The Story of Successful Product Innovation: A Guide through 7 Books
Unlock the power of product management with tailored book recommendations! Here is your guide to finding a worthwhile read for your experience, background and product context.
With the wealth of books written in the domain, it is never easy to catch the big fish, the book that will help you stay ahead and approach the next challenge ready. For those of you newer to product management, let me disclose that one of the reasons behind this fact is that there are just so many ‘flavors’ of product management, each valuing slightly different mix of skills and knowledge. Your product can be a yogurt, an AI-powered app, an enterprise solution, a toy, or even (a real announcement I saw — this one’s rare!) a narrative that an NGO uses to spark interest of philanthropists. Further, you may be starting things off, optimizing what has been built, or exploring opportunities to give mature products a new life. You may work closer to business or closer to engineering.
When a few colleagues of mine asked me for book recommendations in the product domain, I realised that there cannot be one simple answer. Although some books are more universally applicable, so much depends on your background, your product, and its current challenges.
This article is the attempt to provide you with my best recommendation tailored to your needs. I chose to limit it to seven books that I read, applied in practice, and highly recommend: ‘The Professional Product Owner’, ‘Escaping the Build Trap’, ‘Competing Against Luck’, ‘Intercom on Jobs-to-be-Done’, ‘Value Proposition Design’, ‘Product Development and Management: Body of Knowledge’, and ‘The Other Side of Innovation’. To support you in getting straight to what you are looking for, I divided the article in three parts:
- A Guide through Seven Books. I you already working in the product domain? Have you read some of the books already? I am placing here the chosen books in a wide product management context, so you can narrow down the ones relevant for you.
- Recommendations for Newcomers. Got an appetite to start in product management? If you are currently working in agile teams, as project/ops manager, in R&D, or as digital marketer, you will find a tailored recommendation here.
- Leveraging Knowledge from Books in Practice: My Story. Are you facing a particular challenge and curious about which book might be of help? I am sharing here an example of an issue that each book helped me solve.
Part 1: A Guide through Seven Books
In this part of the article, I am assuming that you already have at least an introductory knowledge about product management (see Part 2 if not). For each of the books, I am discussing ‘Why it’s worth’ — placing them in the context of other books; ‘Recommended context’ — describing the stage of product lifecycle and a type of product where I see them as the best fit; and ‘Your Key Benefit’ — where I am sharing my opinion on their unique value.
If you want to narrow down books of interest by the relevance to your context first, take a look at the map below. Of course, no product has such a perfect trajectory and often you want to manage it simultaneously from a few perspectives (e.g., keep incrementally satisfying current market while exploring expansion opportunities), so treat it just as a food for thought.
And here comes the the detailed guide through seven books.
‘The Professional Product Owner’ by Don McGreal, Ralph Jocham
Why it’s worth: This book is an outstanding operating system for optimizing products’ value through their lifecycle. Since it is centred around the Scrum methodology, it will be of most use for product managers working with dedicated teams capable of releasing in an incremental fashion.
Recommended context: Optimizing a product that already reached product-market fit, especially, if flexibly upgradable (like an app or an IoT device).
Your key benefit: The unique value of this book — and the one I am especially recommending it for — is the tactical toolkit for incrementally improving the value proposition of a product already established on the market: especially aspects of how to measure value, and how to manage backlog and releases. You can use these sections of the book to audit your processes and enrich your team’s retrospectives.
‘Escaping the Build Trap’ by Melissa Perri
Why it’s worth: This book dives deep into the area that is given a little space in the ‘Professional Product Owner’ — dealing with unknown unknowns. In the book’s author’s own words: ‘Many companies follow such a rigid development process and cadence that there is no opportunity to experiment’. Indeed, the experiences that the author weaves the book’s narrative around come from an organisation that — strongly incentivized for continuous delivery — missed to notice issues which were critical for the overall platform’s success. The best analogy that I can find — at least for those of you comfortable with the language of mathematics — is that while the former book is a heuristic to find a ‘local optimum’ for the product, this book is a heuristic that explores the ways for finding a ‘global optimum’.
