28 Must Read Books for Product Managers and Product Developers

A legacy post, kept as originally published. Dates, links and images may be out of date.

Whether you are new to the world of product management or are a seasoned product manager or product developer, we all are always learning and looking for ways to expand or refresh our skills. Instead of browsing the bookshelves at your favorite local bookshop and choosing one blind, take a look at our list of must read product management books for tried-and-true recommendations from the PMN community.

To make it easy to pick a book of your current interest, we have created different categories and assigned each book to a category. On our Resources page we also provide you with a description of each of these must read product management books, so you get an idea of what to expect and what you’ll be able to learn from that book.

(Introduction to) Product Management

• Inspired: How To Create Products Customers Love by Marty Cagan

• Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work by Chip Heath & Dan Heath

• The Product Manager’s Survival Guide: Everything You Need to Know to Succeed as a Product Manager by Steven Haines

• The Product Manager’s Desk Reference (Second Edition) by Steven Haines

• Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable by Seth Godin

• The Art of Product Management: Lessons from a Silicon Valley Innovator by Rich Mironov

Agile Product Management

• Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days by Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky & Braden Kowitz

• Agile Product Management with Scrum: Creating Products that Customers Love by Roman Pichler

Strategy & Planning

• Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers by Geoffrey A. Moore

• The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail by Clayton M. Christensen

• The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz

• The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering by Frederick P. Brooks Jr.

Customer Development

• Lean Customer Development: Building Products Your Customers Will Buy by Cindy Alvarez

• The Four Steps to the Epiphany by Steve Blank

Design & User Experience

• The Design of Everyday Things: Revised and Expanded Edition by Don Norman

• Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products by Nir Eyal

• Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability by Steve Krug

• Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath

Features & User Stories

• User Story Mapping: Discover the Whole Story, Build the Right Product by Jeff Patton

• User Stories Applied: For Agile Software Development by Mike Cohn

Wireframing & Storyboarding

• Wireframing Essentials by Matthew J. Hamm

• Communicating the User Experience: A Practical Guide for Creating Useful UX Documentation by Richard Caddick & Steve Cable

Metrics

• Tuned In: Uncover the Extraordinary Opportunities That Lead to Business Breakthroughs by Craig Stull, Phil Myers & David Meerman Scott

• Lean Analytics by Alistair Croll & Benjamin Yoskovitz

Testing & Validating MVP

• The Lean Product Playbook: How to Innovate with Minimum Viable Products and Rapid Customer Feedback by Dan Olsen

• The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries

Preparing For Job Interviews

• Cracking the PM Interview: How to Land a Product Manager Job in Technology by Gayle Laakmann McDowell & Jackie Bavaro

• Decode and Conquer: Answers to Product Management Interviews by Lewis C. Lin

What are your favorite PM reads?

Obviously, this list is not set in stone and we all have our personal favorites. We would like to keep this list updated and would love to learn what your favorite must read product management books are. Please share the books that have helped you on your product management and product development journey in the comments!