9 Books Every Product Manager Should Read in 2023

Reading is important for many reasons. And that’s why this post is all about the best books for product managers.

Tom Corley, author of the book Change Your Habits, Change Your Life, interviewed many self-made millionaires about their habits for success and found that reading was the most common denominator. 88% of the financially successful individuals he interviewed said that they read for at least 30-minutes a day. 63% said that they listened to audiobooks during their daily commute. And 86% said that they read at least two self-improvement books every month. 

You may be wondering what this has to do with product management. To be frank, it has everything to do with product management. The following books will give you insight into how successful people got to where they are today, and provide inspiration for how you can be better at your job.

Here’s a list of the nine best books for product managers to read in 2023:

1. Hooked: How to Build Habit Forming Products by Nir Eyal

When you design and develop a product, the ultimate goal is to have users integrate it into their everyday lives –– to become a household name. Hooked helps product managers understand exactly what it is that makes consumers habitually engage with certain products and what qualities make or break a product. 

Author Nir Eyal explains these concepts and many others with his Hook Model – a 4-step process that some of the most successful companies use when developing and marketing their products. These processes encourage desired customer behaviors through multiple “hook cycles” that are aimed at bringing a user back time and time again in a natural way, without having to rely on heavy advertising.

Here is a peek into the 4 steps in the Hook Model:

1. Trigger: Niral Eyal explains both internal and external triggers – the things that prompt users to interact with a certain product.
2. Action: A behavior that is carried out in anticipation of a reward.
3. Variable Reward: The way a product creates a craving and desire within a user.
4. Investment: When and how a user invests their time, money, data, and social effort into a product.

2. The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick

Rob Fitzpatrick is an entrepreneur with over 10-years of experience. He has developed products that have been used by massive companies like Sony and MTV. His book The Mom Test is a handbook that helps developers who don’t have much experience in customer-facing roles figure out how to talk to customers for their insight. 

Being able to have conversations with customers is an invaluable skill. Unfortunately, it’s a hard skill to master and many people are unsure of how to do so. The Mom Test shows you how customer conversations can fail and how you can learn from those mistakes, get better at talking to your audience, and feel confident in your business decisions. 

3. Lean UX by Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden

Lean UX has become the chosen approach to interaction design and is specifically designed to work for cross-functional teams. Authors Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden delve into the principles of Lean UX as well as the tactics and techniques that are necessary for incorporating design, experimentation, iteration, and more into a product’s life cycle.

This book teaches the importance of prioritizing the customer experience over what a product is going to deliver. Product managers that read this book will learn how to take a product through short, iterative cycles to determine the best course of action for the user and for the business.

4. The Lean Startup by Eric Ries

Author Eric Ries says that a startup is “an organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty.” Startups must persevere through every day as it is filled with uncertainty and forge a path to a successful business. 

The Lean Startup is broken up into three parts: Vision, Steer, and Accelerate. 

Vision identifies who is an entrepreneur, what a startup is, and how startups can measure their progress.

Steer takes readers through the Lean Startup Method and each part of the build, measure, learn feedback loop. This portion of the book instructs how to make assumptions, test them, evaluate progress, and provides a method for knowing if, when, and how to change direction.

Accelerate explores techniques that Lean Startups need to make their way through the build, measure, learn feedback loop as quickly as possible so they can grow as quickly as possible.

5. Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts by Annie Duke

Author Annie Duke is a World Series of Poker champion, a professional speaker, and a decision strategist who studied cognitive psychology at UPenn. She is an expert at making decisions through her career and education, and now uses her expertise to help others make the best decisions they possibly can –– even when they don’t have all the facts. 

In Thinking in Bets, Annie Duke uses a behavioral science approach to teach how to make confident decisions in the face of uncertainty by taking stock of what you do know and what you don’t. This approach will make you less likely to react with your emotions, biases, and destructive habits and more likely to be calm, confident, and successful.

6. The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz

Throughout your career, you will encounter many situations in which you will have to make tough choices. Choices like halting a project that you’ve been working on for years, sacrificing your free time to make an important deadline, and removing people from your teams that aren’t good fits anymore. 

The Hard Thing About Hard Things is a candid telling of how difficult it really is to be in a position of leadership. We rarely see the struggles and failures that successful people experience. From the outside, their “hard things” might look like millions of dollars, the freedom to travel the world, and luxurious things. Horowitz is brutally honest about the fact that all the glitters is not gold. And if you want to get to the top, you’re going to have to tough it out through real, hard things.

7. The Design of Everything by Don Norman

Have you ever struggled to figure out a product that should be quite simple? For example, perhaps you have looked at a microwave and could not figure out which button will allow you to set a custom cook time, or you’ve pushed a door that you were supposed to pull.

Don Norman reassures us that the fault does not lie within us. Our error is the result of a poorly designed product –– one that was possibly designed with aesthetics in mind instead of functionality. Or perhaps it was just laziness.

The Design of Everything teaches readers how to design with an understanding of the wants and needs of users and the principles of cognitive psychology. It’s quite simple: design products with visible features, take advantage of natural relationships that combine function and control, and make smart use of limitations. The ultimate goal is to direct the user to the correction action on the correct control at the correct time.

8. Lean Analytics by Alistair Croll and Ben Yoskovitz

Analytics are extremely important to running a business, managing a product, or founding a startup. Without analytics, you won’t be able to get a clear and accurate picture of your performance. This would make it nearly impossible to define issues, find your audience, decide what to design, and how to scale your business.  

Lean Analytics helps readers determine the metrics that matter the most to their business so they can make well-informed decisions that will push them forward. Authors Croll and Yoskovitz lay out the steps to take a startup from idea to a fully-fledged business. There are over 30 case studies to learn from and a year’s worth of interviews from hundreds of founders and investors. 

9. Product-Led Growth by Wes Bush

As an aspiring product manager, it’s a great idea to build a product that you can share when applying and interviewing for open positions. Not only does this prove that you can build a product, but it gives you real-life experience with everything from management to design to marketing.

Product-Led Growth is a best-selling book by Wes Bush focusing on “how you can turn your product into a growth engine, widen your funnel, and dominate your market while cutting your customer acquisition costs.” The three primary parts of the book include:

• Why product-led growth is becoming more popular
• How to build a product-led foundation
• A framework for turning users into customers

If you want to become a PM or are already working in this capacity, this book will change the way you look at products forever (in a good way, of course).

Final Thoughts

There is always room for self-improvement and education no matter where you are in your career. Every one of us has time in our day to read a few chapters of a book! If you really don’t think your lifestyle allows for 30-minutes of reading time per day, download an audiobook and listen during your commute, while you get ready for work in the morning, or while you’re cleaning the house! No more excuses. Success is right around the corner, and these books for product managers are sure to help you find it!

Looking for some literature to help you land the product manager job of your dreams? Check out the hundreds of common PM interview questions on our site and take part in our prep course. Better yet, focus on those that are most closely related to your upcoming interviews and career goals. For instance, you may want to spend a good amount of time on Facebook PM interview questions. Many of them have been thoroughly answered by our community members. Feel free to weigh in on their answers or provide your own!