I’m a product development nut. And I’m a book junkie. I love this stuff. I recently moved to Raleigh, NC (from always blissful Santa Barbara, CA) to work at Pendo.io, a startup focused on helping product managers build awesome products. You can find me on Twitter at @johncutlefish.
It occurred to me today that my Kindle collection was starting to get pretty large. Poking around Amazon I realized that you can actually get a list of all your purchased books. It isn’t a perfect list (the titles are cut off), but it gives you enough information to find the book. The kicker was getting an email from a friend asking for some book recommendations. So I decided to share the current state of the book list with her (and you).
This covers the topics that interest me: leadership, UX, startups, cognitive bias, product management, Agile, management, complexity theory, marketing, design thinking, system thinking, data, analytics, hypothesis-driven development, product development, self-improvement, communication, organization design, lean, kanban, collaboration, and generally figuring out ways groups of people can continuously improve and build useful stuff.
I’ve read each of these books. I’m a big believer that there is never a magic bullet. None of these books presents the definitive “way”. Where there is a “why” (and inspiration, and rigor, and an open mind), there are a host of tools that can help get you there. Choose wisely.
Books
- #Workout: Games, Tools & Practices to Engage People, Improve..
Jurgen Appelo - 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People (Voices..
Susan Weinschenk - Agile Business: A Leader’s Guide to Harnessing Complexity
Bob Gower - Agile Experience Design: A Digital Designer’s Guide to..
Lindsay Ratcliffe - Agile Product Management with Scrum: Creating Products that..
Roman Pichler - All Edge: Inside the New Workplace Networks
Clay Spinuzzi - Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (Incerto)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb - Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management (Pragmatic..
Johanna Rothman - Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error
Kathryn Schulz - Blinkracy: A Step-by-Step Guide to Make Any Company..
Sebastian Klein - Bootstrapping Using Services: Entrepreneur Journeys
Sramana Mitra - Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy
Martin Lindstrom - Conversion Optimization: The Art and Science of Converting..
Khalid Saleh - Crucial Conversations Tools for Talking When Stakes Are..
Kerry Patterson - Data Driven Design: How Today’s Product Designer Approaches..
Phillip A. Harris - Designing the Conversation: Techniques for Successful..
Russ Unger - Disciplined Entrepreneurship: 24 Steps to a Successful..
Bill Aulet - Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup
Brad Feld - Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web..
Steve Krug - Drift into Failure: From Hunting Broken Components to..
Sidney Dekker - Ending the Management Illusion: How to Drive Business..
Hersh Shefrin - Exponential Organizations: Why new organizations are ten..
Salim Ismail - Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days
Jessica Livingston - Getting Results the Agile Way: A Personal Results System for..
J.D. Meier - Getting to Yes with Yourself: (and Other Worthy Opponents)
William Ury - Habit Stacking: 97 Small Life Changes That Take Five Minutes..
S.J. Scott - Holacracy: The New Management System for a Rapidly Changing.. Brian Robertson
- How Google Works
Eric Schmidt - How To Be The Luckiest Person Alive!
James Altucher - How to Change the World: Change Management 3.0
Jurgen Appelo - How to Make Sense of Any Mess: Information Architecture for..
Abby Covert - Impact Mapping: Making a big impact with software products..
Gojko Adzic - Implementing Lean Software Development: From Concept to Cash..
Mary Poppendieck - Influence (Collins Business Essentials)
Cialdini PhD - Inspired: How To Create Products Customers Love
Marty Cagan - Intertwingled: Information Changes Everything
Peter Morville - Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights
Steve Portigal - Joel on Software
Joel Spolsky - Kanban
David J. Anderson - Kanban from the Inside: Understand the Kanban Method,..
Mike Burrows - Lean Analytics: Use Data to Build a Better Startup Faster..
Alistair Croll - Lean Change Management: Innovative practices for managing..
Jason Little - Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate..
Jez Humble - Lean from the Trenches: Managing Large-Scale Projects with..
Henrik Kniberg - Lean Marketing for Startups: Agile Product Development,..
