
Ask HN: Must Read Books for a Product Manager - gls2ro
What are the best book that you would recommend to be read by a product manager?<p>I&#x27;m currently doing (probably) what a product manager does for 3 small technical teams trying to implement some ideas.<p>I would like to document more on what a product manager does, what are the best ways to do the job and what are some best practices.
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tptacek
I was a PM for an enterprise product for several years (I took a sabbatical
from software development for a little while to do something more business-y).

The original Ries "Positioning" book was good, and is probably more valuable
than Porter's Competitive Strategy for tech PMs.

"Selling The Wheel" is a very light read and, if you've never watched a sales
team get managed, is a good introduction to how products get sold (in B2B
situations) at different stages of maturity.

Most of Joel Spolsky's blog posts are effectively describing the job of a PM;
they're more valuable than any book I can think of.

I like "Four Steps To The Epiphany" as a sort of roadmap to bringing
enterprise-type products to market. The book itself is kind of funny; it has
the appearance of being typeset entirely in Microsoft Word, which gives it a
sort of samizdat charm.

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segner
Surprisingly, the book that had the largest impact on how I think about
(software) products is "The Design of Everyday Things" by Donald Norman. You
won't find expressions like 'creating value' nor the word 'software' in it but
IMHO its ideas are at the beating heart of any product-market fit.

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rahimnathwani
Two good books for anyone interviewing PMs or being interviewed for a PM
position are Decode & Conquer and Cracking the PM interview.

Whilst both are focused on interviews rather than doing the job, they each
contain some nuggets about how to think.

As others have said, Inspired, Lean Startup and Four Steps are essential
reading.

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olegious
Lean Startup is a great book. When I first started, I found "Inspired, How to
Create Products that Customers Love" by Marty Cagan to be a great resource.

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pmcpinto
Lean Startup - Eric Ries, Business Model Generation, The Design of Business -
Roger Martin

