7 Inspiring Books on Product and Team Management
We have put together a selection of books for you that help product managers, executives, and team leaders save the world from boring products and ineffective teams.
“The Five Dysfunctions of a Team”
Author: Patrick Lencioni is a speaker, writer, and entrepreneur. He consults top managers and businessmen, sports teams, and educational organizations. He lectures on leadership, teamwork, and business development. He has written 12 books for managers and businessmen.
The main idea: “No matter how each person assesses his own situation, if the team loses, everyone loses.”
What is the book about?: Cohesive, productive teams don't just appear out of thin air, they're made. Lencioni looks at five common problems managers face and offers solutions.
Vice 1. Mutual distrustTeam members do not open up to each other, they hide their weaknesses and mistakes.
Solution: Show your vulnerability to the team and show by example how important it is to trust each other.
Vice 2. Avoiding conflict or false agreement. Team members avoid discussions and debates in order to maintain a veneer of agreement. This prevents real problems from being solved and leads to solutions that don't work.
Solution: Choose a team member at random and ask him or her to bring to the surface a hidden disagreement or problem in the team that has not been discussed openly before. Continue the discussion until it is clear to everyone that the problem has been resolved. If this exercise doesn't work for you, Lencioni has others in the book.
Vice 3: Optionality. This vice follows from the previous one. The team is afraid of conflicts and does not make decisions, and if they do, the employees do not take responsibility for them.
Solution: Show employees that even the worst-case scenario is not the end of the world and can be dealt with. Conduct public analysis of forecasts so that employees feel that decisions are based on facts and not randomness.
Vice 4: Lack of demand. Team members do not care how well their colleagues or subordinates perform their tasks. The main goal of each team member is to avoid discomfort.
Solution: Remove uncertainty. Communicate goals and work standards regularly, conduct retrospectives.
Vice 5. Indifference to the overall result. The final stage of team vices development. When employees do not make demands on each other's work, they are not interested in the overall result. They are not responsible for their contribution to the common cause, but pay more attention to their careers.
Solution: Explain what will achieve success and ask the team to publicly commit to achieving the goals.
Who will benefit from this: executives, top managers, team leads, project managers, HR managers and anyone who wants to grow to a management position.
“Emotional Courage: How to Take Charge, Not Be Afraid of Difficult Conversations, and Inspire Others”
AuthorPeter Bregman is an author and the head of Bregman Partners, which advises the heads of Nike, American Express, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan Chase, Clear Channel.
The main idea: “Realizing who you really are allows you to remain resilient in the face of external influences – success or failure, praise or criticism.”
What is the book about?: Emotional courage is the ability to recognize and manage your own emotions. It helps you understand and influence the emotions of others. To develop emotional courage, Bregman suggests:
Know yourselfA person who does not know and does not understand himself cannot understand others.
Learn to be insignificantAccording to Bregman, a strong person must be able to be insignificant when communicating with subordinates.
Don't be afraid to receive feedbackA competent leader is always ready to listen to constructive criticism and correct his mistakes.
Start from the endBregman suggests not to drag out the conversation, but to move straight to the difficult and unpleasant things.
Who will benefit from this: to everyone who wants to become more confident, learn to cope with their feelings and the negative emotions of others.
“The Goal. The Process of Continuous Improvement”
Author: Eliyahu Goldratt is an Israeli physicist who created several business methods: “Technologies for Optimizing Production”, “Thinking Processes”, “Drum-Buffer-Rope”, “Management by Chain Critical Project Management”.
The main idea“An hour of bottleneck downtime equals an hour of system downtime.”
What is the book about?: An industrial novel, the hero of which is the director of an unprofitable machine-building plant. The enterprise misses delivery deadlines, although the warehouses are full of unsold goods. The hero has three months to get things going.
