Preface

I don’t want to talk about the benefits of reading a book (:D). I just want to introduce the books I have read so far. Most of the books I read are in the fields of product management, software engineering, and soft skills.

The list of books is as follows:

1. Living by the Code (By Enrique López-Mañas)

Living by the Code brings the experiences and insights of over 40 of today’s top developers, leaders and innovators in tech together in one single book, to help you grow your career in today’s ever-changing technical landscape. It’s like having dozens of tech’s best mentors — right at your fingertips. This book is for anybody who is struggling to make their mark in the competitive tech industry — no matter whether you’re a developer for a big corporation, a scrappy solo entrepreneur, or someone in between — this book is what you need to make your best career move!

📚 Click here to purchase.

2. The Product Manager Handbook (By Carl Shan)

Product Management is one of the most sought-after jobs in technology. With prestigious programs like Google’s Associate Product Manager or Microsoft’s Program Manager, PMs are highly valuable company leaders that can lead to a company’s success or failure. This Handbook is for you if you are:

• Curious to learn what Product Management is all about
• Interested in breaking into Product Management as a Software Engineer, student or from another background
• Looking to learn from the best Product Managers on how to succeed
• An aspiring entrepreneur looking to build great products

This 60-page Handbook contains advice from top Product Managers from companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and more! It also features advice from best-selling authors about how to break into and succeed as a Product Manager!

📚 Click here to purchase.

3. The Ideal Team Player (By Patrick Lencioni)

In his classic book The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Patrick Lencioni laid out a groundbreaking approach for tackling the perilous group behaviors that destroy teamwork. Here he turns his focus to the individual, revealing the three indispensable virtues of an ideal team player.

In The Ideal Team Player, Lencioni tells the story of Jeff Shanley, a leader desperate to save his uncle’s company by restoring its cultural commitment to teamwork. Jeff must crack the code on the virtues that real team players possess and then build a culture of hiring and development around those virtues. Beyond the fable, Lencioni presents a practical framework and actionable tools for identifying, hiring, and developing ideal team players.

Whether you’re a leader trying to create a culture around teamwork, a staffing professional looking to hire real team players, or a team player wanting to improve yourself, this book will prove to be as useful as it is compelling.

📚 Click here to purchase.

4. The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses (By Eric Ries)

Eric Ries defines a startup as an organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty. This is just as true for one person in a garage or a group of seasoned professionals in a Fortune 500 boardroom. What they have in common is a mission to penetrate that fog of uncertainty to discover a successful path to a sustainable business.

The Lean Startup approach fosters companies that are both more capital efficient and that leverage human creativity more effectively. Inspired by lessons from lean manufacturing, it relies on “validated learning,” rapid scientific experimentation, as well as a number of counter-intuitive practices that shorten product development cycles, measure actual progress without resorting to vanity metrics, and learn what customers really want. It enables a company to shift directions with agility, altering plans inch by inch, minute by minute.

Rather than wasting time creating elaborate business plans, The Lean Startup offers entrepreneurs—in companies of all sizes—a way to test their vision continuously, to adapt and adjust before it’s too late. Ries provides a scientific approach to creating and managing successful startups in a age when companies need to innovate more than ever.

📚 Click here to purchase.

5. Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days (By Jake Knapp)

From inside Google Ventures, a unique five-day process for solving tough problems, proven at thousands of companies in mobile, e-commerce, healthcare, finance, and more.

Entrepreneurs and leaders face big questions every day: What’s the most important place to focus your effort, and how do you start? What will your idea look like in real life? How many meetings and discussions does it take before you can be sure you have the right solution?

Now there’s a surefire way to answer these important questions: the Design Sprint, created at Google by Jake Knapp. This method is like fast-forwarding into the future, so you can see how customers react before you invest all the time and expense of creating your new product, service, or campaign.

In a Design Sprint, you take a small team, clear your schedules for a week, and rapidly progress from problem, to prototype, to tested solution using the step-by-step five-day process in this book.

A practical guide to answering critical business questions, Sprint is a book for teams of any size, from small startups to Fortune 100s, from teachers to nonprofits. It can replace the old office defaults with a smarter, more respectful, and more effective way of solving problems that brings out the best contributions of everyone on the team—and helps you spend your time on work that really matters.

📚 Click here to purchase.

6. Cracking the PM Interview: How to Land a Product Manager Job in Technology (By Gayle Laakmann McDowell and Jackie Bavaro)

How many pizzas are delivered in Manhattan? How do you design an alarm clock for the blind? What is your favorite piece of software and why? How would you launch a video rental service in India? This book will teach you how to answer these questions and more.

