22 Best Digital Product Management Books

It takes a lot of work to become successful in the field of product management. Thus, acquiring as much knowledge as you can become essential for a successful career in product management. Digital product management books are the best approach to fully absorb information if you want to learn from industry pundits.

According to some product management concepts, the following are the best digital product management books categorized by their purpose:

Getting Started

1. Inspired: How to Create Tech Products That Customers Love

Author: Marty Cagan

As the name implies, it will inspire you by revealing top product management techniques from businesses like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Netflix, and Tesla, whose digital products are utilised by billions of people worldwide.

Career

2. Cracking the PM Career

Authors: Jackie Bavaro and Gayle Laakmann McDowell

This is the go-to book for it if you want to start preparing for a job transition or entering into product management. With Gayle Mcdowell’s experience in hiring consulting and Jackie Bavaro’s 15 years of experience in product management, this book is the ideal gift for beginners to understand what skills to master and how to prepare for interviews with top organisations.

3. Decode and Conquer: Answers to Product Management Interviews

Author: Lewis C. Lin

Another excellent book for aceing Product Management interviews is Decode and Conquer. Lewis C. Lin offers advice from insiders in the field on how to succeed in a Product Management interview.

Additionally, he discusses issues like mistakes to avoid during interviews, different frameworks for design and metrics questions, sample responses, and much more that will undoubtedly aid you in getting a position in product management.

For Early Business Phase

4. The Lean Startup

Author: Eric Ries

With the rise of startups over the past few decades and the speed at which technology is evolving, it has become more and more crucial for businesses to remain innovative. Innovation has historically been heavily concentrated on R&D and big launches, which is risky in terms of capital and other tangible and intangible assets if it fails.

Having failed at expensive launches himself, Eric Ries came to the conclusion that the main cause of failure was “working forward from the technology instead of working backwards from the business results you’re trying to achieve.”. This gave rise to the incredible “Lean Startup” book or methodology, which emphasises working backwards from the business results the company is attempting to achieve. Many companies, like Dropbox, General Electric, and many more, began using the Lean methodology.

With the help of this book, you will learn some crucial principles to abide by or keep in mind when developing a new product or company.

5. The Lean Product Playbook

Author: Dan Olsen

The Lean Product Playbook is the manual for creating products that consumers enjoy. It is a “product” version of the prior book. Building successful products is difficult, and let’s face it, the majority of new products that are built fail. This book aids in comprehending how to create products using lean thinking and methods. This book explains how to:

• Determine your target customers
• Identify underserved customer needs
• Create a winning product strategy
• Decide on your Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
• Design your MVP prototype
• Test your MVP with customers
• Iterate rapidly to achieve product-market fit

6. Value Proposition Design: How to Create Products and Services Customers Want

Authors: Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur, Gregory Bernarda, Alan Smith

The days of creating products based solely on intuition and hunches are over. Value Proposition Design shows you how to use your products to develop compelling solutions that customers will be willing to pay for.

The “Value Proposition Canvas” concept that is explained in this book teaches you how to design, test, produce, and manage products and services that people genuinely want. This canvas will assist you in creating amazing value, getting closer to your clients, and avoiding wasting time and effort on concepts that don’t really matter to them.

Understand & Develop Product Management Skills

Basics, Examples with Tips & Tricks

7. The Product Book

Authors: Josh Anon, Carlos González de Villaumbrosia

The Product Book by Josh Anon and Carlos González de Villaumbrosia is a comprehensive manual or curriculum on product management. Product School, where product managers from FAANG companies and other top businesses teach, was founded and is run by Carlos. 

This book aims to answer a very unique thought – NOBODY ASKED A PRODUCT MANAGER TO SHOW UP. 

Essentially, the idea is that while engineers create the product, designers ensure a good user experience and attractive aesthetic. Sales enable potential customers to purchase the product while marketing ensures that customers are aware of it. So why do we need a product manager?

And this book does a superb job of elaborating on this idea with specific examples and detailed explanations.

8. Product Management in Practice: A Real-World Guide to the Key Connective Role of the 21st Century

Author: Matt LeMay

This book just like the previous one is a great guide on the most misunderstood role in the world which is product management. The author tries to focus on the core skills – communication, organization, research, and execution that can build a successful product manager.

It teaches you the process of how to build the product that people love which is the core objective of the product manager.

Metrics & Goals

9. Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs

Author: John Doerr

Measure what matters is a book on OKRs – Objective & Key Results that will show you the value of choosing the appropriate metrics and is used by many top organisations, like Google, Intel, and many others. Objectives are what you, your company, or your product is seeking to accomplish, and key results are the ways in which those top priorities will be accomplished through specific, measurable actions within a predetermined time frame.

This book contains some excellent case studies that have assisted outstanding firms in experiencing explosive and exponential growth.

