Best Product Management Books (2024)
Over the past few years, I have run a book club at my company. It started as something I would do with just my team and slowly expanded to encompass a wider breadth of the company. I have found it a good way to stay on top of the latest thinking in product management and business strategy. It is also fun to discuss the topics with a group.
Below are the books that the club enjoyed the most, organized by category. These books are easy to read with plenty of stories and have strong insightful takeaways.
Product Management
Inspired by Marty Cagan (Intro to Product Management & Software Development)
This book is a seminal guide to Product Management; if you only read one book about Product, this is the one! It provides a broad overview of Product Management and software development in general.
I have read this book with my teams for years now. The one bit of feedback I always get is that people want the book to go deeper. However, I believe broader is better for a book providing an overview of product management. There are plenty of great books that cover specific topics in much greater depth.
When Coffee & Kale Compete by Alan Klement (Jobs To Be Done)
Based on the seminal HBR article by Clayton M. Christensen, “this framework is an approach to developing products based on understanding both the customer’s specific goal or “job,” and the thought processes that would lead that customer to “hire” a product to complete the job.”
From a product perspective, this is a critical framework to have and use in your PM toolbox. It moves beyond identifying the business problem to figuring out the job your product was hired to complete. For any PM, this is the crux of product discovery. You will never be able to solve your users’ business problems if you don’t understand the job your product solves for them.
I find this to be a good follow-on book to Cagan’s Inspired. It takes you deeper into the business problem space. For Product Managers, nailing this skill is critical for success.
The Build Trap by Melissa Perri (Outcome-Based Product Management)
A few years ago a CX person at my company told me they thought the job of a product manager was to take client requests and get them done as quickly as possible. Her measure of success for a PM was based on how fast you could crank features through the mill. This is what is referred to as a “Feature Factory.”
As a PM, it is easy to get caught up in the treadmill of shipping features. If your focus is on output instead of outcomes, this is a great book for you. It explains how to escape the build trap and focus on metrics that ultimately drive better outcomes for your clients.
The book has a good balance of narrative woven into theory which helps explain the application. If you just want the theory, I recommend reading “Outcomes over Output” by Joshua Seiden. At 86 pages, it is a fast read and covers the theory well.
Obviously Awesome by April Dunford (How to Nail Product Positioning)
So you built a great product, now what? How do you take your product to market and have it stand out against competitors? This is where positioning is critical to your success. As one reviewer on Amazon put it “April Dunford will make you realize that great products and great marketing don’t matter if you don’t position it correctly.”
The book explains product positioning succinctly. One of her key points is not to use the standard template positioning statement of “For [target buyers] is a [market category] which provides [main benefits]…” Instead, she advocates for defining your unique position in the market through the five components — competitive alternatives, unique attributes, value, target market characteristics, market category, and relevant trends. One of her key takeaways is you can’t be everything to everyone, you must choose. This is a similar theme to other books: hard choices need to be made to be successful.
For those of you looking for a how-to book, the second half of the book walks you through the steps of crafting a positioning statement. It is a quick read at 184 pages.
As a bonus, the book focuses on the business-to-business (B2B) space. In my experience, many product management books tend to focus on business-to-consumer (B2C) leaving it to the reader to figure out how to apply the learnings to B2B. It is nice to see the inverse once in a while.
Confessions of the Pricing Man by Hermann Simon (Product Pricing)
Have you been struggling to figure out how to price your product? There are many books on pricing out there, but they tend to be theory-based and seem to be written for a college course. As a practicing PM, I find it hard to trudge through these books.
This is the first book I have seen that offers practical advice and some theory. Hermann Simon gives you real-world examples from his consulting experiences that are easily relatable. If you need to figure out pricing, this is the book to read.
Financial Intelligence for Entrepreneurs by Karen Berman and Joe Knight (Financial Intelligence, What you need to know about numbers)
If you are a Product Manager without an MBA or business degree, this is a must-read. Even if you don’t want to be the CEO of your product, it is important to be able to read an income statement or understand the difference between net and gross profit. The ultimate success of your product depends on the financials of your specific product or the company overall.
This subject can be very dry though, so many team members asked for a straightforward book on the basics of accounting/finance. This is it! The basic concepts are clearly explained in a short 220 pages. Before you know it, you’ll be grilling your CFO about the balance sheet:)
Business/Product Strategy
Over the years, I always ensured I offered one book covering business strategy with each book club session. We all know PMs are always busy. Whether it is getting a new release out the door or putting out a fire, it can leave little time for thinking about strategy.
Unfortunately without a solid product strategy, a PM doesn’t know what direction to take their product. How do you know whether solving one business problem is more important than another? Sure there are prioritization methods like RICE, but they won’t tell you whether directionally you are headed the right way.
Without a solid product strategy, you are like an Uber driver. You careen from the most impactful business problem to the next. A couple of years later, you lift up your head and realize the market has completely changed and your product is no longer relevant.
Over the past few years, I have found the books below to offer the best learnings for business strategy. They each cover different aspects of business strategy and work well when used in combination.
Playing to Win by Roger Martin (Business/Product Strategy Framework)
If you have been a PM for more than a year or two, you will inevitably be asked to articulate your product strategy. Search “Product Strategy” on the web and you will see many books and articles about it. What I have found missing though is a solid framework that helps you work through and define your strategy.
Roger Martin’s book gives you an excellent strategic framework to think through and create your strategy. He sees strategy as an integrated set of choices that uniquely positions you to win against your competitors. It starts with a winning aspiration and includes where to play and most importantly in my opinion, how will you win.
If you read one book on strategy, this is the one I would spend the time on.
The Crux by Richard Rumelt (How Leaders Become Strategists)
This is the second book from the author of “Good Strategy Bad Strategy.” Richard Rumelt in this book focuses on how to figure out the crux — the one challenge that appears to be both critical and solvable. If you can solve this, your product/company will be able to win in the market.
Both Richard and Roger bring up the key point that strategy defines not only what you will do, but also what you will not do. This latter part can be very challenging in most companies where there is always pressure to do it all and faster. Peanut buttering is not a strategy for success though. We need to make the hard choices.
For those of you who have read “Playing to Win” by Roger Martin, I highly recommend this book as they pair nicely. See my article “Playing to Win by Finding the Crux” if you want more details.
7 Powers by Hamilton Helmer (The Foundations of Business Strategy)
According to Hamilton Helmer, there are 7 persistent sources of competitive business advantage. You may have heard of some of these like scale economies, network economies, or switching costs. You will not win long-term if you are not employing one of these at your company.
The book has a significant number of formulas and the introduction can scare people off. If you skim through those parts, the chapters covering the 7 powers are enlightening, with tech stories that help illustrate the key points. The last two chapters do a nice job of helping you understand how to apply the powers. It covers what power is effective at each stage in a company’s journey and which ones to pursue.
While this book is more about business strategy than product, it is an important read for anyone in Product leadership. At 180 pages, it is a fast read and a great way to learn the foundations of business strategy.
BTW, The Acquired Podcast uses these 7 powers when reviewing the companies they discuss.