Cracking the PM Interview is a comprehensive book about landing a product management role in a startup or bigger tech company. Learn how the ambiguously-named “PM” (product manager / program manager) role varies across companies, what experience you need, how to make your existing experience translate, what a great PM resume and cover letter look like, and finally, how to master the interview: estimation questions, behavioral questions, case questions, product questions, technical questions, and the super important “pitch.”

📚 Click here to purchase.

7. Cracking the PM Career: The Skills, Frameworks, and Practices to Become a Great Product Manager (Cracking the Interview & Career) (By Gayle Laakmann McDowell and Jackie Bavaro)

Product management is a big role, and this a big book.

From the authors of the best-selling Cracking the PM Interview comes the comprehensive guide to the skills, frameworks, and practices to become a great product manager. It will help you level-up your skills and career from your first product management role through product leadership, addressing questions like:

• What does it take to become a great product manager and great leader?

• How can you reliably ship products that make a difference in the world?

• How do you build your product intuition, hone your execution, strengthen your leadership, and develop your strategic skills?

• What does it take to lead and inspire teams?

• When is people management the right career move?

• How does excellence in those skills translate into career success?

This book will teach you the reliable frameworks and best practices that improve your chances of shipping a successful product. The frameworks won’t transform you into a great product manager overnight or guarantee that your products never fail, but they’ll help you avoid the most common problems and give you the structure to start experimenting, reflecting, and improving.

You’ll learn how to:

• Design high-quality products that delight users and solve people’s needs.

• Run and deliver your projects quickly, smoothly, and effectively.

• Create product visions and strategies to set direction and optimize for long-term impact. Lead people and influence without authority.

• Manage people, develop great PMs, build great teams, and create great product organizations.

• Manage your career so you can translate your efforts into the recognition you deserve. Topics include:

  • Getting Started: the product life cycle; the first 90 days

  • Product Skills: user research; A/B tests; problem solving frameworks; systems thinking; product discovery; design sprints; ethical product design; technical terms and concepts; product documentation (specs and PRDs)

  • Execution Skills: agile project management; minimum viable products (MVPs); incremental development; product launches; time management; overcoming obstacles

  • Strategic Skills: product vision; strategy; roadmaps; goals and OKRs

  • Leadership Skills: growth mindset; ownership mentality; influencing without authority; stakeholder management; collaboration; communication; inspiring a team; mentoring; working with designers, engineers, and executives

  • People Management Skills: becoming a people manager; being a member of the leadership team; reviewing work; holding people accountable; coaching and development; recruiting and interviewing; product processes; organizational structures

  • Careers: career ladders; career goals; partnering with your manager; picking the right team; negotiations; networking; handling bad situations; career options beyond PM

  • Product Leader Q&A: in-depth career interviews with eleven successful product leaders who have chosen career paths including CPO, head of product, CEO, social impact work, venture capital, angel investing, coaching, and starting their own companies.

And much, much more.

Featuring stories from over fifty PMs and product leaders who have worked at organizations including: Adobe, AirBnB, Amazon, Apple, Asana, Atlassian, Calendly, Chan-Zuckerberg Institute, Chegg, Cisco, City of San Jose, Coda, Coinbase, Dropbox, eBay, Facebook, FlipKart, Gojek, Google, HSBC, Instagram, LinkedIn, Medium, Microsoft, Netflix, OpenTable, Pinterest, Pocket Gems, Quora, Samsara, Slack, Sonos, Stripe, Swiggy, Twitter, Uber, Walmart Labs, Yahoo, and Yelp.

📚 Click here to purchase.

8. Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love (Silicon Valley Product Group) (By Marty Cagan)

Learn to design, build, and scale products consumers can’t get enough of

How do today’s most successful tech companies―Amazon, Google, Facebook, Netflix, Tesla―design, develop, and deploy the products that have earned the love of literally billions of people around the world? Perhaps surprisingly, they do it very differently than most tech companies. 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.

With sections on assembling the right people and skillsets, discovering the right product, embracing an effective yet lightweight process, and creating a strong product culture, readers can take the information they learn and immediately leverage it within their own organizations―dramatically improving their own product efforts.

Whether you’re an early-stage startup working to get to product/market fit, or a growth-stage company working to scale your product organization, or a large, long-established company trying to regain your ability to consistently deliver new value for your customers, INSPIRED will take you and your product organization to a new level of customer engagement, consistent innovation, and business success.

