A Product Manager plays a critical role in guiding the steps in a product’s lifecycle, advocating for customer needs, and ensuring the product’s connection with market trends. This role leads to a smoother user experience for clients and ensures the faster development of the product. Earlier, the role of a product manager was handled by other team members; however, this role has become quite essential because of the change in customer expectations. This article lists the top books a product manager should read to enhance their strategic thinking and refine their leadership qualities.
Escaping the Build Trap
“Escaping the Build Trap” covers how effective product management helps organizations solve real customer problems. The book teaches product management principles that are applicable to companies of all sizes. The book also teaches how to build a culture that is focused on successful outcomes over outputs.
Hacking Growth
This book discusses the methodology responsible for the growth of companies like Uber, Airbnb, LinkedIn, etc.: Growth Hacking. It sheds light on how to create and execute custom-made growth hacking strategies to increase the customer base and market share.
Sprint
“Sprint” is a practical guide that answers critical business questions and is suitable for teams of any size. The book covers solving big problems and testing new ideas in just five days. The guide can potentially replace the old office defaults with a smarter and more effective way of solving problems.
The Product Momentum Gap
This book provides a comprehensive guide to creating genuine value for the customer. The authors emphasize that organizations should watch out for the product momentum gap to help them achieve their desired results. They also provide a set of tools to beat the same and directly connect product development to customer value.
The Lean Product Playbook
“The Lean Product Playbook” teaches how to innovate with minimum viable products and customer feedback. The book provides step-by-step guidance on improving the chances of building successful products. The author has worked with various companies like Facebook, Hightail, Epocrates, etc., and has summarized what he has learned in the book.
Strategize
This book enables its readers to make the right strategic decisions. It uses various proven techniques and tools to help product managers create a winning product strategy and actionable roadmap.
Forget the Funnel
This book guides its readers to think strategically about marketing the product. The authors have developed a Customer-Led Growth Framework that helps organizations solve their product marketing struggles and hit ambitious targets.
Continuous Discovery Habits
This book provides a structured approach to continuous discovery that ensures the organization makes a product or service that the customers want. The book is ideal for those who want to discover products that create customer and business value.
The Lean Startup
In the past few decades, companies have started taking a different approach to building and launching new products, called “The Lean Startup.” The book covers the challenges traditional firms face and emphasizes the importance of learning and validating assumptions. It popularized various product management concepts that are now considered fundamental – build-measure-learn, pivot, and minimum-viable-product.
Outcomes Over Output
Even though setting goals as outcomes sounds simple, it can be hard to implement in practice. This book acts as a practical guide to using outcomes to guide the team’s work.
Evidence-Guided
This book offers a systematic approach to help create high-impact products. It covers choosing the right outcomes, prioritizing ideas, and effective collaboration and demonstrates each concept with real-world examples.
The Cold Start Problem
The book covers how to leverage network effects to launch and scale businesses. It sheds light on the common mistakes that startups make that make them unable to scale and compete with their competitors. The author has interviewed the CEOs and founding teams of organizations like Zoom, Dropbox, Tinder, Uber, etc., and included their insights in the book.
The Right It
The law of market failure states that most new products will fail, even if skillfully executed, and this book provides a guide to beating this beast, i.e., market failure. The book consists of various case studies that keep the readers engaged and help them convert their ideas into successful endeavors.
Designing for Behavior Change
This book covers how psychology and behavioral science can be applied to product design and development. It helps product managers easily identify targets, build the product, and gauge its effectiveness.
Product Direction
The book teaches how to identify, select, and define the correct product strategy that helps build successful products at scale. It helps identify the most critical problems and opportunities regarding customer experience. The book also covers using data science to pinpoint problems and test potential solutions.
The Product-Led Organization
This book teaches how to transform a company into a product-led organization and drive growth by putting the products at the center of customer experience. The book also comprehensively covers the quantitative and qualitative insights required to make better decisions and shape better product experiences.
Asif Razzaq is the CEO of Marktechpost Media Inc.. As a visionary entrepreneur and engineer, Asif is committed to harnessing the potential of Artificial Intelligence for social good. His most recent endeavor is the launch of an Artificial Intelligence Media Platform, Marktechpost, which stands out for its in-depth coverage of machine learning and deep learning news that is both technically sound and easily understandable by a wide audience. The platform boasts of over 2 million monthly views, illustrating its popularity among audiences.