Sean Ellis - Lean UX: Applying Lean Principles to Improve User Experience
Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden - Learn or Die: Using Science to Build a Leading-Edge Learning..
Edward D Hess - Lessons in Agile Management: On the Road to Kanban
David J Anderson - Let’s Stop Meeting Like This: Tools to Save Time and Get..
Dick Axelrod - Life is Short And So Is This Book: Brief Thoughts On Making..
Peter Atkins - Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small..
Peter Sims - Management 3.0: Leading Agile Developers, Developing Agile..
Jurgen Appelo - Measuring the User Experience: Collecting, Analyzing, and..
William Albert - Mindset: The New Psychology of Success
Carol Dweck - Nail It then Scale It: The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Creating..
Nathan Furr - No One Understands You and What to Do About It
Heidi Halvorson - Once a Runner: A Novel
Parker Jr. - Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life
TonianneDeMariaBarry - Pitch Anything: An Innovative Method for Presenting,..
Oren Klaff - Poke the Box
Seth Godin - Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind
Al Ries - Predictably Irrational, Revised and Expanded Edition: The..
Dan Ariely - Purple People Leader
Chester Goad - Quantifying the User Experience: Practical Statistics for..
Jeff Sauro - Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations..
Frederic Laloux - Rework
Jason Fried - Rocket Surgery Made Easy: The Do-It-Yourself Guide to..
Steve Krug - Running Lean: Iterate from Plan A to a Plan That Works (Lean..
Ash Maurya - Scaling Up
Verne Harnish - Scrumban: Essays on Kanban Systems for Lean Software..
Corey Ladas - Self-Reliance
Ralph Waldo Emerson - Seven Databases in Seven Weeks: A Guide to Modern Databases..
Eric Redmond - Signals and Boundaries: Building Blocks for Complex Adaptive..
John H. Holland - Statistics Done Wrong: The Woefully Complete Guide
Alex Reinhart - Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard
Chip Heath - TAPE SUCKS: Inside Data Domain, A Silicon Valley Growth..
Frank Slootman - Team Geek: A Software Developer’s Guide to Working Well with..
Brian Fitzpatrick - The 8 Qualities of Drama Free Teams: Do More. Stress Less
Dennis McIntee - The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and..
Seth Godin - The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning..
Peter M. Senge - The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When..
Ben Horowitz - The Human Side of Agile — How to Help Your Team Deliver
Gil Broza - The Innovator’s Hypothesis: How Cheap Experiments Are Worth..
Michael Schrage - The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management: Reinventing the..
Stephen Denning - The Lean Mindset: Ask the Right Questions
Mary Poppendieck - The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous..
Eric Ries - The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering,..
Frederick P. Brooks - The Open Organization: Igniting Passion and Performance
Jim Whitehurst - The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and..
Charles Duhigg - The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second..
Donald G. Reinertsen - The Startup Owner’s Manual: The Step-by-Step Guide for..
steve blank - The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Douglas Adams - The User Experience Team of One: A Research and Design..
Leah Buley - The War Of Art: Winning the Inner Creative Battle
Steven Pressfield - Thinking in Systems: A Primer
Meadows. Donella - Thinking, Fast and Slow
Daniel Kahneman - Tough Sh*t: Life Advice from a Fat, Lazy Slob Who Did Good
Kevin Smith - User Interface Inspection Methods: A User-Centered Design..
Chauncey Wilson - User Stories Applied: For Agile Software Development..
Mike Cohn - User Story Mapping: Discover the Whole Story, Build the..
Jeff Patton - Web Analytics 2.0: The Art of Online Accountability and..
Avinash Kaushik - Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to..
Cesar Hidalgo - Why Plans Fail: Cognitive Bias, Decision Making, and Your..
Jim Benson - Wiser: Getting Beyond Groupthink to Make Groups Smarter
Cass R. Sunstein - Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform..
Laszlo Bock - Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing..
Herminia Ibarra - Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
Peter Thiel Thanks! Did I get anyone’s name wrong? Do the links within Medium work? Did I miss someone? Do you have other recommendations? Let me know …