I recently put together a list of articles, videos and I think people moving into a product role should read to get a good grasp of the fundamentals. books These are just a starting point to help new Product Managers / Owners / Humans think about problem-solving in the internet age and give them mental models. If that’s you, you’ll need to know that they’re not recipes but, in time, they can help you create your own. In the end, building things people care about is hard work, and it’s all on you. Good luck! Articles / Essays We don’t Sell Saddles Here , Slack’s CEO, wrote this brilliant memo 2 weeks before Slack launched. It’s about the meaning of what you’re building. That matters a whole lot more than what the product says on the tin: Stewart Butterfield https://medium.com/@stewart/we-dont-sell-saddles-here-4c59524d650d#.ldajcg1ds Thinking Exponentially — 10x not 10% , now a partner at Google Ventures, explains why Product Managers should always be the strongest advocates for disruption: Ken Norton https://www.kennorton.com/essays/10x-not-10-percent.html What makes a great Product Manager , VP of Product Management at Skyscanner and formerly a Director of Product at Skype, has a look at the key traits of a great PM: Piero Sierra https://medium.com/@pierosierra/builders-make-the-best-product-people-22fdb8d75dfe#.jdjcefyf0 Solving the right problems , one of the leading thinkers in Product, asks us to escape the very common trap where companies think they’re making progress by keeping people busy. Here’s how to focus on making sure we’re solving real problems for people: Melissa Perri https://www.mindtheproduct.com/2017/07/escaping-build-trap-melissa-perri/ Speed of iteration beats quality of iteration This one took me a while to fully absorb. I wholeheartedly disagreed with it at first, but then slowly came around to loving this. , creator of StackOverflow, builds on John Boyd’s airplane fighting teachings and explains that learning fast, starting small and iterating constantly is the way to survive: Jeff Atwood https://blog.codinghorror.com/boyds-law-of-iteration/ Do things that don’t scale Premature optimisation kills great ideas. To get to Product-market fit, you need traction. To get traction you need to do things that allow you to learn about your customers faster than the competition before you run out of your scarce resource (often money). This, by , is a classic: Paul Graham http://paulgraham.com/ds.html Finding Product Market Fit at A16Z is next with another future-proof essay about how finding product market fit is all that matters when building something new: Marc Andreessen http://pmarchive.com/guide_to_startups_part4.html How to start a startup The whole How to Start a Startup series, organised by at Y Combinator, is full of gems from great speakers. Great content like this wasn’t free 10 years ago: Sam Altman http://startupclass.samaltman.com/ What do you actually do? Great products don’t happen by accident, by , a Director of Product Design at Facebook has influenced me heavily. Now, when faced with a new situation, I try to think of the at my disposal. If I don’t have one that works, I try to find one or create it. A good playbook is essential for Product Managers: Jon Lax tools https://medium.com/great-products-dont-happen-by-accident/great-products-dont-happen-by-accident-f46323d8ad94#.pj1236nkd Working Backwards If you want to build great products, start with the end goal. Amazon’s technique is now super well-known and if you want your team to fully understand the problem, even before writing a single line of code, it’s worth giving it a shot: https://medium.com/bluesoft-labs/try-an-internal-press-release-before-starting-new-products-867703682934#.734z4kt4w Should you really build that? , Product Manager at Slack, once this quote from Neil Hunt (CPO at Netflix) and it just perfectly summarised what I felt about getting stuff in front of user. Removing complexity is key to building great products. Sean Rose tweeted Where does your product stand? When people talk about Unique Value Propositions or Unique Selling Points, they often mean this. is a brilliant thinker and his “Position, Position, Position” essay makes a great argument about establishing yourself clearly through trade-offs. If you do X, instead of equally defensible Y, you’re immediately going to be different from anyone else doing it. If you do it across a number of dimensions, you will have found your place. Read it: Ryan Singer https://m.signalvnoise.com/position-position-position-34b510a28ddc#.m6ggr5p3a There’s no Process Silver Bullet is one of the 17 original signatories of the (very much worth reading and comprehending) and literally wrote the book on Extreme Programming. This is how we sees Agile and software development processes, 20 years later, through the lens of his 3X framework: Kent Beck Agile Manifesto https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YX2XR73LnRY Internet Economy 101 is the business