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

  • Metcalfe's Law

  • 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

  • Brian Armstrong's new PM letter

  • 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

  • The Great Mental Models Volume 1: General Thinking Concepts

  • The Great Mental Models Volume 3: Systems and Mathematics

  • 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