Best Product Management Books: 36 Picks Recommended by CEOs

Nir Eyal lays out the Hook Model, a four-step cycle he finds in products people return to out of habit, with examples from the iPhone to Pinterest. Irina Marinescu ties it to user retention, which she calls a top goal for product managers.

The 37signals founders set down how they build web software: keep it simple, make contrarian choices and ship with a small team, the approach behind Basecamp. Anoop Anthony values its terse advice on running a product software company, and Gary Bury keeps returning to it.

Three Google Ventures design partners describe a five-day routine in which a team moves from a hard problem to prototypes and customer tests. Eric Ries calls it a proven formula for getting to a decision in five days, and Javed Khatri uses a similar process to validate ideas.

Rob Fitzpatrick teaches the customer interview, a basic skill of Customer Development: asking people whether an idea is good invites polite lies, so the conversation has to dig for facts instead. Chandini Jain read it to design user interviews free of leading questions.

Kathy Sierra argues that lasting products win because users get better at what the product helps them do, not because of marketing budgets. Aimed at engineers, marketers and support staff alike, it is product manager Irina Marinescu’s favorite business book for putting user experience first.

Ash Maurya gives a system for testing product ideas fast: find a problem worth solving, define a solution, involve customers throughout development and iterate in small steps toward product/market fit, including when to pivot. Garrett Moon recommends it for learning to build products the lean way.

Built around the Value Proposition Canvas, the guide gives product teams a process and exercises for designing and testing offers before effort goes into weak ideas. Product manager Ashley Hathaway says its lessons on empathy, user testing and iteration run through her daily work.

Michael McGrath treats product strategy as the choice of which products a high-technology company rests on, working through timing, differentiation, cost and price, and platform decisions with examples from Microsoft, IBM and Apple. Brian O’Kelley praises its structured thinking about strategy decisions.

Stephen Wunker, Jessica Wattman and David Farber build product innovation on the functional and emotional jobs customers buy things for, with a plan that moves from customer insight to new ideas and then iteration. Dean Roller recommends it for its real examples of getting new ideas started.

Cindy Alvarez shows how to test product ideas with customer interviews before money is spent, covering whom to talk to, how to run each conversation and how to turn the findings into minimum viable products. Thomas Graziani uses it to define his company’s product roadmap more clearly.

Dan Olsen turns Lean Startup ideas into a product process: choose target customers, find underserved needs, set a product strategy, define a minimum viable product, prototype it and test it with customers. Julia Enthoven says it shaped her product sense and her UX decisions.

Anthony W. Ulwick argues that standard customer research feeds product teams misleading inputs, and proposes outcome-driven innovation: find the metrics customers use to judge a job done, then develop products and services around them. His critique draws on more than 200 studies across seventy companies.

Eric Ries writes mainly about startups, but his method of fast experiments, minimum viable products and validated learning is now a common way to build new products. Sheryl Sandberg praised its look at how the tech industry builds products, and Liam Martin applied MVP tests to features.

Clayton Christensen’s study of disruptive innovation shows how leading firms that keep improving products for their best customers lose to crude new entrants. It is about strategy rather than product practice, and Bill Gurley calls it the clearest analysis of why startups can disrupt.

Seth Godin argues that advertising works less and less, so companies must build remarkable products worth talking about and aim them at people who spread the word. Lori Cheek, a tech startup founder, calls it her favorite business book for its case for standing out.

Geoffrey A. Moore’s marketing classic explains the gap between early adopters and pragmatic mainstream buyers of technology products, with tactics such as the whole product and positioning. Sanja Zepan recommends it for products moving to a wider market, and Bill Gurley calls it required for enterprise plays.

Steve Krug’s brief, heavily illustrated usability guide holds that a site or program should let people finish their task as easily and directly as possible. Anoop Anthony learned the craft from it when he started out and finds the latest edition still relevant.

