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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  • Agile Retrospectives

    5.01 rating

    Derby and Larsen give a five stage structure for retrospectives covering set the stage, gather data, generate insights, decide what to do, and close. The bulk of the book is a catalogue of activities for each stage, with timings, materials and the situations each suits.

    scrumteams

  • An Elegant Puzzle

    4.03 ratings

    Larson treats engineering management as a systems problem. Covers team sizing and the four states a team can be in, how to run an organisation through growth, technical migrations, career ladders and performance calibration, and …

    leadershipteams

  • Atomic Design

    Frost's methodology for building interface design systems by composing small pieces into larger ones. The stages run from atoms, the smallest elements such as a label or an input, through molecules and organisms to templates and finally pages with real content in them.

    designdeliveryteams

  • Coaching Agile Teams

    Adkins covers the coaching side of the Scrum Master role in depth. Works through the mindset shift from expert to coach, then the stances of teacher, mentor, problem solver, conflict navigator, collaboration conductor and coach.

    coachingleadershipteams

  • Crucial Conversations

    4.027 ratings

    A method for conversations where stakes are high, opinions differ and emotions run strong. The authors cover starting with heart, noticing when safety has broken down, mastering your own stories, stating your path with facts …

    communicationteams

  • Design Systems

    Kholmatova approaches a design system as a shared language rather than as a component library, and organises the book around defining that language before building anything.

    designteamsdelivery

  • Difficult Conversations

    The authors argue that every hard conversation is really three conversations happening at once, one about what happened, one about feelings, and one about identity.

    communicationleadershipteams

  • Empowered

    4.02 ratings

    A book about product leadership rather than product work. Cagan and Jones argue that the difference between strong and weak product organisations lies in the manager's job of coaching and staffing, and they spend most of the book on those two duties.

    leadershipteams

  • Getting Real

    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.

    deliveryfoundationsteams

  • High Output Management

    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.

    leadershipteamsfoundations

  • Making Work Visible

    5.01 rating

    DeGrandis names five thieves of time being too much work in progress, unknown dependencies, unplanned work, conflicting priorities and neglected work. Each gets a chapter covering how to spot it, how to make it visible on a board, and the specific countermeasures.

    flowdeliveryteams

  • Managing Transitions

    Bridges separates change, which is external and can be announced on a date, from transition, which is the internal process people go through and cannot be skipped.

    changeleadershipteams

  • Peopleware

    DeMarco and Lister argue that most projects fail for sociological reasons rather than technical ones, and they spend the book on the conditions that let people think.

    teamsprojectleadership

  • Product Leadership

    2.52 ratings

    Banfield, Eriksson and Walkingshaw cover leading product teams, drawing on interviews with many product leaders. Organised around building the team, working with customers and stakeholders, and how the role differs by company stage from startup through growth to enterprise.

    leadershipteams

  • Radical Candor

    3.920 ratings

    Scott's framework places feedback on two axes of caring personally and challenging directly. Radical candour needs both, and the failure modes are ruinous empathy, obnoxious aggression and manipulative insincerity.

    leadershipteams