analyst you need to follow. His masterpiece is aggregation theory, a unified reference to grasp all great internet economy companies: Ben Thompson https://stratechery.com/2015/aggregation-theory/ Follow that up with his new piece on , and just follow . Defining Aggregators Stratechery Abundance in the internet world Read , to build on what Ben Thompson has taught us and really start grasping how the internet has changed everything. You’ll need this to understand how your customers operate. this series by Alex Danco at Social Capital The role of culture Netflix’s genius culture deck is a masterpiece to understand how companies can scale, how to attract the best talent and keep them engaged. Culture eats strategy for breakfast (originally said by Peter Drucker), the Netflix version: https://jobs.netflix.com/culture Also look at Spotify’s (and now everyone else’s) . organisational design How Google sets goals talks about setting goals and tells you all about OKRs: Rick Klau https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJB83EZtAjc Pair (pun intended) Rick’s video with this on paired metrics and how single metric blindness can kill you: https://mattyford.com/blog/2014/6/11/paired-metrics Books The Lean Startup (obviously) Let’s get it out of the way. Read the Lean Startup. It’ll help you understand everything else about product development. Thinking Fast and Slow If you want to understand how users think, you need this intro to Kahneman and Tversky’s work. It’s fascinating. Influence The six principles of persuasion laid out by Cialdini will help you look at your most beloved products in a completely different lens. Read it and see them everywhere. The Design of Everyday Things You’ll need to talk to designers. You’ll need great references about how people interact with the world around them. You need deep sensibility about product design and attention to detail. Don Norman is your guy for every one of these. Zero To One Peter Thiel doesn’t think of innovation like others do. He doesn’t think of competition like others do. He thinks of starting things as either zero or one. Winner-takes-all, is actually all there is. A new mindset. Innovator’s Dillemma This is another classic on the nature of innovation and how making the rational management decision every time will ultimately kill your company. The Innovator’s Dillema is now (2017) 20 years old, but it is perfectly timeless. Competing Against Luck Understand jobs-to-be-done, why people purchase products and how to solve for their deeply rooted motivations and goals. Clay Christensen advocates that there’s a better way to build products than trying out everything and seeing what sticks. Creativity, inc Building a culture of creativity, candor and growth to become one of the world’s most successful animation studios ever. The story of Pixar by Ed Catmull is fantastic. Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson Isaacson is an brilliant storyteller and he gets Steve Jobs, the good and the bad. Don’t read this to become Steve Jobs, read this to understand how one of the most brilliant product creators of all time thought about the world. also has some amazing insights into Jobs’ incredible mind. In the Company of Giants Sprint Going from idea to testable prototype in 5 days from Jake Knapp. Do one and get hooked on testing ideas and failing fast. The Mom Test At the end of your design sprint, you’ll need to ask your customers the right questions. Read the Mom Test to understand what never to ask. Hooked By Nir Eyal as an intro to engagement loops. The Hard Thing about Hard Things Because nothing is easy about building product and Ben Horowitz knows it better than anyone. This books is an incredible account of Ben’s journey as company founder and product builder. Rework The guys at Basecamp (Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson) know perfectly well that everything people say “is the way it has to be” about building a company is wrong. In fact, they’ve built a great company that proves it.

Amazon

Basecamp

Facebook

Google

Netflix

Slack

Super

Twitter

Y Combinator

YouTube

The cost of predictability — shipping great products when we’re either always late or wrong.

New to working in Product? Here’s some recommended reading

About Author

Comments

TOPICS

THIS ARTICLE WAS FEATURED IN

Related Stories

Untitled Story

6 Degrees of Separation: Make Product Decisions with Skin in the Game

The Noonification: The Future of DeFi - Emerging Evolution (11/3/2022)

10 Ways PMs Can Earn The Respect and Trust of Their Team

10 Terms Every Engineer Must Know

10 Subtle Superpowers of DevOps

6 Degrees of Separation: Make Product Decisions with Skin in the Game

The Noonification: The Future of DeFi - Emerging Evolution (11/3/2022)

10 Ways PMs Can Earn The Respect and Trust of Their Team

10 Terms Every Engineer Must Know

10 Subtle Superpowers of DevOps

Light-Mode

Classic

Newspaper

Dark-Mode

Neon Noir

Minty

HN StartUps