Appendix B: Books

A reading list for the ambitious Product Director. These books have shaped my thinking over the past two decades, and I return to many of them regularly. I have organized them by theme rather than importance, as the book you need depends on the challenge you face.

Foundational Strategy

Crossing the Chasm, by Geoffrey A. Moore

Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers

First published in 1991, this book remains one of the most influential titles on market development for technology companies. It introduced concepts like "early adopters," "diffusion of innovation," and the "whole product" that have since become part of the lingua franca of the tech industry. The book explains why you need to change your product fundamentally as you move from the Early Adopters to the Early Majority. I learned this lesson the hard way at Voxmobili, where we never successfully crossed the chasm despite having visionary technology.

Inside the Tornado, by Geoffrey A. Moore

Strategies for Developing, Leveraging, and Surviving Hypergrowth Markets

Moore's sequel explains the market dynamics when a company, the "Gorilla," dominates its fast-growing market. In the 90s, the tech industry experienced a few tornadoes, such as the crushing domination of the Wintel couple. The book contains some shocking advice, such as ignoring your customers (at the right time) and attacking your competitors relentlessly when you are the Gorilla. Today, we are witnessing another tornado with AI, and this book helps explain why certain companies will emerge dominant.

Zero to One, by Peter Thiel and Blake Masters

Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

Peter Thiel founded PayPal, and while he is not as well known as Elon Musk, another member of the "PayPal Mafia," he is a visionary with an outsized influence on the tech world. He made the first outside investment in Facebook. In this short book, Thiel makes bold statements such as monopolistic companies being good for society because they can invest more in fundamental research. His insight that it is better to be the last company in a market than the first has stayed with me. The "last" is the one that closes the market: Google for Search, Facebook for personal social networking. Who will be "last" in AI assistance?

Blue Ocean Strategy, by W. Chan Kim and Renée A. Mauborgne

How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant

A staple of MBA programs, Blue Ocean Strategy explains how you can change the trajectory of your company by making the competition irrelevant. Instead of competing on price and a set of features (red ocean), you change the rules of the game by creating a new market (blue ocean) with a product whose value proposition is radically different from everyone else. In the AI era, this framework is more relevant than ever as AI capabilities enable entirely new value propositions.

The Strategy Book, by Max McKeown

How to Think and Act Strategically to Deliver Outstanding Results

This book tackles the challenges that you will face as a leader creating and executing strategy. It is quite dense for a relatively small book. The last section contains the most common strategic models, including the SWOT analysis, the Five Forces of Competition from Porter, the Burgelman strategy dynamics model, and the BCG growth-share matrix. I keep it on my desk as a reference.

Growth and Engagement

Hooked, by Nir Eyal

How to Build Habit-Forming Products

In Hooked, Nir Eyal explains the strategies and tactics that the most relevant internet companies use to keep users engaged with their services. The most important concept is the "Hooked model" and the four steps of the hook ("TARI"). This "scary" book explains why we all get addicted to social media and mobile apps. It is such an important book that Satya Nadella recommends it to all of Microsoft's employees. For Product Directors overseeing consumer products, understanding these mechanics is essential, whether you choose to deploy them or deliberately avoid them.

Hacking Growth, by Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown

How Today's Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success

Sean Ellis coined the term "growth hacking" and led growth at Dropbox during its explosive early years. This book provides a systematic methodology for pursuing growth through rapid experimentation across marketing, product, and engineering. The concept of growth loops and compounding growth that many teams now use originates from this line of thinking. For Product Directors seeking to embed growth into product strategy rather than treating it as a separate function, this book provides the foundational framework.

Leadership and Management

High Output Management, by Andy Grove

You will find this book among the preferred management books of many CEOs and board members, including Ben Horowitz. I had the chance to read it early in my career, and it had a significant influence. Some lessons have stuck with me, such as training being the highest leverage activity that the manager needs to do. It covers many of the critical tasks that a manager has to do: how you conduct one-to-ones, how you use performance reviews to improve performance, and how you motivate employees by "shaping the field" based on what drives them. It is an absolute must-read for the ambitious middle manager aspiring to director-level leadership.

