As part of my Friday talk at on moving from individual contributor to product leadership, I recommended a few books to cover some of the areas of development to be a truly effective leader. Here are those books 🧵
#prodmgmt
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Coaching / Team building - "Strong Product People" by
Plenty of advice on how to map your team's skills and identify areas of improvement (and how to improve them)
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Product Culture - "Empowered" by & - a front to back desk reference on how to effectively build product teams & a culture to support them
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Team Topologies - the book of the same name by & with plenty of advice on how to set your teams up and optimise for success
amazon.co.uk/Team-Topologie
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Hiring & Firing - "Hiring Product Managers" by - goes into great detail about how to intentionally hire what you need and not just create Frankenstein job specs
amazon.co.uk/Hiring-Product
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Strategy - "Radical Product Thinking" by - there are loads of strategy books out there but this aims to help you think big and create an ethical future to boot
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Inspire the Team - "Radical Candor" by . Making sure you have productive conversations with your team, get them on the same page, and are open and honest in good times & bad
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Look after Yourself - "Managing Product = Managing Tensions" by . Goes deep on why product management can (sometimes) suck & some of the ways you can survive & thrive
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I called out these books in the presentation as
a) I'm not the cleverest person in the room, I'm standing on the shoulders of giants
b) Each of the slides could have been talks on their own
If you're moving into product leadership I very much recommend checking these out!
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