Marty Cagan
I'm a founder and partner at Silicon Valley Product Group, former product leader at eBay, Netscape and HP. Author of INSPIRED and EMPOWERED.
20+ Book Recommendations by Marty Cagan
INSPIRED
Marty Cagan
Product friends: if you haven't read INSPIRED, Amazon US is running a Cyber special this week of $3.99 for the Kindle version: https://t.co/rWYyP5XnUK
EMPOWERED
Marty Cagan
Product friends: if you've been thinking about reading EMPOWERED, Amazon US is running a Black Friday special of $3.99 for the Kindle version: https://t.co/v35olAVSaR
EMPOWERED
Marty Cagan
If you've been wanting to read EMPOWERED, https://t.co/BXuZnf7lZV is running a promotion today (July 10), offering the Kindle version for $3.99: https://t.co/Z3aw6IVyK7
Loved
Martina Lauchengco
I just listened to the LOVED audio book sample and @mavinmartina sounds like a professional narrator - she makes it seem easy (it's not!). For those that prefer listening rather than reading, check out: https://t.co/kGpJCesJan
Continuous Discovery Habits
Teresa Torres
Obviously I'm more than a little biased, but I truly believe this is the right 3 books for aspiring strong product people to get their career started in the right direction: https://t.co/bPBwcCaeZI
Empowered
Marty Cagan
Great teams are comprised of ordinary people that are empowered and inspired. They are empowered to solve hard problems in ways their customers love yet work for their business. They are inspired with ideas and techniques for quickly evaluating those ideas to discover solutions that work: they are valuable, usable, feasible and viable. This book is about the idea and reality of "achieving extraordinary results from ordinary people". Empowered is the companion to Inspired. It addresses the other half of the problem of building tech productshow to get the absolute best work from your product teams. However, the books message applies much more broadly than just to product teams. Inspired was aimed at product managers. Empowered is aimed at all levels of technology-powered organizations: founders and CEO's, leaders of product, technology and design, and the countless product managers, product designers and engineers that comprise the teams. This book will not just inspire companies to empower their employees but will teach them how. This book will help readers achieve the benefits of truly empowered teams.Obviously I'm more than a little biased, but I truly believe this is the right 3 books for aspiring strong product people to get their career started in the right direction: https://t.co/bPBwcCaeZI
Inspired
Marty Cagan
How do today's most successful tech companies—Amazon, Google, Facebook, Netflix, Tesla—define, design and develop the products that have earned the love of literally billions of people around the world? Perhaps surprisingly, they do it very differently than the vast majority of tech companies. In INSPIRED, technology product management thought leader Marty Cagan provides readers with a master class in how to structure and staff an empowered and effective product organization, and how to discover and deliver technology products that your customers will love—and that will work for your business. With sections on assembling the right people and skills, discovering the right product, embracing an effective yet lightweight process, scaling the product organization, and creating a strong product culture, readers can take the information they learn and immediately leverage it within their own organizations—dramatically improving their own product efforts. Whether you're an early stage startup working to get to product/market fit, or a growth-stage company working to scale your organization, or a large, long-established company trying to regain your ability to consistently deliver new value for your customers, INSPIRED will take you and your product organization to a new level of customer engagement, consistent innovation, and business success. Filled with the author's own personal stories—and profiles of some of today's most-successful product managers and technology-powered product companies, including Adobe, Apple, BBC, Google, Microsoft, and Netflix—INSPIRED will show you how to turn up the dial of your own product efforts, creating technology products your customers love. The first edition of INSPIRED, published ten years ago, established itself as the primary reference for technology product managers, and can be found on the shelves of nearly every successful technology product company worldwide. This thoroughly updated second edition shares the same objective of being the most valuable resource for technology product managers, yet it is completely new—sharing the latest practices and techniques of today's most-successful tech product companies, and the men and women behind every great product.Obviously I'm more than a little biased, but I truly believe this is the right 3 books for aspiring strong product people to get their career started in the right direction: https://t.co/bPBwcCaeZI
The Inmates Are Running the Asylum
Alan Cooper
