Recommended Product Management and Product Marketing Books
The Lean Startup: How Constant Innovation Creates Radically Successful Businesses
Eric Ries introduces the idea of the minimum viable product (MVP) as an approach for startups to learn quickly and evolve their business model before it’s too late.
Innovation Games: Creating Breakthrough Products Through Collaborative Play
Luke Hohmann brings us a great instruction manual on how to use games with your customers to uncover their needs and wants or, as the book says, “creating breakthrough products through collaborative play”.
Inspired: How to Create Products Customers Love
An excellent book aimed at software product teams. Marty Cagan draws on his extensive experience to give practical advice on prototyping, designing minimal products and measuring success.
Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (and How to Take Advantage of it)
William Poundstone reveals the hidden psychology of how we react to pricing. It’s packed with interesting experiments, pricing tricks and tactics – all good stuff to have in your kit-bag if you work on pricing.
Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant
A game-changing book by Kim and Mauborgne on differentiation that provides a structured approach to help companies stand out, i.e. moving them to a clear blue ocean where they have no direct competition.
The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail
Prof Clayton M. Christenson provides an excellent review of the factors that led to high attrition in technology industries and highlights the lessons businesses should learn.
Predictably Irrational: The hidden forces that shape our decisions
Dan Ariely is a behavioral economist who studies the way people make decisions when they buy, sell and make real-life choices. A fascinating read with useful insights into proposition development.
Crossing the Chasm
Geoffrey Moore broke new ground in describing this critical phase in the product lifecycle of high-tech products and provides insight into how to achieve successful product adoption.
The Mom Test: How to Talk to Customers and Learn If Your Business Is a Good Idea When Everyone Is Lying to You
Rob Fitzpatrick provides guidance that will help you have better customer conversations that drive your market insights. It helps you overcome many of the barriers to getting real answers by focusing on stories.
What Customers Want: Using Outcome-Driven Innovation to Create Breakthrough Products and Services
This book by Anthony Ulwick is the definitive book on the “Job to be Done” concept that is so powerful in understanding customer needs. It also provides tools such as “Outcome-Driven Innovation” to get quantitative data to support decision making.
Inside the Tornado: Strategies for Developing, Leveraging, and Surviving Hypergrowth Markets
Continuing on from Crossing the Chasm, Geoffrey Moore explains how you will now find yourself in the tornado. At this point in time it’s make or break for your product.
Just Enough Requirements Management: Where Software Development Meets Marketing
Product managers spend a lot of time working on requirements but are not trained in the same way as requirements managers. This book by Al Davis provides invaluable guidance on how to handle them efficiently.
Principles of Marketing
Philip Kotler is considered the father of modern marketing by many. This book provides broad coverage of the subject and is used by many business schools. It’s a great reference for any non-specialists to have on their bookshelf.
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
This is a classic book by Steven Covey that gained popularity in the 80s and 90s and is a staple of any manager’s bookshelf. It provides seven key pieces of timeless advice on how to be effective, ranging from “be proactive” to “sharpen the saw”.
Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity
Getting Things Done is all about how to be more effective in an office environment. David Allen brings a range of principles founded on big ideas that are incredibly practical and will help you simply get more things done.
Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers
In this book, Osterwalder and Pigneur introduce us to the Business Model Canvas, which has become a “go-to” tool for many businesses to describe their business model in a single page.
Value Proposition Design: How to Create Products and Services Customers Want
The sequel to Business Model Generation by Osterwalder and Pigneur. In this book, they provide new tools and techniques that help dig deeper into Value Proposition Design.
