Product Arts Recommended Books

The books listed below provide some good reading and insight for product management in software and high tech products. Clicking on a cover or title will take you to Amazon.

Recommended List
	The Guide to the Product Management and Marketing Body of Knowledge: ProdBOK Guide A new book has been published that helps companies and product managers understand the responsibilities and activities typically associated with the role. It's called the ProdBOK for short. The ProdBOK was a multiyear activity spanning some 60 contributors. As one of those individuals, I'll provide a view of some of the goals and challenges of the book. See the full article at A Review of ProdBOK
	Product Innovation and Technology Strategy This is another in series of books from Robert Cooper (Stage-Gate) and is a few years old. Like all of his books, it's high on his own processes and supported by rehashed survey stats from his clients companies. However, this brings some fresh material to scene, specifically in setting up the fundamentals of portfolio strategy and planning. The focus is on tech products. If you've read other books from him, there will be some repeat here. It also is not terribly deep, but if you're looking for a good overview of how to approach your overall product and portfolio strategy, this is a good place to start for ideas. It also takes you from the strategic into the tactical and addressing resources and project selection, in addition to product and technology roadmaps.
	Innovation X - Why a Company's Toughest Problems are its Greatest Advantage The author is the creative director at frog design and had the chance to work with some leading companies. The concepts explored in the book explore the problem that companies face that new products are becoming more complex as convergence of technologies occur and as customer expectations go up. Therefore, you can't really just be thinking about the product as an isolated thing, but rather as a whole customer experience and the ecosystem needed to create it. Many of the concepts align with my own experience and that the real innovation opportunities increasingly are in expanding your solutions to fully integrated systems over a larger customer lifecycle and set of activities. Some good examples included.

	Escape Velocity - Free Your Company's Future FromtThe Pull of the Past This is the most recent Geoffrey Moore book, and it's really good if you are a company with a mature product portfolio (which is actually the majority of companies). He looks at how to leverage your strengths but also where you need to let go in order to create new growth. The first chapter on Category strength is especially good, but he also goes into depth on how to manage other forms of strength - Company, Market, Offer, and Execution. Well written, and brings in concepts from his previous books that are relevant.
	Good Strategy/Bad Strategy The first few chapters are a must read for anyone doing company or product strategy, ESPECIALLY if you're in senior management. It puts to shame most of the fluff and stuff that companies put out as a replacement for actual strategy, including vision, mission and values statements. It also rants about the use of goals as a replacement for developing a larger picture about HOW you'll achieve the goals. These are often left as the "tactics" for lower level managers to figure out, when in reality, they are the core elements required if you really want to align the organization to achieve them. He provides a 3 step process to developing strategy: 1) Diagnosis, 2) A Guiding Principal, and 3) Coherent Actions. The biggest shortfall is the author gives many examples of bad strategy and some examples of good ones, but does not successfully guide you through enough examples to illustrate how to get to a good one, such as what decisions specifically might have turned the bad ones around. It feels like he's on the right track, but it could use less ranting and more guiding.
	Portfolio Management for New Products This book has been around for 10 years, but is still far and away the best book on managing product portfolios. It's geared toward large enterprise with big product portfolios and gives examples of a number of ways to analyze and strategize about your portfolio. The concepts can be applied to any size company that needs to think about portfolio management. The author is the creator of the Stage-Gate process, and so it has a lot of formality, but the the real value is the examples and the discussion around getting away from ROI/NPV mentality into a more holistic assessment including the qualitative assessment so often required for more innovative ventures.
	Business Model Generation Continuing our theme around business model innovation, this new book is very visual, and was created by an army of people in a collaborative venture. It uses a Business Model Canvas as the basis for laying out a more detailed set of activities that were summarized in Seizing the White Space. There are examples of business models across a number of different businesses and revenue models using the canvas in addition to discussing the process for creating new business model ideas. This is a nice book to have around as a reference and to help with ideas to help get ideas.
	Seizing the White Space: Business Model Innovation for Growth and Renewal If you're doing any amount of product strategy planning, whether in an existing company or for a new one, this book gives you a straightforward way to understand the concepts of business model. It identifies the core pieces of a business model beyond just the revenue and profit drivers, and places the emphasis on the product or service and the resources and processes required to deliver it. It's a perfect complement to the Innovator's Solution (see below) and is tightly coupled to it by identifying how incumbent companies in a market are handicapped by their own success for developing new business models. It's an easy read without a lot of jargon and fairly short. The later chapter on DogCorp is also entertaining and helps illustrate some of the issues of establishing a new business model in existing companies.