Filled with the author’s own personal stories―and profiles of some of today’s most-successful product managers and technology-powered product companies, including Adobe, Apple, BBC, Google, Microsoft, and Netflix―INSPIRED will show you how to turn up the dial of your own product efforts, creating technology products your customers love.

The first edition of INSPIRED, published ten years ago, established itself as the primary reference for technology product managers, and can be found on the shelves of nearly every successful technology product company worldwide. This thoroughly updated second edition shares the same objective of being the most valuable resource for technology product managers, yet it is completely new―sharing the latest practices and techniques of today’s most-successful tech product companies, and the men and women behind every great product.

📚 Click here to purchase.

9. The Professional Product Owner: Leveraging Scrum as a Competitive Advantage (By Don McGreal & Ralph Jocham)

The role of the Product Owner is more crucial than ever. But it’s about much more than mechanics: it’s about taking accountability and refocusing on value as the primary objective of all you do. In The Professional Product Owner, two leading experts in successful Scrum product ownership show exactly how to do this. You’ll learn how to identify where value can be found, measure it, and maximize it throughout your entire product lifecycle.

Drawing on their combined 40+ years of experience in using agile and Scrum in product management, Don McGreal and Ralph Jocham guide you through all facets of envisioning, emerging, and maturing a product using the Scrum framework.

McGreal and Jocham discuss strategy, showing how to connect Vision, Value, and Validation in ROI-focused agile product management. They lay out Scrum best-practices for managing complexity and continuously delivering value, and they define the concrete practices and tools you can use to manage Product Backlogs and release plans, all with the goal of making you a more successful Product Owner. Throughout, the authors share revealing personal experiences that illuminate obstacles to success and show how they can be overcome.

• Define success from the “outside in,” using external customer-driven measurements to guide development and maximize value

• Bring empowerment and entrepreneurship to the Product Owner’s role, and align everyone behind a shared business model

• Use Evidence-Based Management (EBMgt) to invest in the right places, make smarter decisions, and reduce risk

• Effectively apply Scrum’s Product Owner role, artifacts, and events

• Populate and manage Product Backlogs, and use just-in-time specifications

• Plan and manage releases, improve transparency, and reduce technical debt

• Scale your product, not your Scrum

• Use Scrum to inject autonomy, mastery, and purpose into your product team’s work

Whatever your role in product management or agile development, this guide will help you deliver products that offer more value, more rapidly, and more often.

📚 Click here to purchase.

10. Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know (By Adam Grant)

Intelligence is usually seen as the ability to think and learn, but in a rapidly changing world, there’s another set of cognitive skills that might matter more: the ability to rethink and unlearn. In our daily lives, too many of us favor the comfort of conviction over the discomfort of doubt. We listen to opinions that make us feel good, instead of ideas that make us think hard. We see disagreement as a threat to our egos, rather than an opportunity to learn. We surround ourselves with people who agree with our conclusions, when we should be gravitating toward those who challenge our thought process. The result is that our beliefs get brittle long before our bones. We think too much like preachers defending our sacred beliefs, prosecutors proving the other side wrong, and politicians campaigning for approval–and too little like scientists searching for truth. Intelligence is no cure, and it can even be a curse: being good at thinking can make us worse at rethinking. The brighter we are, the blinder to our own limitations we can become.

Organizational psychologist Adam Grant is an expert on opening other people’s minds–and our own. As Wharton’s top-rated professor and the bestselling author of Originals and Give and Take, he makes it one of his guiding principles to argue like he’s right but listen like he’s wrong. With bold ideas and rigorous evidence, he investigates how we can embrace the joy of being wrong, bring nuance to charged conversations, and build schools, workplaces, and communities of lifelong learners. You’ll learn how an international debate champion wins arguments, a Black musician persuades white supremacists to abandon hate, a vaccine whisperer convinces concerned parents to immunize their children, and Adam has coaxed Yankees fans to root for the Red Sox. Think Again reveals that we don’t have to believe everything we think or internalize everything we feel. It’s an invitation to let go of views that are no longer serving us well and prize mental flexibility over foolish consistency. If knowledge is power, knowing what we don’t know is wisdom.

📚 Click here to purchase.

11. The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable (By Patrick Lencioni)

After her first two weeks observing the problems at DecisionTech, Kathryn Petersen, its new CEO, had more than a few moments when she wondered if she should have taken the job. But Kathryn knew there was little chance she would have turned it down. After all, retirement had made her antsy, and nothing excited her more than a challenge. What she could not have known when she accepted the job, however, was just how dysfunctional her team was, and how team members would challenge her in ways that no one ever had before.

