Top PM Book Recommendations for 2022
Looking to add to your reading list?
Check out these recommendations from our Women In Product community.
Wondering what books to read next to help develop your product management and leadership skills? The titles highlighted below are for people both new and seasoned in their career looking to gain new skills and approaches from those who have walked the walk!
Product Management
Radical Product Thinking: The New Mindset for Innovating Smarter, Radhika Dutt
Iteration rules product development, but it isn’t enough to produce dramatic results. This book champions Radical Product Thinking, a systematic methodology for building visionary, game-changing products.
Listen to Radhika on our Great PM Book Series podcast. Listen now.
Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love, Marty Cagan
In Inspired, technology product management thought leader Marty Cagan provides readers with a master class in how to structure and staff a vibrant and successful product organization and how to discover and deliver technology products that your customers will love — and that will work for your business.
Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products, Marty Cagan
The goal of Empowered is to provide you, as a leader of product management, product design, or engineering, with everything you’ll need to create an environment of consistent innovation.
Continuous Discovery Habits: Discover Products that Create Customer Value and Business Value, Teresa Torres
How do you know that you are making a product or service that your customers want? How do you ensure that you are improving it over time? In this book, you’ll learn a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery that will help you answer these questions, giving you the confidence to act while also preparing you to be wrong.
Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value, Melissa Perri
To stay competitive in today’s market, organizations need to adopt a culture of customer-centric practices that focus on outcomes rather than outputs. In this book, Melissa Perri explains how laying the foundation for great product management can help companies solve real customer problems while achieving business goals
Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts, Annie Duke
Annie Duke, a former World Series of Poker champion turned business consultant, draws on examples from business, sports, politics, and (of course) poker to share tools anyone can use to embrace uncertainty and make better decisions.
Loved: How to Rethink Marketing for Tech Products, Martina Lauchengo
Most tech companies get marketing wrong because they don’t know how to do product marketing right. Loved shows what leaders like Apple, Netflix, Microsoft, and Salesforce do well and how to apply it to transform product marketing at your company.
Watch a replay of Martina’s session at our 2022 conference: The Marriage of Product and Go-to-market: What it Means for Product Leaders. Watch now.
Listen to Martina on our Great PM Book Series podcast. Listen now.
The Design of Everyday Things, Donald Norman
The Design of Everyday Things shows that good, usable design is possible. The rules are simple: make things visible, exploit natural relationships that couple function and control, and make intelligent use of constraints. The goal: guide the user effortlessly to the right action on the right control at the right time.
Management & Leadership
Take Back Your Power: 10 New Rules for Women at Work, Deborah Liu
For every woman who grew up competing on the uneven playing field, who is told she is too aggressive, assertive, dramatic, or emotional, this book is the battle cry you need to learn to thrive within the system that exists today, even if it’s not the one we wish it were. Take Back Your Power presents both hard data and Liu’s personal experiences from twenty years as a woman leader in the male-dominated tech industry.
Listen to her podcast episode where she talks about how she was able to build and leverage power throughout her career — and how you can do the same. Listen now.
Jerks at Work: Toxic Coworkers and What to Do about them, Tessa West
Jerks at Work is the definitive guide to dealing with — and ultimately breaking free from — the overbearing bosses, irritating coworkers, and all-around difficult people who make work and life miserable.
Community member Bosky Mukherjee interviews Tessa on an episode from our Great PM Book Series podcast. They explore what goes into the making of jerk-like behavior at work and consider common reactions of those who are targeted. Listen now.
Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs, John Doerr
Legendary venture capitalist John Doerr reveals how the goal-setting system of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) has helped tech giants from Intel to Google achieve explosive growth—and how it can help any organization thrive.
Strengths Based Leadership: Great Leaders, Teams, and Why People Follow, Tom Rath & Barry Conchie
This book identifies three keys to being a more effective leader: knowing your strengths and investing in others’ strengths, getting people with the right strengths on your team, and understanding and meeting the four basic needs of those who look to you for leadership.
Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail, Clayton M Christensen
Christensen explains why most companies miss out on new waves of innovation. Offering both successes and failures from leading companies as a guide, The Innovator’s Dilemma gives you a set of rules for capitalizing on the phenomenon of disruptive innovation.
Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything, BJ Fogg
A habit expert from Stanford University shares his breakthrough method for building habits quickly and easily. With Tiny Habits you’ll increase productivity by tapping into positive emotions to create a happier and healthier life. Dr. Fogg’s new and extremely practical method picks up where Atomic Habits left off.
Most startups fail. But many of those failures are preventable. The Lean Startup is a new approach being adopted across the globe, changing the way companies are built and new products are launched.
What books have you read that have helped you succeed in the workplace?
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