New to PM

This is the list I give people starting their first PM job (or trying to land one). Nothing replaces real world experience, so if you really want to become a PM, or a better one, then you should be focused on the core cycle: build a product, talk to users, iterate based on user feedback, and repeat. You'll learn the important skills along the way.

There is of course benefit from learning from others, and you'll be able to pull nuggets of insight from this list to help you on your product management journey. Read this top to bottom – it starts with what the job actually is, moves through craft and shipping, and ends with strategy and the longer game. This is an opinionated list – but I also don't agree with everything written. Take everything you read with a grain of salt, figure out what you can apply to your own work, skip what you think is not relevant in the current moment, and let me know what you think is missing.

Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love — Marty Cagan
Start here for the shape of the job. Cagan's picture of empowered product teams is the ideal – most orgs fall short of it, but you need the reference point before you can tell a product team from a feature factory.
Don't Make Me Think — Steve Krug
The fastest usability education available – read it in a weekend, run better design reviews on Monday. New PMs over-index on what to build; this starts fixing how it gets used.
The Design of Everyday Things — Don Norman
Norman gives you the vocabulary for why a product feels wrong – affordances, mappings, feedback. Once you have the words, you stop saying "make it more intuitive" in design reviews (a phrase that helps no one).
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information — Edward R. Tufte
You'll ship more charts than features in your first year – decks, dashboards, one-pagers. Tufte is the standard for showing data honestly, and he'll give you a permanent allergy to chartjunk (your stakeholders will notice the difference).
The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement — Eliyahu M. Goldratt
A novel about factory bottlenecks that will change how you look at your team's delivery. Find the constraint, fix the constraint, repeat – everything else is motion.
Good Strategy, Bad Strategy — Richard Rumelt
The kernel – diagnosis, guiding policy, coherent action – is the single most useful strategy tool I know. It also inoculates you against the fluff that passes for strategy in most planning decks.
High Output Management — Andrew Grove
Grove treats management as an engineering problem: leverage, output, meetings as a technology. You won't manage anyone as a new PM, but you'll work through other people from day one – same math.
Nonviolent Communication — Marshall B. Rosenberg
PMs carry responsibility without authority, so every hard conversation is a negotiation. Rosenberg's framework is the rare one that survives contact with a real disagreement – observations before judgments, requests instead of demands.
Thinking in Systems: A Primer — Donella H. Meadows
Metrics get gamed, incentives leak, quick fixes bite back. Meadows explains why – stocks, feedback loops, and delays – and once you see them you can't unsee them in your own product.

This list is deliberately short – the job is learned by doing, and the reading is there to force you to take a step back from your day to day. It's thinnest on talking to users, which no book fixes anyway (a handful of awkward customer conversations will teach you more than another framework). If something carried you through your first year that isn't here, let me know.