For twenty years, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team has been engaging audiences with a page-turning, realistic fable that follows the travails of Kathryn Petersen, DecisionTech’s CEO, as she faces the ultimate leadership crisis. She must unite a team in such disarray that it threatens to derail the entire company.

Equal parts leadership fable and business handbook, this definitive source on teamwork by Patrick Lencioni reveals the five behavioral tendencies that go to the heart of why even the best teams struggle. He offers a powerful model and step-by-step guide for overcoming those dysfunctions and getting every one rowing in the same direction.

Today, the lessons in The Five Dysfunctions of a Team are more relevant than ever. This special anniversary edition celebrates one of the best-selling business books of all time with a new foreword from the author that reflects on its legacy and lessons.

📚 Click here to purchase.

12. Continuous Discovery Habits: Discover Products that Create Customer Value and Business Value (By 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? How do you guarantee that your team is creating value for your customers in a way that creates value for your business?

In this book, you’ll learn a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery that will help you answer each of these questions, giving you the confidence to act while also preparing you to be wrong. You’ll learn to balance action with doubt so that you can get started without being blindsided by what you don’t get right.

If you want to discover products that customers love-that also deliver business results-this book is for you.

📚 Click here to purchase.

13. Refactoring UI (By Adam Wathan and Steve Schoger)

This book contains literally everything we know about web design, distilled into short, easy to read chapters.

Every chapter is designed to be as independent as possible, so you can read them in almost any order. And if you want to sit down and read the whole thing at once, you’ll have no trouble getting through it in just a couple of hours.

The book does not repeat the same ideas over and over just to fill out the page count. It is written a lot like writers’ blog posts — every sentence is highlight-worthy.

📚 Click here to purchase.

14. Outcomes Over Output: Why customer behavior is the key metric for business success (By Josh Seiden)

In the old days, when we made physical products, setting project goals wasn’t that hard. But in today’s service- and software-driven world, “done” is less obvious. When is Amazon done? When is Google done? Or Facebook? In reality, services powered by digital systems are never done. So then how do we give teams a goal that they can work on?Mostly, we simply ask teams to build features—but features are the wrong way to go. We often build features that create no value. Instead, we need to give teams an outcome to achieve. Using outcomes creates focus and alignment. It eliminates needless work. And it puts the customer at the center of everything you do.Setting goals as outcomes sounds simple, but it can be hard to do in practice. This book is a practical guide to using outcomes to guide the work of your team. “Josh’s crisp volume brims with insight about how to fly at just the right level - the level of outcomes. If you’ve ever wondered how M your MVP should be, or how to get more R in your OKRs, this book will help.”

📚 Click here to purchase.

15. Leadership and Self-Deception: Getting out of the Box (By The Arbinger Institute)

Since its original publication in 2000, Leadership and Self-Deception has become a word-of-mouth phenomenon. Its sales continue to increase year after year, and the book’s popularity has gone global, with editions now available in over twenty languages.

Through a story everyone can relate to about a man facing challenges on the job and in his family, the authors expose the fascinating ways that we can blind ourselves to our true motivations and unwittingly sabotage the effectiveness of our own efforts to achieve success and increase happiness.

This new edition has been revised throughout to make the story even more compelling. And drawing on the extensive correspondence the authors have received over the years, they have added a section that outlines the many ways that readers have been using Leadership and Self-Deception to improve their lives and workplaces—areas such as team building, conflict resolution, and personal growth and development, to name a few.

Read this extraordinary book and discover what millions already have learned—how to consistently tap into an innate ability that dramatically improves both your results and your relationships.

📚 Click here to purchase.

16. Decode and Conquer: Answers to Product Management Interviews (By The Lewis C. Lin)

Seeking a product management position?

Get Decode and Conquer, the world’s first book on preparing you for the product management (PM) interview. Author and professional interview coach, Lewis C. Lin provides you with an industry insider’s perspective on how to conquer the most difficult PM interview questions. Decode and Conquer reveals:

• Frameworks for tackling product design and metrics questions, including the famous CIRCLES Method™, AARM Method™, and DIGS Method™

• Biggest mistakes PM candidates make at the interview and how to avoid them Insider tips on just what interviewers are looking for and how to answer so they can’t say NO to hiring you

• Sample answers for the most important PM interview questions

Questions and answers covered in the book include:

• Design a new iPad app for Google Spreadsheet.

• Brainstorm as many algorithms as possible for recommending Twitter followers.

• You’re the CEO of the Yellow Cab taxi service. How do you respond to Uber?

