đ 9 Books That Will Help in Product Development
Today I share with you my TOP 9 books that will help you in product development and management. In my personal opinion đ
1. Rework
â Goodreads rating: 3.97. One of my favourite books in general.
Rework shows you a better, faster, easier way to succeed in business. Read it and youâll know why plans are actually harmful, why you donât need outside investors, and why youâre better off ignoring the competition. The truth is, you need less than you think. You donât need to be a workaholic. You donât need to staff up. You donât need to waste time on paperwork or meetings. You donât even need an office. Those are all just excuses.
What you really need to do is stop talking and start working. This book shows you the way. Youâll learn how to be more productive, how to get exposure without breaking the bank, and tons more counterintuitive ideas that will inspire and provoke you.
With its straightforward language and easy-is-better approach, Rework is the perfect playbook for anyone whoâs ever dreamed of doing it on their own. Hardcore entrepreneurs, small-business owners, people stuck in day jobs they hate, victims of âdownsizingâ, and artists who donât want to starve anymore will all find valuable guidance in these pages.
2. The Product Book
â Goodreads rating: 4.13.
âNo one asked you to show up.â Every experienced product manager has heard some version of those words at some point in their career. Think about a company. Engineers build the product. Designers make sure it has a great user experience and looks good. Marketing makes sure customers know about the product. Sales get potential customers to open their wallets to buy the product. What more does a company need? What does a product manager do?
Based upon Product Schoolâs curriculum, which has helped thousands of students become great product managers, The Product Book answers that question. Filled with practical advice, best practices, and expert tips, this book is here to help you succeed!
Product School offers product management classes taught by real-world product managers, who work at renowned tech companies like Google, Facebook, Snapchat, Airbnb, LinkedIn, PayPal, Netflix and more. The classes are designed to fit into your work schedule, and the campuses are conveniently located in Silicon Valley, San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York.
3. Getting Real: The Smarter, Faster, Easier Way to Build a Web Application
â Goodreads rating: 3.98.
Getting Real is the business, design, programming, and marketing philosophies of 37signals â a developer of web-based software used by over 1 million people and businesses in 70 countries.
Why is the book relevant?
37signals used the unconventional Getting Real process to launch five successful web-based applications (Basecamp, Campfire, Backpack, Writeboard, Ta-da List), and Ruby on Rails, an open-source web application framework, in just two years with no funding, no debt, and only 7 people.
Whatâs in it for me?
Anyone working on a web app â including entrepreneurs, designers, programmers, executives, or marketers â will find value, fresh perspectives, and inspiration in this practical book. At under 200 pages, itâs quick reading too. Makes a great aeroplane book.
4. The 1-Page Marketing Plan: Get New Customers, Make More Money, And Stand out From The Crowd
â Goodreads rating: 4.31.
To build a successful business, you need to stop doing random acts of marketing and start following a reliable plan for rapid business growth. Traditionally, creating a marketing plan has been a difficult and time-consuming process, which is why it often doesnât get done.
In The 1-Page Marketing Plan, serial entrepreneur and rebellious marketer Allan Dib reveals a marketing implementation breakthrough that makes creating a marketing plan simple and fast. Itâs literally a single page, divided up into nine squares. With it, youâll be able to map out your own sophisticated marketing plan and go from zero to marketing hero.
Whether youâre just starting out or are an experienced entrepreneur, The 1-Page Marketing Plan is the easiest and fastest way to create a marketing plan that will propel your business growth.
5. Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love
â Goodreads rating: 4.25.
The basic premise of Inspired is that the best tech companies create products in a manner very different from how most companies create products. The goal of the book is to share the techniques of the best companies. This book is aimed primarily at Product Managers working on technology-powered products. That includes the hundreds of âtech companiesâ like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter and the like, as well as the thousands of companies moving to leverage technology (financial companies, media companies, retailers, manufacturers, and nearly every industry).
Inspired covers companies from early-stage start-ups to large, established companies. The products might be consumer products or devices, business services for small businesses to enterprises, internal tools, and developer platforms.
Inspired is secondarily aimed at the designers, engineers, user researchers and data scientists that work closely with the product managers on product teams at these same companies.
6. Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products
â Goodreads rating: 4.10.
Why do some products capture widespread attention while others flop? What makes us engage with certain products out of sheer habit? Is there a pattern underlying how technologies hook us?
Nir Eyal answers these questions (and many more) by explaining the Hook Model â a four-step process embedded into the products of many successful companies to subtly encourage customer behaviour. Through consecutive âhook cyclesâ, these products reach their ultimate goal of bringing users back again and again without depending on costly advertising or aggressive messaging.
Hooked is based on Eyalâs years of research, consulting, and practical experience. He wrote the book he wished had been available to him as a start-up founder â not abstract theory, but a how-to guide for building better products.
Hooked is written for product managers, designers, marketers, start-up founders, and anyone who seeks to understand how products influence our behaviour.
7. Customers for Life: How to Turn That One-Time Buyer Into a Lifetime Customer
â Goodreads rating: 4.20.
Drawing on his incredible success in transforming his Dallas Cadillac dealership into the second largest in America, Carl Sewell revealed the secret of getting customers to return again and again in the original Customers for Life.
Sewell focuses on the expectations and demands of contemporary consumers and employees, showing that businesses can remain committed to quality service in the fast-paced new millennium by sticking to his time-proven approach: Figure out what customers want and make sure they get it.
8. The Mom Test: How to talk to customers & learn if your business is a good idea when everyone is lying to you
â Goodreads rating: 4.37.
They say you shouldnât ask your mom whether your business is a good idea, because she loves you and will lie to you. This is technically true, but it misses the point. You shouldnât ask anyone if your business is a good idea. Itâs a bad question and everyone will lie to you at least a little. As a matter of fact, itâs not their responsibility to tell you the truth. Itâs your responsibility to find it and itâs worth doing right.
Talking to customers is one of the foundational skills of both Customer Development and Lean Startup. We all know weâre supposed to do it, but nobody seems willing to admit that itâs easy to screw up and hard to do right. The Mom Test is going to show you how customer conversations go wrong and how you can do better.
9. Value Proposition Design: How to Create Products and Services Customers Want
â Goodreads rating: 4.21.
It shows you how to use the Value Proposition Canvas, a practical business tool to design, test, create, and manage products and services customers want. It complements and perfectly integrates with the Business Model Canvas from Business Model Generation so you can succeed with great value propositions embedded in scalable and profitable business models.
Practical exercises, process illustrations, and workshop suggestions help you immediately apply the tools in the book to your daily work.
Youâll love Value Proposition Design if youâve been overwhelmed by the task of true customer value creation, frustrated by unproductive product meetings and misaligned teams, involved in bold shiny projects that blew up, or simply disappointed by the failure of a good idea.
Value Proposition Design will help you successfully understand the patterns of value creation, leverage the experience and skills of your team, avoid wasting time with ideas that wonât work and guide you through the design and test of products and services that customers want.
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