12 Must-Read Books for Product Managers in 2021
2020 was a tough year for all of us, but at least we can celebrate some fantastic new books that came to light during this year. Our must-read book list for 2021 provides you with some new publications by already established authors, exciting newcomers, and new content around classic Product Manager topics such as Product Leadership, working with data and Product Strategy as well as some out-of-the-box topics on learning to think like a rocket scientist or mapping the future. These are our top 12 books for 2021:
Empowered
Why read?
What is it about the top tech product companies such as Amazon, Apple, Google, Netflix and Tesla that enables their record of consistent innovation? Most people think it’s because these companies are somehow able to find and attract a level of talent that makes this innovation possible. But the real advantage these companies have is not so much who they hire, but rather how they enable their people to work together to solve hard problems and create extraordinary products. As legendary Silicon Valley coach - and coach to the founders of several of today’s leading tech companies - Bill Campbell said, “Leadership is about recognizing that there’s a greatness in everyone, and your job is to create an environment where that greatness can emerge.”
432 pages, 2020
Uncharted
Why read?
How can we think about the future? What do we need to do—and who do we need to be?
In her bold and invigorating new book, distinguished businesswoman and author Margaret Heffernan explores the people and organizations who aren’t daunted by uncertainty. Drawing on a wide array of people and places, Uncharted traces long-term projects that shrewdly evolved over generations to meet the unpredictable challenges of every new age. Heffernan also looks at radical exercises and experiments that redefined standard practices by embracing different perspectives and testing fresh approaches. Preparing to confront a variable future provides the antidote to passivity and prediction. Ranging freely through history and from business to science, government to friendships, this refreshing book challenges us to mine our own creativity and humanity for the capacity to create the futures we want and can believe in.
320 pages, 2020
Strong
Why read?
Are you a product leader looking for advice on how to be certain that every product manager on your team lives up to their full potential? Do you want to make sure your product people are competent, empowered, and inspired, and would you like to know how you can best help them on this journey? If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, then this book is for you! By the end of this book, you will understand: • Why you need to focus on the personal development of every product manager—and of the team as a whole—to unlock their full potential. • Why coaching is an important part of your job, and how to do it in the most effective way. • How you can define what a good product manager looks like. • How you can accurately assess product managers and provide them with valuable, actionable, and helpful feedback on their current performance that will help them perform even better. • Which methods/frameworks you can use to make sure product managers learn what they need to know to be more effective—enhancing their people skills. And you will be able to: • Reflect on your own coaching personality and define your own areas for development. • Efficiently prepare and use one-on-ones as your main coaching tool.
392 pages, 2020
No Rules Rules
Why read?
Netflix cofounder Reed Hastings reveals for the first time the unorthodox culture behind one of the world’s most innovative, imaginative, and successful companies. At Netflix, Hastings set new standards, valuing people over process, emphasizing innovation over efficiency, and giving employees context, not controls. At Netflix, there are no vacation or expense policies. At Netflix, adequate performance gets a generous severance, and hard work is irrelevant. At Netflix, you don’t try to please your boss, you give candid feedback instead. At Netflix, employees don’t need approval, and the company pays top of market. When Hastings and his team first devised these unorthodox principles, the implications were unknown and untested. But in just a short period, their methods led to unparalleled speed and boldness, as Netflix quickly became one of the most loved brands in the world. Drawing on hundreds of interviews with current and past Netflix employees from around the globe and never-before-told stories of trial and error from Hastings’s own career, No Rules Rules is the fascinating and untold account of the philosophy behind one of the world’s most innovative, imaginative, and successful companies.
320 pages, 2020
Think Like a Rocket Scientist
Why read?
In this accessible and practical book, Ozan Varol reveals nine simple strategies from rocket science that you can use to make your own giant leaps in work and life - whether it’s landing your dream job, accelerating your business, learning a new skill, or creating the next breakthrough product. Today, thinking like a rocket scientist is a necessity. We all encounter complex and unfamiliar problems in our lives. Those who can tackle these problems – without clear guidelines and with the clock ticking - enjoy an extraordinary advantage.
Think Like a Rocket Scientist will inspire you to take your own moonshot and enable you to achieve liftoff.
368 pages, 2020
If Then
Why read?