Eric Ries carries build, measure and learn cycles and minimum viable products into established firms, nonprofits and governments, drawing on work with GE, Toyota and Airbnb. Erik Cheong found it aimed more at multinational corporations than at startups.

Steve Blank’s Customer Development process is aimed at startups searching for a business model, and its tools for exposing weak spots in a product plan while fixes are cheap carry over to product work. Neal O’Gorman, a former product manager, says it made him more customer-centric.

Don Norman blames hard-to-use objects on design that ignores people, and introduces affordances, mapping, constraints and user-centered design. It is a design book rather than a product management one, yet Julia Enthoven credits it with informing her product sense.

John Doerr explains Objectives and Key Results, the goal system he learned at Intel and brought to Google: objectives say what to achieve, key results set measurable steps, and every goal is visible across teams. Alexandra Stroe recommends it.

Tracy Kidder follows Tom West’s engineering team at Data General as it races to design a next-generation computer under heavy pressure. Mohnish Pabrai says everyone working in product development should read it, and Scott Johnson says it showed him how a high tech product gets made.

Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur offer a handbook for designing business models with the Business Model Canvas, the companion to Value Proposition Design. Ashley Hathaway says she borrows from both constantly, and Kaci Lambe Kai liked its case that a business model can be more than a stuffy document.

Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown describe growth hacking, cross-functional teams running quick test cycles to acquire, engage and retain customers, which they compare with Lean Startup in product development. Kyrylo Taranenko calls growth hacking a real trend.

Frederick P. Brooks Jr. drew essays from managing IBM’s System/360 and OS/360, including Brooks’s law, that adding programmers to a late software project makes it later, and a case for prototyping. Jeff Bezos has recommended it.

IDEO chief executive Tim Brown presents design thinking, a human-centered method for matching what people need with what is feasible and viable, and argues for fast, cheap prototypes that fail early. Doug McMillon put it on his list of inspiring reads.

Tom Kelley and Jonathan Littman describe how IDEO keeps producing new products, from the Apple mouse to the Palm V, through teamwork, immersion in the user’s view and a fast brainstorm-and-build process. Seth Godin says seeing how well they design raises one’s expectations.

Ash Maurya’s follow-up to Running Lean is about startup metrics: judging whether a business model works, measuring traction rather than revenue and running two-week LEAN sprints to rank and test ideas. Eric Ries describes it as the leap from startup to sustainable business.

Alex Bogusky and John Winsor argue that inventive products should carry their own marketing, using product design, a brand’s history and internal collaboration as tools for building it in. It is a marketing book, and Bogdana Butnar has it on her list.

Alistair Croll and Ben Yoskovitz focus on startup data: which numbers to track at each stage, with the One Metric That Matters at the center, so a team can settle its product and market before the cash is gone. Ola Olusoga recommends it.

Henrik Kniberg reports how a Swedish company with about 40 people ran Scrum and XP for a year, testing sprint lengths, definitions of done and formats for product and sprint backlogs. Mircea Scarlatescu includes it on his list for entrepreneurs and team leaders.

Mike Cohn explains how software teams adopt Scrum and keep it working, from structuring teams and scaling up to distributed teams and metrics. It is a development process book, and Nicolae Andronic recommends it for building a product in an organized way.

Jesse James Garrett splits user experience work into layers, starting with strategy and requirements and ending with visual design, so a site serves business goals and user needs together. Kaci Lambe Kai took from it that users are never the problem, only bad design.

Clayton Christensen and Michael E. Raynor turn disruption theory around, showing the forces that push managers toward bad calls as they shape new ideas and offering frameworks for building a disruptive business. Product manager Ashley Hathaway recommends it.

John Maeda’s ten laws weigh simplicity against complexity in design, technology and business, starting with a warning against adding features only because it can be done. Design director Ryan Len names it among the books that changed how he sees things.

Steve Blank and Bob Dorf write a manual for building startups, organized around the Business Model Canvas, that sends founders out to customers so they develop products people will buy. Bill Earner calls it a fuller, hands-on manual for customer development than The Lean Startup.