Recommended context: When a product has an issue scaling — which may be a symptom of issues with product-market fit and missing understanding of customer pain points.
Your key benefit: The greatest strength of the book is the author’s proposal for the holistic product management process that both encompasses and goes beyond the definitions of product manager’s role in strategy development, market research, product development, and product communication processes. The proposal is in principle an iterative strategy-discovery-delivery equipped with additional detail and decision-making structure.
‘Competing Against Luck’ by Clayton M. Christensen et al.
Why it’s worth: While ‘Escaping the Build Trap’ is great for adopting a rigorous process of spotting customer problems and experimenting with solutions, the ‘jobs-to-be-done’ theory presented in this book helps you go a few steps further on a journey toward building lasting value. In the author’s words, the remedy sounds simple: ‘Innovation succeeds when it addresses a job that needs to be done’. Hence, the book is meant to answer exactly the question of how to develop a strategy and an organisational structure in strong relation to the in-depth understanding of reasons behind customer choices.
Recommended context: Looking for a new life for a product or exploring brand new businesses within the differentiator strategy framework (meaning, optimising for unique customer value rather than a low price).
Your key benefit: This book will be very inspiring (but I would say: not enough practical by itself) input filled with analogies if you are in the position of driving change in the organisation, clearly phrasing the mission, and organising innovation around it. You will get a tool when exploring and evaluating new business opportunities. Finally comes the most tangible resource: You will get a framework for interviewing customers meant to surface the causes of their choices that you can audit your methods against.
‘Intercom on Jobs-to-be-Done’ by Des Traynor
Why it’s worth: While ‘Competing Against Luck’ presents a high-level framework for thinking about innovation and sources of its success, I place this book in a role of a very practical supplement to the theory. It will be particularly useful for Digital Product Managers, as — unlike the former book — it is based on experiences from the software industry.
Recommended context to read: Looking for a new life for a product (especially, software products) or exploring brand new businesses within the differentiator strategy framework.
Your key benefit: You are getting a Jobs-to-be-Done-inspired perspective on eight key activities across the product management lifecycle: persona creation; competitive assessment; marketing funnel; journey mapping; feature analysis; requirement specification; project charter; customer interviews. Enjoy!
‘Value Proposition Design’ by Alexander Osterwalder et al.
Why it’s worth: The framework and process presented in the book is a zoom-in on a crucial aspect of arguably the most popular business tool in the startup world: business model canvas. I place it as an alternative read to ‘Intercom on Jobs-to-be-Done’ yet much more exhaustive when it comes to the design process guidance. Since it is founded on the jobs-to-be-done theory as well, you will be able to leverage concepts from other books in practice during business model canvas creation (e.g., what ‘Competing Against Luck’ calls ‘experiences required to perform the job very, very well’ could be distinguished here as ‘pain relievers’ and ‘gain creators’).
Recommended context: All the stages that require disciplined creativity and testing, especially, the idea stage, pre-launch, and new business.
Your key benefit: You get a rich set of tools along the value proposition design (or evolution) process that will serve you as an inspiration to prepare co-creation workshops and contextualise urgency for product discovery or delivery work.
‘Product Development & Management Association: Body of Knowledge’
Why it’s worth: This book is an entire body of knowledge with each section written by a different author. It encompasses not only a list of aspects needed to make product innovation work but also introduces tons of tools covering aspects from ideation and financial assessments to building innovation cultures and managing portfolios. The table that closes the book — summarising the application of product innovation principles across food, electronics, software, and pharma products — is a good picture of a meta-knowledge that the book offers.
Recommended context: Stages of getting from idea to market, especially when substantial investment in product development is required and there is a portfolio of options to manage.
Your key benefit: The knowledge in the book will help you zoom out and surface gaps in the innovation organisation as a whole. This can be very useful in prioritising process needs. You will also get a chance to confirm your comprehensive knowledge of the book’s contents through a ‘New Product Development Professional’ certification.