Examines how increasingly complicated computer technology has outpaced the ability of the average consumer to use it without frustration and calls for changes that will bring computer technology in line with how average people think@tannerc fyi, this is from one of my favorite books: https://t.co/W1wpxxSkWL
Continuous Discovery Habits
Teresa Torres
Today Teresa's @ttorres new book Continuous Discovery Habits finally launched. I can tell you she put serious hours and effort into this book, and it fills a real gap in the available offerings. I view it as an important complement to INSPIRED: https://t.co/O300f22M3O
Working Backwards
Colin Bryar
Working Backwards is an insider's breakdown of Amazon's approach to culture, leadership, and best practices from Colin Bryar and Bill Carr, two long-time, top-level Amazon executives...@hansen_tsui https://t.co/tv4JzxnHXj and also https://t.co/oYxFcOejLb
Working Backwards
Colin Bryar
Working Backwards is an insider's breakdown of Amazon's approach to culture, leadership, and best practices from Colin Bryar and Bill Carr, two long-time, top-level Amazon executives...@JaceDeloney @laurenruth @chris_svpg very detailed explanation in the new book: https://t.co/zULUpwKBLQ
Build What Matters
Ben Foster
congrats to Ben Foster (@fosterinnovates) on the launch of his new book: Build What Matters. Lots of good advice. https://t.co/5hUIPJCdtM
Empowered
Marty Cagan
Great teams are comprised of ordinary people that are empowered and inspired. They are empowered to solve hard problems in ways their customers love yet work for their business. They are inspired with ideas and techniques for quickly evaluating those ideas to discover solutions that work: they are valuable, usable, feasible and viable. This book is about the idea and reality of "achieving extraordinary results from ordinary people". Empowered is the companion to Inspired. It addresses the other half of the problem of building tech productshow to get the absolute best work from your product teams. However, the books message applies much more broadly than just to product teams. Inspired was aimed at product managers. Empowered is aimed at all levels of technology-powered organizations: founders and CEO's, leaders of product, technology and design, and the countless product managers, product designers and engineers that comprise the teams. This book will not just inspire companies to empower their employees but will teach them how. This book will help readers achieve the benefits of truly empowered teams.EMPOWERED now available for pre-order on Amazon: https://t.co/xtbMQxEVlE
The Making of a Manager
Julie Zhuo
Instant Wall Street Journal Bestseller! Congratulations, you're a manager! After you pop the champagne, accept the shiny new title, and step into this thrilling next chapter of your career, the truth descends like a fog: you don't really know what you're doing. That's exactly how Julie Zhuo felt when she became a rookie manager at the age of 25. She stared at a long list of logistics--from hiring to firing, from meeting to messaging, from planning to pitching--and faced a thousand questions and uncertainties. How was she supposed to spin teamwork into value? How could she be a good steward of her reports' careers? What was the secret to leading with confidence in new and unexpected situations? Now, having managed dozens of teams spanning tens to hundreds of people, Julie knows the most important lesson of all: great managers are made, not born. If you care enough to be reading this, then you care enough to be a great manager. The Making of a Manager is a modern field guide packed everyday examples and transformative insights, including: * How to tell a great manager from an average manager (illustrations included) * When you should look past an awkward interview and hire someone anyway * How to build trust with your reports through not being a boss * Where to look when you lose faith and lack the answers Whether you're new to the job, a veteran leader, or looking to be promoted, this is the handbook you need to be the kind of manager you wish you had.I finally had a chance to read "The Making of a Manager" by @joulee - if you're a manager of product, design or engineering for a company built on empowered product teams, it's worth your time - Julie and I have learned a lot of the same hard lessons: https://t.co/1IpuH15iH9
Car Guys vs. Bean Counters
Bob Lutz
@gbufremsays here's a book not many people know about but it's very relevant to so many companies today, but comes with a big caveat: you have to ignore his misguided political rants, and just focus on what he calls "car guys" which we would call "product person": https://t.co/JkzJCDXPbP
Whistleblower
Susan Fowler
1/ I just finished the remarkable new book by @susanthesquark: https://t.co/BQVKz7lO98
Intentional Integrity
Robert Chesnut
I am excited that my friend Rob Chestnut (Chief Ethics Officer at AirBnB) new book is now available for pre-order: "Intentional Integrity - How Smart Companies Can Lead an Ethical Revolution" https://t.co/39LxRVkYgp