The book's key message is that to strengthen a business, you need to find the weak link, department, team, or employee and help them work better. According to Goldratt, the following tasks are faced by a manager:
constantly look for weak spots;
identify the reason why the weak link is performing worse than the others;
fix a problem that is causing a link to perform poorly;
check that the actions have solved the problem and the productivity of the weak department has increased;
return to the first point – searching for new restrictions for business growth.
Who will benefit from this: to all managers.
“Inspired: How to Create Products That Customers Love”
Author: Marty Kagan is a product management expert and co-owner of Silicon Valley Product Group. Kagan has worked on product development for eBay, AOL, Netscape Communications, and Hewlett-Packard.
The main idea: “The difference between vision and strategy is similar to the difference between good leadership and good management. A leader inspires and sets direction, while a manager helps achieve the goal.”
About what: How companies like Google, Amazon, Apple, and Netflix build cross-functional teams to create products that resonate in the marketplace.
Who will benefit from this?: investors, company owners, product managers, marketers and sales managers, developers and designers.
“Complex Decisions: How to Manage a Business When There Are No Easy Answers”
Author: Ben Horowitz is an American businessman and investor, general partner of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, whose assets are estimated at more than $35 billion (as of 2023).
The main idea: “In a good place to work, people have the opportunity to focus on the work at hand, and at the same time, they are confident that the success of the company as a whole and of themselves in particular will depend on how well they do it. It is a real pleasure to work for such a company. Every employee wakes up in the morning knowing that he or she will have to work.”
What the book is about: Horowitz uses his own biography to explain how to manage large teams. He analyzes the challenges that leaders face every day and offers solutions based on his experience.
Some tips from Horowitz:
Think about your people first, then about the product and profit.
Clear procedures and a transparent system of promotions and salary increases will help to cope with intrigues within the company.
To make the right decisions quickly, you must have constant access to reliable information about what is happening in the company.
Who will find it useful?: for executives, business owners, startup founders, team leaders.
“Six Team Geniuses: How Each One's Abilities Enhance the Overall Performance”
Author: Patrick Lencioni again.
The main idea: “I am a firm believer that work should be fun and fulfilling; that each of us has unique innate abilities that need to be developed. Talent classification has given me insight into how to make the greatest contribution to my company, my team, and my family.”
What the book is about: How to find a job that will bring joy and energy. Leoncini's model helps to identify natural talents:
A genius of wonder. Able to ask questions, make guesses and reflect on the state of affairs.
A genius of inventiveness. Easily comes up with new ideas and solutions.
Genius of galvanization (inspirer). Knows how to inspire, unite and convince to take on a task.
Genius of assistance. Knows how to support others. Understands the needs of others.
Genius of persistence. Sees projects through to completion and finds satisfaction in completing tasks.
Who will find it useful?: for managers, team leaders.
“How to make a product”
Author: Ivan Zamesin is an entrepreneur, developing the Focus Calenda calendar application, founder of the Meta psychotherapist selection service, author of the How to Make a Product training. He has developed his own interpretation of the well-known Jobs To Be Done product development approach.
The main idea of the book: “The first principle through which, in my opinion, ABSOLUTELY all decisions in a startup should be passed is: do we bring value to our customers?”
About what: How to develop a product: principles, scripts and mechanics of research, stages of product life. Tools for different types of research. For example, JTBD research scenarios that help B2C products find their market segment.
Who will find it useful?: everyone who works with the product: product managers, designers, developers, marketers.
In a nutshell
“The Five Dysfunctions of a Team”: Eliminate the team's vices (mistrust, fear of conflict, irresponsibility, undemandingness and indifference to the result), and it will be healthy.
“Emotional Courage”: Develop emotional courage to make decisions and handle difficult situations with confidence.
“The Goal. The Process of Continuous Improvement”: Constantly look for and eliminate weak links in processes.
“Inspired”: build cross-functional teams, clearly separate leadership and management.
“Difficult decisions”: put your employees first.
“Six Team Geniuses”: Bring out the natural talents of your employees – the geniuses of wonder, inventiveness, galvanization, cooperation, tenacity and organization.
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