The 5 best Product books and posts

I’ve kept mental notes of the resources that changed the way I build products over the past 15 years. Typically after reading, I would share one of these with every PM I know and not stop talking about them for weeks. This week I went back and tracked down all of them and wrote a one line review.

I’m sure I missed a few, but this is a highly curated, fairly exhaustive set of articles that resonated strongly with me and shaped me into the PM I am today (plus a few recent ones to stay relevant :D).

My criteria:

1. Insightful - Shares a new idea or frames it in an incredibly clear way
2. Evergreen - not related to a specific trend or moment in time
3. Accessible - you can jump right in without knowing a bunch of jargon

This is a living document that was last updated on Jan 8, 2021.

Most influential posts

1. Be a Great Product Leader (video) - Great product leaders define what game we’re playing and how we keep score.
2. The Next Feature Fallacy - Building another feature probably won't make people start using your product.
3. The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn - A set of guiding principles for startups or 0→1 products.
4. Steve Jobs Introducing the iPhone - One of the best product pitches I’ve seen. Simply ‘Phone + iPod + Browser.’
5. The Interface of a Cheeseburger - A usability breakdown of one of the most user friendly products around.

Keep scrolling for the full list of books and articles 👇

Most influential books

• Steve Krug - Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug (2000)
  • One Line Review: Practical usability tips rooted in real examples.
  • Most of the beautiful visual design you throw at a product tends to confuse people.
  • Make it obvious is a better mantra than ‘fewer steps’ or ‘less clicks’ which sometimes make things NOT obvious.
  • Every tiny decision adds to our cognitive workload and ultimately causes users to quit.
  • Show your designs to real users before shipping them.
• The Unix Philosophy by Ken Thompson (1978)
  • One Line Review: A set of principles to build focused software that doesn’t sprawl.
  • Write programs that do one thing and do one thing well.
  • Expect the output of every program to become the input of another.
  • Design software (even operating systems) to be tried early, ideally within weeks.
  • Use tools (vs manual processes) to lighten a task.
• Jane Jacobs - Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs (1961)
  • One Line Review: The design of cities have a dramatic effects on human behavior (much like software).
  • Poorer neighborhoods are safer because the community (e.g. grandma looking out the window to watch kids, merchant standing outside his shop) are invested in its safety.
  • Well placed parks can make a neighborhood feel alive. Poorly placed parks can be the epicenter of crime.
  • The broken window theory - A broken window on a street noone ever walks down will stay open indefinitely.
  • ‘Ideal cities’ do not exist. Every time we try to build an ideal city, humans suffer. Great cities sprawl.
• Influence - The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini (1984)
  • One Line Review: Tangible examples of how humans behave irrationally.
  • You can use versions of these techniques when building products or when working with other people.
  • I don’t look at these as tricks but rather ways to more deeply understand humans and understand why we behave the way we do.
  • Most of the situations apply to everyday PM Leadership & Drive situations, such as:
    • It’s easier to make a sale if you start with a foot in the door.
    • If someone buys you lunch, you feel obligated to it for them.
    • If you see a tip jar with money in it, you’re more likely to donate.

The full list

• Chris Anderson (Twitter)
  • Book: The Long Tail (2008) - The internet enables long tail distribution (e.g. Youtube videos with <10k views) and Chris explains how this affects the products we build.
  • The Long Tail - A shorter article containing the core concepts from his book.
• Jeff Atwood (Blog, Twitter)
  • Rubber Duck Problem Solving - Talking through your problem out loud often gets you to clarity (Jeff built Stack Overflow with this in mind).
  • Please Don’t Learn to Code - A take on ‘how much technical knowledge do I need to be a good Product Manager?“
  • The Rule of Three - To build a product that will truly grow, you need to convince at least 3 different audiences to use it (this lines up with my experience).
• Andrew Bosworth (Blog, Twitter)
  • Strength Dictates Weakness - Your strengths are likely also causing some of your greatest weaknesses.
  • A Career Cold Start Algorithm - A simple playbook to ramp up as quickly as possible when you join a new team.
• Ed Catmull (Twitter)
  • Book: Creativity Inc (2014) - How Pixar creates/process that encourages creativity and rapid, direct (but kind) feedback.
• Andrew Chen (Blog, Twitter)
  • User Retention: Why depending on notification-driven retention sucks - Without organic retention, you’ll always need to prop your product up with paid traffic or growth tactics.
  • The Next Feature Fallacy: The fallacy that the a new feature will suddenly make people use your product. - New features do not magically achieve product/market fit. Often removing a feature is better than adding one.
  • The 20 best marketplace essays. - A laundry list of great articles on two sided marketplaces.
• Shreyas Doshi (Twitter)
  • Why do smart product teams often build products with little or no impact - Common pitfalls that PM’s often fall into that stops them from being successful. (I am guilty of many of these)
• Jason Fried (Blog, Twitter)
  • Post: Status meetings are the scourge - Shift your standups from sync to async and give everyone time back.
  • Book: Getting Real (2006) - An (at the time) controversial take: Don’t raise VC money, grow organically, build simple tools to make it easier to get your job done.
• Naomi Gleit (Twitter)
  • Understand, Identify, Execute - A framework for running great product teams and especially effective for growth teams. (Unfortunately I couldn’t find a video of Naomi giving this talk)
• Paul Graham (Blog, Twitter)
  • The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn - A set of guiding principles for startups or 0→1 products.
  • What business can learn from open source - Open source produces an incredible amount of value with little financial incentive. Here’s why it works.
  • Maker’s Schedule, Manager's Schedule - Time needed for deep/creative thinking requires large blocks in your calendar (but managers are incentivized to flood calendars with meetings).
• Ben Horowitz (Blog, Twitter)
  • Good Product Manager, Great Product Manager - A set of qualities that some of the world’s best PM’s exhibit (or don’t exhibit).
• Steve Jobs
  • Introducing the iPhone - One of the best product pitches I’ve seen. Positioned simply as ‘Phone + iPod + Browser.’
  • Introducing the iPod - How to frame your product against other products in the market.
  • 1998 Product Strategy - Great product strategy. This is the keynote where Apple shrunk their focus consumer / pro and desktop / portable.
• Avinash Kushik (Blog, Twitter)
  • Book: Web Analytics 2.0 (2009) - Simple, tactical advice on how to instrument and track metrics from the guy who knows more about google analytics than anyone out there. Also applies to apps.
• Adam Nash (Blog, Twitter)
  • Be a Great Product Leader (video) - Great product leaders define what game we’re playing and how we keep score.
  • User Acquisition: The five sources of traffic - Pro’s and con’s of the internet’s primary customer acquisition levers.
  • Marissa Meyer on Google Search Results - How to balance testing/experiments and research.
• Jakob Nielsen (Blog, Twitter)
  • Why you only need to test with 5 users - How to run an effective, lightweight user research session
  • How people read online - Eye tracking data across a variety of websites highlights how people scan (not read).
• Adam Penenberg (Blog, Twitter)
  • Book: Viral Loop (2009) - Case studies of how to build and measure virality in your products with a ton of real world examples (e.g. Hot or Not).
• Lenny Rachitsky (Newsletter, Twitter)
  • How today’s fast growing B2B businesses got their first 10 customers - Very few people write about how to get your first few customers. Here’s Super-tactical advice from real companies.
• Oliver Reichenstein (Blog, Twitter)
  • The Interface of a Cheeseburger - A usability breakdown of one of the most user friendly products around.
  • Web Design is 95% Typography - Designing text is incredibly complex and shapes how people use your product.
• Eric Ries (Blog, Twitter)
  • Book: The Lean Startup (2011) - Most teams try to build out a product and make a ‘big splash.’ Instead, build small products and optimize on the speed of idea→feedback above all else.
• Alex Schultz (Twitter)
  • Video: Growth - The fundamentals of effective growth teams (with specific examples from early days of eBay and FB)
• Joel Splosky (Blog, Twitter)
  • Things You Should Never Do, Pt. 1 - A software rewrite is rarely worth it.
• Ken Thompson
  • The Unix Philosophy (1978) - A set of principles for building incredibly simple and effective software (e.g. unix/linux)
• Albert Wenger (Blog, Twitter)
  • Kaizen for Software Developers - A series (linked in first paragraph) on how to solve optimization problems by applying lean manufacturing theory.

What are the books, videos, or articles that changed the way you look at Product Management? I’d love to hear about them! @bdickason

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Post last updated: Jan 8, 2021

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