Overview:
This is a collection of my favorite books for product managers. The topics covered include product management, customer development, analytics, business strategy and psychology. They are listed in no particular order.
General:
- Intercom on Product Management
- The First Principles of Product Management by Brandon Chu
- Good Product Manager/Bad Product Manager by Ben Horowitz
- Let’s talk about Product Management by Josh Elman
- Product Management Mental Models for Everyone by Brandon Chu
- The Top 10 Deliverables of Product Managers by Sachin Rekhi
- What is a Product? by Marty Cagan
- What Seven Years at Airbnb Taught Me About Building a Business by Lenny Rachitsky
- 9 Habits of World Class Startups by James Currier
- This is the Product Death Cycle. Why it happens, and how to break out of it by Andrew Chen
- Help! My Company Does Not Understand Product Management by Brian de Haaff
- Product 101 for Engineers: A Functional Introduction by Aneel Lakhani
- What is product management? by Atlassian Team
- The 6 types of Product Managers. Which one do you need? by Catherine Ulrich
- 30+ Product Management “Best Practices” by Gerry Claps
- What Makes For a Good Product Manager? by Andy Johns
- 3 Types of Product Managers: Builders, Tuners, Innovators by Sachin Rekhi
- Product Management Career Ladders at 8 Top Technology Firms by Sachin Rekhi
- The Art of Product Management by Sachin Rekhi (Video)
- Good Product Managers, Great Product Managers by Shreyas Doshi
- Getting to “technical enough” as a product manager by Lulu Chen
Strategy:
- Many Strategies Fail Because They’re Not Actually Strategies by Freek Vermeulen
- How to "Build the Right Thing" & scale w/principles, values mission by Des Traynor (VIDEO)
- Why Product People Should Care About Business Strategy by Roman Pickler
- The only thing that matters by Marc Andressen
- Product > Strategy > Business Model by Fred Wilson
- Not all good products make good businesses by Des Traynor
- What is Good Product Strategy? by Melissa Perri
- Niche to Win, Baby. by Dave McClure
- Why it’s nice to compete against a large, profitable company by Jason Cohen
- Position, Position, Position! by Ryan Singer
Growth:
- The Growth Handbook by Intercom
- How to Build a Growth Machine by Brian Balfour
- How to Become a Customer Acquisition Expert by Brian Balfour
- Growth Is Optional: 10 Reasons Why Companies Fail At Growth by Brian Balfour
- Traction vs Growth by Brian Balfour
- Growth Loops are the New Funnels by Brian Balfour
- Growth Marketing by Julian Shapiro
- The Racecar Growth Framework by Dan Hockenmaier & Lenny Rachitsky
- How the biggest consumer apps got their first 1,000 users by Lenny Rachitsky
- The Network Effects Bible by James Currier
- How To Launch A Product or Feature To Maximize Growth by Brian Balfour
- Drive Growth by Picking the Right Lane — A Customer Acquisition Playbook for Consumer Startups by Dan Hockenmaier
- SaaS Content Marketing: Why You Should Focus on Bottom of the Funnel First to Drive Signups by Benji Hyam
- B2B SaaS Marketing Guide - 2021 by Alex Kracov
- From 0 to 2 Million Daily Active Users: A Guide To Growing via Partnerships by Brian Balfour
- Crafting The First Mile Of Product by Scott Belsky
- How to Tell Your Story: A Simple Framework for Startups by Om Malik
- Inner Workings of Product Management at Product Led Growth Companies by Ashley Murphy
- The Ultimate Product Led Growth Resources Guide by Kyle Poyar
User Research & UX:
- Intercom on Jobs-to-be-Done
- 5 product feedback mistakes we all make by Des Traynor
- 10 Things I’ve Learned About Customer Development by Cindy Alvarez
- The Jobs-to-be-Done Canvas by Tony Ulwick
- Measuring Customer Value in a Software Product by Daniel Zacarias
- Ditch the Solution-First Mindset and Start by Defining the Problem by Ludivine Siau
- How to Figure Out if Your Product Actually Solves Problems by Katie Cerar
- How Jason Cohen got 30 customers before building his product
- Conducting User Research to Grow A Business: Our Method and Questions by Benji Hyam
- How We Used a Simple Survey to Crack the Code on Our Customers by Benji Hyam
- Why Products Fail by Richard Holmes
- Don’t Serve Burnt Pizza (And Other Lessons in Building Minimum Lovable Products) by Jiaona Zhang
- For better products, start with a problem statement by Robbie Allan
- The Hierarchy of User Friction by Sachin Rehkhi
- Feature/Product Fit by Casey Winters
Metrics/Analytics:
- The only metric that matters by Josh Elman
- Nine Business Models and the Metrics Investors Want by Anu Hariharan (Video)
- The Business Equation by Brett Bivens
- DTC Metrics, Explained by Zachariah Reitano