The Hard Things About Hard Things, by Ben Horowitz

Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers

Not only is it hard to be a startup CEO, but it is also a lonely job. Before co-founding the leading VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, Ben Horowitz was the CEO of Loudcloud. In this book, he shares the lessons that he learned from this experience. It covers many concepts, such as the wartime CEO and the peacetime CEO. I think this book is one of the best to understand what it takes to be a CEO and why the CEO is the only one who can make certain kinds of decisions. As a Product Director, you will often be closest to the CEO and need to understand their world.

The Shackleton's Way, by Margot Morrell and Stephanie Capparell

Leadership Lessons from the Great Antarctic Explorer

This book tells the story of Sir Ernest Shackleton and his crew aboard the Endurance while exploring the Eastern part of Antarctica. The Endurance got trapped in ice for months, and the crew managed to survive thanks to Shackleton's leadership. The story is quite inspiring, and you can read it either as a leadership book or as a novel. In moments of crisis, which every Product Director will face, Shackleton's example of maintaining team morale and making impossible decisions provides a powerful model.

The Manager's Toolkit, by HBR

The 13 Skills Managers Need to Succeed

The Harvard Business School publishes excellent toolkits in their Harvard Business Essentials collection. The Manager's Toolkit gives practical, actionable advice about setting goals, hiring, keeping your best employees, delegating with confidence, managing your time, managing your team, coaching, handling problem employees, and dealing with crises. That is a laundry list of skills to master, and this book is a useful guide.

Organic Management, by Charles Sirois

Creating a Culture of Innovation

I stumbled upon this book as I had the chance to meet the author, Charles Sirois, through my previous work at OnMobile. Charles Sirois, one of the most successful businessmen in Canada, published this seminal book in 2000 about creating a culture of innovation and designing distributed organizations. The subject of distributed organizations has become even more critical today, especially as AI agents become part of the team structure.

Communication and Persuasion

Pitch Anything, by Oren Klaff

An Innovative Method for Presenting, Persuading, and Winning the Deal

This book provides a set of rules to help you deliver a fantastic pitch to a large audience. You will learn how the "crocodile brain" works and what you need to do to bypass it so that you can win the heart of your audience. I recommend this book because making presentations is one of the most critical parts of the job. As you work through others, pitching is one of those tools that help you get things done.

Made to Stick, by Chip Heath and Dan Heath

Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

Why do some ideas take hold while others fade? The Heath brothers analyzed what makes ideas memorable and actionable, distilling their findings into the SUCCESs framework: Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional, Stories. For Product Directors who must communicate vision to diverse audiences, from engineers to executives to customers, understanding what makes ideas stick is invaluable. This book changed how I structure memos and presentations.

Thank You for Arguing, by Jay Heinrichs

What Aristotle, Lincoln, and Homer Simpson Can Teach Us About the Art of Persuasion

The Ancient Greeks understood persuasion deeply, and their frameworks remain powerful. This book makes classical rhetoric accessible and practical. The balance of ethos (credibility), pathos (emotion), and logos (logic) that I work on with my team members comes directly from this tradition. Heinrichs shows how to apply these principles in modern contexts, from boardroom debates to everyday conversations.

The Pyramid Principle, by Barbara Minto

Logic in Writing and Thinking

Barbara Minto developed this methodology at McKinsey, and it has become the standard for executive communication in consulting and beyond. The core idea is simple: start with the answer, then provide supporting arguments. This "bottom-line first" approach respects your audience's time and makes your communication more effective. For Product Directors who must communicate with busy executives, mastering this technique is essential.

Sales and Business Development

SPIN Selling, by Neil Rackham

B2B product managers work with salespeople and need to understand how selling works. SPIN Selling is a great book that gets inside the head of a good salesperson. It was written following extensive research through analyzing more than 35,000 sales calls to find the secrets of successful ones. It showed that the most successful sales happen when the buyer does most of the talking and the sales rep asks powerful questions. As the book states, "People do not buy from salespeople because they understand their products but because they felt the salesperson understood their problems."

Advanced Selling Strategies, by Brian Tracy

This book is aimed at salespeople and is an excellent read if you want to switch to business development. One idea that struck me is that a few enhancements in some key areas can have a dramatic impact on performance. For a salesperson, a slight improvement can move the needle from not closing a deal to winning it, and that has a substantial effect on compensation. Applied to product management, a small change in the product can lead to a dramatic improvement in engagement or ARPU.