	Blockbusters: The Five Keys to Developing Great New Products I have to admit than when I read the "X secrets to success" byline on any book, I'm doubtful. This book goes a long way towards delivering. Despite being nearly ten years old and feeling a bit stale on the examples with studies done on companies 15-20 years ago, the points are very relevant. It's interesting to see how several of the discussions that evolved from studies in the hardware world have become the key drivers of Agile/Scrum software practices. It also goes beyond just project level issues and hammers on the need for executives to be involved at a deep level if you are truly going for great, and which has been demonstrated more recently by Apple, Facebook, Google, Amazon, and others. This also aligns to one of our early articles: Who's Your Chief Product Officer.
	Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd A very engaging book and unlike most. It is not a how-to and is more like an in-depth discussion over dinner. The author's style is very informal and almost apologetic. The insights and examples about company brands that stand out from the herd and why are quite good. The general theme is the vast majority of companies tend towards herd mentality as they try to differentiate and become indistinguishable from each other from a consumer's point of view. The very act of competitive analysis puts us into an arms race mentality to match or beat competition through small level augmentation (similar to the concept of competing in a Red Ocean). This book will create a new way to think about your brand (and product strategy) and how you really compete. Highly recommended reading.
	Scrappy Project Management: The 12 Predictable & Avoidable Pitfalls Every Project Faces This is a scrappy little book that has attitude. It's to the point - no sugar coating - and fun to read. It's only about 130 pages long, but it delivers unlike few of the recent gaggle of short, self-published books. It has good advice in every chapter, with little napkin diagrams to show you how simple some communication tools can be, and none of them involve a gantt chart. If you have to manage projects, this book will tell you what you really need know and do. It's the project management's equivalent of "Just Do It!".
	Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow The premise is fairly simple. Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs is the basis of the whole book, and the author applies looking at satisfying levels of needs as the basis for your company culture and strategy. He applies it to customers, to employees and to investors. Not everyone will be interested in all of these discussions, but the section on customers and product is quite good. Even though his particular business is a chain of boutique hotels, he provides many good examples for high tech products. He breaks each of the hierarchies into 3 levels, with the Customer levels being Meets Expectations, Meets Desires, and Meets Unrecognized Needs. These levels correspond exactly to the three Kano Analysis needs of Must Have, Performance, and Delighters. His summary and closing chapters get a little woo-woo, but the book did a good job overall of keeping my interest.
	Trade-off: Why Some Things Catch On, and Others Don't The title of the book totally intrigued me, as the whole problem in product strategy is figuring out the viable trade-offs for competing in the market. The book proposes there are two (and only two) directions for focus: experience (also called fidelity) or convenience. You should provide products that people either love or they need. Being in the middle is where many unsuccessful products fall. There is actually very little in the book that hasn't been discussed elsewhere, but it's the singlemindedness of attempting to classify the strategies into the two buckets that is interesting. On occassion, the classification feels contrived and forced, and the definition of "experience" and "convenience" seems to be a moving target, but it provides a worthwhile lens to view your product relative to competition when assessing product strategy.
	Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business - I thought this was going to be a quick read, but it took me a while. The basic premise of the book is the distinction between amateurs and professionals making contributions on the web is blurring, thus the "crowd" is becoming a dominant factor. An example is Wikipedia, which now drawfs the content available in Encyclopedia Britannica. However, the author goes on to describe several other manifestations of the phenomena through open source, open collaboration, user generated content, prediction markets, microfinance, and several other examples including the underlying algorithm for Google search. It is insightful reading with lots of examples.
	Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant (whew!) If you haven't yet read this book, you should. The basics are this - if you're competing on the same industry parameters (price, speed, size, "more of something") than everyone else, you're competing in a Red Ocean, with limited potential defined by your competition. If you redefine some factors or find new parameters to compete on that customers value AND you find a way to reduce your cost structure by not competing on other traditional factors, you create a Blue Ocean. It provides an interesting graphical way to look at the competitive environment. It also discusses innovating not just in product features, but also in customer experience across the entire customer lifecycle. Basic, powerful stuff.
	The Silver Lining: An Innovation Playbook for Uncertain Times This is written by the co-author of "Seeing What's Next" with Clayton Christiansen. While it feels like it was hastily thrown together for advice on what to do during the recession, the advice is applicable for any period. It's short and sweet and references other books if you need more details. It gives a good walk-through on ways to create new innovative offerings in your product line, or even changes to specific features on your existing products to find more markets. I put it as a good starting point to initiate your strategic thinking and then go read more on topics that seem attractive.
