15 Product Management Books: The Product Manager’s Library

Role of Books in Shaping Product Management Professionals

Whether you’re a professional wanting to advance in your career or a budding product manager wanting to grasp the strategic significance of product management, these must-reads will provide you with the knowledge, understanding, and motivation you need to succeed in your product management endeavors. 

Acquiring Information and Developing Skills

The best books for product managers offer priceless insights into the strategies, techniques, and procedures used by successful product managers and businesses. They may also help you gain and sharpen the abilities necessary to succeed in your position, including stakeholder management, product roadmap planning, user research, data analysis, and leadership.

Developing Originality and Creativity 

Numerous product management books include cutting-edge concepts and methods to encourage originality and push your thinking. Their opinions can offer fresh approaches to problem-solving, fulfilling customer requirements, and setting your product apart from competitors. 

Enhancing Your Career Path

Reading books about product management can also be beneficial to your professional growth. They can help you get ready for interviews, adjust to the demands of a new role, or set you up for a promotion to an executive or senior level.

Providing a Guide to Best Practices 

Books can be your best guides, and they typically offer industry best practices that have been proven effective in various scenarios. Even if there are a ton of articles and courses available online, books offer depth and comprehensiveness about the best practices that are not found in other media. 

Importance of Continuous Learning in Product Management

The dynamic profession of product management depends on ongoing education and skill development, thus requiring you to commit to lifelong education to hone your skill set. Listed below is the significance of continuous learning:

Digital Literacy 

Product management highlights the importance of advancing digital literacy and staying updated with technological advancements to benefit from new product management platforms and solutions. 

Agile Methods 

To create incremental products and respond quickly to changes in the market, people must have both flexibility and competence in agile methodologies. 

Understanding Data

Data analytics expertise is becoming increasingly important; thus, product management focuses on the capacity to analyze insights from data to help you make well-informed product decisions. 

Helps Achieve Goals

In the workplace, continuous training can increase employee skill sets, which ultimately helps not only set goals but also achieve both personal and company goals. 

15 Product Management Books

Let’s explore some of the best product management books available.

1. Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love

Why do some items receive positive feedback from consumers while others do not? This book describes how product managers can play an important role in providing a solution to this topic. The author, product management guru Marty Cagan, states that before investing all of your efforts in developing a product, you must be certain that it will succeed. She introduces the concept of “product culture,” which is very important for the entire process of managing and creating superior products. 

2. Cracking the PM Interview

Gayle Laakmann McDowell and Jackie Bavaro’s book Cracking the PM Interview is the greatest resource for preparing for product manager interviews. It is one of the best books on product management as it will give you a thorough grasp of how the project management function differs from company to company, what experiences you should have, how to write a strong resume and CV, and how to crack the interview questions. 

3. The Lean Product Playbook: How to Innovate with Customers and Create Products That Win

The Lean Product Playbook by Dan Olsen is the best book for product managers to create products that customers love. It offers a summary of the Lean approach to readers and highlights the importance of continuous customer validation and continuous improvement. With the help of this eBook, product managers may become more innovative and produce goods that surpass their competitors as it adds more actual instances from businesses like Google, Amazon, and Airbnb.

4. The Product Book: How to Become a Great Product Manager

This book by Josh Anon and Carlos González de Villaumbrosia is a great resource for anyone in the product management industry, whether they are already employed in the position or not. It offers creative ideas and the best ways to carry them out and is jam-packed with useful advice. People from organizations like Netflix, Google, and Facebook offer their product management wisdom in The Product Book, which is a veritable gold mine of knowledge.

5. Escaping From the Building Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value, 

Melissa Perri, in this one of the best product management books, demonstrates how establishing a solid basis for excellent product management may assist businesses in accomplishing their objectives and resolving actual consumer issues. Product Teams tend to overlook the actual demands of users in favor of creating features. This pattern is known as the “build trap” by Melissa Perri. You ought to study this book to find out how to get out of this terrible trap.

6. The Mom Test: How to Talk to Your Customers & Learn If They Will Actually Pay You

The title of the book is derived from Rob Fitzpatrick’s claim that you need to be able to receive objective feedback from anyone, including your mother. It offers helpful advice on how to get feedback from clients without influencing their answers. It’s a priceless tool for business owners, product managers, and everyone working with customers.

7. Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products

This best-seller by Nir Eyalun reveals how certain products seem to attract customers without any effort on their part. This perceptive handbook reveals strategies for developing goods with enticing user experiences that encourage repeat business. It provides easy-to-follow four-step strategies to help designers, marketing specialists, and aspiring business owners.

8. Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days

For teams of any size, from small startups to Fortune 100s, teachers to nonprofits, Sprint is a useful manual for providing practical answers to important business concerns. It’s for everyone who needs answers right now and has a major opportunity, issue, or idea. Sprint by Jake Knapp is one of the best product management books for discovering the tricks behind the five-day process that Google Ventures partners utilize to go from a prototype to a decision.     

9. The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers.

If you decide to pursue this path, Ben Horowitz’s book will help you prepare for any real obstacles you might encounter. He describes common issues in investing, managing, purchasing, selling, and marketing—all crucial phases of a product’s life cycle and integral to product management—using examples from his own experiences. Horowitz talks about actual instances in his life where he had to learn how to be a successful CEO, fire employees, and steal business from rivals. 

10. My Product Management Toolkit

For any PM who wants to learn the ins and outs of the industry, My Product Management Toolkit is the best book on product management. It breaks down the many product management responsibilities and describes all the duties associated with this line of work. Every chapter of this book comprises objectives, pertinent tools and methods, a detailed analysis, important conclusions, and practical pieces of advice. 

11. User Story Mapping

Product Managers always struggle with prioritization. Jeff Patton’s book “User Story Mapping” offers a helpful overview of the technique, which involves visualizing and ranking user stories to create solutions that effectively satisfy consumer needs. It helps you learn how to discover the complete user story, effectively organize and prioritize product development, and produce goods that appeal to your target market.

12. Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Technology Projects to Mainstream Customers

Geoffrey A. Moore addresses the challenges of marketing and selling innovative products in “Crossing the Chasm,”. He also guides managing the critical transition from first-time buyers to regular consumers. The book was produced before the 1990s digital revolution, but its guidelines for creating creative development strategies have remained relevant over time.

13. Measure What Matters: Online Tools for Understanding Customers, Social Media, Engagement, and Key Relationships 

“Measure What Matters” by Katie Delahaye Paine is a thorough manual for comprehending and utilizing web resources for relationship assessment, social media analytics and customer insights. This book offers the foundation that enables tech companies to grow explosively and has aided in the success of many other goods.

14. Dare to Lead: Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts.

Brené Brown’s study explains in this New York Times bestseller why and how product managers should cultivate a new culture of vulnerability. This book is ideal for those who wish to improve their soft skills, such as communication, which is crucial for project managers.

15. High Output Management

Andrew Grove’s High Output Management teaches you how to build and lead highly efficient teams, inspire team members, and elevate their performance. This book is a virtual crash course in product management that has the potential to completely change your operations. 

How to Advance Your Product Management Career?

Here are the following points to take into consideration while choosing product management courses and how they will boost your career:

Understanding the Mindset of Your Colleagues And Customers

It is easier to predict how your coworkers and clients will respond to your decisions if you are aware of their histories and mindsets. Thus, continuous learning promotes interaction and dialogue between those who are impacted by product managers’ actions and those who manage them. 

Acquiring Knowledge through Case Studies

You can obtain an understanding of the difficulties, choices, and results of actual product scenarios by reading case studies. Additionally, by taking note of other people’s errors and blunders, you can keep from making the same ones. 

Following Podcasts and Publications

It instills a reading and hearing habit among product managers. These podcasts and publications are usually posted to the same blogs every week and last 10 minutes. They cover topics such as product leadership, product/market fit, and planning and roadmaps. 

Conclusion

Dive into the dynamic world of product development with the Product Management Training. This comprehensive course is designed to equip you with the end-to-end knowledge needed to excel in the fast-paced field of product management. Whether you’re looking to break into the industry or aiming to sharpen your skills, this program covers everything from product planning and execution to design and market delivery. With expert-led training and real-world projects, you’ll gain the hands-on experience necessary to manage the lifecycle of a successful product.

FAQs 

1. Can these books help me transition into a product management role?

With the help of the insightful product managers who came before you, each of these books offers a special chance to develop personally and professionally. By following in their footsteps and avoiding the mistakes they have made along the road, you can enhance your career in product management. 

2. Are there online resources that complement these books for learning product management? 

There are lots of online product management courses and live training sessions that you can add to your reading list. Podcasts, blogs and videos can also be incorporated into your study material. 

3. What are the four pillars of product management?

The four key areas of product management are product planning, product strategy, product marketing, and product iteration. 

4. What are the 3 major areas of product management?

The three major areas of product management are product discovery, product planning and product development.