Strategy, discovery, metrics, growth, pricing, design, delivery and leadership. Each entry says when it is the right one to pick up.
The book 37signals wrote about how they built Basecamp, and the direct ancestor of Shape Up. It argues for a smaller product, a smaller team and a shorter path to launch, then works through what that means for scope, design, code and writing.
Allen's system for keeping commitments out of your head and in a set of lists you trust. The workflow moves through capturing everything that has your attention, clarifying what each item actually is, organising the results into …
The Harvard Negotiation Project's method for principled negotiation, which separates the people from the problem and bargains over interests rather than stated positions.
Downe led design in the UK Government Digital Service and distilled that experience into fifteen principles for a service that works. Each principle gets a short chapter, covering matters such as being easy to find, explaining its …
Rumelt separates strategy from goal setting and aspiration. A strategy has a kernel of three parts, being a diagnosis that names the challenge, a guiding policy for dealing with it, and coherent actions that carry the policy out.
Ellis and Brown document the growth team process. You need a cross functional team, a north star metric, a high tempo cycle of analysing, ideating, prioritising and testing, and a growth model that maps the equation behind the numbers.
The thorough guide to planning and running usability tests, written by two people who have run a great many of them. The first part covers what usability is and where testing fits alongside other methods, and the second walks …
Grove ran Intel and wrote a management book grounded in production thinking, opening with a breakfast factory to explain limiting steps, capacity and quality control.
Eyal's four phase Hook Model of trigger, action, variable reward and investment describes how products build habitual use. Covers external and internal triggers, the Fogg behaviour model applied to reducing the effort of an …
Flyvbjerg spent decades assembling a database of large projects and their outcomes, and with Gardner turns that evidence into a short set of rules. The central finding is that big projects fail because planning is rushed and delivery is slow, when the reliable pattern is the reverse.
Pichler's book on leading without authority. Covers the mindset shift, listening and empathy as working tools, guiding stakeholders and development teams towards decisions, handling conflict, and the specific practices for collaborative decision making including consent and consensus.
Covert wrote a short book about information architecture for people who would never call themselves information architects. It moves from identifying the mess and stating your intent through to choosing a direction, giving structure to the parts and preparing to adjust as things change.
Kendrick works through risk in the order you meet it on a project, starting with scope risk, then schedule and resource risk, then the analysis and response planning that follow.
Adzic's short book on a visual technique linking deliverables back to goals. The map has four levels asking why, who, how and what, so every feature traces to an actor whose behaviour must change in service of a measurable goal.
Cohen and Bradford model influence as exchange, arguing that you obtain cooperation by trading things the other person values rather than by holding power over them.