Books on Product Leadership

Coaching, staffing, strategy and structure, for people who lead product teams rather than products.

Moving from running a product to running the people who run products changes what the job rewards. These cover the shift itself, then the two duties that take most of the time, being growing people and setting a strategy clear enough that teams can act without asking.

  1. Empowered

    4.02 ratings

    The most direct treatment of the product leader's two jobs, being coaching and staffing, with a competency model you can use in a one to one this week.

  2. The Making of a Manager

    4.89 ratings

    The honest first management book, covering the early mistakes and the mechanics of feedback, hiring and meetings.

  3. Radical Candor

    3.920 ratings

    The feedback framework, plus the manager practices around career conversations and running a team's debate and decide cycle.

  4. An Elegant Puzzle

    4.03 ratings

    Organisational design as a systems problem, in short standalone essays you can read when the specific problem lands.

  5. Team Topologies

    4.05 ratings

    Four team types and three interaction modes, and the argument that team boundaries determine the architecture you end up with.

  6. Transformed

    For leaders changing an existing organisation rather than building a new one, including the objections each change meets.

  7. Product Leadership

    2.52 ratings

    How the role differs across startup, growth and enterprise stages, drawn from interviews with a wide set of product leaders.

  8. The Hard Thing About Hard Things

    3.851 ratings

    The decisions with no good answer. Free of formula, and useful for the honesty about what leadership actually involves.

  9. Working Backwards

    4.03 ratings

    Amazon's mechanisms, including single threaded leadership and input metrics, described concretely enough to borrow.

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