Financial Literacy

Financial Intelligence, by Karen Berman, Joe Knight, and John Case

A Manager's Guide to Knowing What the Numbers Really Mean

Product managers, especially those with a pure technical background, may find the world of finance daunting and challenging to approach. This book comes to the rescue as it makes finance interesting to learn, simple, and fun. You know that cash is king, and you have heard of EBITDA, but you are not sure about free cash flow, goodwill impairments, or DSO. After reading this book, those concepts will no longer be abstract. Financial intelligence helps you reach a new level of financial literacy, which becomes essential at the director level.

Design

The Design of Everyday Things, by Donald A. Norman

With more than 100,000 copies sold, The Design of Everyday Things is one of the first recommended books for the design student. It does not cover digital design, but that is what makes it still relevant after so many years. The book covers user research, mental models, and practical design. Many years after reading it, I still remember vividly how a stove control should be designed, and this explains my frustration when I use poorly designed ones. I recommend it for the product manager who wants to engage well with their product designer colleagues.

AI-Era Product Management

Co-Intelligence, by Ethan Mollick

Living and Working with AI

Ethan Mollick, a Wharton professor who has extensively studied AI's impact on knowledge work, provides the most practical and grounded perspective on working alongside AI. Unlike breathless futurism or dismissive skepticism, Mollick offers concrete guidance on how to integrate AI into creative and analytical work. For Product Directors navigating the transition to AI-augmented teams, this book provides frameworks for experimentation and adoption that actually work.

The Coming Wave, by Mustafa Suleyman

Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century's Greatest Dilemma

Suleyman co-founded DeepMind and now leads Microsoft AI. This book examines the convergence of AI with other transformative technologies and the challenges of containing their effects. For Product Directors building AI-powered products, understanding the broader trajectory of the technology and its societal implications is essential. The book is honest about both the potential and the risks, which is the kind of balanced perspective we need.

Prediction Machines, by Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, and Avi Goldfarb

The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence

This book reframes AI as a technology that dramatically reduces the cost of prediction. That simple insight has profound implications for product strategy. When prediction becomes cheap, you can use it in places where it was previously uneconomical. The authors, all economists at the University of Toronto, provide frameworks for identifying where AI creates value and how it reshapes competitive dynamics. Less technical than many AI books, it is ideal for Product Directors who need strategic understanding without implementation details.

Human + Machine, by Paul R. Daugherty and H. James Wilson

Reimagining Work in the Age of AI

Based on Accenture's research across hundreds of companies, this book examines how organizations are redesigning processes to leverage the complementary strengths of humans and machines. The concept of the "missing middle," where humans and AI collaborate most effectively, is particularly relevant for Product Directors designing AI-augmented workflows. The book provides concrete examples across industries.

Personal Development

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, by Stephen Covey

Powerful Lessons in Personal Change

I stumbled upon this book in the personal library of a friend almost 15 years ago, and it changed my life. With more than 25 million copies sold, it is simply known as "the 7 habits." It starts with the first pillar of Independence, personal leadership, with the habits of being proactive, beginning with the end in mind, and putting first things first. The second pillar is Interdependence, relational leadership, with the habits of thinking win-win, seeking first to understand, and creating synergies. The last critical practice is sharpening the saw, continuous growth.

The Power of Impossible Thinking, by Wind, Crook, and Gunther

Transform the Business of Your Life and the Life of Your Business

This book is not a bestseller, but I like it very much. A bit edgy, it covers many interesting concepts such as mental models and how we can shape our thinking to expand our human potential. The practice of zooming in and zooming out, presented in the book, is particularly relevant to the work of product managers, who always need to juggle between the fine details and the big picture.

The Art of the Start, by Guy Kawasaki

The Time-tested, Battle-Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything

Guy Kawasaki was the first technology evangelist at Apple. He is known for his 10-20-30 rule of PowerPoint: a presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points. The Art of the Start is a great book, easy to read, and full of provocative insights. The first edition explains how to write a solid business plan while the second edition is less about plans and more about agile methods to launch a company and its product fast.