A product management reading list

I was recently updating our Product notion page at Monzo and ended up totally geeking out and writing a very long reading list. It’s full of stuff to read that’s either influenced me directly or which I’ve sent to people to describe core concepts like growth accounting.

I put this list together because we’re hiring PMs pretty fast and almost all of them ask for reading material on the way in. We also have a lot of people at Monzo who came from traditional banks in search of a new way of doing things. They really want to understand how this “product” thing works. So this list is for them too.

There’s a mix of old and new. I’ve got the Apple Human Interface Guidelines from 1987 on the list because it’s still one of the best things ever written about how to design interfaces for humans. And then there are short, kind of annoying posts from Farnham Street that illustrate concepts like second order thinking. Is this the best exposition on secondary and tertiary effects? Almost certainly not. But it does the trick in a quick and dirty way.

Anyway, I hope you find it valuable. Maybe there will be something in here which will cause you to think a bit differently, or understand a problem you’re working on from a new angle. Maybe a fully baked growth accounting visualisation will show you something surprising about your product and cause you to turn left where you would have otherwise turned right. Maybe a refresher on Metcalfe’s Law will lead you to prioritise social features, or “Why Speedboats Win and Tankers Sink” will lead you to re-emphasise the value of empiricism in your organisation.

And if you’ve got good stuff to read that isn’t on this list, please share.

Cheers!

Articles and videos

Books