Product Management Books

Recommended reading material for Product Managers and Product Marketers

As part of our survey every year, we ask participants for any suggestions they have on interesting books. We’ve combined these results with our own recommendations to create a comprehensive reading list for product managers and product marketers.

Our list contains some classic product management books like ‘Crossing the Chasm’ by Geoffrey Moore and newer publications like ‘Empowered’ by Marty Cagan.

These recommendations cover a range of important product management activities and topics such as Minimal Viable Products (MVPs), user story mapping, innovation, and market positioning.

So, if you are looking to expand your reading list or even if you are looking to line your bookshelves with impressive-looking titles(!), our list is a valuable starting point.

If you would like to recommend a book or take part in our annual product management survey, please get in touch at [email protected].

Radical Focus

The OKR promise is to link your corporate vision with your daily activities. This book explains the ‘Why, What, and When’ of OKRs – through stories and practical advice.

Persuasive Presentations: Inspire action, Engage the audience, Sell your ideas

A handy guide which takes you through all the key things you need to consider to make your presentations impactful and memorable for the right reasons.

Ten Types of Innovation: The Discipline of Building Breakthroughs

This book is your guide to the ten types of innovation and how to use them effectively. Use it to find new opportunities to make your products thrive.

The B2B Innovator’s Map: How to Get from Idea to Your First Ten Customers

Learn a step-by-step framework to get from idea to your first ten customers. Discover profitable opportunities, reduce uncertainty, and build digital products customers are eager to buy!

Testing Business Ideas: A Field Guide for Rapid Experimentation

This book is for anyone applying a lean mindset to business.

Product Management in practice

A great read if you want to get under the skin of what it’s like to be a real product manager.

Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value

The shift from outputs is long overdue for many product teams. Emphasizing the customer problems you solve instead of the product you ship. Melissa Perri explains how this shift can help enable you to be successful as well as how to achieve it in your organization.

Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant

A game-changing book by Kim and Mauborgne on differentiation that provides a structured approach to help companies stand out, i.e. moving them to a clear blue ocean where they have no direct competition.

Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers

In this book, Osterwalder and Pigneur introduce us to the Business Model Canvas, which has become a “go-to” tool for many businesses to describe their business model in a single page.

Crossing the Chasm

Geoffrey Moore broke new ground in describing this critical phase in the product lifecycle of high-tech products and provides insight into how to achieve successful product adoption.

Empowered: Ordinary people, extraordinary products

Another great book from Marty Cagan and Chris Jones about what allows the top tech companies to consistently innovate. It’s about empowered product teams working on problems to solve, rather than just building features.

Inspired: How to Create Products Customers Love

An excellent book aimed at software product teams. Marty Cagan draws on his extensive experience to give practical advice on prototyping, designing minimal products, and measuring success.

Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

Getting Things Done is all about how to be more effective in an office environment. David Allen brings a range of principles founded on big ideas that are incredibly practical and will help you simply get more things done.

Hiring Product Managers

A short 40 minute read to guide you through recruiting Product Managers.

Monetizing Innovation

Today, more than ever, companies need to innovate to survive. But successful innovation measured in Dollars and Cents is tough. Companies obsess over being creative and innovative and spend significant time on products, yet struggle to monetize them. Monetizing Innovation presents a new way forward, to remove the guesswork and radically improve the odds of success.

OKRs at the center: How to Use Goals to Drive Ongoing Change and Create the Organization You Want

A short 50 minute read on the essence of applying OKRs to provide a bridge between vision, strategy, and organizational goals.

Made to Stick

A great read with tips and tricks on how to present stuff and communicate effectively.

Predictably Irrational: The hidden forces that shape our decisions

Dan Ariely is a behavioral economist who studies the way people make decisions when they buy, sell and make real-life choices. A fascinating read with useful insights into proposition development.

What Customers Want: Using Outcome-Driven Innovation to Create Breakthrough Products and Services

This book by Anthony Ulwick is the definitive book on the “Job to be Done” concept that is so powerful in understanding customer needs. It also provides tools such as “Outcome-Driven Innovation” to get quantitative data to support decision making.

What Color is Your Parachute?

This book is sub-titled a practical manual for job-hunters and career-changers. It’s a classic guide that gets reprinted every year and gives great insights on how to approach changing your job.

