Top Product books recommended by experts

At MentorCruise, we are all about making the most out of the experience of others. As part of that, we've connected and asked dozens of experts and professionals about their favourite Product books – and here are the answers.

Table of Contents

Fundamentals of Product

Understanding the concepts of Product starts with understanding the fundamentals. On your way to mastery, it's crucial for you to understand how certain concepts were derived, and why things work like they do. Starting with these resources is the best way to do so.

Predictably Irrational, Revised and Expanded Edition: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions

Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely discusses how we make irrational decisions in different situations. It's an eye-opening read that explores our cognitive biases, decision-making patterns, and the role of emotions in shaping our choices.

Recommended by the experts and mentors at MentorCruise

User Story Mapping: Discover the Whole Story, Build the Right Product

User story mapping is a valuable tool for software development, once you understand why and how to use it. This insightful book examines how this often misunderstood technique can help your team stay focused on users and their needs without getting lost in the enthusiasm for individual product features.

Recommended by the experts and mentors at MentorCruise

Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days

The book outlines the step-by-step process, which includes defining the problem, ideating solutions, prototyping, and conducting user testing. This framework allows teams to make significant progress in just five days. Defining the Problem: Central to the design sprint is clearly defining the problem statement.

Recommended by the experts and mentors at MentorCruise

The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses

The lean startup methodology is a method of managing and building a business or startup by experimenting, testing, and iterating while developing products based on findings from your tests and feedback.

Recommended by the experts and mentors at MentorCruise

The Lean Product Playbook: How to Innovate with Minimum Viable Products and Rapid Customer Feedback

It walks you through how to: Determine your target customers Identify underserved customer needs Create a winning product strategy Decide on your Minimum Viable Product (MVP) Design your MVP prototype Test your MVP with customers Iterate rapidly to achieve product-market fit This book was written by entrepreneur and Lean product expert Dan Olsen whose experience spans product management, UX de…

Recommended by the experts and mentors at MentorCruise

Thinking, Fast and Slow

System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. The impact of overconfidence on corporate strategies, the difficulties of predicting what will make us happy in the future, the profound effect of cognitive biases on everything from playing the stock market to planning our next vacation―each of these can be understood only by knowing how the t…

Recommended by the experts and mentors at MentorCruise

Additional Product Reading

These books are not required for you to learn Product, but they are highly recommended for you to deepen your knowledge.

The Design Of Everyday Things

The Design of Everyday Things is a best-selling book by cognitive scientist and usability engineer Donald Norman about how design serves as the communication between object and user, and how to optimize that conduit of communication in order to make the experience of using the object pleasurable.

Recommended by the experts and mentors at MentorCruise

The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers

The Hard Thing About Hard Things has been the most recommended book to me from numerous conversations with great entrepreneurs on my podcast Growth Mindset Podcast. It’s reached the point now that if I ask for a book recommendation for business advice, I add ‘other than the obvious Hard Thing About Things’.

Recommended by the experts and mentors at MentorCruise

This list is curated by MentorCruise and can include Amazon affiliate links. Have any other suggestions? Add here.

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