The design thinking product people are expected to have, from usability fundamentals to defending a decision in a review.
Product managers are not designers and still have to recognise a good design argument, run a usability session and explain a choice to an executive who wants the button moved. These books give you that without asking you to open a design tool. The list runs from the foundations that change how you look at everything, through the research and collaboration practices, to the meeting where the work is either accepted or reopened.
Affordances, signifiers, mapping, feedback and the gulfs of execution and evaluation. Norman's argument that most so called user error is design error is the single most useful idea to carry into a bug triage.
Krug on scanning rather than reading, conventions worth keeping, and the trunk test for orientation. It also describes a cheap usability testing approach you can run yourself, which is the fastest return of anything here.
Gothelf and Seiden on making assumptions explicit and running design inside a delivery cadence rather than upstream of it. The book to read when design keeps arriving late and arriving finished.
Five days from a stuck problem to a tested prototype, with exercises, timings, roles and materials given. Worth it for the decision structure alone, particularly the Decider role and working alone together.
Greever covers the meeting after the work is done, including how to connect a choice back to an agreed objective and how to answer the objections that recur. Read it before your next review with an executive.
Hall on doing research yourself, covering what each method is for and how much evidence is actually enough. Direct about the situations where a survey will mislead you.
Portigal on interview craft, including rapport, silence, follow up and asking for stories rather than opinions. This is the skill that quietly improves every other research method you use.
Eyal's trigger, action, variable reward and investment model, for products used repeatedly rather than once. The closing chapter on the ethics of habit design is the part worth arguing about with your team.
Where design intent meets a backlog. Patton's map is the artefact that stops a coherent experience being delivered as unconnected fragments across four sprints.