Interested in Product Management? Or just want to pick up a good read to expand your Product Management and Product Marketing skills? Rather than browsing the bookshelves of your local bookstore for a product management-related book and picking up one blindly, have a look at this list of top six product management books. These books will surely help you broaden your knowledge around product management.
The book is no less than a blessing for all the aspiring product managers. More than a primer on how to prepare for the interview or how to make an excellent resume, the book explains what product management and the position of a product manager really is. With this book, an individual can examine the role of a product manager from all the perspectives, understand how to land a job, and learn how to advance in the career by mastering the responsibilities.
This book could take an individual from a novice stage to a confident product manager. It starts by making you understand the keys to success in the domain of product management. Further, it teaches you how to become an expert of any product and a customer advocate. Later in the book, you figure out how effectively you can manage your team and increase the productivity of your team members. Overall, this book helps you advance in your career of product management.
Unless the product will add value to customer’s life, it is not worth building, says Marty Cagan whose book teaches you how you should decide which products or design you should pursue. Flip some pages of the book and learn how to prove your proposed product will be a big hit. The book will help you in defining a minimum viable product and juggling the conflicting needs of other teams such as sales, design, engineering, etc.
The book touches the behavioural aspects of the customers. It teaches you how you can use behavioural psychology to hook customers and keep them coming back without the use of aggressive promotion techniques. It tells you how you can create “viral loops” so users instinctively reach for your product. With this book, you learn how to build customer engagement and build products that people admire.
Your customers have a zillion brands and businesses talking to them. And they have now learned to filter the noise and reduce the clutter. So, in such a scenario, how do you get through to them and grab & hold their attention? This amazing book delivers the mantras on how to choose the best and catchy name for your product. It also informs about building a strategy to make the most of your current market position and how to use the right metrics to improve your campaigns.
Cognitive scientist Donald Norman argues that the design of any product is not just something that is used to catch a customer’s attention; it is one of the main reasons why some products are a huge hit while others flop. Through his book, he reminds you not to get caught up in slick technology and forget that you are building the product to solve a problem faced by humans.
These were the top six books that we recommend to every aspiring product manager. If you think, we skipped an important product management read, please share the same in the comments section.