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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  • Building Products for the Enterprise

    Reeves and Gaines cover what changes when the buyer is not the user. Multiple stakeholders, long sales cycles, procurement, security review, integration requirements and the influence of sales and customer success on the roadmap all get direct treatment.

    strategyenterprise

  • Business Model Generation

    5.01 rating

    Osterwalder and Pigneur's Business Model Canvas, with nine building blocks covering customer segments, value propositions, channels, customer relationships, revenue streams, key resources, key activities, key partnerships and cost structure.

    strategypricing

  • Crossing the Chasm

    4.215 ratings

    Moore's revision of the technology adoption lifecycle argues there is a gap between early adopters, who buy a change agent, and the early majority, who buy a productivity improvement backed by references.

    strategygrowth

  • Data Science for Business

    Written for the people who work with data scientists rather than for the people who will build the models. It teaches the fundamental concepts, including how a business problem maps onto a data mining task, why overfitting happens …

    dataaistrategy

  • Escaping the Build Trap

    Perri names the pattern where organisations measure success in features shipped rather than problems solved, then works through what replaces it. You get a product role defined by outcomes, a strategy framework she calls the …

    strategyfoundations

  • Escaping the Feature Factory

    Cutler's collected writing on the feature factory pattern, where teams ship features on a schedule with no feedback loop to outcomes. Covers the signals that you are in one, including no discovery, success measured at delivery, and constant context switching.

    strategymetrics

  • Good Strategy Bad Strategy

    3.97 ratings

    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.

    strategy

  • Impact Mapping

    5.01 rating

    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.

    strategydelivery

  • Inspired

    4.317 ratings

    Cagan sets out how product teams at companies shipping continuously actually operate. Empowered teams are given problems rather than feature lists, a product manager is accountable for value and viability, and a designer and engineers are involved from the start.

    strategydiscoveryfoundations

  • Leading Change

    Kotter's eight stage process for organisational change, drawn from studying transformations that stalled alongside ones that held. The stages run from establishing urgency and building a guiding coalition, through creating and …

    changeleadershipstrategy

  • Lean Enterprise

    A book about applying lean and agile thinking above the level of a single team, written for organisations that already have a delivery capability and cannot start again.

    enterprisedeliverystrategy

  • Managing Successful Programmes

    The official MSP manual, describing how to run a programme as coordinated projects and change activity aimed at an outcome rather than a deliverable. The fifth edition is organised into principles, themes and processes, with …

    programmegovernancestrategy

  • Mental Models

    Young's method for building a large diagram of what people are trying to accomplish, drawn from transcripts of open ended interviews and grouped into towers of related tasks, thoughts and feelings.

    researchdesignstrategy

  • Monetizing Innovation

    Ramanujam and Tacke argue that pricing should shape the product rather than follow it, and that willingness to pay conversations belong early in development. Covers the four failure types they name feature shocks, minivations, hidden gems and undead products.

    pricingstrategy

  • Objectives and Key Results

    Niven and Lamorte wrote the implementation manual for OKRs rather than the argument for adopting them. The book covers writing objectives and key results that hold up under scrutiny, the difference between committed and …

    metricsstrategyleadership