Books for understanding software product management

A software team can have plenty to build while the company remains unsure how it chooses the work. Who connects customer problems with business priorities? What makes the next feature worth pursuing? If those questions are driving your reading, the subject is product management, not simply getting a clearer specification or releasing code more reliably.

I would start with Infinite Upside for the owner's view of a useful result. Marty Cagan's Inspired addresses technology product organizations and their work. Melissa Perri's Escaping the Build Trap examines the connection between product activity and outcomes. The books overlap substantially; compare their organizational emphases before choosing one.

1. Infinite Upside — Vijay Sheth

   Start with the person who needs to use the result. Chapter 16 asks for a meaningful stopping point defined from that person's position. A useful draft, a message reaching its recipient and a report someone can open and understand are different completed tasks.

   The discussion also recognizes a familiar human version of the difficulty: a person can finish their portion while leaving the receiver unable to use what arrived. Faster execution can repeat the same misunderstanding rather than resolve it.

   That is why I would begin here. The owner has to care about the result beyond the system's last action. These passages describe desired capabilities and operating expectations, not an implemented product-management method or an account of a software product team's transformation.

   Imagine an invented company celebrating a release while remaining unable to explain which customer problem it intended to address. Its owner wants to understand the management of product choices, rather than only count completed development work.

   Read the account for that owner purpose. The following books address the product organization more directly.

2. Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love, second edition — Marty Cagan

   For the technology product organization's work. Wiley's description connects structuring and staffing a product organization with discovering and delivering technology products. Its scope includes people, the product, process and culture.

   Investigate Cagan when you want to understand how those responsibilities belong together. That is wider than asking a developer to implement an already settled request, and more specific than choosing a generic introduction to managing employees.

   The publisher's selected listing identifies the second edition in January 2018. Keep the edition clear when examining its examples and product practices. The title's promise of customer love is not a result established for the invented company by this selection.

   The broad product-organization emphasis is the reason to consider the book. Bring a question about the work your company expects product management to carry. A description of practices in technology companies cannot establish that your company has the same people, authority, information or commercial setting.

3. Escaping the Build Trap — Melissa Perri

   For the relationship between product activity and outcomes. O'Reilly's public overview presents Perri's book around organizations shipping features without enough attention to the customer needs and value those features are meant to address.

   The scope connects product management, strategy, the organization and its culture. Consider this direction when the company can describe what it has built more clearly than why the work matters to customers and the business.

   That emphasis gives the invented company a reading question beyond whether its release met the schedule. It may want to investigate how product activities connect to intended outcomes. The book does not supply evidence of the actual release's effects.

   The publisher dates the book to November 2018 and labels its level intermediate to advanced. Compare an available passage with the knowledge you already have. Cagan and Perri share substantial territory; choose the treatment whose emphasis best matches the organizational question you want to study. Neither is selected as a coding manual or a substitute for learning from the people using the product.

Choose the product-management question

Begin with useful completion, the technology product organization's work or the connection between product activity and outcomes. Bring that management question to the next sample and look for an explanation you can follow.

If the learning task is developing and managing requirements, use the requirements selection. If it is dependable technology delivery across the operation, use the delivery selection.