Product Books

Strategy, discovery, metrics, growth, pricing, design, delivery and leadership. Each entry says when it is the right one to pick up.

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  • Sooner Safer Happier

    Smart and co authors present patterns and antipatterns for large scale ways of working change, drawn from banking and other regulated industries. Organised around the idea that better value sooner safer happier is the outcome to aim at rather than agile adoption itself.

    leadershipdelivery

  • Specification by Example

    Adzic's book on specification by example, sometimes published as Bridging the Communication Gap. Covers deriving scope from goals, specifying collaboratively, illustrating requirements with concrete examples, refining those into a …

    deliverytechnical

  • Sprint

    4.216 ratings

    The five day design sprint process from Google Ventures, written as a day by day operating manual. Monday maps the problem and picks a target, Tuesday sketches solutions, Wednesday decides and storyboards, Thursday builds a realistic prototype, Friday tests it with five customers.

    discoverydesign

  • Storytelling with Data

    4.86 ratings

    Knaflic's book on communicating with charts. Covers choosing an effective visual, eliminating clutter using Gestalt principles, directing attention with preattentive attributes, thinking like a designer, and building a narrative arc around the data.

    communicationmetrics

  • Strategic Writing for UX

    Podmajersky treats interface text as a design material with a job to do, and builds a repeatable process for producing it. The book starts from the organisation's goals and the user's goals, derives a voice from the product's …

    writingdesignux

  • Strategize

    Pichler's framework for product strategy and roadmapping. Covers the Product Vision Board for capturing vision, target group, needs, product and business goals, then moves to strategy validation, the GO product roadmap built on goals rather than features, and key performance indicators.

    strategy

  • Strategy That Works

    Leinwand and Mainardi studied companies that consistently execute strategy and found five unconventional acts, including committing to an identity, translating the strategic into the everyday, putting culture to work, cutting costs to grow stronger, and shaping the future.

    strategy

  • Succeeding with Agile

    Cohn's book on adoption at organisational scale rather than team practice. Covers the ADAPT model for change, choosing whether to start with a pilot or go broad, the patterns of spreading practice across teams, and the specific …

    scrumleadership

  • Swipe to Unlock

    4.02 ratings

    A plain language guide to the technology behind software products, written for people who need to hold their end of a conversation with engineers. Covers how the internet works, software development, operating systems, databases, hardware, security and business models.

    careertechnical

  • Team Topologies

    4.05 ratings

    Skelton and Pais give four team types of stream aligned, enabling, complicated subsystem and platform, and three interaction modes of collaboration, X as a service and facilitating.

    teamsdelivery

  • Testing Business Ideas

    Bland and Osterwalder catalogue forty four experiments for testing desirability, feasibility and viability, each with cost, setup time, evidence strength and reliability rated.

    experimentationdiscovery

  • The Age of Agile

    Denning argues that agile practice at team level only pays off when the surrounding management model changes too. He frames this as three laws covering the small team, the customer, and the network.

    leadershipstrategy

  • The Art of Statistics

    Spiegelhalter frames statistics as the practice of turning a real question into data and back into an answer, using a problem solving cycle as the spine of the book.

    datametricsresearch

  • The Cold Start Problem

    4.01 rating

    Chen, writing from his time at Uber and Andreessen Horowitz, treats network effects as a lifecycle rather than a property. The stages run from the cold start problem through the tipping point, escape velocity, the ceiling and the moat.

    growthstrategy

  • The Deadline

    A novel in which a manager is kidnapped and set to run software projects in a fictional country, a device that lets DeMarco test management ideas as plot rather than as advice.

    projectdeliveryteams