A product management reading list
I was recently updating our Product notion page at Monzo and ended up totally geeking out and writing a very long reading list. It’s full of stuff to read that’s either influenced me directly or which I’ve sent to people to describe core concepts like growth accounting.
I put this list together because we’re hiring PMs pretty fast and almost all of them ask for reading material on the way in. We also have a lot of people at Monzo who came from traditional banks in search of a new way of doing things. They really want to understand how this “product” thing works. So this list is for them too.
There’s a mix of old and new. I’ve got the Apple Human Interface Guidelines from 1987 on the list because it’s still one of the best things ever written about how to design interfaces for humans. And then there are short, kind of annoying posts from Farnham Street that illustrate concepts like second order thinking. Is this the best exposition on secondary and tertiary effects? Almost certainly not. But it does the trick in a quick and dirty way.
Anyway, I hope you find it valuable. Maybe there will be something in here which will cause you to think a bit differently, or understand a problem you’re working on from a new angle. Maybe a fully baked growth accounting visualisation will show you something surprising about your product and cause you to turn left where you would have otherwise turned right. Maybe a refresher on Metcalfe’s Law will lead you to prioritise social features, or “Why Speedboats Win and Tankers Sink” will lead you to re-emphasise the value of empiricism in your organisation.
And if you’ve got good stuff to read that isn’t on this list, please share.
Cheers!
Articles and videos
Building Good Products
We Don't Sell Saddles Here by Stewart Butterfield
The 4 Stages of 0→1 Products by Julie Zhuo
The Next Feature Fallacy by Andrew Chen
Why Speedboats Win and Tankers Sink by our very own Mikkel Dengsøe
Casey's Guide to Finding Product/Market Fit by Casey Winters
Diligence at Social Capital series is absolutely essential reading
Purpose: the heart of the builder by Sep Kamvar from Mastery and Mimicry
Defining Product Success: Metrics and Goals by Chandra Narayanan, et al
What is Retention? by the Sequoia Data Science team
Training your product intuition by Merci Victoria Grace
How bad ideas get on the roadmap by Christian Bonilla
WTF is Strategy? by Vince Law
Featuritis vs. the Happy User Peak by Kathy Sierra
Nine Business Models and the Metrics Investors Want video by Anu Hariharan (an investor in Monzo)
Product Growth
How to build a growth team — lessons from Uber, Hubspot, and others by Andrew Chen
How to Set Up, Hire and Scale a Growth Strategy and Team by Anu Hariharan
The Power User Curve: The best way to understand your most engaged users by Andrew Chen
Quick Ratio as a Shortcut to Understand Product Growth by Ekaterina Skorobogatova
Videos:
Growth by Alex Schultz
How we put Facebook on the path to 1 billion users by Chamath Palihapitiya
Metrics and Hiring for your Growth Team by Anu Harihan and Gustaf Alstromer
Product Management
Facebook product sense interview (everything you need to know) by IGotAnOffer is a great guide to how to think as a product manager
Good Product Manager/Bad Product Manager by Ben Horowitz is good to read but a bit outdated
How to Work with Designers by Julie Zhuo
Building companies
Coordination Headwinds: Organisations Are Like Slime Molds by Alex Komoroske
Book Review: Talent by Zvi Mowshowitz
High Standards by Jeff Bezos
Individuals matter by Dan Luu
Prioritise the Highest Order Bit by Cedric Chin
Do Things That Don't Scale by Paul Graham
Practical Thought about Practical Thought: Turning $2 Million Into $2 Trillion by Charlie Munger
Software is Eating the World by Marc Andreessen
Ways of thinking
Mental Models: The Best Way to Make Intelligent Decisions (~100 Models Explained) from Farnham Street
Second-Order Thinking: What Smart People Use to Outperform from Farnham Street
The Revised Psychology of Human Misjudgment by Charlie Munger
Ways of working
How to Set KPIs and Goals by Adora Cheung
Completed Staff Work by Tom Watson Jr of IBM
Mark Zuckerberg's Letter to Investors — focus on "The Hacker Way" section
Jeff Bezos: People who are 'right a lot' make decisions differently than everyone else — here's how — it's a click bait headline but it's right
The Motivation Wave video by BJ Fogg — When you have high willpower/motivation, do (1) hard things that structure future behavior; (2) hard things that make future behaviors easier; (3) hard things that increase your capability/skills.
Books
Ways of thinking
Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows and Diana Wright
Thinking Strategically by Avinash Dixit and Barry Nalebuff is a good introduction to Game Theory
Building
Nudge: The Final Edition by Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler
Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey A. Moore
Design
The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman
The Laws of Simplicity by John Maeda
Human Interface Guidelines: The Apple Desktop Interface by Apple
Teams
High Output Management by Andy Grove
Crucial Conversations — Tools for talking when stakes are high by Kerry Patterson, et al
Organisational Culture and Leadership by Edgar Schein
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni
Self, Philosophy, Other
Mindset by Carol Dweck
The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz
Principles: Life and Work by Ray Dalio
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius