Essential Reading for Founders, Product Managers and Agile Marketers

November 24, 2012

This is like a hackers guide to levelling up in the software development world. If you don’t know a lot about Agile, software development practices or customer development read through the following books and you’ll be conversational.

User Story Mapping – Jeff Patton

Brilliant approach to collaborating to gain a shared understanding of what a team is trying to achieve – solving customer problems in the most effective manner. Definitely read this.

Business Model Generation – Alexander Osterwalder

The product management team at Atlassian picked this up back in 2010. It won’t take you long to read through this book – the exercises are the key takeaway and you will need to set aside time for those.

Ash Maurya riffed on this and came up with the Lean Canvas which is aimed at entrepreneurs. You can use Confluence to build lean canvas’ too.

The Lean Startup – Eric Ries

I was fortunate enough to interview Eric at Summit 2012. Fascinating stuff to be found in The Lean Startup.

All of Eric’s writing evolved from Steve Blank’s book The Four Steps to the Epiphany, now superseded by The Startup Owner’s Manual. I am yet to read The Startup Owner’s Manual, but I did catch Steve’s keynote at SF Agile – gold!

Switch – Chip & Dan Heath

Get it, read it. One of the earlier books in my Product Management career that helped me understand how to change behaviour. Looking back, reminds me of work by Nir Eyal and Seth Godin.