10 Books for Product Managers

Posted on 2/23/2023, 1:45:38 PM

Are you a product manager looking to grow your skills? If so, here are a few product management books to help you succeed.

Inspired: How to Create Products Customers Love by Marty Cagan: This book discusses how successful companies design, develop, and deploy products that customers love. It goes through how you can structure and stack a successful product organization. It answers questions like how to build a strong product culture. It's ideal for startups, growth-stage companies, and large established companies. It's filled with the author's personal stories and profiles of some of today's most successful product managers and tech companies, such as Adobe, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Netflix. It's ideal for product managers in tech.

Cracking the PM Interview by Gayle Laakmann McDowell: Have an interview coming up? This is the ideal book to help you land a product management role in a startup or large tech company. Learn how the product manager role varies across companies, what experience you will need, what a successful resume looks like, and how to master the interview.

The Product Book by Product School: What does a successful product manager look like? What do Product managers do? It's filled with practical advice, best practices, and expert tips to help product managers succeed in their new roles.

Tribe of Mentors by Tim Ferris: Written by Tim Ferris, the number one New York Times best-selling author of 4-Hour Work Week, this book combines the tools, tactics, and habits of the world's top performers. Learn from successful entrepreneurs, athletes, artists, and billionaire investors to answer life's most challenging questions and become more successful. Suitable for anyone looking to transform their lives.

My Product Management Toolkit by Marc Abraham: A comprehensive guide to developing a physical or digital product that consumers love. It goes through how to determine what customers want. It presents straightforward suggestions for developing both physical and digital products. It explores product management, including consumer analysis, personnel management, and product evolution. Suitable for those developing a product for a small startup or large tech company.

The Lean Product Playbook by Dan Olsen: How to apply lean startup principles to build products that customers love. Building products is complex. Most new products fail. Goes through clear step-by-step guidance and advice on how to make successful products. 

It walks through

1. Determining your target customers
2. Identifying underserved customer needs
3. Creating a winning product strategy
4. Deciding on your MVP
5. Designing your MVP prototype
6. Test your MVP with customers
7. Iterate rapidly to achieve product-market fit

Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days by Jake Knapp: The team of Google Ventures discusses a five-day process for solving challenging problems. In a design sprint, a small squad attacks a problem and develops a prototype and solution through a five-day cycle. This process allows you to see how customers react before investing all the time and expense in creating your new product, service, or campaign. This book is useful for teams of any size. 

Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products by Nir Eyal: Why do some products succeed while others fail? This book introduces us to Hooked Model or four step process to build customer habits. It goes through how to make successful products that return customers without investing heavily in advertising. 

• How to create user habits that stick
• How to create products that people love
• Behavior techniques used by Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and other habit-forming products

Nir Eyal relies on years of research, consulting, and practical experience to write a manual for creating habit-forming products. He has taught at Stanford Graduate School of Business and the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design. 

You can check out summaries of these books on the book summary website, sumizeit.com

To book a call with a leading product managers who can give you career advice, visit mentordial.com.