This tweet from one of my besties in the tech space is the inspiration for this post. As a product manager, I have of course read dozens of books on the topic at hand. But I am also one of those “scale-up executive consultants” that sees all sides of the story in tech startups & scaleups. And I can very much agree that the principles of good product management apply to all dimensions of life and work.
In this post, I’m summarizing some of the books I have read and have helped me better understand how to build stuff people actually need and want! but as Matt suggested, everyone’s a product manager in their job so they may help all of you. If you want to follow what I am reading, here’s my Goodreads profile.
From Vision to Tactics
You can’t be a good product manager if you are not aligned with the rest of the company. So we’ll start at the top and work our way down towards Roadmap management (the tactics section is too practical for this post).
Vision
I’m not a big fan of chest-pumping prose on successful leadership practices. But the JUST CAUSE principle from Simon Sinek’s book The Infinite Game is a very powerful thought. It’s not a coincidence that Start With Why is also from his hand and the Infinite Game definitely builds up on that. The JUST CAUSE principle is the main reason for reading this book. If you don’t like reading books (you shouldn’t be here but anyhow) just watch this 3-minute clip.
Mission
A second book closely related but somewhat more practical already, which is why it landed here in the mission section, is Competing Against Luck by Clayton Christensen. The leading principle in this book is: “what job are my customers hiring this product to do?” where he rephrases the old adagios of “how can I get more people to buy my product?” in a way that spurs innovation.
Strategy
Here’s where it starts to become interesting and more practical. We went from WHY we are here and WHO are we meant to be, rolling more into the WHAT and HOW. This is where your 2 to 5-year plans reside (5 is already far away!).
When I think about strategy, the first thing that comes to mind is Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS). Complexity theory and Systems theory are big rabbit holes to get lost in, but a great starting point is Thinking in Systems by Donella H. Meadows. And if you’re ready for more, start with some of Gary Klein’s work, such as Seeing What Others Don’t and Sources of Power.
The most important resource on the strategy list is Wardley Mapping. Other than being a great person, Simon Wardley is a great thinker. His model/framework of mapping processes en tools depending on their maturity level and its relative distance from the user is incredibly insightful. If you’ve never heard of Wardley Mapping, drop everything you are doing and start digging.
All Simon’s work is CC (creative commons) and one of our friends in the community has summarized the online materials here where you can find the blog on Medium, an e-book version, or even a free audiobook in .MP3 format.
If you like a paper book, go and fetch The Art of Strategy by Erik Schön where you’re not only getting the basics of Wardley Mapping but you are also introduced to Sun Tzu (the Art of War) and John Boyd (the OODA loop) with countless references to more materials.
A third resource I think fits perfectly here is The Phoenix and The Unicorn by Peter Hinssen. Peter is one of the greatest business thinkers we have in Belgium and all of his work is worth reading. This book is particularly interesting if you are in a larger organization and need a guide for what’s next and why.
Roadmap
Crap, Matt wanted some practical frameworks and all I’ve shared so far is (very useful) satellite and helicopter view stuff. But where’s that practical stuff you actually use day2day as a product manager? Ok then, here you go:
Escaping the Build Trap by Melissa Perri. Readable in one go but so good! Melissa really hits the nail on the head on how to create real value, based on a true understanding of the problem that you are trying to fix. If you are just starting to build your product-led organization, THIS is what you should read first.
Start at the End by Matt Wallaert is the perfect follow-up. Matt provides a perfect framework for design-oriented thinking. The title literally says what the book is about: start with the behavior that would result from what tour are building and work your way back to how you need to build it.
And Hooked by Nir Eyal is a close third in this category. Where Melissa started your practical organization and Matt gave you the angle of viewing, Nir is giving you a boat load of behavioral analysis insights on how to make something people actually WANT to use. Not just solving a problem the good way but creating hooks that pull them back for more, creating new habits.
The following team is off-the-charts crazy, but you have to have read Shape Up by Ryan Singer (Basecamp). At Timeseer.AI we are following their 6–8 weeks cycle principles but it is soooo much more than just that, and we’re frankly not (mentally) ready yet to go all the way. This team has a tendency of questioning every framework they are using and how much it is actually working for them. Forget about 2-week sprints and SCRUM and all that! They’ve taken the “roadmap is *.*” to the “roadmap is /dev/null”.
You can read the book for free online or as a .PDF through this site but I did buy the copy for my bookshelf.
OTHER RESOURCES
If you are more into video, here are two more resources:
- The Product Angle is a great video podcast with dozen of good interviews about Product Management in general and a lot of book reviews as well.
- A Product Book Club that collectively reads one Product Managers book per month and discusses it afterward.
EXTRA:
These are two frameworks we are using but that have grown out of multiple resources and not necessarily from a specific book.
The B2B Business Model Canvas: everybody has seen the classic Business Model Canvas that is mainly built for Consumer Goods, but we are using an optimized version for B2B, first initiated by Bert Baeck when we were at TrendMiner. It has since been our cornerstone framework where everything else resides underneath.
The Weighted Roadmap: If you’ve used a product management tool in the likes of AHA, Productboard, or Harvestr.IO , you’ve already seen the principles of adding drivers for sales/marketing/retention/… to a feature request and subtracting or dividing the cost of implementation. This helps you indicate the weight a feature will have on the total value of your product. The order in which your features will show up on your weighted roadmap is of course not to be followed blindly but it provides the most objective language for debate.
SI = Sales Increase / PRM = PR & Marketing / LTV = Long-Term Strategic Value / CR = Customer Retention / OE = Operational Efficiency