‘The Other Side of Innovation’ by Vijay Govindarajan, Chris Trimble
Why it’s worth: ‘Product Development & Management Association: Body of Knowledge’ along with other books might have given you a set of tools to innovate. But how to even start in an established organisation where everything is optimised for efficiency? The book comprises two sections distinct enough that they might as well be treated as separate books. The first one describes in detail the necessity and all the complexities of building a dedicated team that collaborates with the rest of the organisation to enable innovation. The second one is a great piece about the challenge of introducing the culture of disciplined learning in business.
Recommended context: Taking strategic decisions on how to structure the organisation and distribute investments for innovation success — in general, at the very early stages of the product lifecycle.
Your key benefit: The book can serve as a practical recommendation if you are set to succeed with a more radical or disruptive innovation idea within an established organisation. I also see the tools in the experimentation part as a potentially powerful approach to management of initiatives portfolio as it describes how to view and study investment opportunities in a form of causality and dependency graphs.
Do you know by now if any of the books above is for you? Did you find a good alternative? Leave a comment below about your decision! I am really curious.
Part 2: Recommendations for Newcomers
Are you new to product management? Are you curious to make the first step and get a feeling of what it is about? I have created this part for you. Always based on the seven very recommendable books I chose, I will share my suggestions depending on your background. If you are not sure which one is most relevant, don’t worry, just look through and see which part resonates most. You will find links to the sections about each book from Part 1, so you can easily dive a bit deeper.
Agile Teams Background
If you are used to work in agile teams, especially, the ones following processes inspired by Scrum, the most natural way for you to start getting into product management is by understanding well the Scrum product ownership position.
Reading ‘The Professional Product Owner’ for the first time when I was relatively new to product management, I enjoyed a lot its comprehensive outlook from the product vision down to the details of daily Scrum practices. This is what you will profit a lot from, especially if you are up to continue working with digital products in agile cultures (chances as that with your experience with Scrum, you will be able to skip some sections).
As the next step on your path, I recommend to pair the knowledge from the former book with the guidelines shared in ‘Escaping the Build Trap’. You will profit from very to-the-point introductory chapters surfacing some of the typical good patterns and anti-patterns of product management: the difference between “why?” and “when?”, “taking orders” vs. “managing stakeholders”, “love for ideas” vs. “love for problems”, and so.
Internally-Focused Managers (e.g., Project or Operations)
I am referring here to a large group of professionals with diverse backgrounds. My point is that you have one trait: the focus at your current work is efficient execution and delivery. I will give two options depending on your key interest.
Deep understanding of a customer is at the core of product management. Are you interested to get a perspective on how to identify a customer need and start translating it into a product? The pages of ‘Competing Against Luck’ will shape your perspective on customers, products, and services. The framework is practical enough that you will be able to start exercising the application of it on your own choices which is fun (I did it when choosing a gym). This will help you understand why the main competitor of your company’s product may not necessarily be someone copying the product but rather your customer choosing to “do nothing”.
As an alternative, since you might already have strong execution and leadership skills, how about you start from learning to facilitate the explorative and creative stages of the process? The authors of ‘Value Proposition Design’ are known for doing great work at putting together many concepts from the innovation world into intuitive frameworks. Hence, you should find it a very practical position to explore important aspects of business creation and decide from there what other books are necessary to read.
Research & Development
If your key strengths are in engineering high-quality technological solution, I see two options depending on your key interest.
If you are willing to expand your knowledge for the holistic process of building great products from idea to launch you will profit from getting your hands on ‘Product Development & Management Association: Body of Knowledge’ and gradually exploring tools that suit your challenges. Treat it like an encyclopedia!
If your primary interest is to understand customers very well and linking that with products you are building, consider ‘Competing Against Luck’. It will give you a very customer-centric framework of thinking and will help you understand why the main competitor of your product may be a customer choosing to “do nothing”.
