give you the tools to revitalize your company’s methods, 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
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.
The 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.
55. The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done by Peter F. Drucker
What makes an executive? Peter F. Drucker reminds us that the measure of the executive is the ability to “get the right things done.” That usually means doing what others have overlooked and avoiding what is unproductive. Intelligence, imagination, and knowledge are wasted in an executive job without the habits of mind that turn them into results.
56. The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development by Donald G. Reinertsen
This book lays out a well-organized set of 175 underlying principles in eight major areas. Reinertsen 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 change how you think about product development.
57. The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton M. Christensen
Using 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, it 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.
Written for HR professionals and business leaders, Built for People explains how to improve workforce and business performance through people-centered working methods, evidence-based decisions, 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 your bottom line, you want the updated practices in the landmark bestseller Hug Your Customers. The only way to stay in business is to have customers, and the only way to increase profit is to attract more customer visits through exceptional service.
Filled with accessible advice, personal case studies, and tips any businessperson can use, it is a blueprint for customer and employee retention, higher per-capita spending, and lasting success.
60. Seeing What Others Don’t: The Remarkable Ways We Gain Insights by Gary Klein
Insights like Darwin’s understanding of evolution and Watson and Crick’s discovery of the structure of DNA can change the world. We also need insights into the everyday things that frustrate and confuse us so we can solve problems more effectively.
Yet we know little about when, why, or how insights form or what blocks them. 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 get the best outcome for the customer.
Product managers are under pressure to drive spectacular results, often without much direct power or authority. If you do not know how to influence people at every level 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
Value Stream Network pioneer and technology leader Dr. Mik Kersten introduces the Flow Framework, a new way of seeing, measuring, and managing software delivery.
The Flow Framework enables your company’s evolution from a project-oriented dinosaur to a product-centric innovator that thrives in the Age of Software. If you are 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, product managers must understand how customer preferences change, how technology evolves, and how to anticipate what competitors might do.
You need a reliable resource with timely guidance and practical tools. With new content and expert advice, this updated edition brings you fully up to date on what it takes to succeed as a product manager.
64. The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas
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 are a new coder, an experienced programmer, or a manager responsible for software projects, use these lessons daily and you will see gains in productivity, accuracy, and job satisfaction. It is a natural read for anyone moving into a technical product manager role.
65. Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters by Richard Rumelt
Rumelt debunks the elements of “bad strategy” and awakens an understanding of the power of a “good strategy.” He introduces nine sources of power, from using leverage to focusing on growth, that are pragmatic tools you can put to work on Monday morning. He brings his ideas to life with examples from business, nonprofit, and military affairs.
66. Leading from the Middle: A Playbook for Managers to Influence Up, Down, and Across the Organization by Scott Mautz
Leading from the Middle is a practical guide for the backbone of an organization: those who have a boss and are a boss, and must lead from the messy middle. Former P&G executive Scott Mautz walks readers through the challenges these managers face and the mindset and skill set they need to manage up and down and influence 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 separates 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 cause projects big and small to fail, and the research-based principles that 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 right questions so complex, fluid organizations can keep evolving.
69. The Innovation Mindset: Eight Essential Steps to Transform Any Industry by Lorraine Marchand
Innovation requires more than a eureka moment. Most new product ideas never reach the market, usually because they fail to address a real problem that customers are willing to pay to solve. What do people and businesses need to know about the realities of innovating?
Marchand’s how-to program is straightforward to follow. It features a toolkit of strategic templates and planning frameworks illustrated with case studies. Written in an authoritative but conversational voice, 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 about project management pushes readers to examine and reassess their business practices and to transform how managers think and act.
71. Pragmatic Project Management: Five Scalable Steps to Success by David Pratt
Pragmatic Project Management helps you select the methodologies and tools that let you spend minimum effort for maximum gain on your project. This clearly written guide starts 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 new products. He offers strategic advice to product managers and tech professionals on 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, 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 argues that being plugged-in may be the most important capability a manager can develop in the 21st century. It means seeing choices across an organization’s people, technology, and processes, then mixing them into new and powerful strategies, structures, and practices. 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 fuses 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.
Choose a Product Management Tool to Put These Books into Practice
A good book should be part of your toolkit, but the insight you gain is wasted without an intuitive system to apply it. The list above mixes product and project management titles; if the two roles blur for you, read our explainer on product management vs. project management.
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Frequently asked questions
What are the best product management books for beginners?
Start with the books written specifically about the PM role: Product Management for Dummies, The Product Book, Product Management in Practice, and Inspired. They explain what a product manager does all day and how a product organization is structured.
Which product management books cover customer discovery and user research?
The Mom Test and Deploy Empathy teach how to interview customers without getting misleading answers. Continuous Discovery Habits and The Lean Product Playbook turn those conversations into a repeatable discovery process.
Which books on this list cover roadmaps, OKRs, and prioritization?
Product Roadmaps Relaunched shows how to build a roadmap and use it to align stakeholders. Measure What Matters introduces OKRs, and User Story Mapping helps teams keep the focus on user needs instead of individual features.
What is the difference between product management books and project management books?
Product management titles such as Escaping the Build Trap focus on solving real customer problems while meeting business goals. Project management titles on this list, including The Goal, Critical Chain Project Management, and Pragmatic Project Management, focus on delivering the work itself. Both are useful to a PM.
Which product management books did Marty Cagan write?
Two books on this list: Inspired, a guide to structuring and staffing a product organization, and Empowered, co-written with Chris Jones, which tackles product leadership and is a natural companion to Inspired.
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