Ask HN: Books you would recommended for starting out in product management? - jonny_F
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donw
These books apply to pretty much any type of product:

"The Mom Test" by Rob Fitzpatrick will teach you how to figure out what your
customers really want, because it is almost certainly not what they are asking
for.

"How to Make Sense of Any Mess" by Abby Covert. How to organize and present
information.

"To Sell is Human" by Dan Pink. This is how you should look at sales and
marketing.

Assuming you are going to be building software:

"Seductive Interaction Design" by Stephen P. Anderson.

"Planning Extreme Programming" and "Extreme Programming Explained" are must-
reads for working with software teams.

I've worn both product and engineer hats on my path to being a sort of
rentable CTO, and am always happy to help out people that are getting started
as a PM -- email is in the profile.

Good luck!

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matt101589
I've been going through this list:

[https://medium.com/@noah_weiss/50-articles-and-books-that-
wi...](https://medium.com/@noah_weiss/50-articles-and-books-that-will-make-
you-a-great-product-manager-aad5babee2f7#.3gopwkxkk)

Includes books and articles. Been very helpful so far.

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itamarst
"Badass" by Kathy Siera: how to make products that succeed by making your
users be badass

"Design for How People Learn" by Julie Dirksen: instructional design, but any
product will involve a bunch of teaching.

Will return with more if I remember any.

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dbg31415
How to Win Friends and Influence People.

Being able to get people in your corner will help you.

Don't Make me Think, Zero to One, The Lean Startup, and anything about
capturing metrics and data driven decisions is great too.

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allfou
No book. Build a product from scratch. If you've never built a product from A
to Z, including having at least 1-2 users you're communicating with, then you
won't land a PM job.

~~~
bsvalley
Yep, build and learn... the best way to do it

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olegious
"inspired, how to create products that people love" by cagan, his blog on
svpg.com is good too.

"Lean startup"

"The hard thing about hard things"

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xplusy
Rework, Learn startup

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erinyong
Cracking the PM Interview