The Simulmatics Corporation, founded in 1959, mined data, targeted voters, accelerated news, manipulated consumers, destabilized politics, and disordered knowledge–decades before Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Cambridge Analytica. Silicon Valley likes to imagine it has no past but the scientists of Simulmatics are the long-dead grandfathers of Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. Borrowing from psychological warfare, they used computers to predict and direct human behavior, deploying their “People Machine” from New York, Cambridge, and Saigon for clients that included John Kennedy’s presidential campaign, the New York Times, Young & Rubicam, and, during the Vietnam War, the Department of Defence.
Jill Lepore, distinguished Harvard historian and _New Yorker _staff writer, unearthed from the archives the almost unbelievable story of this long-vanished corporation, and of the women hidden behind it. In the 1950s and 1960s, Lepore argues, Simulmatics invented the future by building the machine in which the world now finds itself trapped and tormented, algorithm by algorithm.
415 pages, 2020
Winning Now, Winning Later
Why read?
Business leaders often take actions that prop up earnings in the short term, but compromise their companies’ long-term health. David Cote, the much-respected former leader of Honeywell International and one of the most successful CEOs of his generation, shares a simple, paradigm-shifting method of achieving both short- and long-term goals. Short-termism is rampant among executives and managers today, causing many companies to underperform and even go out of business. With competition intense and investors demanding strong quarterly gains now, leaders all too often feel obliged to sacrifice the investments so necessary for long-term growth.
288 pages, 2020
Mapping Experiences
Why read?
Customers who have inconsistent experiences with products and services are understandably frustrated. But it’s worse for organizations that can’t pinpoint the causes of these problems because they’re too focused on processes. This updated book shows your team how to use alignment diagrams to turn valuable customer observations into actionable insight. With this powerful technique, you can visually map existing customer experience and envision future solutions.
440 pages, 2020
Product Direction
Why read?
We all know that making great products is hard, involving many steps and experts from multiple disciplines. Yet most teams are not paying enough to the activity that makes all further efforts easier and more impactful: setting the right product direction. The absence of clear flows, artifacts, and accountabilities to create it aggravates this pain, resulting in a lack of alignment affecting the product’s success. Product Direction describes tools and techniques to go through the creation of a Product Strategy, a Strategic Roadmap, and OKRs, taking care of how to navigate the critical links between each of them to achieve success at scale.
250 pages, 2021
Calling Bullshit
Why read?
We think we know bullshit when we hear it, but do we?
Two science professors give us the tools to dismantle misinformation and think clearly in a world of fake news and bad data. Politicians are unconstrained by facts. Science is conducted by press release. Start-up culture elevates hype to high art. The world is awash in bullshit, and we’re drowning in it. Based on a popular course at the University of Washington, this book gives us the tools to see through the obfuscations, deliberate and careless, that dominate every realm of our lives. In this lively, provocative guide, biologist Carl Bergstrom and data scientist Jevin West show that calling out nonsense is crucial to a properly functioning social group, whether it be a circle of friends, a community of researchers, or the citizens of a nation. Through six rules of thumb, they help us to recognize when numbers are being manipulated, to cut through the crap wherever we encounter it - even within ourselves - and learn how to give the real facts to a crystal-loving friend or climate change denier uncle. Calling Bullshit is an indispensable handbook to the art of scepticism.
336 pages, 2020
Believe in People
Why read?
A surprising take on how you can help tackle the really big problems in society–from one of America’s most successful entrepreneurs.
People are looking for a better way. Towering barriers are holding millions of people back, and the institutions that should help everyone rise are not doing the job. Crumbling communities. One-size fits all education. Businesses that rig the economy. Public policy that stifles opportunity and emboldens the extremes. As a result, this country is quickly heading toward a two-tiered society.
Today’s challenges call for nothing short of a paradigm shift – away from a top-down approach that sees people as problems to be managed, toward bottom-up solutions that empower everyone to realize their potential and foster a more inclusive society.
320 pages, 2020
Product Management's Sacred Seven
Why read?
Authored by 3 Product Managers at Facebook, Google, and Microsoft, Product Management’s Sacred Seven is a comprehensive resource that will teach you the must-know knowledge and applied skills necessary to become a world-class PM that can get hired anywhere.
671 pages, 2020