Books on Behavioural Science for Product Managers

How people actually decide, and what that means for the thing you are building.

Product work rests on assumptions about why somebody clicks, buys, returns or leaves, and most of those assumptions come from introspection. These replace introspection with research. Ordered from the broadest theory to the most directly applicable.

  1. Thinking, Fast and Slow

    4.1236 ratings

    The foundation. Kahneman's two systems and the biases that follow from them sit behind most of what the other books here apply.

  2. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

    Cialdini's principles of persuasion, which appear in every growth tactic you have ever seen and are worth recognising by name.

  3. Hooked

    4.025 ratings

    The habit loop applied to product design. Read it for the mechanics, then read the last chapter for the question of whether you should.

  4. The Design of Everyday Things

    Norman on affordances and mental models. It explains why a user does the wrong thing with an interface that seemed obvious to the team that built it.

  5. Laws of UX

    The psychology principles most often cited in interface work, each stated in a page with the research behind it.

  6. Competing Against Luck

    Jobs to be done as a theory of why somebody switches, which is a behavioural question wearing the clothes of a market one.

  7. Practical Empathy

    The research skill underneath all of it, which is following somebody else's reasoning without substituting your own.

  8. Mental Models

    A wider set of thinking tools, aimed at the decisions a product manager makes rather than the ones a user makes.

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