Digital Marketing
If you are thinking to shift to digital product management, have a look at ‘Intercom on Jobs-to-be-done’. Some of the methods and approaches presented in the book may be helpful already in your current work, e.g., the ones related to marketing funnel. Overall, you will get ideas on how to effectively transmit user context and motivations, and ultimately drive more user-centric solutions throughout the organisation.
Are you ready to start reading your first book on product management? Which one did you choose? Hit me up in the comments below. I am really curious about your thoughts.
Part 3: Leveraging Knowledge from Books in Practice: My Story
Are you facing a particular challenge and curious which book might be of help? Are you uncertain if spending time on a chosen book will be worthwhile in your busy schedule. To support you with final decisions, I am sharing here a story with examples of how the processes, tools, ideas, and frameworks from the books helped me on some of my challenges. I am placing it in a chronological order that may give you a further insight on which book is most relevant for you.
Streamlining software development with ‘The Professional Product Owner’ toolkit: We utilized the tools and processes from the book while introducing development efforts from the new product development project I was leading into the pipeline of the software team working across other projects and bugfixes. I put on a product owner hat and started splitting the more certain project efforts into iterations (sprints) to facilitate the alignment with the rest of the team efforts. Further, we used it as a guidance to facilitate daily standups to further nurture collaboration — which stayed with the software team since then.
Leveraging ‘Intercom on Jobs-to-be-done’ for contextual and verifiable requirement specs: We used the book’s approach for requirement specifications to define the scope of a minimum viable product. First: the fact that these specifications were so solution-agnostic and so rich in need and context specification helped find and implement “good enough” technical solutions with the speed of light. Second, having all requirements defined as a statement of the context, motivation, and expected outcome served as a powerful blueprint to verify our assumptions with the first users.
Building portfolio processes with ‘Product Development & Management Association: Body of Knowledge’ as a reference: I remember a winter evening walking down the street and listening to the episode of the ‘Product Mastery Now’ podcast with Steve Atherton, the author of the book’s chapter on Portfolio Management, as a guest. I memorised it for the excitement once I realised that — with the company’s new investment round — sound portfolio management processes were exactly what we needed. Indeed, the incremental introduction of project portfolio management in the organisation was largely inspired by the principles and tactics presented in the book.
Designing product discovery processes using the ‘Value Proposition Design’ toolkit: We used testing and learning cards presented in the book to support multiple product discovery activities. Finally, with all experiences, we formalised a 13-step process and toolkit that we called ‘hypothesis-driven discovery & decision-making’.
Presenting product discovery efforts in relation to business objectives using ‘The Other Side of Innovation’: Here’s a context from an innovation project we ran. Through studies of users, systems, and standards, we defined and structured a problem space we believed might be worth exploring. Meanwhile, we gathered a spectrum of business goals behind and critical ingredients for market success. How to put it together to effectively scope and pace the project? Faced with this situation, I decided to leverage the cause-and-effect map concept described in the book. It allowed us to create one single map where each research/design investment decision is linked with the hierarchy of (hypothetical!) expected outcomes, up to the business strategy. I recommend it as an interesting place to start in contexts of high ambiguity to surface riskiest assumptions while the high certainty critical path work can keep going.
Facilitating product strategic thinking with the process from ‘Escaping the Build Trap’: With a fellow product manager in my team, we built a habit of iterating a series of questions shared in the book during our 1:1s. These are meant to navigate through the product management process introduced in the book. That routine was unfailingly helping us go beyond the day-to-day execution challenges and focus on the strategy, the assumptions the team was making, and think creatively about the high-impact actions to take.
Bridging execution with the vision using the framework from ‘Competing Against Luck’: I used the framework introduced in the book (also in the HBS ‘Disruptive Strategy’ online course) while evolving a product concept with a startup I was consulting. It was very fruitful because — just as all strategy components shall link to the mission — here, desired experiences and integration around them are linked to one core customer’s job statement. A multilayered space for research, ideation, and action is formed.
So… Decided which book will you read next? Which one is it? What other tools might be used on some of these challenges? Please, leave a comment below!