	The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth The original "Innovator's Dilemma" was a classic but was short on specifics for what to really do. It's premise was that market incumbents usually engage in incremental innovations to their best customers while disruptors go after the least valued customers at the low end and then move up-market. The reason it's disruptive is because the industry business model is turned on its head. This book provides specific strategies for both the incumbents and disruptors, and reasons why. This is a good book and it's not necessary that you read the original to understand this one.
	The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products that Win Have you ever been on a failed or stalled product? Have you ever been in an unsuccessful start-up or attempting to grow one now? The author has been in 8 start-ups with 5 IPO's, so has something to say. He does it through proposing the traditional product development process is wrong for new businesses and has an alternate proposal. It goes hand-in-glove with Agile, but goes WAY beyond it from a business perspective on validating your value prop first and above anything else before building your business, and then goes on to explain how to scale. There is so much information in this book covering (nearly) every part of the new product process and building a business that it can be a serious reference book for any product at any stage.
	Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die This book is a gem. As a product manager, do you need to create product visions and value props that are memorable and resonate with your audience? Do you need to make product pitches and train others on complex solutions? As a project or program manager, do you need align people on purpose of the next release? As an executive, do you need to communicate strategy so that your people Get It? This book attempts to make your communications "sticky" using SUCCESs: Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional and with Stories. That sounds pretty common sense and straightforward, but they beat you over the head with lots of delightful and surprising examples of how to do it. The book is very easy to read (while the concepts are in reality quite difficult to do).
	Pricing with Confidence: 10 Ways to Stop Leaving Money on the Table If you are involved with pricing for B2B products, you should read this book. Very easy to read and focuses on pricing for value instead of competing on price. This is a high level strategy book that does not get into details, like how to do licensed vs. subscriptions models. It almost borders on a product strategy book and discusses pricing (and product strategy) as you move through the product life cycle relative to competition. Also has an excellent discussion on creating your customer's ROI and how to arm your sales force with appropriate tools for selling. Only downside is it does not discuss consumer pricing.
	Inspired: How To Create Products Customers Love Nearly everything in this book is actually already online in a blog going back multiple years, but it's just so much easier to read in a book somehow. This book is for the seasoned product manager or even the manager of product managers as you had to have been there to appreciate the insights. The focus is on web-based services, but is applicable to most software and embedded systems. The book started out slowly for me, but I grew into it by the middle and could see many of my experiences (and foibles) discussed.
	Tuned In: Uncover the Extraordinary Opportunities That Lead to Business Breakthroughs This is from the folks at Pragmatic Marketing and it's a fun read about being tuned in or tuned out to the real needs of your customers. They are quite fond of the statement "your opinion, though interesting, is irrelevant" when having internal company debates about what customers need. Basically, get out of the building and talk to your customers. Hint: give this book to your boss, your program managers and your technical leads.
	The Product Manager's Desk Reference This is a big, comprehensive book. It's pretty much the A to Z of product management and product marketing at a detailed level. I believe lesser experienced product managers would benefit the most, if they really have the motivation to read the whole thing. Senior PM's will find some useful chapters but you'll have to wade through a lot of stuff. The rigor of the book will more closely align to larger companies
	Crossing the Chasm First published in the early 1990's, this book is still relevant for anyone in high tech product development. It discusses the adoption cycle for disruptive technology innovation and what you should be doing at each stage for the different profiles of customers. If you're involved in leading edge technologies, read this book. It's a good discussion of why you'll likely to fail and some things to try to do about it.
	Making Things Happen: Mastering Project Management (Theory in Practice) Originally released as The Art of Project Management (now Making Things Happen), this is more of a Project Management 201 book after you've been through the wringer a few times. The author's experience is mostly as a program manager at Microsoft, but he does a good job of making it more generic across any software development project. Lots of discussion of dealing with people and bosses, which is really the primary challenge of being a project manager.
	What Customers Want: Using Outcome-Driven Innovation to Create Breakthrough Products and Services There are a whole bunch of YouTube videos that step through the high level concepts in this book, so if that's more your style just search for them. It focuses on a fairly elaborate methodology for understanding the "jobs" users want to accomplish and measurements of the outcomes they are looking for. They provide a good case study of a common power tool redesign that had market success using the principals. While a good read and provides insight into how you can approach analyzing customer needs that can change the way you approach the issue, the full methodology is quite data intensive and likely beyond the means of most companies.
	User Stories Applied: For Agile Software Development If you know nothing of Agile methodology and how requirements are done in "real time" while developing the product, this is a very good primer. The author is a consultant and Agile trainer and highly regarded. Even if you're not doing Agile, learning to think in terms of user goals and activities, similar to the "What Customers Want" book above discusses, will improve the way you approach software requirements BEFORE heading into detailed Use Cases.

Recommended List