Ask HN: Must Read Books for a Product Manager

Lean Startup - Eric Ries, Business Model Generation, The Design of Business - Roger Martin

Lean Startup is a great book. When I first started, I found "Inspired, How to Create Products that Customers Love" by Marty Cagan to be a great resource.

I was a PM for an enterprise product for several years (I took a sabbatical from software development for a little while to do something more business-y).

The original Ries "Positioning" book was good, and is probably more valuable than Porter's Competitive Strategy for tech PMs.

"Selling The Wheel" is a very light read and, if you've never watched a sales team get managed, is a good introduction to how products get sold (in B2B situations) at different stages of maturity.

Most of Joel Spolsky's blog posts are effectively describing the job of a PM; they're more valuable than any book I can think of.

I like "Four Steps To The Epiphany" as a sort of roadmap to bringing enterprise-type products to market. The book itself is kind of funny; it has the appearance of being typeset entirely in Microsoft Word, which gives it a sort of samizdat charm.

Surprisingly, the book that had the largest impact on how I think about (software) products is "The Design of Everyday Things" by Donald Norman. You won't find expressions like 'creating value' nor the word 'software' in it but IMHO its ideas are at the beating heart of any product-market fit.

Two good books for anyone interviewing PMs or being interviewed for a PM position are Decode & Conquer and Cracking the PM interview.

Whilst both are focused on interviews rather than doing the job, they each contain some nuggets about how to think.

As others have said, Inspired, Lean Startup and Four Steps are essential reading.