10. Outcomes Over Output: Why Customer Behavior is the Key Metric for Business Success

Author: Josh Seiden

I’ve always been a strong proponent of this; my tagline on covers really says outcomes > output. Furthermore, this book does a fantastic job of outlining how to concentrate on what is important. Most businesses continue to toil, develop new features, and chase the next big thing without ever pausing to consider whether or not it will actually create value for the target audience.

This book is a fantastic resource that will assist you or your team in concentrating on an outcome-based approach to creating a successful product.

Experimentation & Discovery

11. Sprint: Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days

Author: Jake Knapp

Let’s face it, building new things in the digital realm is expensive. How can you ensure that the product you are creating will unquestionably improve the lives of your customers? The answer could be found in this approach – a 5-day unique process established by Jake Knapp from Google Ventures.

It is a design sprint in which a small team can quickly move from a problem to a prototype to a tested hypothesis while following the step-by-step procedure outlined in this book.

12. Continuous Discovery Habits: Discover Products That Create Customer Value and Business Value

Author: Teresa Torres

This book attempts to provide a solution to the subject of how to create products that customers want and how to make sure you are constantly trying to improve them. This book prepares you to be wrong while simultaneously teaching you how to approach ongoing discovery sustainably. 

13. The Mom Test: How to talk to customers & learn if your business is a good idea when everyone is lying to you

Author: Rob Fitzpatrick

This excellent book demonstrates how to take customer feedback seriously. This will undoubtedly help you sort through the criticism and answer some very important questions, such as if your solution is worthwhile and whether people will pay for it (because the majority of them will lie to you about your product/business). Start with this book if you want your new venture or product to be a success.

Understanding & Changing User Behaviour

14. Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products

Author: Nir Eyal

As implied by the title, Nir Eyal teaches us how to create habit-forming products using a four-step paradigm he created, popularly known as the “Hook Model.” He tries to explain why certain products have insane retention rates while others barely have any retention at all.

He wishes he had had access to his years of research, consulting, and real-world expertise when he was developing products. You can see how eye-opening this book would be for influencing and understanding user behaviour from the foregoing.

15. Badass: Making Users Awesome

Author: Kathy Sierra

Want to lessen the influence of chance? Want to be independent of PR gimmicks and extravagant marketing spending? If you want to learn how to outgrow your competition and stop depending on persuading marketing techniques, this book is a terrific resource.

It mainly focuses on how to combine shockingly underappreciated science and a distinct point of view to make a user’s experience richer and deeper.

16. The Design of Everyday Things

Author: Don Norman

In this book, cognitive scientist and usability expert Don Norman discusses why some products make users happy while others irritate them. Dan tries to argue that one of the main reasons why users frequently feel like they failed when using a product is the lack of intuitive instruction.

This book includes a number of case studies that attempt to explain the psychology behind what he considers to be a good or terrible design.

Execution

17. User Story Mapping

Author: Jeff Patton

In essence, User Story Mapping is a highly useful tool, particularly for Agile/Lean teams to help people understand what you’re building and why you’re building it.  

18. Epic Alignment

Author: Nils Janse

In order to keep everyone on the same page from ideation to launch, this book seeks to describe how you drive with your thinking. Over 300 product managers were questioned by Nils Janse and his team in order to learn more about their methods, collaborative styles, common difficulties, and approaches to tackling those problems.

This book teaches you how to steer product development toward research-based work that is focused on impact and outcomes.

19. Product Roadmaps Relaunched: How to Set Direction while Embracing Uncertainty

Authors: C. Todd Lombardo, Bruce Mccarthy, Evan Ryan, Michael Connors

A product’s success depends on the scientific foundation of its product roadmap. This book shows you how to prioritise ideas and requests while also creating an effective roadmap and coordinating it with all of your stakeholders.

Marketing/Scaling

20. Crossing the Chasm

Author: Geoffrey A. Moore

Crossing the Chasm, sometimes referred to as “the bible” for introducing innovative products to larger markets, certainly lives up to its reputation. This book focuses on solving the “chasm” or adoption gap between early adopters and the mainstream market for innovative products.

Becoming a Product Leader

21. Empowered

Author: Marty Cagan and Chris Jones

Any manager’s success depends not only on the quality of the people they hire, but also on how well they foster an environment in which each member of the team can thrive. You can establish such an environment with the help of this book.

22. Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value

Author: Melissa Perri

This book too explains how to focus on outcomes rather than output. Companies that rely on output, often fall into the “build trap”, shipping out features that satisfy the leadership/team rather than the customers.

Conclusion

To make it a bit less overwhelming, I’ve tried to divide the best digital product management books into sections that will help you to choose a book according to the challenge you are facing.

Thank you so much for taking the time to read this article all the way through.

What subject would you like to learn more about? What professional issues are you facing? Please share your opinions in the space provided below.

Enjoyed reading it? Share and subscribe, don’t forget.