What You Do Is Who You Are
Ben Horowitz
Ben Horowitz, a leading venture capitalist, modern management expert, and New York Times bestselling author, combines lessons both from history and from modern organizational practice with practical and often surprising advice to help executives build cultures that can weather both good and bad times. Ben Horowitz has long been fascinated by history, and particularly by how people behave differently than you’d expect. The time and circumstances in which they were raised often shapes them—yet a few leaders have managed to shape their times. In What You Do Is Who You Are, he turns his attention to a question crucial to every organization: how do you create and sustain the culture you want? To Horowitz, culture is how a company makes decisions. It is the set of assumptions employees use to resolve everyday problems: should I stay at the Red Roof Inn, or the Four Seasons? Should we discuss the color of this product for five minutes or thirty hours? If culture is not purposeful, it will be an accident or a mistake. What You Do Is Who You Are explains how to make your culture purposeful by spotlighting four models of leadership and culture-building—the leader of the only successful slave revolt, Haiti’s Toussaint Louverture; the Samurai, who ruled Japan for seven hundred years and shaped modern Japanese culture; Genghis Khan, who built the world’s largest empire; and Shaka Senghor, an American ex-con who created the most formidable prison gang in the yard and ultimately transformed prison culture. Horowitz connects these leadership examples to modern case-studies, including how Louverture’s cultural techniques were applied (or should have been) by Reed Hastings at Netflix, Travis Kalanick at Uber, and Hillary Clinton, and how Genghis Khan’s vision of cultural inclusiveness has parallels in the work of Don Thompson, the first African-American CEO of McDonalds, and of Maggie Wilderotter, the CEO who led Frontier Communications. Horowitz then offers guidance to help any company understand its own strategy and build a successful culture. What You Do Is Who You Are is a journey through culture, from ancient to modern. Along the way, it answers a question fundamental to any organization: who are we? How do people talk about us when we’re not around? How do we treat our customers? Are we there for people in a pinch? Can we be trusted? Who you are is not the values you list on the wall. It’s not what you say in company-wide meeting. It’s not your marketing campaign. It’s not even what you believe. Who you are is what you do. This book aims to help you do the things you need to become the kind of leader you want to be—and others want to follow.I just finished the new @bhorowitz book, "What You Do Is Who You Are" - pretty tough job to follow up his earlier book, but he did. It's truly exceptional. I am encouraging every founder, CEO and head of product I know to please read: https://t.co/YBAbSkQZ9g
Car Guys vs. Bean Counters
Bob Lutz
In 2001, General Motors hired Bob Lutz out of retirement with a mandate to save the company by making great cars again. He launched a war against penny pinching, office politics, turf wars and risk avoidance. After declaring bankruptcy during the recession of 2008, GM is back on track thanks to its embrace of Lutz's philosophy. Lutz's common sense lessons (with a generous helping of fascinating anecdotes) will inspire readers at any company facing the bean counter analysis-paralysis menace.the disease of so many large old businesses - but in this case lives were lost: https://t.co/Dt3nnjaKTE - same basic story as: https://t.co/TxLEOOiKpK
Educated
Tara Westover
‘An amazing story, and truly inspiring. The kind of book everyone will enjoy. IT’S EVEN BETTER THAN YOU’VE HEARD.’ – Bill Gates Selected as a book of the year by AMAZON, THE TIMES, SUNDAY TIMES, GUARDIAN, NEW YORK TIMES, ECONOMIST, NEW STATESMAN, VOGUE, IRISH TIMES, IRISH EXAMINER and RED MAGAZINE THE MULTI-MILLION COPY BESTSELLER A Book of the Decade, 2010-2020 (Independent) ________________________ Tara Westover and her family grew up preparing for the End of Days but, according to the government, she didn’t exist. She hadn’t been registered for a birth certificate. She had no school records because she’d never set foot in a classroom, and no medical records because her father didn’t believe in hospitals. As she grew older, her father became more radical and her brother more violent. At sixteen, Tara knew she had to leave home. In doing so she discovered both the transformative power of education, and the price she had to pay for it. ________________________ · From one of TIME magazine's 100 most influential people of 2019 · Shortlisted for the 2018 BAMB Readers' Awards · Recommended as a summer read by Barack Obama, Antony Beevor, India Knight, Blake Morrison and Nina Stibbe@audcrane @business Thank you Audrey! The coolest part is in the pic my book is directly under Educated, which was my personal favorite book of 2018. Basking in the proximity.
