Inspired – Marty Cagan

If you’re a PM and you haven’t read Inspired, drop what you’re doing and read it.

Competing Against Luck – Clayton Christensen

There’s a lot out there about jobs-to-be-done, but this is the origin and to really understand the key concept go to the source.

The Lean Startup – Eric Ries

Embrace the ‘build-measure-learn’ loop, where your product is the experiment and every failure is a step closer to PM greatness.

Continuous Discovery Habits – Teresa Torres

Continuous Discovery is an essential framework for ensuring you are aligning your teams’ efforts with actual customer needs.

Monetizing Innovation – Madhavan Ramanujam

This book reminds PMs that innovation isn’t just about cool features; it’s about making sure those features make cents.

Influence without Authority – Allan Cohen and David Bradford

Product is all about influencing without authority to get things done, this provides a structured reciprocity based framework for achieving it.

Working Backwards – Colin Bryar and Bill Carr

I love the writing based approach established at Amazon, I now start almost any collaborative effort with a doc and async comms rather than a meeting and deck.

How to Measure Anything – Douglas W. Hubbard

If there are multiple big bets on the table and the strategy isn’t clear enough to determine which to place, you can try using measurement to reduce the uncertainty and inform a decision.

Gamestorming – James Macanufo, Sunni Brown

PMs need to be master facilitators. If you’ve ever participated in some exercise involving stickies and boards with categories or progress you’ve Gamestormed. Gamestorming documents tools and techniques for how to engage your teams in meaningful productive activities that actually produce results. Rather than freewheeling discussions engage your team and stakeholders in a way that enables everyone to contribute and gets the most out of valuable collaboration time.

Empowered – Marty Cagan

Given the prevalence of feature factories, this one can be both depressing and galvanizing. As an idealist, it gave me a ton of energy and passion that fuels my efforts to improve product orgs.

Extreme Ownership – Jocko Willink, Leif Babin

PMs have to be leaders. Nothing can sink your credibility faster than pointing fingers or passing the buck. Take extreme levels of ownership and in a healthy org your credibility will continue to rise.

The Inevitable – Kevin Kelly

For PMs who want to skate to where the puck is going, not where it’s been.

Design of Everyday Things – Dan Norman

This classic reminds us that if a user can’t use it, it might as well be a paperweight.

Thinking Fast and Slow – Daniel Kahneman

Dive into the depths of human decision-making and fish out some priceless PM insights.

Misbehaving – Richard Thaler

The canonical Behavioral Economics book is foundational for PMs. Just like econs don’t exist, perfect users do not, they’re humans who make irrational decisions, this is a humbling realization.

Thinking in Bets – Annie Duke

Everything is a bet. Along with the musings of John Cutler on bets, this is an excellent starting point for internalizing a bet based approach to decision making.

Ego Is The Enemy – Ryan Holiday

Because sometimes the biggest roadblock between a product and its success are egos. Learn how to keep your own in check.

The Obstacle is the Way – Ryan Holiday

PMs must be resilient. The stoic mindset canonized succinctly by Holiday is a powerful tool for facing challenges and valuing them for the teachers they are.

Shoe Dog – Phil Knight

The Power of Now – Eckhart Tolle

Awareness – Anthony de Mello

Sapiens – Yuval Noah Harari