What does it take to succeed as a product manager? In what isn’t your typical course syllabus, we’ve gathered answers to this question from leading product minds around the world. You won’t find any textbooks here – just bite-sized, first-person, accounts of the technical skills, design principles and business thinking required to master this enormously interdisciplinary role.
Product Management
- Let’s Talk About Product Management by Josh Elman
- How to Hire a Product Manager by Ken Norton
- Be a Great Product Leader by Adam Nash
- PM at Microsoft by Steve Sinofsky
- What Distinguishes the Top 1% Product Managers from the top 10%? by Ian McAllister
- Essentials of Product Management by Janna Bastow
- Good Product Manager, Bad Product Manager by Ben Horowitz
- The Art of Product Management: Lessons from a Silicon Valley Innovator by Rich Mironov
- Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love by Marty Cagan
Courtesy of Josh Elman, Partner at venture capital firm Greylock.
User Experience
- Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug
- 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People by Dr. Susan Weinschenk
- The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman
- How To Measure Anything by Douglas W. Hubbard
- Hooked: How to Build Habit Forming Products by Nir Eyal
User (un)friendly design, as seen in “The Design of Everyday Things” by Donald Norman.
Business Strategy & Planning
- The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
- Not All Good Products Make Good Businesses by Des Traynor
- The Only Thing That Matters by Mark Andreessen
- Niche to Win, Baby by Dave McClure
- The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz
The “feedback loop,” as described in “The Lean Startup” by Eric Ries.
Course Compare will be adding to this and other “101” posts across a range of tech disciplines. Let us know in the comments section if you have essential reading for aspiring product managers to add to this list.
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