The No Asshole Rule
Robert I. Sutton PhD
The No Asshole Rule is a New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today and Business Week bestseller.@Tilly_Kammeron check out the book "the no asshole rule" by Bob Sutton
Measure What Matters
John Doerr
I just finished reading Measure What Matters. Felipe's review is fair - roughly half the examples of key results are lists of activities rather than business results. However, there are other big benefits of OKR's, and the book does a good job overall - worth reading. https://t.co/xipngZy0Is
Inspired
Marty Cagan
How do today's most successful tech companies—Amazon, Google, Facebook, Netflix, Tesla—define, design and develop the products that have earned the love of literally billions of people around the world? Perhaps surprisingly, they do it very differently than the vast majority of tech companies. In INSPIRED, technology product management thought leader Marty Cagan provides readers with a master class in how to structure and staff an empowered and effective product organization, and how to discover and deliver technology products that your customers will love—and that will work for your business. With sections on assembling the right people and skills, discovering the right product, embracing an effective yet lightweight process, scaling the product organization, and creating a strong product culture, readers can take the information they learn and immediately leverage it within their own organizations—dramatically improving their own product efforts. Whether you're an early stage startup working to get to product/market fit, or a growth-stage company working to scale your organization, or a large, long-established company trying to regain your ability to consistently deliver new value for your customers, INSPIRED will take you and your product organization to a new level of customer engagement, consistent innovation, and business success. Filled with the author's own personal stories—and profiles of some of today's most-successful product managers and technology-powered product companies, including Adobe, Apple, BBC, Google, Microsoft, and Netflix—INSPIRED will show you how to turn up the dial of your own product efforts, creating technology products your customers love. The first edition of INSPIRED, published ten years ago, established itself as the primary reference for technology product managers, and can be found on the shelves of nearly every successful technology product company worldwide. This thoroughly updated second edition shares the same objective of being the most valuable resource for technology product managers, yet it is completely new—sharing the latest practices and techniques of today's most-successful tech product companies, and the men and women behind every great product.@chadfowler look no further: https://t.co/f8zijrWyS4
Principles
Ray Dalio
#1 New York Times Bestseller “Significant...The book is both instructive and surprisingly moving.” —The New York Times Ray Dalio, one of the world’s most successful investors and entrepreneurs, shares the unconventional principles that he’s developed, refined, and used over the past forty years to create unique results in both life and business—and which any person or organization can adopt to help achieve their goals. In 1975, Ray Dalio founded an investment firm, Bridgewater Associates, out of his two-bedroom apartment in New York City. Forty years later, Bridgewater has made more money for its clients than any other hedge fund in history and grown into the fifth most important private company in the United States, according to Fortune magazine. Dalio himself has been named to Time magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people in the world. Along the way, Dalio discovered a set of unique principles that have led to Bridgewater’s exceptionally effective culture, which he describes as “an idea meritocracy that strives to achieve meaningful work and meaningful relationships through radical transparency.” It is these principles, and not anything special about Dalio—who grew up an ordinary kid in a middle-class Long Island neighborhood—that he believes are the reason behind his success. In Principles, Dalio shares what he’s learned over the course of his remarkable career. He argues that life, management, economics, and investing can all be systemized into rules and understood like machines. The book’s hundreds of practical lessons, which are built around his cornerstones of “radical truth” and “radical transparency,” include Dalio laying out the most effective ways for individuals and organizations to make decisions, approach challenges, and build strong teams. He also describes the innovative tools the firm uses to bring an idea meritocracy to life, such as creating “baseball cards” for all employees that distill their strengths and weaknesses, and employing computerized decision-making systems to make believability-weighted decisions. While the book brims with novel ideas for organizations and institutions, Principles also offers a clear, straightforward approach to decision-making that Dalio believes anyone can apply, no matter what they’re seeking to achieve. Here, from a man who has been called both “the Steve Jobs of investing” and “the philosopher king of the financial universe” (CIO magazine), is a rare opportunity to gain proven advice unlike anything you’ll find in the conventional business press.in my view, the most important business book of 2017: @RayDalio's Principles; I wrote about why at https://t.co/oCGDgqk6KZ
Sprint
Jake Knapp
@agringaus https://t.co/vvnnxsg5Pp
The Hard Thing About Hard Things
Ben Horowitz
trust me: if you're a leader in tech, the best thing you can do in 2014 for your company is to read @bhorowitz book: http://t.co/qfAlSuWPEc
UX for Lean Startups
Laura Klein
Creating a great user experience doesn’t have to be a lengthy or expensive process. This hands-on book shows you how to use Lean UX techniques to do it faster and smarter. You’ll learn how to tighten the iteration loop, get more customer feedback, reduce the time it takes to get great products to market, and build something your customers will truly love. User Experience expert Laura Klein gets you right to work with specific tips on how to make design and research quick, flexible, and measurable enough to work in a Lean environment. Rather than bog you down with a high-level discussion of Lean UX, UX for Lean Startups offers a series of standalone chapters that let you concentrate on those areas most important to your startup. The advice Laura Klein provides in this book comes from more than 15 years of working with startups and building great user experiences.My favorite book yet in the Lean series, and Lean UX book I've been waiting for: UX For Lean Startups by Laura Klein: http://t.co/eK1uOohdAR
The Lean Startup
Eric Ries
Outlines a revisionist approach to management while arguing against common perceptions about the inevitability of startup failures, explaining the importance of providing genuinely needed products and services as well as organizing a business that can adapt to continuous customer feedback.just posted my views on the new book "The Lean Startup" exec summary: buy it. See http://t.co/j9I0TVOs #leanstartup