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Product Management Reading List

Product Management Books for the Junior AND Senior Product Manager

What are the best books to get started in product management? Sometimes, I’m asked: what are the best books for any product manager? This is the ultimate list.

These are my go-tos to bring anyone into product management, or to level up your existing product management skills.

Inspired – this is like The Bible for individual contributor product management. I’m sure you’ve read it by now, but if you haven’t, pick this one up! Inspired is about all the non-tactical stuff of product management, and is where the industry has been trying to move the PM role to lately. My copy is marked up, bookmarked, and highlighted – and I know lots of PMs and ScrumMasters whose copy is the same way. Can’t recommend this book more.


Escaping the Build Trap – This is kind of a companion book to Inspired. I bet you’ll nod your head alongside every page of this. Experimentation, checking assumptions, of course. But also PM management and team building. This book will make you a better product manager, but may also give you good insight into words and phrases you can use to get the attention of people looking to hire product leaders. 


Good Strategy / Bad Strategy – I just love this book. Early on in my PM career, I recognized that different people had different ideas of what “the strategy” or “a strategy” was. That’s still the case, but this book clarified (to me) what the mental model of a generic strategy was. And that enabled me to parse, analyze, and ultimately challenge the strategic ideas of others. It’s good stuff, and has helped as I’ve moved into broader roles.

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Spleet the Animals

I’ve been in an extremely creative mood this week – from drawing to even a little music production. Computers are amazing creative machines and I’m glad we live in the age we do.

Here are a few creative things I enjoyed this week:

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Make Your Day

We’re technically in the dog days of summer, but considering I’ve barely left my house for 141 days, I’m just going to call it March 160th.

Here are a few things that I enjoyed this week:

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Luigi is Real

It’s been insanely hot here this week. My lawn makes me sad, but my little garden in the back is growing really well. Let me know if you would like more information, and how many hours you have to talk about it.

In the meantime, here are some things I really enjoyed this week.

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Release the Kraken

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Reading List

Reading Today: September 16, 2016

Today’s collection of articles that may or may not be directly related to product management.

Meetspace says that a “Value Study” is a much cooler way of saying that you’re executing a “Price Sensitivity Survey”.

Dropshipping may have relatively low margins, but it’s also a relatively simple way to start a business with low risk.

As they start it’s 20th season, the creators of South Park wonder “Oh, fuck, are we that old—do we need to go? Should we?”

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Reading List

Reading Today: December 8, 2014

Here’s a list of things I’m reading today.

Startup School Lesson 15: How to Manage
I’ve learned everything I know about managing people directly from bad managers and indirectly from great managers. I read as much about management as I can since there’s only one way to get better at it.

Quit Your Day Job: John W. Golden
Some great tips on how John W. Golden (https://www.etsy.com/shop/johnwgolden) has turned his Etsy store into a viable business. I’m struggling with momentum lately, so hearing these stories helps me realize that quitting is easy, but I won’t create a sustainable business by quitting (or relying solely on Etsy).

Grappling With the Culture of Free in Napster’s Aftermath
We run into this every single day at ATK since there are dozens of free recipe websites. I got my first internet connection in 2001 (post-Napster), so it’s interesting to read how “the Internet” became synonymous with “free”.

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Product Management Reading List Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Reading Today: December 2, 2014

Three articles I’m reading this morning about search engine optimizzation, A/B testing and user experience.

Google Penguin Nearly Killed My Business
The moral of the story is that there’s no shortcut to ranking well on Google. More so than ever it’s about getting established, reputable sites linking to yours for a good reason.

How Naive A/B Testing Goes Wrong and How to Fix it
I’m in the middle of a couple of A/B and multivariate tests both at my day job and on my Etsy store, so it’s fascinating to hear how others do it and what they’re leaning.

“Invalid Username or Password” Is a Useless Security Measure
Another day-job-related link. We currently tell you if the email is unknown, or if the password is incorrect. Since I’m in a unique position to be both the product owner of our largest online product and the director of customer service, I know first-hand the impact this change has had on customer service contact (40% drop in account-related emails). The developers are concerned that this opens up our site to attacks, but I’m pushing back from a UX standpoint. So obviously I sent this link to them.

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Etsy Harbor Hangings Reading List

Reading This Morning: November 30, 2014

We spent the last few days celebrating Thanksgiving at my wife’s parent’s house this weekend. This gave me lots of time to tweak and play with all the different levers of my Etsy business, including a major focus on search engine optimization. Of all the articles and sites I read in the last couple of days, here are the three that are most interesting to me:

Are My Listings Relevant?
A tool that will do a search for any term and tell you how relevant your shop is in Etsy searches for that term.

Etsy Relevancy SEO and Stats Explained!
Basic information to make you relevant in Etsy searches.

SEO: Low Views or Keyword Rut?
This is the forums posts that helped me the absolute most. Kelly from KAStylesMasonJars offers up on-demand advice on the keywords and titles you’re using for your listings. I went through page after page of other shop owners asking her what she thought, and she gave them the same advice: your titles and your keywords don’t match, aren’t long enough, or aren’t descriptive enough. Then gave suggestions. I’ll do a write-up on my experience (stats and all!), but to show how effective this is quickly: I had 340 promoted listing impressions before I started executing her keyword and title strategy (about average for Saturday @ 7). I now have 1,402 in less than 3 hours.

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Reading List

Reading Today: November 27, 2014

Here’s what I’m reading this morning.

Twitter is Tracking What Other Apps It’s Users Have Installed
Twitter now knows what other apps you have installed on your iPhone and will use that to give you a better experience.

How We Did the SNL Title Sequence
A very cool behind the scenes look at how they created a great looking opening package for the 40th year of Saturday Night Live.

Squarespace Coupons
I recently signed up for a Squarespace website to create landing pages for an upcoming Harbor Hangings ad test. On their checkout, they had a space for a coupon code. The first result when Googling “squarespace coupon” is a page hosted by Squarespace giving you a 10% off code and a message saying you won’t find a better coupon code on another site. Search ended, conversion complete. Great idea that I’m going to steal for Harbor Hangings at some point.