Books for Product Managers

Ten books that cover the whole job, ordered so the first one is the one to read if you only read one.

Product management pulls in discovery, strategy, delivery and persuasion, and no single book covers all four well. This list is ordered rather than ranked. The first few establish how the job works and what good looks like, the middle ones go deep on the skills you use weekly, and the last few are the ones you return to once you have run into the problem they describe.

  1. Inspired

    4.317 ratings

    The clearest description of how strong product teams actually operate, and the reference point most other product books argue with. Start here if you are working out what the job is supposed to look like.

  2. Continuous Discovery Habits

    4.73 ratings

    Turns talking to customers from an occasional project into a weekly habit, with the opportunity solution tree as the artefact that keeps it honest.

  3. Escaping the Build Trap

    The book to read when your organisation measures you by features shipped. Names the pattern and gives you the strategy and structure arguments to change it.

  4. Good Strategy Bad Strategy

    3.97 ratings

    Not a product book, and the one most likely to change how you write a strategy. The diagnosis, guiding policy and coherent action kernel applies directly to product.

  5. The Mom Test

    4.01 rating

    Two hours to read and it fixes the single most common research mistake, which is asking people about your idea instead of about their life.

  6. Product Management in Practice

    The honest account of the daily reality, including stakeholder politics and ambiguity. Useful precisely because it does not describe the idealised version.

  7. User Story Mapping

    5.01 rating

    The most practical treatment of turning a understanding of users into a backlog that still makes sense three months later.

  8. Measure What Matters

    5.02 ratings

    Read it for how objectives and key results are supposed to work before your company adopts them badly.

  9. Obviously Awesome

    Positioning is usually treated as a marketing concern, and it decides what your product is allowed to be. Short and immediately usable.

  10. Thinking, Fast and Slow

    4.1236 ratings

    The background on judgement that makes you more careful with research findings, forecasts and your own confidence.

  11. The Practitioner's Guide to Product Management

    A candid account of the job from someone doing it, including the parts that go wrong. Pairs well with the books above, which describe how product work should look, by showing how it often actually goes.

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