- The Guide to Product Analytics by Mixpanel
- Value metric benchmarks by Patrick Campbell
- The red flags and magic numbers that investors look for in your startup’s metrics by Andrew Chen
- Product engagement: the most important metric you aren’t tracking for your SaaS business by Derek Skaletsky
- Redpoint SaaS Startup Key Metrics Template by Tomasz Tunguz
- 3 Essential Dashboards for Every Product by Sachin Rekhi
- 16 Startup Metrics by Jeff Jordan, Anu Hariharan, Frank Chen, and Preethi Kasireddy
Product / Market Fit:
- What it feels like when you've found product-market fit by Lenny Rachitsky
- The Never Ending Road to Product Market Fit by Brian Balfour
- How to know if you've got product-market fit by Lenny Rachitsky
- Andy Johns thread on P/M Fit
- Finding product-market fit: models and frameworks for SaaS companies by Stephen Millard
- Fundamentals of Product-Market Fit by Andy Sparks
- A Quantitative Approach to Product Market Fit by Tribe Capital
- True Product Market Fit is a Minimum Viable Company by Ann Miura-Ko
- How to measure product market fit by Joni Hoadley
Prioritization/Roadmaps:
- Assessing Product Opportunities by Marty Cagan
- The first rule of prioritization: No snacking by Des Traynor
- Prioritize Opportunities, Not Solutions by Teresa Torres
- Escape From the Feature Roadmap to Outcome-driven Development by Alice Newton Rex
- How to Prioritize Product Features and Improvements by Richard Banfield
- Why This Opportunity Solution Tree is Changing the Way Product Teams Work by Teresa Torres
- Where do product roadmaps come from? by Paul Adams
- The Next Feature Fallacy: The fallacy that the next new feature will suddenly make people use your product by Andrew Chen
- Building a Product Roadmap by Richard Banfield
- Growing up Lean: Lean Strategies for Maturing Products by Janna Bastow
- Ship outcomes, not just features, with the Product Impact Framework by Brian Donohue and Robbie Allan
- How to Prioritize a Product Roadmap by Sachin Rekhi
- Why Outcomes Over Outputs? by John Cutler
- Sustainable Product Strategy: How to Move from Outputs to Outcomes by Inessa Lurye
- The Fundamentals of Roadmapping by Julia Austin
- Themes: A Small Change to Product Roadmaps with Large Effects by Jared Spool
Process:
- Lessons learned from scaling a product team by Paul Adams
- Missionaries vs Mercenaries by Marty Cagan
- Product vs. Feature Teams by Marty Cagan
- An inside look at how Figma ships product by Yuhki Yamashita
- Failed SquadGoals - Spotify doesn’t use “the Spotify model” and neither should you by Jeremiah Lee
- The Five Things Every Product Team Member Should Know by Karl Sluis
- Don’t Join the Cult by Paul Adams (Video)
- Dual-Track Agile by Marty Cagan
- How to Run a Quarterly Product Strategy Meeting: A Board Meeting for Product by Gibson Biddle
- Killing the Product Development Assembly Line: A PM’s Guide to Empowering Design and Engineering by Lisa Zhu
- Models for Product Development by Department of Product
- Miro's Product Alignment Approach by Farbod Saraf
PRDs/Specs:
- Figma's approach to modern PRDs by Yuhki Yamashita
- Template: Product Specification from a Lyft PM
- Lessons learned from scaling a product team by Paul Adams
- On Writing Product Specs by Gaurav Oberoi
- Product Requirements Template by Atlassian
- My favorite product management templates by Lenny Rachitsky
Communication:
- The Basecamp Guide to Internal Communication
- The Pyramid Principle by Ameet Ranadive
- How to be Persuasive by Jackie Bavaro
- Mastering Effective Communication as a Product Manager by Sachin Rekhi
- Visual Communication templates for Product Managers by Richard Holmes
- 5 Tips for Saying No to Stakeholders
- The Beauty of Amazon's 6-Pager by Brad Porter
Collaboration:
- How to work with Engineers by Julie Zhuo
- How to work with Designers by Julie Zhuo
- How to work with Software Engineers by Ken Norton
- How to Make Cross Functional Teams Work by Department of Product
Leadership:
- Crossing the Canyon: Product Manager to Product Leader by Fareed Mosavat and Casey Winters
- Be a Great Product Leader by Adam Nash
- Building a great product management organization: What product managers do and how to identify great ones by Elad Gil
- The Autonomy Spectrum: How Much Autonomy Should You Give Your Teams? by Casey Winters
- How to Hire a Product Manager by Ken Norton
- Coaching Tools - The Assessment by Marty Cagan
- Do This Now: 8 Ways to Focus your Product Team on Impact, Not Features by John Cutler
- How to be a Great Product Leader
- The Job of Leadership by Ev Williams
- The VP of Product vs. the Product Manager by Ellen Chisa
- Why Founders Fail: The Product CEO Paradox by Ben Horowitz