10 must read books for a Product Manager

Aspiring product managers usually find it hard to search for good books to gain a good knowledge source. What are some of the good books that can help product managers? Here are the top 10 books to read on Product Management for Product Managers. If you are an aspiring product manager, product owner, product designer, entrepreneur, business person, then these books will help you get knowledge and approach to product management. If you are already a practicing one, fret not as these will give you a different dimension or perspective on how you look at products. 

1) The Lean Product Playbook: How to Innovate with Minimum Viable Products and Rapid Customer Feedback.

Dan Olsen wrote the Lean Product Playbook. He is an Entrepreneur and a Lean Product Expert. This book is for those who wanted to learn more about Lean startup principles and applying them to create products that customers love. This book walks you through 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 to achieve product-market fit

This book improves your chances of building successful products through step-by-step guidance. It is a definite go-to resource if you aspire to develop exceptional products. 

Get your copy here. 

2) The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses

Numerous startups fail before they can create a sustainable business model. They have to create something meaningful, which will sustain. The Lean Startup is a methodology for product development that targets shortening the development cycles and validates a proposed business model. It uses business-hypothesis-driven experimentation, iterative product releases, and validated learning.

Companies can reduce market risks and avoid product failures at a large scale by iteratively building products and services to satisfy customer needs. This book gives you the complete details on Lean Startup. 

The author Eric Reyes is an entrepreneur and a mastermind behind the Long-Term Stock exchange (LTSE). He is also an entrepreneur-in-residence at the Harvard Business School. 

Get your copy here. 

3) The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers

Many books from great authors talk about how great it is to build products and businesses, but there are significantly fewer who speak of its difficulty. This book is an insight of Ben Horowitz, from managing, buying, selling, investing, developing, and supervising technology companies. He shares everything from his experience, including firing friends, poaching competitors, cultivating, and sustaining a CEO mentality. 

Ben Horowitz is very straightforward, practical, and humorous. One can find all these trademarks of him in his books. He is an experienced and respected entrepreneur who offers advice on building and running a startup. 

Get your copy here. 

4) Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

Doing things on what someone else already knew will take one from 1 to n. It means that adding more to something which is already there. If you want to go from 0 to 1, you need to do something which nobody tried before. Tomorrow's champions cannot win by competing ruthlessly in today's market. 

In his book, Peter Thiel expresses that the next Bill Gates will not build an operating system, and the next Sergey and Larry will not build a search engine. He also states that the achievement of progress can happen in any industry or area of business. It comes from the most critical skill that every leader must master: learning to think for yourself.

This book presents an optimistic view of the future progress in products and an alternate take on innovation. 

Peter Thiel is a billionaire entrepreneur, author, and venture capitalist. He co-founded Paypal, Palantir Technologies, Founders Fund. 

Get your copy here. 

5) Strategize: Product Strategy and Product Roadmap Practices for the Digital Age

If you are in the role of owning a product - Product Manager, Product Owner, Product Executive, etc., then this book is for you. Using tools and techniques that have already proved in the industry, Roman Pichler explains how to create effective strategies and actionable roadmaps to help you maximize your chance of building successful products. 

This book offers practical examples that help you apply it directly to your products. This book should be on your must reading list as a product manager. After reading this book, you will be able to,

• Create an inspiring vision for your product. 
• Develop a product strategy that maximizes the chances of launching a winning product. 
• Keep your product successful and proactively manage its life cycle.
•  Build an actionable roadmap that aligns stakeholders and works in an agile, dynamic context. 
• Get the relationship between the product roadmap and the product backlog right. 
• Able to review the product strategy and roadmap and keep them up-to-date.

Roman Pichler is a product management expert specialized in digital products. As the founder and director of Pichler Consulting, Roman looks after its offerings, which allows him to continue practicing product management and experiment with new ideas.

Get your copy here. 

6) Build Better Products: A Modern Approach to Building Successful User-Centered Products

It's easier than ever to build a new product. But developing a great product that people want to buy and use is another story. Build Better Products is a hands-on, step-by-step guide that helps teams incorporate strategy, empathy, design, and analytics into their development process. You'll learn to develop products and features that improve your business's bottom line while dramatically improving customer experience.