• You’re part of the Google Search web spam team. How would you detect duplicate websites? The billboard industry is under monetized. How can Google create a new product or offering to address this?

• Land that Dream Product Manager Job.

Recommended by Executives from Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle & VMWare

📚 Click here to purchase.

17. Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value (By 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. Companies that live and die by outputs often fall into the “build trap,” cranking out features to meet their schedule rather than the customer’s needs.

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. By understanding how to communicate and collaborate within a company structure, you can create a product culture that benefits both the business and the customer. You’ll learn product management principles that can be applied to any organization, big or small.

In five parts, this book explores:

• Why organizations ship features rather than cultivate the value those features represent

• How to set up a product organization that scales

• How product strategy connects a company’s vision and economic outcomes back to the product activities

• How to identify and pursue the right opportunities for producing value through an iterative product framework

• How to build a culture focused on successful outcomes over outputs

📚 Click here to purchase.

18. Product Management For Dummies (By Brian Lawley & Pamela Schure)

Product management plays a pivotal role in organizations. In fact, it’s now considered the fourth most important title in corporate America―yet only a tiny fraction of product managers have been trained for this vital position. If you’re one of the hundreds of thousands of people who hold this essential job―or simply aspire to break into a new role―Product Management For Dummies gives you the tools to increase your skill level and manage products like a pro.

From defining what product management is―and isn’t―to exploring the rising importance of product management in the corporate world, this friendly and accessible guide quickly gets you up to speed on everything it takes to thrive in this growing field. It offers plain-English explanations of the product life cycle, market research, competitive analysis, market and pricing strategy, product roadmaps, the people skills it takes to effectively influence and negotiate, and so much more.

• Create a winning strategy for your product

• Gather and analyze customer and market feedback

• Prioritize and convey requirements to engineering teams effectively

• Maximize revenues and profitability

Product managers are responsible for so much more than meets the eye―and this friendly, authoritative guide lifts the curtain on what it takes to succeed.

📚 Click here to purchase.

19. The Manager’s Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change (By Camille Fournier)

Managing people is difficult wherever you work. But in the tech industry, where management is also a technical discipline, the learning curve can be brutal—especially when there are few tools, texts, and frameworks to help you. In this practical guide, author Camille Fournier (tech lead turned CTO) takes you through each stage in the journey from engineer to technical manager.

From mentoring interns to working with senior staff, you’ll get actionable advice for approaching various obstacles in your path. This book is ideal whether you’re a New manager, a mentor, or a more experienced leader looking for fresh advice. Pick up this book and learn how to become a better manager and leader in your organization.

• Begin by exploring what you expect from a manager

• Understand what it takes to be a good mentor, and a good tech lead

• Learn how to manage individual members while remaining focused on the entire team

• Understand how to manage yourself and avoid common pitfalls that challenge many leaders

• Manage multiple teams and learn how to manage managers

• Learn how to build and bootstrap a unifying culture in teams.

📚 Click here to purchase.

20. Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs (By John Doerr)

In the fall of 1999, John Doerr met with the founders of a start-up whom he’d just given $12.5 million, the biggest investment of his career. Larry Page and Sergey Brin had amazing technology, entrepreneurial energy, and sky-high ambitions, but no real business plan. For Google to change the world (or even to survive), Page and Brin had to learn how to make tough choices on priorities while keeping their team on track. They’d have to know when to pull the plug on losing propositions, to fail fast. And they needed timely, relevant data to track their progress—to measure what mattered.

Doerr taught them about a proven approach to operating excellence: Objectives and Key Results. He had first discovered OKRs in the 1970s as an engineer at Intel, where the legendary Andy Grove (“the greatest manager of his or any era”) drove the best-run company Doerr had ever seen. Later, as a venture capitalist, Doerr shared Grove’s brainchild with more than fifty companies. Wherever the process was faithfully practiced, it worked.

In this goal-setting system, objectives define what we seek to achieve; key results are how those top-priority goals will be attained with specific, measurable actions within a set time frame. Everyone’s goals, from entry level to CEO, are transparent to the entire organization.

The benefits are profound. OKRs surface an organization’s most important work. They focus effort and foster coordination. They keep employees on track. They link objectives across silos to unify and strengthen the entire company. Along the way, OKRs enhance workplace satisfaction and boost retention.

In Measure What Matters, Doerr shares a broad range of first-person, behind-the-scenes case studies, with narrators including Bono and Bill Gates, to demonstrate the focus, agility, and explosive growth that OKRs have spurred at so many great organizations. This book will help a new generation of leaders capture the same magic.

📚 Click here to purchase.

🤓 This list will be updated over time …