Part 2: Core Reading

Now that you understand what a PM does and how your community and market views the role, it’s time to start doing some core reading to study the craft and get a more in depth understanding of the core elements surrounding Product Management.

As with most Product Management content out there, there’s a huge amount of published work that you can read to learn more about it. This list consists of some of my favourite books and why I think they’re valuable to read. That said, remember that it’s up to you to make sure you are taking in the best information and utilising it, since nothing will be perfectly suited to your exact situation.

Inspired - How to be an excellent Product Manager

If there’s one book on this list that you read this should be it. With the second edition now about 6 years old it’s surprising that even in the tech industry it’s still a valuable resource for understanding how the best product managers deliver results at the most successful companies in the world.

The one thing that I also tell people when they read this book is that the stories and people that are described are not typical. Most businesses aren’t structured to support the type of innovation that happens in the stories specifically around the testing and failure of ideas; and there are exceedingly few people who are as strong and capable as the people who are described in the book.

That said it’s always good to know what the best looks like, so you can assess where your company and skills are to know where the biggest improvements could be, and potentially what the ‘quirks’ are with your workplace that you have to work within but know they aren’t universally best practice.

Start With Why - Understanding Why your business exists

The first time I watched Simon explaining the Golden Circle it felt transformative. I can’t explain the feeling of how what he was saying clicked with me in a way that nothing else in the past had.

Start With Why is a formalised version of that original talk, and you could probably skip reading it if you binged a lot of his content on YouTube. However I think watching it in all it’s original glory is well worth the 17-18 minute investment. The simple way that he describes the difference in companies that start with why they exist and end up with what they sell compared to companies that sell things but don’t really have a strong and articulated ‘Why’ they exist is a really important concept.

This book and concept is a great way to understand why some companies can have such strong cult followings, considering at the end of the day they are just be a company selling a product. Apple is the perfect example for this, since people don't just buy Apple products; they buy into the Apple ecosystem, lifestyle, and brand.

Competing Against Luck / Jobs To Be Done - Understand what your customers actually want

What do LPs, Tapes, CDs, and Spotify all have in common? They allow people to create a mood with music.

Innovation comes with solving these problems better than any other solution out there, but to come up with a better solution than any other business, you must first ensure that you understand your customer’s problems better than anyone else.

The core idea of JTBD theory is that customers are looking to ‘hire’ your product to do a job, and that the the job doesn’t change, only the solution options. This is a concept that will help you to get to the bottom of the problems that your customers are actually trying to solve, whether they pick your product or not; and what your product is really competing against in the customer’s mind.

There’s no point in building solutions that don’t solve your customer’s problems, and this book helps you to avoid that.

Continuous Discovery Habits - Assessing your problem space and solution options

This book focuses heavily on the idea of the “Opportunity Solution Tree”, which is a way to visualise the different solution options that come from each of the business problem opportunities.

Recently there has been a strong emphasis on ‘discovery’ work, specifically from what I’ve seen there are many mature companies that have been riding the coattails of their cash cow products that are now getting disrupted by faster moving start ups. This new focus on discovery is one way that these businesses are looking to fight back with innovation of their own.

Something that could get overlooked but is also super valuable with this concept is that it makes it much easier to align teams around opportunities and solutions if they’re documented in a simple visual style. You can easily show a group of leaders the OST and explain why you’re targeting specific opportunities and solution options at any given time.

Shape Up - Build products the right way

The ongoing debate of ‘Agile vs Waterfall’ is still raging, however in my mind we should move past Agile frameworks into something more bespoke and abstract. The Shape-Up way of working by Basecamp is a pretty great example of how to do effective product development without all the administration of standard Agile Scrum or similar.

Coming from a background of being a strong proponent of implementing cookie cutter Agile, Shape-Up was a refreshing take on how to still effectively build innovative products without having to have excessive documentation and ceremony, just strong understanding of the problem and time to come up with great solutions.

On of my biggest takeaways was the shift in mindset from ‘how long will this take?’ to ‘how much effort do we want to invest in solving this?’. That alone was a lightbulb moment for me, and it has helped me to completely shift my mindset when figuring out what is best to work on next.

The Sprint Book - How to test an idea quickly

If you’re serious about the testing that’s described in Inspired, this book is a great companion on how to run a discovery sprint in just one week. I’m not sure how many companies are actually giving their staff the freedom to implement the ideas in this book, but all of the meetings, materials, and content is very specifically detailed; which means that if it’s your first time all you have to do is flip to the back of the book and look at the guides to be able to run your own workshops.

I’m sure there are 100s of other books, medium articles, newsletters, LinkedIn Influencers, and YouTube videos that have great content but these are a few of my favourites. They should set you up with some of the core principles to use as foundations when working on hard product problems.

Stay tuned for the next chapter, where I'll be exploring different Product Development frameworks, discussing their advantages, drawbacks, and my criteria for choosing among them.