The Ten Best Product Management Books

A few weeks ago, I sat down with some of the product managers at ThoughtWorks to put together a list of the ten best product management books. It turned out to be more complicated than we thought! Product managers need a broad understanding of a lot of different disciplines, and we all had extensive reading lists to pick from!

In this post, I’ll share the list I put together. If you’re new to product management, start at the top and work your way through, If not, jump around and pick what’s interesting to you. They are all fascinating reads that will help you become a better product manager!

Understanding Design Thinking, Lean, and Agile

If you are starting in product management, it is easy to be overwhelmed by the unprecedented array of processes, tools, and methods for digital product development. It can be hard to understand how these all fit together, but Jonny Schneider’s book Understanding Design Thinking, Lean, and Agile provides a straightforward explanation.

The book will help you to evaluate your situation and then apply the right techniques to improve your product development. Even better, it’s less than 70 pages, making it a quick read to get you started.

The Lean Product Playbook

If there were one book I’d recommend to learn or remind yourself of the fundamentals of product management, it would be The Lean Product Playbook. It had to have a place in the list of best product management books.

The book brings together ideas from Lean Startup and Lean UX to give you an actionable model for finding product-market fit. It consists of a 6-step process that explains how to:

• Determine your target customers.
• Identify underserved customer needs.
• Create a winning product strategy.
• Decide on your Minimum Viable Product (MVP).
• Design your MVP prototype.
• Test your MVP with customers.
• Iterate rapidly.

It also comes with several real-world examples that illustrate the full product development lifecycle from a product management standpoint.

Product Roadmaps Relaunched

A good product roadmap is one of the most critical documents you develop as a product manager. It is how you communicate your product strategy and make product trade-off decisions. I think it’s so important it’s worth reading a book specifically on the subject.

Product Roadmaps Relaunched provides an excellent practical guide to building effective roadmaps in agile environments. The book acknowledges the lack of future certainty and provides an adaptable approach to building roadmaps. It includes lots of actionable advice to help you align stakeholders, prioritise new ideas and evolve your roadmap. Not to mention, it’s very well designed and easy to use as a reference book.

Business Model Generation

A vital part of a product managers job is to develop a product that creates value for a customer segment. To find an opportunity to create value, you need to identify potential customers and the problems they have. But to turn an opportunity into a business, you need to have a sustainable business model to deliver value to your customers and capture some back for yourself.

Business Model Generation provides a practical handbook for anyone looking to create or improve a business model. It introduces the business model canvas and explains how to use it with examples of well-known companies. Developing business models can appear challenging, but this book will give you a quick and easy way to start. You can then test the model and iterate.

Hooked

If you’ve been working in product management for a while, there’s an excellent chance you’ve already read Nir Eyal’s bestselling Hooked. If you haven’t read it, it should be at the top of your reading list.

Hooked is an excellent introduction to user psychology and how to design product experiences that create user habits. The book shows how businesses that invest in creating habits gain a significant competitive advantage and gives real-world examples from companies, including Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter.

Read my summary of Hooked!

Crossing The Chasm

Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore is one of the best product management books focused on product marketing. It’s an essential read for anyone looking to grow their products user base. It explains how you can develop products that make the jump from cool novelties for a small group of early-adopter to full-blown mass-market successes.

The book introduces the Technology Adoption Lifecycle and explains why there is a gap (the chasm) between the needs/wants of the early adopters and those of the mainstream market. It then explores how to narrow the chasm and reach the mainstream by targeting a specific niche market, offering a whole product solution and becoming the market leader.

Read my summary of Crossing the Chasm!

Lean Analytics

Getting stuck in research and data-analysis mode can be a genuine pitfall for product managers. But doing research and analysing data is an essential part of making good product decisions. Understanding when to look for data and what data to look for is the key to finding the balance.

For this reason, I recommend Lean Analytics. This book offers excellent insights into how to collect the right data, what tools to use for analysing it properly, and how to learn from the most successful and data-driven companies before setting your analytics objectives. If you are looking for a book purely on web analytics, this isn’t for you. If, however, you want to know how to apply analytics to building a successful product, this is a great read.

The Hard Thing About Hard Things

Most of the books in this list show you how to use tried and tested approaches to manage your products. Unfortunately, as a product manager, you won’t always find yourself with a playbook. Sometimes you need to make tough decisions when you’re not sure what to do.

In The Hard Thing About Hard Things, Ben Horowitz shows you how difficult it is to launch a successful product. He shares his stories building venture-backed startups and his advice for navigating the problems you may face. Although the book doesn’t focus exclusively on product management, it gives an honest insight into the challenges you may face as a product manager.

Scaling Lean

When launching a new product, it can be hard to separate the meaningful metrics from the distractions. Understanding if your product is gaining traction is essential if you are to be successful. In Scaling Lean Ash Maurya gives you a way to measure and scale a tech startup with maximum efficiency. This book will teach you:

• Why early-stage products can’t be measured using traditional metrics like revenue and profit; and why traction is a better metric.
• How to model traction to recognise the one clear goal for your product.
• How to identify the constraints that prevent your product from gaining traction.

What makes Scaling Lean one of the best product management books is how it brings together concepts from Systems Thinking, Lean Startup and the Theory of Constraints into an actionable package for product managers.

Read my summary of Scaling Lean!

Lean Enterprise

If you are a product leader in a large enterprise, you’ll know there are many challenges to applying lean product practices. Many large organisations struggle to respond to changing market conditions, the latest customer needs or emerging technologies when building products, but it doesn’t need to be like that.

Lean Enterprise provides a practical guide to applying lean and agile principles at scale across your organisation. Through case studies, you’ll learn how successful enterprises have rethought everything from governance and financial management to systems architecture and organisational culture in the pursuit of radically improved performance.

At a time when we see an accelerating rate of innovation, it’s critical to have an adaptable organisation. This makes Lean Enterprise an essential read for product leaders in corporate organisations and government.