This book's concepts help teams learn more about their users and apply them to make products people use and love. Laura Klien worked as an engineer, UX designer, and product manager in Silicon Valley for companies of all sizes. She advises early-stage startups and consults with companies that want to improve their research, UX, and product development processes. She has a deep and abiding love of business jargon, and her fondest wish is to facilitate a synergy someday or synergize facilitation. Whichever is easier.

Get your copy here. 

7) Inspired: How to Create Products that Customers Love

You could be an early-stage startup, or a company at growth-stage trying to scale your organization, or an established company trying to deliver new and more value to your customer. This book will take you and your company to an all-new level of customer engagement, consistent innovation, and business success, irrespective of who you are. From the experience of the author and some of the finest Product Managers from Adobe, Apple, Google, Microsft, and Netflix - this book helps you improve your product efforts in creating technology products your customers love.

Marty Cagan is a Silicon Valley-based product executive with more than 20 years of experience with industry leaders, including eBay, AOL, Netscape Communications, and Hewlett-Packard. Martin was the original leader of Product and Design for eBay, where he was responsible for defining products and services for the company's global e-commerce trading site. Marty now works with technology companies from across the globe on improving both innovation and velocity.

Get your copy here. 

8) Implementing Beyond Budgeting: Unlocking the Performance Potential

Several organizations are exploring management innovation to help them cope and out-perform in these new and different realities. Beyond Budgeting may be the most important new idea that addresses these radical changes due to its broad scope and coherent approach. Abolishing the traditional, detailed annual budget is necessary but not sufficient. Organizations on the journey are questioning their old leadership beliefs. They are tearing up their old command-and-control management models, with "agile" and "human" as the foundation for a new start.

This book is both a theoretical introduction and a practical guide to bringing such a more empowered and adaptive management model to life. Drawing on the author's twenty years of Beyond Budgeting experience, this book not only demonstrates the serious problems with traditional management through numerous practical examples. It also follows several companies on its Beyond Budgeting journey, including Scandinavia's largest company Statoil where the author has been heading up implementation since 2005. You'll get a first-hand glimpse at the reality of transitioning to a large multinational company and gain a real-world perspective on what successful implementation entails.

Get your copy here. 

9) Good To Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap And Others Don't

How can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies, achieve enduring greatness? Are there companies that defy gravity and convert long-term mediocrity or worse into long-term superiority? And if so, what are the universal distinguishing characteristics that cause a company to go from good to great?

Using strict benchmarks, Collins and his research team identified a set of elite companies that made the leap to great results and sustained those results for at least fifteen years. How great? They generated cumulative stock returns that beat the general stock market by an average of seven times in fifteen years, better than twice the results delivered by a composite index of the world's most significant companies Coca-Cola, Intel, General Electric, and Merck. 

The Good to Great study findings will surprise many readers and shed light on virtually every management strategy and practice area. The findings include:

• Level 5 Leaders
• First Who, then What
• Confront the Brutal Facts
• The Hedgehog Concept
• A Culture of Discipline
• Technology Accelerators
• The Flywheel and the Doom Loop

Get your copy here. 

10) Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone To Take Action

Why are some people and organizations more inventive, pioneering, and successful than others? And why are they able to repeat their success again and again?

In business, it doesn't matter what you do; it matters WHY you do it. Start with Why analyses leaders like Martin Luther King Jr and Steve Jobs and discovers that they all think in the same way - they all started with why. Simon Sinek explains the framework needed for businesses to move past knowing what they do to how they do it, and then ask the more critical question-WHY? Why do we do what we do? Why do we exist? Learning to ask these questions can unlock the secret to inspirational business. Sinek explains what it truly takes to lead and inspire and how anyone can know how to do it.

Simon Sinek is a motivational speaker and has spoken at the UN Global Compact Leaders Summit in 2016 and TEDx conferences, beginning in 2009. He is also an instructor of strategic communications at Columbia University. 

Get your copy here. 

These ten books can help a Product Manager get the required knowledge, tools, and techniques to get started. These books also provide the experiences of the authors who are practicing entrepreneurs, founders, and investors. These books are not ranked nor ordered in a specific way. You can read them in any particular order, as each of these books carries a unique approach. We aim to list the books and not to rank them. Happy reading!