Appendix A. A Reading List for Expanding Your Product Management Practice

Given the connective nature of product management, drawing on multiple ideas and disciplines is key for truly excelling in this deeply cross-functional role. Product management always brings new challenges, and a wide base of knowledge will help you be better prepared for whatever comes your way.

To that end, I’ve found that the books and articles that have helped me the most as a product manager are rarely about “product management.” What follows is a list of the books that have proven most impactful for me in building my product management practice, as well as a few notes about what you might be looking for if this book is right for you, and how it helped me build my product management practice.

Influence Without Authority (Wiley, 2005) by David L. Bradford and Allan R. Cohen

If You’re Looking For: Strategies for leading through influence in low-authority roles and scenarios.

How It Helped Me: The content in this book is useful, but the in-depth case studies are really useful, and were the inspiration for the product manager stories included in this book.

The Trusted Advisor (Touchstone, 2011) by David H. Maister, Charles H. Green, and Robert M. Galford

If You’re Looking For: Actionable strategies for building trust with customers and senior stakeholders.

How It Helped Me: The Trusted Advisor is that most helpful kind of book, where the specific behaviors it recommends against are behaviors that you might find yourself exhibiting all too often. Reading this book for the first time was the very last time I said something like “I’ll put my best people on it” when scoping out a consulting gig.

Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (Random House, 2006) by Carol Dweck

If You’re Looking For: A way to work past your overachiever tendencies and open yourself up to being wrong and learning new things.

How It Helped Me: In Chapter 3 of this book, we discussed how cultivating a growth mindset is key to succeeding as a product management. This book helped me understand how and why I was often operating within a fixed mindset, and even opened up some space for me to understand how moments that made me feel smart or accomplished might be doing material harm to my team and organization.

The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business (Jossey-Bass, 2012) by Patrick Lencioni

If You’re Looking For: A way to better understand organizational health (and dysfunction).

How It Helped Me: The Advantage is the first business book I recommend to most people, because it describes common patterns of organizational dysfunction with unparalleled clarity and generosity. Reading The Advantage helped me understand that many of the patterns of organizational dysfunction I had encountered in my career as a product manager were real and widespread. It also provided me with critical tools for addressing these patterns.

Good to Great (HarperBusiness, 2011) by Jim Collins

If You’re Looking For: A meticulous, scientific breakdown of what makes an organization achieve great results.

How It Helped Me: Good to Great is an exhaustively researched, illuminating, and entertaining guide to why some companies succeed where others fail. There are great lessons here about organizational leadership, which I’ve found crucial for understanding when, why, and how to provide candid feedback to senior leaders. The follow-up How the Mighty Fall is also a great read.

Crucial Conversations (McGraw-Hill Education, 2011) by Al Switzler, Ron McMillan, Joseph Grenny, and Kerry Patterson

If You’re Looking For: Strategies for having difficult conversations without becoming defensive, shutting down, or freaking out.

How It Helped Me: An absurdly high percentage of the work of product management comes down to suppressing and working through defensive and counterproductive reactions to other people’s comments and questions. This book is an incredible resource for avoiding common communication traps for product managers, and is equally helpful for navigating difficult conversations in a personal context. The idea of “victim stories” as a way of dealing with conflict helped me understand and work through my own tendencies toward being a Product Martyr.

The Scrum Field Guide: Agile Advice for Your First Year and Beyond (Addison-Wesley Professional, 2012) by Mitch Lacey

If You’re Looking For: Practical guidance on implementing Agile frameworks.

How It Helped Me: Early in my career as a product manager, I read a lot of books about Agile software development—and this was my favorite. Specifically, this book really helped me understand and navigate the reactions I could expect from my team as we began implementing Agile practices, and appreciate the value of starting with an off-the-shelf framework.

Data Science for Business (O’Reilly, 2013) by Tom Fawcett and Foster Provost

If You’re Looking For: A genuinely useful and jargon-busting explanation of how data science works and how it can help meet business goals.

How It Helped Me: This book explains the fundamentals of data science in clear, concise, and actionable terms. It completely changed the way I was able to collaborate with data scientists by giving me the language to tie their work directly to business goals.

Just Enough Research (A Book Apart, 2013) by Erika Hall

If You’re Looking For: Straightforward and useful guidance on conducting research to learn about stakeholders, competitors, and users.

How It Helped Me: This book provides an incredibly valuable balance of specific research approaches and high-level guidance about why and how to conduct research. It is both a handy reference and a fun read, concise and useful and engaging through and through. I usually keep it on hand whenever I’m embarking on a project that involves any kind of research, both to read up on specific techniques and to realign my overall approach as needed.

Lean Analytics (O’Reilly, 2013) by Benjamin Yoskovitz and Alistair Croll

If You’re Looking For: A no-nonsense way to use analytics to understand what’s actually going on with your product and business.

How It Helped Me: There are many great books in the Lean Startup series, but this one is my very favorite. Even as a person who has sometimes balked at the idea of quantitative goals, I found this book very helpful in thinking through how and why analytics can be used to improve the way that organizations work.

Radical Focus (Boxes & Arrows, 2016) by Christina Wodtke

If You’re Looking For: More information about the Objectives and Key Results framework, or just a fresh take on setting organizational goals overall.

How It Helped Me: Having implemented the Objectives and Key Results framework with varying degrees of success at different organizations, I was thrilled to find a book that describes OKRs in compelling, narrative terms. Nearly every mistake a team can make when implementing OKRs is brought to light here, and Wodtke’s emphasis on focus as a goal serves as an important reminder that the goals we set also provide critical guidance about what not to do or build.