6 Unexpected Books Every Product Manager Should Read
Because Who Said All the Good Advice Was in a Spreadsheet?
Why another book list…
Books are a major source of inspiration for me, and I devour any product management literature I can find. However, I’ve noticed something interesting along the way — some of the most profound impacts on my approach to product management have come from books that aren’t about product management at all.
In this blog, I want to share six books that have shaped how I think about my role and responsibilities as a product manager, though they’re not the usual suspects on most product management reading lists. These books have offered me fresh perspectives and valuable insights that are directly applicable to the day-to-day challenges we face in our field.
“The Infinite Game” by Simon Sinek
I spent the first 11 years of my career in sales, and there the entire world is broken into chunks. Big chunks (a financial year), medium-sized chunks (a quarter), small chunks (monthly account reviews), and tiny chunks (weekly forecast calls). I’ll spare you the rant, I know where this is coming from and I even agree that structure and controls are needed to prevent chaos.
That said, what I started noticing is that this structure heavily influenced decision making: Customers were offered a higher discount if they were to sign “this quarter”, sales “adjusting” their pipeline before a call with their management to look better, or to get the resources they want on time. Sales and their management value quick wins over long-term success and, even worse, over customer satisfaction.
In his book, Simon Sinek describes how we should replace this short-term, or ‘finite’, thinking with a long-term view. This assumes that we are playing a game that never ends: an infinite game. His book is not only inspirational but gives enough case studies that triggered my pragmatic thinking as to how it can be applied if it doesn’t come from “the top”.
My conclusion was that, as soon as you add time as a fixed constant to an equation, you will see a decline in quality. I have seen too many roadmaps and delivery plans that changed, even short-term. Some for good reasons, as unexpected events can happen any time. And some for bad reasons, if you want to call them bad, but lack of discovery and validation leading to a misjudgement on how fast you can deliver something is a real problem.
The concrete actions I took, after having finished this book, was that I removed “deadlines” from my delivery plans, unless a commitment was required to another team. We aimed not just to release products, but to make an impact. If we weren’t sure that, what we could ship, had the impact we expected, we wouldn’t ship. That didn’t mean we weren’t going fast, we just removed the “deadlines”. I also removed timelines from my roadmap entirely, which is still quite unusual, apparently. I am happy to speak about priorities, and the impact we want to make for our customers, but I will not talk about a list of features anyone can expect in 12–18 months from now.
My last take away was that as Product Managers we sometimes underestimate the impact we can have on culture. Even if your product team members don’t report directly to you, you can still create an environment where they are (somewhat) shielded from old habits and create a setup where transformation can happen.
“No rules rules” by Reed Hastings & Erin Meyer
I still remember one of my first performance reviews. The first company I worked for in my sales career was Hewlett-Packard, and I was a Presales in the Enterprise Software department. During my yearly review meeting with my manager I was asked about what rating I would give myself. You know, one of these things that companies do to make it easier for management: performance levels indicated by letters. I answered that I would give myself the lowest score, a rating usually used for folks that were designated for a performance improvement plan, or marked for termination if you were not in a country with somewhat decent employer rights. When my manager, visibly shocked, asked about the reason, I explained that I failed to comply with a company priority. I hadn’t filled out my timesheet reporting in months…
The question is simple: Why do we hire professionals, and then treat them like children…
Reed describes how Netflix has systematically built a culture focused on responsibility and accountability. The book teaches that you must build culture intentionally and treat it as a ‘Product’. It needs to have a purpose, a desired outcome, it needs to be reviewed and improved, consistently and frequently.
Among the many take-aways, two stood out for me as candidates for practical application. One was how to treat mistakes. I found myself downplaying my mistakes too often, sometimes it was even hard to admit to mistakes. Instead of saying: “We didn’t do proper discovery, and because our assumptions were untested we really had a hard time get traction with this new feature”, I would have said: “We had a rocky start, but we turned it around and things are improving rapidly”. I only tried to not look like an idiot, but exactly this thinking was stopping me from dealing with mistakes in a productive way, making me bound to repeat them.
The book emphasizes that Netflix not only handles mistakes but also has built a culture that expects and embraces them. What you can do, as a Product Manager, to help facilitate this kind of culture is be open and upfront when things don’t go optimally, and use it to reflect on your work first. Even a problem in delivery might be traced back to a lack of validation in product discovery. Showing, that it is more important to improve how things are done, than to highlight isolated mistakes, can make a big difference.
The second topic that changed how I acted was their take on transparency. People often hide or change information before passing it on. Not necessarily with bad intentions, sometimes this happens to “protect” others, the team, the company. “You can’t tell the team that we might need to restructure the department, they are going to freak out!”.
My take on this is simple, folks are not stupid and they know something is going on way earlier than you think. Sharing openly, without exception builds trust. This is something that anyone can start doing today. In my previous company we were looking at restructuring our unit, which would impact about 50 people across different departments. Instead of waiting for all the details to be clear, and communicating it a week before it happened, we let folks know about the intent, the reason and where we were in the process. This gave everyone the chance to think their situation through on their own time, and approach their managers with questions and even suggestions.
“The Captain Class” by Sam Walker
The topic of leadership always fascinated me, the connection between one’s position, their authority, the words they use, and the actions they take (or not take). Especially with politicians this is becomes a heatedly debated subject, which I am not going into here. 😉
Looking at the corporate world, I found the same patterns observed in politics, similarly labeled as “Leadership”. My personal view is that leadership needs to be detached from career or position on the corporate ladder. I have seen the worst leaders high up in an organization, and some of the best leaders that worked in a team with only a few people.
