Product Management 101 Reading List

This is a curated list based on recommendations of experienced friends / professional references on how I should start building knowledge to become a great product manager.

My goal here is to immerse myself on the concepts of product management and soak up as much knowledge possible to implement this on my day-to-day routine.

Remember (how to learn something):

• focus on what's interesting,
• ignore (skip) what's boring
• you don't have the obligation to read the whole book. read only what's appealing to you. if it's trash, throw it away.
• take smart notes and write a guide summarizing your findings to make this knowledge more accessible to rookies in the future

Who to follow on Twitter:

Absolutely mandatory (I don't believe you are not reading every single word this person has written):

• Ryan Singer (Basecamp)
• Lenny Rachitsky (Airbnb)
• Shreyas (Stripe)

Nice to follow:

• JustAnotherPM (Yelp)
• Andrew Chen (Uber)
• Noah Weiss (Slack)

Reading list:

Articles:

• Good PM, Bad PM *** read this 10 times
• My favorite product management templates *** this was specially useful for me
• Plans are useless. But planning is indispensable. ** this is too verbose, but you should invest some time in internalizing it.
• The Growing Specialization of Product Management ** this is important to optimize your career
• How to get into product management (and thrive!)
• Project Manager vs Product Manager
• A Product Manager's Job
• 11 Frameworks every PM should know

Books:

How to read:

• First skim the books to see if they are useful or not.
• While skimming, take note of the important parts (but don't fully read them. just note down what you think is important)
• Come back and read the important parts carefully and summarize them
• Don't read the parts you don't find interesting, and don't feel guilty about that. This is not a school assignment, no one is going to judge you for that. Take what you want, and leave.
• If the book is not useful or interesting, drop it and forget it. Do not waste your time and energy by forcing yourself to read something you don't want to.
• I've found the Inspired Product Management and Cracking the PM Interview Books to be uninteresting, so I just ignored them.
• There are probably things that I lost by doing that, but I invested this time in learning things I actually find interesting and inspiring, so I think it was a net positive.

For Skimming:

(you can obviously tell my favorites)

• Shape Up ❤️
• Product Led Organization
• Never Split the Difference ❤️
• The hard thing about the hard things ❤️
• Don't Make me Think
• Drive
• Team Topologies
• A Pattern Language
• The Nature of Order ❤️
• High Output Management
• The Effective Executive ❤️
• When Kale and Coffee Compete ❤️
• Product Led Growth ❤️
• Smartcuts ❤️
• Crossing the Chasm
• The Score Takes Care of Itself
• Sprint
• Lean startup
• Product Led Onboarding