Bookshelf
Over the years, many books have given great insight and direction and have been incredibly thought-provoking. Here I share some of my favourite books with an overview of why I love them.
Start With Why
Start with why is first on my list for a reason. Whatever industry or career you are in, ‘why’ is such a powerful message. Articulating why will help you lead others and bring them on board with your vision. It also gets to the heart of value, which can be so easily lost in a world of features. It’s well worth a read.
Lean UX
One of the more underrated books, Lean UX offers a powerful framework for quickly finding product market fit and validated learning. Understand the principles from this framework, which can be applied to almost any vertical and way of working. A brilliant step-by-step with examples throughout. A must-read for agile teams.
The Lean Startup
What has to be the original ‘Lean’, The Lean Start Up focuses at a business level. Outlining an approach to business that learns what customers want by continually testing, adapting and adjusting. It’s one to read to help you innovate from within your organisation or essential if you're an entrepreneur.
Testing Business Ideas
Testing business ideas is a blueprint for people who want to set up and run innovation teams. The book walks through each stage, from understanding how the process works to scaling testing in your organisation. Filled with examples and beautiful illustrations, it’s the perfect reference book. This is a firm favourite and one I also go back to.
Hooked
This is the power of mixing psychology with product. Hooked walks through the stages of habit and how to develop products that utilise our human habit nature. After reading this, it made me look at lots of products in a whole new light. A brilliant read if you need some inspiration or insight for customer retention or bringing people back to your product.
Essentialism
A mindset framework that aims to take the hectic and distil it down to the essentials. This one is less of a business focus, but the lessons can be applied to all of the work you do. A great toolkit for decisions and boiling things down to where the true value is.
Product Leadership
I love this book because its focus is on the human side of product management. It talks about how the best product managers navigate complexity, manage stakeholders at all levels and lead their teams to success while delivering customer value. Addressing both the strategic and tactical levels, it’s a book I’m more than happy to jump back into every now and again.
The Creative Problem Solver
This is the playbook for solving problems. It outlines 12 different approaches to solving creative problems and detailed the steps for each. If you're looking for a new way to tackle a problem I would highly recommend this book. It’s a perfect reference book.
The workshop Playbook
The Workshopper Playbook is a gem filled with practical advice on running truly valuable workshops. Really focusing on bringing out the best from the people in the room it’s a game changer with so many applications. Once you have the skills from the book down, you will be on your way to delivering engaging, value-driven workshops that people love attending.