It does beg the question, if leadership is not tied to a role, what is it actually? Ask ChatGPT and you’ll get something like this: “Effective leadership is not solely about authority or position; it encompasses a range of skills, including communication, empathy, problem-solving, adaptability, and integrity.” Alright, more words, doesn’t really help.
After reading Sam’s book it became clear to me why that is. For all those books and blogs to take effect on your leadership skills, there needs to be one condition: You need to care, truly and deeply. And not just say it, but really mean it.
The Captain Class looks at the most successful sports teams and why few of them were able to consistently excel in their respective discipline. The answer, as you can guess from the title, is that the team’s Captain is the secret key to success, and not the coach or the star player.
The book has found 7 traits of elite captains, which separate true leaders from the rest of the pack. On of them stood out for me: “Strong convictions and the courage to stand apart”.
When I started my career as a PM, I worked on a new product that underpinned one of the companies most strategic initiatives: A multi product strategy. After a few months, and making some sense of what I was doing, I realized that this product, at least with the current strategy, was not going to succeed. I felt compelled to inform senior management, not to shoot something down but to shift the strategy towards an improved outcome. The management team, who have been part of the product’s journey since its inception, didn’t agree with the shift. Not only that, I was labelled “overly critical”. It was a tough time, but at the same time it helped enforce the thought that anyone should speak up and make a stand, especially when it’s “a hill to die on”. They key point here is to be clear about your own motivation: Is it the team(s) success or your own idea of how things should be done?
“The Culture Map” by Erin Meyer
“The Italians are always late…”, “The Germans are always so overly correct”, “You can’t get anything done in Turkiyë unless you know someone…”
These were some clichés that I grew up with, but interestingly, as I started working more with customers and colleagues from different cultures, some of these clichés seem to hold some truths.
Erin’s book is an eye opener that brings a structure to those perceptions, a way to distinguish nuances along 8 different categories. The book is filled with real life examples that really help understand other cultures and their behavior better, and help you approach a multi-cultural environment in your day-to-day job.
One category addresses the aspect of hierarchy and the influence a leader asserts. Living in the Netherlands, hierarchies here are usually flat, even in large companies the CEO is just “Maarten”. I also worked with teams in India, are more hierarchical country compared to the Netherlands, where the manager holds more authority even in “normal” meetings. Once you realize the differences, you can adjust your own behaviour. For example, in meetings with my Netherlands based teams everyone was giving feedback freely, regardless of their position or role. With my team based in India, everyone was usually looking at the groups manager to respond to my inquiries. The book describes ways to deal with these situations, in my case it was a simple thing: Calling team members out by name to get their responses ahead of the managers response.
I can recommend this book for anyone working in an international setup: Colleagues in another country, or customers. But even if you plan to travel abroad this is a brilliant read.
“Calling Bullshit” by Carl T. Bergstrom & Jevin D. West
There is a saying I grew up with “Do not believe any statistics you haven’t faked yourself”. Although I’m a ‘numbers person’ who values data for making smart decisions, I recognize data is not the sole answer.
Unfortunately, you will face or have faced people from the ends of the spectrum. I call them “fanatics” and “deniers”, where the former love to go as deep as possible in their analysis and base entire strategies on a spreadsheet. The latter are the ones that don’t believe in the value of data at all, and only use it if it supports their opinion.
“Calling Bullshit” will help you deal with both groups, as they share a common approach: Pulling out statistics that support their cause. It will help you spot the subtle ways people use data in their own “advantage”, and fight the bias that stands in the way of a more rational decision making.
I still remember a presentation given by a former colleague about a research project that was initiated to look at potential trade-offs on a strategic topic. At the end of the presentation, conclusions were drawn and a set of actions was proposed. What appeared strange to parts of the audience was that the percentages shown were rather “round”. When questioned about the sample size, which the presenter had omitted, it turns out that it was only 20.
“Demand Side Sales” by Bob Moesta
Regardless of whether your company is Sales-Led, Product-Led, or follows a hybrid model, sales are essential for business growth.
Where we have it wrong in a lot of cases is that we look at sales from our, the provider’s, perspective. Sales is not tied to having a sales force, a group of sellers that goes out and actively convinces customers to buy. Sales happens when a customer has a problem, realizes that there is a better way and needs help moving on to a new state.
Bob’s book outlines key concepts that explain the forces that hold people back and drive them towards that new situation, and the fundamental impact it can have on every part of the customers buying journey.
I looked at it through the lense of Product Management, and apart from the opportunity to create more synergies with between Marketing, Sales and Product, there are some concrete and fundamental steps you can take.
We started applying it in two areas, one is reviewing our positioning. At the moment our messaging is full of our technical advantages, how much better our features are over that of the competition. Don’t get me wrong, these are recognized and proven, and users do like what we have created. But the technology is an enabler und doesn’t stand for a persons problem, and exactly this translation is left to the customer if you, as a vendor, market only your features.
This approach allows for a more holistic view of the situation where also the anxiety of the “new“ needs to be addressed. Any company switching Enterprise Software knows that migration is a big topic. As Product team we immediately think of migration tooling, or if we don’t offer that we convince customers that starting fresh is actually the better solution. (Which might be the case). However, the anxiety doesn’t necessarily lie in moving what you have over to the new solution, it lies deeper: On day 1 of switching to the new solution, will everyone be able to continue to work without interruption? Addressing the migration phase from multiple angles including the licensing, project management or any other aspect will reduce the anxiety and make a decision more likely.
Parting words
“My initial list was much longer, but after several reviews, I narrowed it down to these six. As I’ve mentioned, I’m an avid reader. 📚
I’m always on the lookout for more insightful reads. If you have any recommendations, please share them in the comments or send me a message!”