Analysis for Marketing Planning

A practical guide on how to collate, document and interpret information about the marketplace.

Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works

This book is a masterclass on strategy. Lafley and Martin teach you how to develop strategies to help you achieve what we all want: to be a winner in the marketplace.

User Story Mapping: Discover the Whole Story, Build the Right Product

Mapping out the full customer journey and looking at how different user stories interact over a real task for the user is a powerful tool – instead of getting lost in just one feature or function. In this book, Jeff Patton provides great insights into this often misunderstood technique.

Product Roadmaps Relaunched: How to Set Direction while Embracing Uncertainty

For many people, roadmaps are broken, they give the illusion of a fixed long term plan, but then fail to be delivered. C Todd Lombardo and team share the secrets of how to roadmap in this sort of Agile environment, showing how you can share the plan without tying yourself and your product down.

Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (and How to Take Advantage of it)

William Poundstone reveals the hidden psychology of how we react to pricing. It’s packed with interesting experiments, pricing tricks and tactics – all good stuff to have in your kit-bag if you work on pricing.

Innovation Games: Creating Breakthrough Products Through Collaborative Play

Luke Hohmann brings us a great instruction manual on how to use games with your customers to uncover their needs and wants or, as the book says, “creating breakthrough products through collaborative play”.

The Lean Startup: How Constant Innovation Creates Radically Successful Businesses

Eric Ries introduces the idea of the minimum viable product (MVP) as an approach for startups to learn quickly and evolve their business model before it’s too late.

The Design of Everyday Things:

The design of a product can make or break it. In this classic Don Norman brings the understanding that was once restricted to highly trained design professionals to the rest of us. If you want to understand design better so you can collaborate better with your design team this should be on your bookshelf.

The Strategy Book

A straight forward guide to developing strategy that lends itself to product management.

Persuasive Business Proposals

Writing a winning proposal is vital to getting a ‘yes’ on your next bid. Boost your success rate with the third edition of Persuasive Business Proposals and its hands-on guidance for crafting powerful proposals that attract prospects’ attention and speak to their needs. New: key questions, powerful cover letters, renewal secrets, and more.

Sprint (Google Ventures)

A practical guide to answering critical business questions, Sprint is a book for teams. It’s for anyone with a big opportunity, problem, or idea who needs to get answers today. It introduces us to the design sprint from Google Ventures as a proven technique to rapidly discover, understand and identify solutions.

People Styles at Work (Bolton & Bolton)

Why is it so hard to work (and live) with some people? People Styles at Work and Beyond presents a comprehensive, practical and proven method to help you understand how people behave. Armed with this understanding, you have a toolkit to improve your relationships.

The Alchemy of Growth

Baghai et al. bring us a guide on how to unleash sustainable growth by managing for different horizons. It provides a model that can revitalize organizations and invigorate the people in them. Like the alchemy of old, it seeks to transform every day into the exalted by means that seem little short of magical. The Alchemy of Growth is a comprehensive and practical approach to initiating, achieving and sustaining profitable growth today and tomorrow.

Lean vs Agile vs Design Thinking

A great book about the potential conflicts between Lean, Agile and Design Thinking best practice.

Value Proposition Design: How to Create Products and Services Customers Want

The sequel to Business Model Generation by Osterwalder and Pigneur. In this book, they provide new tools and techniques that help dig deeper into Value Proposition Design.

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

This is a classic book by Steven Covey that gained popularity in the 80s and 90s and is a staple of any manager’s bookshelf. It provides seven key pieces of timeless advice on how to be effective, ranging from “be proactive” to “sharpen the saw”.

Principles of Marketing

Philip Kotler is considered the father of modern marketing by many. This book provides broad coverage of the subject and is used by many business schools. It’s a great reference for any non-specialists to have on their bookshelf.

The Mom Test: How to Talk to Customers and Learn If Your Business Is a Good Idea When Everyone Is Lying to You

Rob Fitzpatrick provides guidance that will help you have better customer conversations that drive your market insights. It helps you overcome many of the barriers to getting real answers by focusing on stories.

The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail

Prof Clayton M. Christenson provides an excellent review of the factors that led to high attrition in technology industries and highlights the lessons businesses should learn.