Product Management in Practice, 2nd Edition

Appendix A. A Reading List for Expanding Your Product Management Practice

The last few years have seen an explosion of high-quality content for working product managers. What follows is a list of the books that have proven most impactful for me in building my product management practice, as well as a few notes about how each book might be helpful to you. Note that this is only a guide to book-length content; there are countless articles, newsletters, Twitter accounts, and videos from conference talks that may prove just as helpful. As always, keep an ear to the ground and never hesitate to ask the working product managers in your network what they’ve been reading lately.

Escaping the Build Trap by Melissa Perri (O’Reilly, 2018)

• If You’re Looking For: A phenomenal overview of why product management matters and how product managers can deliver enormous value to organizations.

• How It Helped Me: The way Perri frames product management as the facilitation of a value exchange between a business and its users is still my very favorite take on the discipline writ large. This is a great place to start for any practitioners or executives who want to know what product management is and why it matters.

Inspired by Marty Cagan (Second Edition, Wiley, 2018)

• If You’re Looking For: The foundational text of modern product management.

• How It Helped Me: Your colleagues, your manager, and your manager’s manager have all read Inspired—and you should too. There are tons of useful concepts ...