The Lean Startup
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Startups fail not from poor building, but from wasting time on products nobody wants. Measure, then pivot or persevere.
Eric Ries
Resources
Books, podcasts, blogs, tools, and plugins I recommend to fellow product-minded people. This craft's too broad to stand still.
Books
Continuous Discovery Habits
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Shifts product development from an episodic project phase into a sustainable weekly routine of continuous discovery.
Teresa Torres
Practical Product Management for Product Owners
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Scrum
Shifts the Product Owner from a passive backlog administrator into an entrepreneurial manager who drives business value.
Chris Lukassen, Robbin Schuurman
User Story Mapping
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Attacks the flat backlog, the linear list of tickets that hides the big picture, with a map of the user's journey.
Jeff Patton
Radical Focus
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A narrative guide to the corporate habit of doing too much at once, and a lightweight system for using OKRs to focus.
Christina Wodtke
Inspired
Transitions companies away from feature factory mindsets into Silicon Valley style empowered teams solving user problems.
Marty Cagan
Escaping the Build Trap
Addresses companies focusing on shipping features, outputs, rather than solving actual user problems, outcomes.
Melissa Perri
Empowered
The sequel to Inspired, scaled to the organizational level: how leaders manage, coach, and staff teams to unleash innovation.
Marty Cagan, Chris Jones
Loved
Part of Cagan's SVPG series, addressing the misunderstood engine of commercial success: product marketing management.
Martina Lauchengco
Transformed
The final piece of Cagan's trilogy: how legacy companies dismantle old project driven systems for a product operating model.
Marty Cagan and SVPG partners
The Professional Product Owner
Scrum
The official Scrum.org guide, elevating the PO from a tactical backlog clerk into a value driven agile product manager.
Don McGreal, Ralph Jocham
Zombie Scrum Survival Guide
Scrum
Tackles organizations that follow every mechanic of Scrum yet fail to ship value, leaving teams slow and mechanical.
Christiaan Verwijs, Johannes Schartau, Barry Overeem
Mastering Collaboration in a Product Team
Scrum
A workbook style guide to cross functional alignment, so product trios actively explore problems and build value.
Natasha Hampshire, Glaudia Califano, David Spinks
Scrum — A Pocket Guide
Scrum
Frames Scrum not as a rigid rulebook, but a human centric philosophy for navigating complexity and culture.
Gunther Verheyen
Accelerate
A data driven, scientifically validated proof that software delivery performance drives organizational performance.
Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, Gene Kim
The Design of Everyday Things
Shifts the blame from human error to recognizing that badly designed objects are the fault of the creator, not the user.
Don Norman
Build
Drawing from inventing the iPod and iPhone, founding Nest, and mentoring startups: part handbook, part memoir, part mentor.
Tony Fadell
Product Management in Practice
While most PM books lean on idealized frameworks, LeMay gives a grounded look at what actually defines the job.
Matt LeMay
The Innovator's Dilemma
Outstanding companies can do everything right, listen to customers, invest heavily, and still lose to disruption.
Clayton M. Christensen
The Lean Product Playbook
The operational companion to The Lean Startup: a step by step blueprint to build, measure, and scale an idea.
Dan Olsen
Podcasts
Lenny's Podcast
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The interview show I actually finish, not just add to a queue.
Lenny Rachitsky
Product Thinking
Less framework talk, more play-by-plays of what actually happened when a team tried it.
Melissa Perri
Mind the Product
Two hosts who ask the follow-up question most interview shows skip past.
The Product Manager Podcast
Hannah Clark interviews product people from the inner circle to the fringes of the process. From The CPO Club.
Hannah Clark, The CPO Club
Blogs
Lenny's Newsletter
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The one PM newsletter I'd keep if I had to cut every other subscription.
Lenny Rachitsky
Francesca Cortesi
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We worked together in Vend's Product organisation, and I'm a big fan of her work on leadership and strategy at scale.
Francesca Cortesi
Product Talk
The deepest, least-hand-wavy writing on discovery I've found.
Teresa Torres
Roman Pichler
Where I go when I need a straight answer on product strategy, not another framework diagram.
Roman Pichler
borischerny.com
Proof that a blog with zero decoration and strong writing beats almost anything with a bigger content team.
Boris Cherny
The CPO Club
A publication and community aimed at product leaders, with executive interviews, playbooks, and a heavy AI slant.
Department of Product
Rich Holmes writes the technical explainers PMs quietly need. Webhooks, microservices, APIs, without hand waving.
Rich Holmes
SVPG Insights
The articles behind the four SVPG books already on this page. Cagan and his partners, still publishing regularly.
Marty Cagan and the SVPG partners
Tools
Linear
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The only issue tracker I've used that doesn't fight the team's own workflow.
Jira Product Discovery
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Where ideas get triaged before they become Jira tickets. Only useful if you're already living in Atlassian.
reMarkable
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A paper-like e-ink tablet that gets me off a screen to actually read and mark up long PRDs.
Replit
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The prototyping tool non-technical PM peers reach for first, near one-click from idea to a shareable app.
Figma Make
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Figma's AI prototyping tool, and the natural pick if design and engineering already live in Figma.
Miro
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Still the whiteboard I reach for when a workshop or messy mapping session needs to happen live, not async.
Claude Code
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The agent I hand real work to. It plans, runs commands, and checks its own output.
Notion
Where every doc, spec, and half-formed idea ends up eventually, for better and worse.
Amplitude
The product analytics tool I trust enough to make a roadmap call off of.
Lovable
For prototypes that need a real backend, not just a frontend. Generates full-stack apps and syncs to GitHub.
Claude Design
Feed it your design system and it hands back functional React components, not just a mockup.
Obsidian
Where the markdown files Claude generates actually live. Local-first, with no lock-in.
Productboard
Turns customer feedback into a prioritized backlog. Earns its keep once the roadmap spans several stakeholders.
Maze
Fast, unmoderated usability testing. Good for a quick read, not a replacement for real interviews.
VS Code
Not the fanciest editor, but the one every AI coding agent targets first, so it's where I end up.
Google Antigravity
Google's agentic coding IDE, built on Gemini. Same category as Claude Code, worth comparing.
Tableau
The BI tool most orgs already have. Drag-and-drop dashboards good enough to skip one-off chart requests.
Plugins
Content Reel
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Real placeholder data in mockups instead of lorem ipsum — small thing, saves review-meeting confusion.
Notion Web Clipper
One click to get a competitor's page or a research article into the same place as everything else.
Product Roadmap Template
The starting structure I duplicate every time rather than building a roadmap doc from scratch.