Recommended Product Management and Product Marketing Books
Product Roadmaps Relaunched: How to Set Direction while Embracing Uncertainty
For many people, roadmaps are broken, they give the illusion of a fixed long term plan, but then fail to be delivered. C Todd Lombardo and team share the secrets of how to roadmap in this sort of Agile environment, showing how you can share the plan without tying yourself and your product down.
Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value
The shift from outputs is long overdue for many product teams. Emphasizing the customer problems you solve instead of the product you ship. Melissa Perri explains how this shift can help enable you to be successful as well as how to achieve it in your organization.
User Story Mapping: Discover the Whole Story, Build the Right Product
Mapping out the full customer journey and looking at how different user stories interact over a real task for the user is a powerful tool – instead of getting lost in just one feature or function. In this book, Jeff Patton provides great insights into this often misunderstood technique.
The Design of Everyday Things:
The design of a product can make or break it. In this classic Don Norman brings the understanding that was once restricted to highly trained design professionals to the rest of us. If you want to understand design better so you can collaborate better with your design team this should be on your bookshelf.
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.
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.
Monetizing Innovation
Today, more than ever, companies need to innovate to survive. But successful innovation measured in Dollars and Cents is tough. Companies obsess over being creative and innovative and spend significant time on products, yet struggle to monetize them. Monetizing Innovation presents a new way forward, to remove the guesswork and radically improve the odds of success.
The Alchemy of Growth
Baghai et al. bring us a guide on how to unleash sustainable growth by managing for different horizons. It provides a model that can revitalize organizations and invigorate the people in them. Like the alchemy of old, it seeks to transform every day into the exalted by means that seem little short of magical. The Alchemy of Growth is a comprehensive and practical approach to initiating, achieving and sustaining profitable growth today and tomorrow.
People Styles at Work (Bolton & Bolton)
Why is it so hard to work (and live) with some people? People Styles at Work and Beyond presents a comprehensive, practical and proven method to help you understand how people behave. Armed with this understanding, you have a toolkit to improve your relationships.
Sprint (Google Ventures)
A practical guide to answering critical business questions, Sprint is a book for teams. It’s for anyone with a big opportunity, problem, or idea who needs to get answers today. It introduces us to the design sprint from Google Ventures as a proven technique to rapidly discover, understand and identify solutions.
Persuasive Business Proposals
Writing a winning proposal is vital to getting a ‘yes’ on your next bid. Boost your success rate with the third edition of Persuasive Business Proposals and its hands-on guidance for crafting powerful proposals that attract prospects’ attention and speak to their needs. New: key questions, powerful cover letters, renewal secrets, and more.
